The stuff you smoke seems to be really good and makes you delusional. Might you share what you are using?
"not hard to negotiate a cooldown" - well, if you think it is easy I am sure the UN is happy to have you as their next negotiator with the leadership of NK.
It's called "try to consider the other side's point of view". Maybe you should try it sometime. North Korea's main 3 goals are (based on my firsthand discussions with North Koreans):
1. Continue existing as an independent state
2. End the economic sanctions / develop the economy
3. A desire for reunification, poorly defined on the details of how that would work, but possibly as some kind of 1 commonwealth, 2-state solution similar to China's One country, two systems approach
China supports 1, since it keeps a democratic nation off their doorstep.
China doesn't support 2, since it would allow foreign competition in, and an economically strong North Korea would be a compeditor.
China doesn't support 3, since a consolidated Korea would likely be closer to the West.
The USA should support 1, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. North Korea is still a convenient buffer zone between the two largest military powers in the world, and sometimes a Sadaam Hussein is better than chaos.
The USA doesn't support 2, since the USA would gain nothing, and would lose pride/face since North Korea has no negotiating power.
The USA doesn't support 3, since it would be bad in the short and long term for both our ally South Korea and our trading partner China.
I don't know enough about South Korea to comment, but I would imagine they are probably split on most or all of these issues.
Considering all that, the most reasonable "cooldown" would be for the US to formally end the Korean War, recognize North Korea as an independent nuclear state, and commit to putting a US embassy in Pyongyang. A single visit by a US President or active-duty Secretary of State could probably accomplish all this without giving up any negotiating power on the more difficult topics, or rocking regional geopolitics too much.
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't.
Well, you're wrong. I have done exactly this.
I left Toshiba more than 5 years ago. My job wasn't difficult, the pay was good, and my immediate supervisor and coworkers were OK to deal with. However, even back then, it was clear that at higher levels, they were making a lot of bad deals that looked good in the short term, but were not good in the long term. They also were transferring power from proven, profitable departments, to recent acquisitions that were questionably run. The only surprise to me about their recent financial problems is how long it has taken for these to come to fruition.
When one sees that a company's future viability is questionable, the choice to leave is not difficult. "Lack of confidence in management" doesn't fully describe all the factors considered when one leaves a company under such circumstances.
No, North Korea is extremely poor, has few natural resources, and can not feed its people.
North Korea's nuclear posture is an extortion racket, intended to increase foreign aid. It worked for quite a while - they got money in return for not developing nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, some US administrations decided to act tough, and North Korea simply increased the threat in order to extract aid.
This is a very simplistic view of things, and doesn't even make sense. They are building nuclear weapons to gain more foreign aid? They aren't stupid, it is exceedingly easy to forsee that their nuclear program would have the opposite effect. They haven't exactly tried to keep their nuclear program a secret.
North Korea is effectively a buffer zone between the 2 most powerful military powers in the world. They know this, and the Korean War never actually ended, as any North Korean will tell you. The US conducts massive military exercises on their doorstep every Spring. "Defensive only", the USA says. "What's with the amphibious assault exercises then?", the DPRK responds. It doesn't help that various countries have tried to make Korea their colonial bitch going back 150 years. The west reinforces this fear with yearly exercises, military planning to assassinate the leader, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, military action in Syria, Pakistan, etc. North Koreans have a very legitimate fear of foreign invasion or regime change.
The nuclear program is intended to ensure North Korea's survival. They are in a precarious position, an animal in a corner considering their geographical location and geopolitical status. North Koreans aren't stupid, and know they will lose a shooting war, nuclear weapons or not. But on the other hand, no nuclear state has ever been invaded by a foreign power. It's the sharpest tooth a nation can bare.
it would be trivial to get rid of the connector, they already have magsafe yet the morons there ditched it for the inferior Usb-C.
Dont expect real innovation from apple anymore. the left overs in job's office are now gone, it's all about profits and margin now. Even Johnny Ives is phoning everything in now.
My IP69-rated Sonim XP6 phone has a magsafe charging connector. It also has a headphone port (with a cover).
Headphone ports are not that difficult to seal. The Galaxy S4 Active and S5 had waterproof headphone jacks, and they didn't even need a cover to do it.
I don't want plans or contracts... but that seems to be what the war is over.
When the big companies come down in price, the MVNOs come down too. I have 2 lines, one on Straight Talk for $45/mo with 5GB + unlimited edge, and the other on H2O wireless with 3GB/mo + unlimited edge for $30/mo. H2O wireless has been a 4 week experiment so far, but I have seen 0 difference in coverage between the two lines and will probably move the Straight Talk line over to H20. The H20 wireless plan was about $10 more expensive 12 months ago. Other prepaid MVNOs have come down in price too. All the SIM cards in stores have the wrong monthly prices on them. It's a great time to own your own phone.
Microsoft look enviously at Apple, who get to control and profit from their walled garden. Then they glance over at Android, and see Google has their play store (which, whereas it may not be a walled garden, has a fence around). Fire users most certainly have their own walled garden courtesy of Amazon.
Apple and Google are both benefiting from these "almost monopolies" they run controlling their users, skimming a bit off the top from everyone. No doubt, Microsoft sees that these are profitable ventures and they want the same control over what runs on Microsoft Windows. It's a little harder to do because there is a lot of legacy applications, and neither consumer, nor software producers want to give a little bit of each purchase to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to continue baby-stepping towards that goal though because they want the money, and their competitors are already doing that.
It will be a sad day when you have no option but to buy from the Microsoft store, but that day is coming.
It's already a sad day because most companies now seem interested only in skimming a little bit of someone elses' profit rather than making an actual product themselves.
I've read a story somewhere about the manager of an engineering department dealing with critical systems at NASA during the space race.
He imposed 9 to 5 work days, as part of his plan to promote a healthy routine. He noticed that overwork leads to mistakes and that nullifies any productivity gain made during extra hours.
It is absolutely true. For work in the trades (machinists, welders, etc), we see the majority of accidents occurring in the final 2 hours of a 12 hour shift. It is naive to think that white collar people don't suffer from fatigue too. The CDC even hosts a study titled "Overtime and Extended Work Shifts: Recent (not so recent now) Findings on Illnesses, Injuries, and Health Behaviors" showing that there may be profound effects on the long-term health of workers as well.
The Japanese put in a lot of hours, but not much of that is "working". Japan's productivity is only 60% of America's. There is a social taboo to leave work before your boss, so people stay late and surf the web. The bosses are promoted based on seniority rather than ability, and are often incompetent with no incentive to take the initiative on more enlightened working conditions. It is better to just stick to prevailing social conventions and keep a low profile.
America: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Japan: The nail that sticks up will be hammered back down.
I have worked in Japanese companies for almost 8 years in total, 7 months of which was in Japan. Everything in your post is true except "so people stay late and surf the web". This is not my experience. In my experience, people stay late and do NOT surf the web. The open floor plan in most Japanese offices makes goofing off unnoticed nearly impossible.
Some people are doing productive work, but slowly. Others were doing unproductive work (again, slowly). Others take frequent visits to other people in different departments. Meetings which require 2-3 people but 8 people are invited also help run up the man hours. Surfing the web for non-work reasons was strictly during lunch hours and breaks, I never saw it.
A Continent is a landmass, not a slightly shallower section of ocean.
There is no clear, universally agreed definition of what a continent is. Australia was an island not long ago - and Europe is a different continent from Asia, which is absurd, in terms of geography.
And where is the line Europe/Asia? Most maps include all of Russia as part of Asia. Some maps draw a line through Russia. My kids even have a geography book that shows Russia as being wholly in Europe.
Corporations being corporations with their policies... fine, whatever. Allegedly reputable news organizations characterizing that video as "anti-semitic" is something else entirely.
Anyone watching the end sequence of that video who goes on to describe it as anti-semitic either does not understand human emotion or is deliberately lying. If that video proves PewDiePie is anti-semitic, then John Cleese, Mel Brooks, Jon Stewart, and dozens of other comedy legends are also anti-semitic, including the political and the largely apolitical.
The anti-semetic angle is just the icing on the cake. The main offense here is taking advantage of poor people, making them do awful things for low pay, making fun of those people for hesitating to do the task, and then making fun of them again for doing the task. Considering the man's immense wealth, it's classic villain behavior. This doesn't fit into a headline neatly, however.
Submitter here. And the gloves are off, FYI.
This is a bizarre little trick, apparently some weird leftover piece of Cold War propaganda, that any time a topic has anything to do with the free market you can point that out and a significant minority of people will believe you've just "won" the discussion and will mod you up, even if you're rambling irrelevant drivel. (It works on Reddit, too.)
Congratulations, Disney and Youtube are legally free to do as they choose. No, the first amendment doesn't constrain them. Are we done with the kindergarten version of Civics now?
There appears to be widespread *lying* about the nature of the videos in question, characterizations that are so brazen as to be actual lies by mainstream media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Independent, etc. This is on top of the WSJ actually going out of their way to get PewDiePie "fired" by mining and editing his content and then sending it directly (from my understanding) to Disney.
I think that alone is all worth talking about. If dishonest and manipulative newspapers don't interest you at all, well there's the door. Bye.
But there's even more: to the extent that companies like Youtube and Disney are being pressured by asshats writing letters and threatening boycotts, I'd even go so far as to say it's worth discussing trying to pressure them in the opposite direction. Not because I'm a huge PewDiePie fan (I'm not; I've watched only a few of his videos), but because the internet is being dominated by a small group of companies and it's worth a little effort to push back now, while we still can, and inform them that free speech for their platform (not just our constitution) is what we actually want.
Just listen to this smug shit coming out of the WSJ and put that in the context of the thousands of Youtubers trying to figure out Youtube's uncodified content policy so their videos won't be de-monetized. Put that in the contest of the millions of Youtube users who just want their favorite hosts to be able to speak their mind uncensored. The WSJ doesn't care about all of that. They only care about media giants being able to dictate acceptable content with an iron fist.
Does that violate the first amendment? Again, no. Is this capitalism at work? Again, yes. You're such a good, smart little anti-Communist for reminding us of these things!
But us talking about it and getting a bit pissed about it and wondering aloud if there's any way to pull the brake on this shitshow before it gets any worse is also capitalism at work. If that's a conversation that doesn't interest you--there's the door. Vote with your feet, citizen.
There will always be the internet equivalent of a town soapbox where any fool can say anything they like. And certainly the people who own a soapbox in Time Square, and pay people to speak there, have a right to fire such people for any reason they choose. This fool has run his course, and joked about things which society agrees must not be joked about. If he is a good fool, he will find another soapbox. If not, he should consider himself lucky to have made millions playing a fool.
Nobody except Gartner believes most of what they predict anyway. Did anyone really think that Microsofts n-th attempt to make a phone OS would be any more successful than the previous ones?
One has to admit the possibility is there. Smartphones have already displaced standalone GPS devices and the majority of consumer cameras. Current smartphones are powerful enough to be most people's computer, TV media frontend, etc. Most personal computers still run Windows. If Microsoft could displace TV set top boxes and computers using a phone-sized device, they could potentially be very successful. Granted, that's a big "if", but it could be done if they got their product development and marketing wagons circled correctly.
Maybe things have changed but Sprint at least used to make it impossible to bring non-sprint phones to their network.
If that's still the case, change your "Psst" to "Pffft" and keep walking.
This could be because Spring uses LTE bands that basically nobody else uses. It then depends on your phone model supporting those bands. It may have nothing to do with Sprint being evil, and more to do with the fact that their frequency allocation is different from everyone else.
Most of the stuff mentioned I can agree with. But less favorable lending rates? Only a Millennial ignorant of history would think that. Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years. My generation (gen-x) had to deal with mortgage interest rates double what they are today. My parents had to deal with 17% interest rates. You have to go all the way back to 1955 to see interest rates as favorable as they are today.
With a 4% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, 42% of your payments over the life of the loan are interest.
With a 8% interest rate, 62% of your payments are interest.
With a 17% interest rate, 81% of your payments are interest.
For just about anyone alive today, there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
As a former homeowner and current renter, I completely agree. There has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
On the other hand, as someone who has done 4 cross-country moves in the last 10 years, and is considering a 5th, buying a home is not attractive to me- yet. I am still homing in on the place I want to live the rest of my life, and taking full advantage of the fact that a willingness to move physically translates into upwards career mobility.
I am telling myself that a 5th move would be "the last for a while" but this may just be a lie I tell myself. Being a homeowner seems to be in conflict with either my personality or the employment environment that currently exists.
Not by itself, but there are plenty of opportunities for tax savings, such as-
Low-income + high income salary averaging out to a slightly lower tax rate overall
Low-income partner can take more advantage of Roth retirement plans, maxxing out their plan (up to either the maximum yearly limits, or their own salary, whichever is less).
1 tax return instead of 2, savings on filing costs and time
Transfer of assets tax-free upon the death of one partner in 99% of cases
Benefit shopping between 2 employers, can be used to lower taxes in some cases
etc
I always thought it was interesting that you can mention another product by name in a TV spot here in America. It is actually illegal in some other countries. You can't name a competitor directly. So most of the time you are left with references to a white box with a generic label like"Product X" or similar. The way they talk about it though, usually makes it clear which other company they are referring to. American advertisers do not have to go through such a loophole.
I don't believe there is any law, just a fear of lawsuits. It is risky but it depends on the context. Presumably Superbowl ads are vetted by an entire team of lawyers.
IIRC, one of the ads was along the lines of "99% of the coverage for significantly less cost". Hard for Verizon to find an argument worth litigating there. The difficult thing to prove (which network is superior) is admitted to be an advantage to Verizon. The claim is on the easier thing to prove (price). If Verizon litigated, they either be arguing that their network was inferior to the competition, or arguing an easy to check fact (price).
I thought this was the most interesting thing from the whole article:
The research team was surprised to find barley in the ancient Chinese beer as barley had not become a staple crop for another 3,000 years.
Think about someone making beer but the ingredients not really catching on in a big way for three thousand years!
Or maybe the estimate of when barley because a staple crop is way off.
Depends on what they mean by "barley". Corn and watermelon are unrecognizable compared to what they were just 200 years ago. This is mostly related to good old fashioned selective breeding. 3,000 years is a very long time in agricultural terms.
When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
Alternatively, 1969 was 24 years after the end of the Second World War. It would be reasonable to assume that it took at least that long for all the destroyed industrial capacity across Asia and Europe to be rebuilt.
P.S. I'm still expecting the Chinese to invade North Korea and Taiwan this spring. Opportunity beckons, this offer expires soon, and so they are going to make the Donald an offer he can't refuse... The Art of War versus The Art of the Deal.
This wouldn't make much sense. North Korea certainly causes China no end of headaches, but if China invaded them, it would ratchet up tensions in the DMZ even higher, they would gain a major humanitarian problem, and not much else. North Korea makes a great buffer zone between China and western-style democracy. It is in everyone's best interest that the current borders remain as-is.
The only issue is whether North Korea should be recognized as a nuclear power or not, and the related question of whether sanctions should continue. If they are recognized as a nuclear power (which they arguably are), sanctions to prevent that from occurring don't make sense on that argument. However, there is the greater goal of keeping the country in squalor so that neither China nor the West wants to take it over. If either side were to take over North Korea, we would be looking at a possible resumption of the Korean war.
They've also got a lot of more traditional stuff too - I believe WD bought over Toshiba's 3.5" hard drive business, and they also bought over Toshiba's NAND flash business very recently (a few weeks ago). (Remember, Toshiba invented NAND flash).
Not sure what happens to OCZ, Sandisk, or DiskOnChip, the first Toshiba bought to have their line of SSDs, the second Toshiba acquired cheaply (Sandisk used Toshiba NAND anyways), and ditto DiskOnChip.
This has a lot less to do with WD going shopping and more to do with Toshiba's financial problems leading to a yard sale.
Long ago, college dorms were more like Army barracks. Now they are private apartments. Food was served in a cafeteria, and you ate what they had today. Now they are more like food courts, and require far more staff. Students expect this kind of service, and if a school doesn't upgrade, they lose students to schools that do. It's overhead that has risen the cost of education, not the cost of professors. The difference in equipment and classrooms between engineering and liberal arts is small compared to the school environment costs.
This is still the case at some schools. You just have to choose based on $/educational benefit. This criteria is not considered by most high school students.
By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.
Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.
One of the great challenges for Trump is that being the executive of a nation is very different from being the executive of a company. In general, Trump could fire anyone you he wanted, at any time, at any of his companies. There are many positions in the government that this can not be done, and "firing" citizens (whether by deporting or by putting them in jail) is also not easy without compelling evidence or circumstances.
"We're all in it together" (and similar) is a phrase that has been spoken a lot lately by Trump and his subordinates. My impression is that this may be Trump realizing and attempting to deal with this key difference between managing government and private companies.
Let the user pick a personalized name like they would for any child or pet.
Since it's only listening for specific "wake words" and this processing must be done on the device itself, I imagine it's easier for them to code a few specific wake words into the firmware (and perhaps not even possible to do much more; I'm not sure we know much about its hardware)--everything else you speak afterwards (and, so they say, only this speech) is sent to AWS or whatnot where there's a lot more processing power, which I imagine that allowing the user to configure an arbitrary word would also take.
I believe the way it works is that it looks for a couple phonemes and if those phonemes match it wakes up, makes sure it is a match and starts processing. If they can change it between 3 or 4 phoneme groups, it would seem like they could fairly easily allow you to choose which phonemes you want it to match. My guess is they don't do this for 2 reasons. The first is that people would be stupid and try to pick something like 'bob' or 'anne' without realizing that it is not complex enough for safe triggers. The second which relates to the first as well is marketing. It is good marketing to have someone constantly saying 'amazon' or 'alexa' over and over. 'Computer' is cute but it's also likely an attempt to corral that keyword the same way microsoft took the word windows.
Even with the ridiculous trademark/copyright landscape we have currently in the USA, there is no way that any company could get away with co-opting "computer" as a trademarkable or otherwise protected word.
At least you get Pandora, TripAdvisor, etc.. Us Infiniti owners just got a broken promise with our Q50s. The jack wipe managing the Airbiquity Choreo integration (branded InTouch) never bothered to turn on anything other than Facialbook and Google Search. I guess they prefer drivers to fumble with the phones they're streaming from via bluetooth instead.
As someone who just rented a car with Apple Carplay for the first time, I wish they would just STOP IT with the touchscreens and just have radios that pair quickly with bluetooth devices and can swap between devices without going 7 menus deep. Showing the currently playing song is plenty. I don't need any more information than that. My phone knows how to interrupt my Pandora music with Waze navigation prompts or any other notification. Even this basic function seemed too difficult for Carplay to do.
If they absolutely must have a touchscreen in the car, let it handle the car stuff and only the car stuff. I have never seen an phone-integrated car app system that worked well. And I travel roughly 75% of the time and cycle through a LOT of different rental cars of all makes and models. It's mostly all rubbish. The least annoying ones are the simplest ones which only handle basic bluetooth functions.
Slashdot Mirror
The stuff you smoke seems to be really good and makes you delusional. Might you share what you are using?
"not hard to negotiate a cooldown" - well, if you think it is easy I am sure the UN is happy to have you as their next negotiator with the leadership of NK.
It's called "try to consider the other side's point of view". Maybe you should try it sometime. North Korea's main 3 goals are (based on my firsthand discussions with North Koreans):
1. Continue existing as an independent state
2. End the economic sanctions / develop the economy
3. A desire for reunification, poorly defined on the details of how that would work, but possibly as some kind of 1 commonwealth, 2-state solution similar to China's One country, two systems approach
China supports 1, since it keeps a democratic nation off their doorstep.
China doesn't support 2, since it would allow foreign competition in, and an economically strong North Korea would be a compeditor.
China doesn't support 3, since a consolidated Korea would likely be closer to the West.
The USA should support 1, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. North Korea is still a convenient buffer zone between the two largest military powers in the world, and sometimes a Sadaam Hussein is better than chaos.
The USA doesn't support 2, since the USA would gain nothing, and would lose pride/face since North Korea has no negotiating power.
The USA doesn't support 3, since it would be bad in the short and long term for both our ally South Korea and our trading partner China.
I don't know enough about South Korea to comment, but I would imagine they are probably split on most or all of these issues.
Considering all that, the most reasonable "cooldown" would be for the US to formally end the Korean War, recognize North Korea as an independent nuclear state, and commit to putting a US embassy in Pyongyang. A single visit by a US President or active-duty Secretary of State could probably accomplish all this without giving up any negotiating power on the more difficult topics, or rocking regional geopolitics too much.
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't.
Well, you're wrong. I have done exactly this.
I left Toshiba more than 5 years ago. My job wasn't difficult, the pay was good, and my immediate supervisor and coworkers were OK to deal with. However, even back then, it was clear that at higher levels, they were making a lot of bad deals that looked good in the short term, but were not good in the long term. They also were transferring power from proven, profitable departments, to recent acquisitions that were questionably run. The only surprise to me about their recent financial problems is how long it has taken for these to come to fruition.
When one sees that a company's future viability is questionable, the choice to leave is not difficult. "Lack of confidence in management" doesn't fully describe all the factors considered when one leaves a company under such circumstances.
No, North Korea is extremely poor, has few natural resources, and can not feed its people.
North Korea's nuclear posture is an extortion racket, intended to increase foreign aid. It worked for quite a while - they got money in return for not developing nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, some US administrations decided to act tough, and North Korea simply increased the threat in order to extract aid.
This is a very simplistic view of things, and doesn't even make sense. They are building nuclear weapons to gain more foreign aid? They aren't stupid, it is exceedingly easy to forsee that their nuclear program would have the opposite effect. They haven't exactly tried to keep their nuclear program a secret.
North Korea is effectively a buffer zone between the 2 most powerful military powers in the world. They know this, and the Korean War never actually ended, as any North Korean will tell you. The US conducts massive military exercises on their doorstep every Spring. "Defensive only", the USA says. "What's with the amphibious assault exercises then?", the DPRK responds. It doesn't help that various countries have tried to make Korea their colonial bitch going back 150 years. The west reinforces this fear with yearly exercises, military planning to assassinate the leader, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, military action in Syria, Pakistan, etc. North Koreans have a very legitimate fear of foreign invasion or regime change.
The nuclear program is intended to ensure North Korea's survival. They are in a precarious position, an animal in a corner considering their geographical location and geopolitical status. North Koreans aren't stupid, and know they will lose a shooting war, nuclear weapons or not. But on the other hand, no nuclear state has ever been invaded by a foreign power. It's the sharpest tooth a nation can bare.
it would be trivial to get rid of the connector, they already have magsafe yet the morons there ditched it for the inferior Usb-C.
Dont expect real innovation from apple anymore. the left overs in job's office are now gone, it's all about profits and margin now. Even Johnny Ives is phoning everything in now.
My IP69-rated Sonim XP6 phone has a magsafe charging connector. It also has a headphone port (with a cover).
Headphone ports are not that difficult to seal. The Galaxy S4 Active and S5 had waterproof headphone jacks, and they didn't even need a cover to do it.
I don't want plans or contracts... but that seems to be what the war is over.
When the big companies come down in price, the MVNOs come down too. I have 2 lines, one on Straight Talk for $45/mo with 5GB + unlimited edge, and the other on H2O wireless with 3GB/mo + unlimited edge for $30/mo. H2O wireless has been a 4 week experiment so far, but I have seen 0 difference in coverage between the two lines and will probably move the Straight Talk line over to H20. The H20 wireless plan was about $10 more expensive 12 months ago. Other prepaid MVNOs have come down in price too. All the SIM cards in stores have the wrong monthly prices on them. It's a great time to own your own phone.
Is there a legal reason SpaceX can't have a lottery for tickets? Seems like a good way to fund these types of things.
That would never happen because there would be a risk that capitalist royalty would have to sit next to a commoner.
Microsoft look enviously at Apple, who get to control and profit from their walled garden. Then they glance over at Android, and see Google has their play store (which, whereas it may not be a walled garden, has a fence around). Fire users most certainly have their own walled garden courtesy of Amazon.
Apple and Google are both benefiting from these "almost monopolies" they run controlling their users, skimming a bit off the top from everyone. No doubt, Microsoft sees that these are profitable ventures and they want the same control over what runs on Microsoft Windows. It's a little harder to do because there is a lot of legacy applications, and neither consumer, nor software producers want to give a little bit of each purchase to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to continue baby-stepping towards that goal though because they want the money, and their competitors are already doing that.
It will be a sad day when you have no option but to buy from the Microsoft store, but that day is coming.
It's already a sad day because most companies now seem interested only in skimming a little bit of someone elses' profit rather than making an actual product themselves.
I've read a story somewhere about the manager of an engineering department dealing with critical systems at NASA during the space race. He imposed 9 to 5 work days, as part of his plan to promote a healthy routine. He noticed that overwork leads to mistakes and that nullifies any productivity gain made during extra hours.
It is absolutely true. For work in the trades (machinists, welders, etc), we see the majority of accidents occurring in the final 2 hours of a 12 hour shift. It is naive to think that white collar people don't suffer from fatigue too. The CDC even hosts a study titled "Overtime and Extended Work Shifts: Recent (not so recent now) Findings on Illnesses, Injuries, and Health Behaviors" showing that there may be profound effects on the long-term health of workers as well.
The Japanese put in a lot of hours, but not much of that is "working". Japan's productivity is only 60% of America's. There is a social taboo to leave work before your boss, so people stay late and surf the web. The bosses are promoted based on seniority rather than ability, and are often incompetent with no incentive to take the initiative on more enlightened working conditions. It is better to just stick to prevailing social conventions and keep a low profile.
America: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Japan: The nail that sticks up will be hammered back down.
I have worked in Japanese companies for almost 8 years in total, 7 months of which was in Japan. Everything in your post is true except "so people stay late and surf the web". This is not my experience. In my experience, people stay late and do NOT surf the web. The open floor plan in most Japanese offices makes goofing off unnoticed nearly impossible.
Some people are doing productive work, but slowly. Others were doing unproductive work (again, slowly). Others take frequent visits to other people in different departments. Meetings which require 2-3 people but 8 people are invited also help run up the man hours. Surfing the web for non-work reasons was strictly during lunch hours and breaks, I never saw it.
A Continent is a landmass, not a slightly shallower section of ocean.
There is no clear, universally agreed definition of what a continent is. Australia was an island not long ago - and Europe is a different continent from Asia, which is absurd, in terms of geography.
And where is the line Europe/Asia? Most maps include all of Russia as part of Asia. Some maps draw a line through Russia. My kids even have a geography book that shows Russia as being wholly in Europe.
Corporations being corporations with their policies... fine, whatever. Allegedly reputable news organizations characterizing that video as "anti-semitic" is something else entirely. Anyone watching the end sequence of that video who goes on to describe it as anti-semitic either does not understand human emotion or is deliberately lying. If that video proves PewDiePie is anti-semitic, then John Cleese, Mel Brooks, Jon Stewart, and dozens of other comedy legends are also anti-semitic, including the political and the largely apolitical.
The anti-semetic angle is just the icing on the cake. The main offense here is taking advantage of poor people, making them do awful things for low pay, making fun of those people for hesitating to do the task, and then making fun of them again for doing the task. Considering the man's immense wealth, it's classic villain behavior. This doesn't fit into a headline neatly, however.
Submitter here. And the gloves are off, FYI. This is a bizarre little trick, apparently some weird leftover piece of Cold War propaganda, that any time a topic has anything to do with the free market you can point that out and a significant minority of people will believe you've just "won" the discussion and will mod you up, even if you're rambling irrelevant drivel. (It works on Reddit, too.) Congratulations, Disney and Youtube are legally free to do as they choose. No, the first amendment doesn't constrain them. Are we done with the kindergarten version of Civics now? There appears to be widespread *lying* about the nature of the videos in question, characterizations that are so brazen as to be actual lies by mainstream media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Independent, etc. This is on top of the WSJ actually going out of their way to get PewDiePie "fired" by mining and editing his content and then sending it directly (from my understanding) to Disney. I think that alone is all worth talking about. If dishonest and manipulative newspapers don't interest you at all, well there's the door. Bye. But there's even more: to the extent that companies like Youtube and Disney are being pressured by asshats writing letters and threatening boycotts, I'd even go so far as to say it's worth discussing trying to pressure them in the opposite direction. Not because I'm a huge PewDiePie fan (I'm not; I've watched only a few of his videos), but because the internet is being dominated by a small group of companies and it's worth a little effort to push back now, while we still can, and inform them that free speech for their platform (not just our constitution) is what we actually want. Just listen to this smug shit coming out of the WSJ and put that in the context of the thousands of Youtubers trying to figure out Youtube's uncodified content policy so their videos won't be de-monetized. Put that in the contest of the millions of Youtube users who just want their favorite hosts to be able to speak their mind uncensored. The WSJ doesn't care about all of that. They only care about media giants being able to dictate acceptable content with an iron fist. Does that violate the first amendment? Again, no. Is this capitalism at work? Again, yes. You're such a good, smart little anti-Communist for reminding us of these things! But us talking about it and getting a bit pissed about it and wondering aloud if there's any way to pull the brake on this shitshow before it gets any worse is also capitalism at work. If that's a conversation that doesn't interest you--there's the door. Vote with your feet, citizen.
There will always be the internet equivalent of a town soapbox where any fool can say anything they like. And certainly the people who own a soapbox in Time Square, and pay people to speak there, have a right to fire such people for any reason they choose. This fool has run his course, and joked about things which society agrees must not be joked about. If he is a good fool, he will find another soapbox. If not, he should consider himself lucky to have made millions playing a fool.
Nobody except Gartner believes most of what they predict anyway. Did anyone really think that Microsofts n-th attempt to make a phone OS would be any more successful than the previous ones?
One has to admit the possibility is there. Smartphones have already displaced standalone GPS devices and the majority of consumer cameras. Current smartphones are powerful enough to be most people's computer, TV media frontend, etc. Most personal computers still run Windows. If Microsoft could displace TV set top boxes and computers using a phone-sized device, they could potentially be very successful. Granted, that's a big "if", but it could be done if they got their product development and marketing wagons circled correctly.
Maybe things have changed but Sprint at least used to make it impossible to bring non-sprint phones to their network.
If that's still the case, change your "Psst" to "Pffft" and keep walking.
This could be because Spring uses LTE bands that basically nobody else uses. It then depends on your phone model supporting those bands. It may have nothing to do with Sprint being evil, and more to do with the fact that their frequency allocation is different from everyone else.
Most of the stuff mentioned I can agree with. But less favorable lending rates? Only a Millennial ignorant of history would think that. Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years. My generation (gen-x) had to deal with mortgage interest rates double what they are today. My parents had to deal with 17% interest rates. You have to go all the way back to 1955 to see interest rates as favorable as they are today. With a 4% interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, 42% of your payments over the life of the loan are interest. With a 8% interest rate, 62% of your payments are interest. With a 17% interest rate, 81% of your payments are interest. For just about anyone alive today, there has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
As a former homeowner and current renter, I completely agree. There has never been a better time to get a mortgage to buy a home.
On the other hand, as someone who has done 4 cross-country moves in the last 10 years, and is considering a 5th, buying a home is not attractive to me- yet. I am still homing in on the place I want to live the rest of my life, and taking full advantage of the fact that a willingness to move physically translates into upwards career mobility.
I am telling myself that a 5th move would be "the last for a while" but this may just be a lie I tell myself. Being a homeowner seems to be in conflict with either my personality or the employment environment that currently exists.
Being married does not save on taxes.
Not by itself, but there are plenty of opportunities for tax savings, such as-
Low-income + high income salary averaging out to a slightly lower tax rate overall
Low-income partner can take more advantage of Roth retirement plans, maxxing out their plan (up to either the maximum yearly limits, or their own salary, whichever is less).
1 tax return instead of 2, savings on filing costs and time
Transfer of assets tax-free upon the death of one partner in 99% of cases
Benefit shopping between 2 employers, can be used to lower taxes in some cases etc
I always thought it was interesting that you can mention another product by name in a TV spot here in America. It is actually illegal in some other countries. You can't name a competitor directly. So most of the time you are left with references to a white box with a generic label like"Product X" or similar. The way they talk about it though, usually makes it clear which other company they are referring to. American advertisers do not have to go through such a loophole.
I don't believe there is any law, just a fear of lawsuits. It is risky but it depends on the context. Presumably Superbowl ads are vetted by an entire team of lawyers.
IIRC, one of the ads was along the lines of "99% of the coverage for significantly less cost". Hard for Verizon to find an argument worth litigating there. The difficult thing to prove (which network is superior) is admitted to be an advantage to Verizon. The claim is on the easier thing to prove (price). If Verizon litigated, they either be arguing that their network was inferior to the competition, or arguing an easy to check fact (price).
I thought this was the most interesting thing from the whole article:
The research team was surprised to find barley in the ancient Chinese beer as barley had not become a staple crop for another 3,000 years.
Think about someone making beer but the ingredients not really catching on in a big way for three thousand years!
Or maybe the estimate of when barley because a staple crop is way off.
Depends on what they mean by "barley". Corn and watermelon are unrecognizable compared to what they were just 200 years ago. This is mostly related to good old fashioned selective breeding. 3,000 years is a very long time in agricultural terms.
When the epitaph of the United States is written, this is what it will say: "America: Killed by landing on the Moon." After that Americans simply can't believe anyone else in the world can do anything better than we can. We must have the best cell phone networks, the best healthcare system, and, even though we despise it, the best education system. We'd never look at what countries that are beating us in education are doing. If they're beating us they must be cheating; the system must be rigged.
Alternatively, 1969 was 24 years after the end of the Second World War. It would be reasonable to assume that it took at least that long for all the destroyed industrial capacity across Asia and Europe to be rebuilt.
P.S. I'm still expecting the Chinese to invade North Korea and Taiwan this spring. Opportunity beckons, this offer expires soon, and so they are going to make the Donald an offer he can't refuse... The Art of War versus The Art of the Deal .
This wouldn't make much sense. North Korea certainly causes China no end of headaches, but if China invaded them, it would ratchet up tensions in the DMZ even higher, they would gain a major humanitarian problem, and not much else. North Korea makes a great buffer zone between China and western-style democracy. It is in everyone's best interest that the current borders remain as-is.
The only issue is whether North Korea should be recognized as a nuclear power or not, and the related question of whether sanctions should continue. If they are recognized as a nuclear power (which they arguably are), sanctions to prevent that from occurring don't make sense on that argument. However, there is the greater goal of keeping the country in squalor so that neither China nor the West wants to take it over. If either side were to take over North Korea, we would be looking at a possible resumption of the Korean war.
They've also got a lot of more traditional stuff too - I believe WD bought over Toshiba's 3.5" hard drive business, and they also bought over Toshiba's NAND flash business very recently (a few weeks ago). (Remember, Toshiba invented NAND flash).
Not sure what happens to OCZ, Sandisk, or DiskOnChip, the first Toshiba bought to have their line of SSDs, the second Toshiba acquired cheaply (Sandisk used Toshiba NAND anyways), and ditto DiskOnChip.
This has a lot less to do with WD going shopping and more to do with Toshiba's financial problems leading to a yard sale.
Long ago, college dorms were more like Army barracks. Now they are private apartments. Food was served in a cafeteria, and you ate what they had today. Now they are more like food courts, and require far more staff. Students expect this kind of service, and if a school doesn't upgrade, they lose students to schools that do. It's overhead that has risen the cost of education, not the cost of professors. The difference in equipment and classrooms between engineering and liberal arts is small compared to the school environment costs.
This is still the case at some schools. You just have to choose based on $/educational benefit. This criteria is not considered by most high school students.
Why Donald's staff are lying:
By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.
Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.
One of the great challenges for Trump is that being the executive of a nation is very different from being the executive of a company. In general, Trump could fire anyone you he wanted, at any time, at any of his companies. There are many positions in the government that this can not be done, and "firing" citizens (whether by deporting or by putting them in jail) is also not easy without compelling evidence or circumstances.
"We're all in it together" (and similar) is a phrase that has been spoken a lot lately by Trump and his subordinates. My impression is that this may be Trump realizing and attempting to deal with this key difference between managing government and private companies.
Let the user pick a personalized name like they would for any child or pet.
Since it's only listening for specific "wake words" and this processing must be done on the device itself, I imagine it's easier for them to code a few specific wake words into the firmware (and perhaps not even possible to do much more; I'm not sure we know much about its hardware)--everything else you speak afterwards (and, so they say, only this speech) is sent to AWS or whatnot where there's a lot more processing power, which I imagine that allowing the user to configure an arbitrary word would also take.
I believe the way it works is that it looks for a couple phonemes and if those phonemes match it wakes up, makes sure it is a match and starts processing. If they can change it between 3 or 4 phoneme groups, it would seem like they could fairly easily allow you to choose which phonemes you want it to match. My guess is they don't do this for 2 reasons. The first is that people would be stupid and try to pick something like 'bob' or 'anne' without realizing that it is not complex enough for safe triggers. The second which relates to the first as well is marketing. It is good marketing to have someone constantly saying 'amazon' or 'alexa' over and over. 'Computer' is cute but it's also likely an attempt to corral that keyword the same way microsoft took the word windows.
Even with the ridiculous trademark/copyright landscape we have currently in the USA, there is no way that any company could get away with co-opting "computer" as a trademarkable or otherwise protected word.
At least you get Pandora, TripAdvisor, etc.. Us Infiniti owners just got a broken promise with our Q50s. The jack wipe managing the Airbiquity Choreo integration (branded InTouch) never bothered to turn on anything other than Facialbook and Google Search. I guess they prefer drivers to fumble with the phones they're streaming from via bluetooth instead.
As someone who just rented a car with Apple Carplay for the first time, I wish they would just STOP IT with the touchscreens and just have radios that pair quickly with bluetooth devices and can swap between devices without going 7 menus deep. Showing the currently playing song is plenty. I don't need any more information than that. My phone knows how to interrupt my Pandora music with Waze navigation prompts or any other notification. Even this basic function seemed too difficult for Carplay to do.
If they absolutely must have a touchscreen in the car, let it handle the car stuff and only the car stuff. I have never seen an phone-integrated car app system that worked well. And I travel roughly 75% of the time and cycle through a LOT of different rental cars of all makes and models. It's mostly all rubbish. The least annoying ones are the simplest ones which only handle basic bluetooth functions.