Maybe they did - if they used similar testing conditions that the EPA uses, then the cheat mode would have kicked in for them as well.
Then their reverse engineers are lazy or don't have enough budget. I've done a lot of reverse engineering over the past 7 years (in a different industry). Sometimes this is for the purpose of manufacturing replacement parts, and sometimes it is to understand how the competitor's product works. In the latter case, the job isn't finished until I know the machine as well as, or better than, the original designer. I do calculations the designer probably didn't do, just to see how overbuilt or overspec'd a part is.
The most important thing is to keep going until I am 100% certain I understand fully how something was designed and is intended to work. I don't trust anything completely until I can prove it and document it myself. It seems like the researchers who found this problem follow the same philosophy. Other car manufacturers seem to have just believed the EPA and other environmental agencies. "Trust but verify" is not just a motto. It is good practice no matter the industry.
an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
I really can't argue anything else in your post, but I can't help but wonder how Cuba was supposed to be an embarrassment vis a vis political systems. Sure, it's easy to make the point that "America can't dislodge this thorn in their side that sits less than 200km from their own shore" but I'm hard pressed to come up with any positive connotations to "our dictatorship is better than your democracy."
There are many positive impacts of being in a society that is not focused on capitalism. I have not been to Cuba, but in a general sense:
1. Most communist countries have more public recreation space. Parks, squares, plazas, etc. are often more numerous and larger because the allocation of land is usually not based on "profit".
2. In communist countries, citizens only have 1 entity to worry about spying on them, collecting personal information, and controlling their life. Cubans worry about the government. Americans worry about the government, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc etc.
3. Culture and the arts often have a higher importance and more public funding. In most capitalist countries, art and culture has to pay for itself, or have the potential to pay for itself, or it doesn't get made. Many communist countries dedicate funding to this. Is it often self-serving? Sure. But art and culture have important roles in society and is often overlooked in capitalist countries.
4. Stronger, smarter, and more comprehensive city planning (not sure if Cuba does this well or not). In capitalist countries, city planning seems to be a lot more organic and chaotic compared to communist ones. Companies and people build where they want to build, and are motivated by cost. This can have serious problems with regards to "tragedy of the commons" where everyone is looking out only for themselves and the entire population suffers as a result. Many communist countries do a better job managing this and make choices that are better for society as a whole. Cities are often more dense, inefficient suburbs are frowned upon, things are built where they are needed and not where it is cheapest to do so, etc. See also point #1.
There are probably a lot more but this is just a few I could think of.
I have both 7zip and winrar installed, and I gotta say I much prefer using winrar over 7zip. The UI is just a lot more elegant and intuitive, and the shell integration works better.
Me too. Winrar's interface is just better for me. It has tons of options for fine-tuning or customizing your work flow. I don't like change and they haven't really changed the interface much in a very long time. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.
The RAR file format itself seems to have more features, probably because the guy makes money off his software and can afford to devote more time to responding to customer suggestions and requests. Winrar is paying the bills, Mr. Roshal and his brother are highly motivated to keep their customers happy. I can easily imagine an open source developer ignoring the feature/bugfix requests of others to work on whatever they feel like.
They talk about choosing this corporate structure (in part) to prevent themselves from exploiting tax loopholes, yet they incorporated in Delaware (rather than the state their main office is actually in -- New York, apparently), which could be construed as exploiting loopholes (at least regulatory, if not directly tax-related) in and of itself. What gives?
Everybody incorporates in Delaware because it is easy and cheap to file the paperwork there. If you are selling things, or have employees, in almost any state, you have to register as a foreign corp/LLC in that state anyway, open worker's comp accounts, open tax accounts and pay income tax, etc. It really isn't cheating on tax, or a loophole, since you have to pay the corporate income tax in whatever state you made the income.
Containers are even less separate than jails, of course they're near the bottom of the barrel in terms of security. Why the Container fad when the overhead of proper virtualization is now so very low it's negligible on any modern server processor?
Containers are easy for weekend IT guys like me who run our own servers. I don't have time to bother with learning an entirely new IT paradigm and setting it all up myself. Home server software makes all of that unnecessary and Docker containers are handled almost like "apps" in some software (like Unraid). I have to set directories and manage the network port mapping but everything else is done for me. It does what I need it to do without requiring much new knowledge or skill.
It's not a technological problem. The real issues with this kind of technology is that it removes direction from the movie. Directors use different angles, aspect ratios, focal lenghts, etc to direct and control the viewer's attention. How do that do that if the viewer is in control of the camera.
They may partially try to do that and then you end up with the stupid situation like that scene in Avatar where the main character wakes from cryo. It was a classic change of focus from a water droplet to the main character, but in 3D it was distracting as heck as I was trying to focus on the water droplet but couldn't. This would not be helped if I could move the camera to not even look at the character in the first place.
Not just direction, but camerawork and editing skills also. In some movies, the camera is "handheld" (or at least edited later to have a "handheld" motion) and this motion is sometimes exploited to show different things in the scene. I noticed this in Blue is the Warmest Color, especially in many of the dialogue scenes. The camera will pan just a very small amount, seemingly randomly, as if it were handheld. But often there is something that was just out of view that is relevant to the current Dialogue.
For the sake of argument, this could have been done intentionally by writing it into the script, done impromptu by a skilled camera operator, requested by the director, or even added in editing. These small elements are the "polish" on a film and give it a unique character if done well. A format without a way to add these small elements is a big step backwards in storytelling.
The amount of fraud and incompetence in medical and psychological "studies" (along with the utter *fail* of peer review make me think that Medicine and Psychology drove off the rails into Snake Oil World many decades ago.
This reminds me of the joke "What do you call the medical student with a final GPA equivalent of D- ? Generally you have to call them 'doctor' ". More terrifying than funny, but half of all doctors are, by definition, below average.
Troll?? Really?? This is from the last link in the summary:
Results The efficacy of paroxetine and imipramine was not statistically or clinically significantly different from placebo for any prespecified primary or secondary efficacy outcome. HAM-D scores decreased by 10.7 (least squares mean) (95% confidence interval 9.1 to 12.3), 9.0 (7.4 to 10.5), and 9.1 (7.5 to 10.7) points, respectively, for the paroxetine, imipramine and placebo groups (P=0.20). There were clinically significant increases in harms, including suicidal ideation and behaviour and other serious adverse events in the paroxetine group and cardiovascular problems in the imipramine group.
Conclusions Neither paroxetine nor high dose imipramine showed efficacy for major depression in adolescents, and there was an increase in harms with both drugs. Access to primary data from trials has important implications for both clinical practice and research, including that published conclusions about efficacy and safety should not be read as authoritative. The reanalysis of Study 329 illustrates the necessity of making primary trial data and protocols available to increase the rigour of the evidence base.
Unless you work for GSK or are one of the original authors, my summary of the conclusions is pretty damned accurate: they fucking lied about badly done science.
This is exactly why I have completely given up on most prescription medications for managing my mental problems. This is not the only one which has been proven to be useless. Most are no better, or only very slightly better, than nothing.
I'm now on prescription Vyvanse (speed) and marijuana to manage my condition. These are real drugs with real effects. I don't need to wonder "do these drugs do anything at all?". They definitely do "something". The only questions left to answer then are "Is this effect helpful for me?" and "Is the effect big enough to justify the side effects". People shouldn't need to question whether a drug works or not. These drug company shenanigans have stalled mental health treatment for decades.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
Why should we buy heavily into solar now? By continuing to pump oil even though the price is very low, the Saudi's are once again giving us a period of very cheap oil. Every few years they do this to slap the competition around. In addition to attempting to make US and Canadian high-cost competition go out of business, they are also slapping down the competition from renewables. The economics for an electric car don't look so great at current car and fuel prices.
They are investing in renewables because they have big piles of money and would prefer to export oil rather than burn it in their inefficient oil-powered power plants. Nobody else in the world burns so much oil for electricity. Oil is an expensive way to make electricity and it is better to sell the oil and make electricity some other way.
If and when solar takes over, it will be cheaper than it is now. That's pretty much a given if you look at any graph of price over time. In addition, we will have the time value of money on our side if we wait to invest in Solar. Until the economics work out in solar's favor, waiting and "being left in the dust" is the smart play. It is exactly the same as buying a hard drive. Waiting as long as possible is the right move. The future buyer will be better off than a buyer today, in almost all cases.
Some people care about the emissions from their car...
just like some people like low flow shower heads and low flow toilets.
There's a big problem with this comparison. In some places, water is more expensive than the "essentially free" that many of us enjoy. Low flow fixtures can save measurable amounts of money, just like CFL and LED lighting.
There is no direct cost for driving a car which is polluting more than it should. In very serious cases (black clouds of smoke) there might be a possible fine but I assume Volkswagen's problem is relatively minor and not visually noticeable.
...how about a "we don't give a shit about your oversized monetized data-vacuum" button?
Okay, maybe too harsh, and I get it - the website has become dominant, and most folks are on it at least 1-2x a day, if not longer. But honestly, when some tiny website feature becomes breathless news, maybe we got our priorities screwed up?
Maybe they should be working on something more useful, like a dating tab. They could bury all the other dating websites in a month if their matchmaking system was even halfway decent. And it could be very good, they have plenty of data to mine regarding both individuals and short/long term relationships.
I recall that Japan has a >99% conviction rate, which is pretty unhealthy for a democracy and is comparable to many totalitarian regimes. This probably means that for Karpeles his conviction will be a formality and it's just a question of how many years he's going to get.
Well, you have to ask *why* the conviction rate is so high before rushing to any judgement. I'm not an expert, but Plea bargaining is not allowed under Japanese law. So they can't use lower level criminals to help obtain evidence for higher level ones. There's no incentive for the low level criminal to cooperate, his sentence is the same no matter what. So they don't cooperate. Weak cases that rely on this sort of criminal cooperation just don't go forward due to lack of evidence.
If he can't keep a woman around while being a billionaire I'd say that mental illness is called "ego".
I knew someone who was a "mere millionaire" who had the same problem.
It's not ego. Women don't come labeled with tags that say "sincere" and "gold digger" so you can tell who loves you because you're a wonderful person and who merely loves your wallet.
That's the real ego problem. Most of us would like not to have the "love" leave when the money does. Or, for that matter, when a higher "bidder" comes along.
Not only that, but being friends with people of a different social status is not easy. I wasn't always very successful, but now I am at the point where I live a very comfortable life. The more successful I get, the more it seems that there are people who "want something" from me. It starts small, with people wanting to use my apartment complex's pool or other facilities. It has a way of snowballing into the expectation that my family will do all the driving and hosting of get-togethers. These problems only occur with friends who are of a lower economic status than us. If they reciprocated, we wouldn't care. I understand those friends aren't flush with cash, but a platter of home cooked baked chicken isn't that expensive, and some of them can't even be bothered with that. A cooler of cheap beer is within just about everyone's monetary reach; especially if I will offer you the same at a later date. But that isn't what I get out of many friendships with lower class people.
We don't have this problem with people on the same income level. They always reciprocate. I don't think about who is "up" and who is "down" monetarily, because they make an effort, and that is enough. Poor people don't seem to think about what I want in return for helping them. I don't count dollars, because I have plenty of my own. The effort in keeping a friendship is all I want to see returned. Sadly, that's very hard to find.
Rich people must struggle tremendously with the problem of someone always trying to get something from them for nothing. You see all the worst and selfish behaviors of humanity. If I were as wealthy as Notch, I would have to dress like a bum, travel the world inconspicuously, and hope nobody notices me. I don't think I would be able to handle all the "help a brother out" BS that he probably has to deal with. It must be exhausting.
You mean like how that show Under the Dome always has product placement integrated into the script? In fact, I have a working theory about the show's plot that hasn't been revealed yet:
If you notice, basically every character in that show goes around carrying a windows phone and/or a surface tablet. One of the aliens told the town that the dome was sent down to protect. My guess is that since so many Microsoft products were under the dome, somehow that billion dollars worth of surface tablets ended up there and not in customer's hands, the dome was sent to protect the world from surface tablets and windows phones by trapping them all inside. The people inside are screwed of course, but at least the rest of the world is safe.
So there, you don't need to watch that show anymore because you already know how it ends (besides, the directing and writing sucks anyways. They scored some good acting talent, but even good actors can't make that show look believable.)
They lose immersion every time that immaculately spotless Prius is in the scene. Not that I was that immersed anyway, with all the ridiculous things that go on in the show. My wife and I watch it as a comedy program now.
So, since the book contains instructions and reasons for filtering water and the pages get consumed as filters, what happens when you are 6 months in and half the book is gone? Why not just make a big stack of filters and a small pamphlet on how/why to use them?
It's perfect for any kind of outdoor survival book. If you manage to survive long enough to filter 100L of water, you probably can find time to memorize the information on the next page.
As somebody that in some respects would qualify as a "Rock Star", people looking for one are an immediate red flag. Not only are they buzzword-users, they likely messed something up to a serious degree and are now looking for a person to clean up that mess. Quite often, that will not be possible with the border conditions given, and the pay will often suck in addition.
Well, maybe they are overusing a buzzword, but more importantly, rockstars can recognize other rockstars and prefer to be among their own kind. Everybody wants superman but why would superman want to work for you? If they really are that good then money isn't a problem for them. Superman wants to roll with the Superfriends because it is annoying to constantly work with people who can't or won't be as effective/productive as Superman. I might not be a rockstar but I work with some heavy hitters. You could double my salary but if my current boss and coworkers wouldn't be working with me, I would be very hesitant to take the offer. Every one of them is in the top 5% in the industry at what they do. Maybe that's just what happens when you make Superman VP of operations and let him handpick his team.
Try to get someone to proactive you low-dose vyvansse or adderall. I can exercise for hours enjoying myself and it suppresses appetite. It is also now on-label used for binge eating so you shouldn't even have to lie to get it.
The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group. If they are not a good fit for the company there is a substantial legal risk to firing them and overhead for carefully creating a paper trail to CYA. It is much easier to hire people from non-protective groups. If they don't work out you fire them and try someone else. Of course for businesses they like the H1-B's the most because if you fire them they get deported which really puts them in a position of power.
There is a substantial risk in firing anyone. My company creates a paper trail for anyone who isn't performing. Making a bigger paper trail for someone in a protected group would be discrimination. We treat everybody the same. Not performing? We'll try to help them. If they can't help themselves, we start building a paper trail. The people who can't be bothered to help themselves usually make it pretty easy to document their ineptitude.
You really need to watch the behind the scenes features for Fury Road. Sure, there was some big obvious CGI (the giant sand storm) but for about 90% of the movie, the things you expect to be CGI (the car crashes, explosions, insane stunts) are real, and the CGI is limited to fleshing out the wasteland background and erasing some safety equipment.
It is a breathtaking movie precisely because it is so real. Action movie fans have been saturated with CGI for so long, we hardly know what the real thing is anymore. Most recent superhero movies have been a big yawn for me. It's all fake and the actors are not really in a scary situation. Nothing brings out good acting like actually driving at high speed through the desert with actual explosions and crashes all around you.
The Unified Korea actually set a Timezone of +8:30 GMT back in 1910. In 1912 when Japan took over, it was reset to Japanese +8:00 GMT. After liberation, South Korea briefly for a year or two went back to +8:30 for a few years in the 50's I believe, but reverted to Japanese +8:00 for economic reasons.
What possible economic reasons could there be? A 30 minute time difference isn't going to make the slightest difference to businesses. It isn't like clocks are sold with fixed time zones and sharing a time zone means they only have to design 1 model.
Our household spends a lot of money on Amazon, but we are not going to renew Prime this year. I ahve been rodering thing from Amazon since the 90s but my satisfaction level with the company peaked a couple years ago adn has been sliding down since. The reasons we are cancelling are varied:
- Items listed as having Prime often do not arrive for 5-6 business days. This is typical for larger items. It annoys me that Amazon lists tham as prime (to me this means item will arrive 2-3 business days), and their practice of having fine print about extra handling time for some prime items is abrasive. Just don't list it as Prime if it won't be shipped for 3-4 days!
- The streaming video options are weak and I don't like the picture quality
- "Prime day" is a joke
- They raised the annual price of Prime 3x since I signed up
- Items shipped prime from Amazon have shown up obivously used or broken multiple many times over the past year (much more often than before)
- Amazon's support people were really hard to deal with when things in the above bullet point happened
- As far as I can tell "super saver" shipping usually only takes one additional day (and sometimes none) to arrive compared to prime
- I have been finding better prices on many things from retailers like Costco and Walmart compared to what Amazon offers
- Amazon uses a variety of tactics to make the camelcamlcamel plugin not work relably to show price history on an item.
Maybe I will regret the decision and we will sign back up, but we are definitely going to try living without it.
Same here. I haven't had used or broken items arrive yet, but I am completely fed up with the 2 day delivery promise turning into 5 days or longer after I order an item. Especially frustrating when I order a bunch of things for a project, plan on starting the project on day X, then one item somehow doesn't arrive until the next week. I may still be eligible for student prime rates but it still isn't worth it. I live in Houston; there really is no excuse for the shipping delays. Maybe Amazon has subcontracted out a little too far, and therefore lost control. It doesn't matter, we're going to try to live without prime.
In a no-holds-barred fight, they have a HUGE bullseye painted on them, and will be easy to take out.
Easy being a relative term.
Keep in mind that in World War II, the Japanese had lots of bases on little tiny islands. And it took hundreds of thousands of Marines to take them away.
The only reason this was done was because carrier aircraft of the era didn't pack anywhere the same punch as land based aircraft. Land based aircraft didn't have the range to hit Japan from areas under US control and return to base. In-flight refueling was still very experimental. Island hopping is no longer necessary. These rocks are small enough to completely obliterate in an afternoon by air anyway. Anybody left is not going to be in a position to threaten high-flying aircraft or ships.
Can someone explain to me why none of the great apes that supposedly share so much with humans in terms of cognitive ability can be taught how to read and to write, not merely as a parlor trick that the creature utilizes so that it will receive some reward that might satisfy an immediate physiological craving such as hunger, but as a technique that the animal might use to communicate its own thoughts and ideas to others (can an ape write a creative story with a beginning, middle, and end, for example?), and in particular, be able to teach this ability to successive generations of apes who may then even surpass the ability of their own instructor? An ape that could read could then teach itself how to do many more things than what it currently knows simply by reading about them, rather than having to be explicitly instructed by someone else... it could learn the rules to a game like chess, for example.
Language is not the only indicator of intelligence. Fu Manchu (the chimp, not the movie character) not only figured out how to use a tool to pick a lock and escape from his exhibit, but also was intelligent enough to realize that he needed to keep his escape tool concealed from humans. In other words, he intentionally and deliberately deceived them. Nobody intentionally taught him to do that. Some animals do practice deception, but not usually in regards to unnatural (manmade) constructs like locks and lockpicks. Children are incapable of deception until they are about 3 years old. Children under 3 also generally can't pick a lock unless they see someone else do it first.
Monkeys aren't people, but some of them are genuinely more intelligent than a 3 year old human.
I expect a standard for big-rigs to be developed where there are modular battery compartments on the underside of the trailer for conventional van trailers, such that the truck pulls up, the batteries under the trailer and under the tractor are swapped, and they're on their way again.
Depending on how they're designed they might also make for good under-ride protection, so cars can't drive under the trailers and get trapped or crushed.
That will require changes to the load limits in every state, or it won't be accepted by any trucking company. I am not involved in the trucking industry, but I had to load a semi with a bunch of my company's equipment several times. There are laws for loading on each axle, and the truck axle limits are different than the trailer axle limits. And every US state and Canadian province is different. My company's stuff isn't especially heavy but juggling the axle loads is a big pain. Many companies that ship equipment frequently (like my company) have sized their equipment for the max truck loads, based on the weight of the average step-deck trailer and the average truck. If you add even 2000 lb of batteries onto either the truck or the trailer it is going to be a problem for lots of people.
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Maybe they did - if they used similar testing conditions that the EPA uses, then the cheat mode would have kicked in for them as well.
Then their reverse engineers are lazy or don't have enough budget. I've done a lot of reverse engineering over the past 7 years (in a different industry). Sometimes this is for the purpose of manufacturing replacement parts, and sometimes it is to understand how the competitor's product works. In the latter case, the job isn't finished until I know the machine as well as, or better than, the original designer. I do calculations the designer probably didn't do, just to see how overbuilt or overspec'd a part is.
The most important thing is to keep going until I am 100% certain I understand fully how something was designed and is intended to work. I don't trust anything completely until I can prove it and document it myself. It seems like the researchers who found this problem follow the same philosophy. Other car manufacturers seem to have just believed the EPA and other environmental agencies. "Trust but verify" is not just a motto. It is good practice no matter the industry.
an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
I really can't argue anything else in your post, but I can't help but wonder how Cuba was supposed to be an embarrassment vis a vis political systems. Sure, it's easy to make the point that "America can't dislodge this thorn in their side that sits less than 200km from their own shore" but I'm hard pressed to come up with any positive connotations to "our dictatorship is better than your democracy."
There are many positive impacts of being in a society that is not focused on capitalism. I have not been to Cuba, but in a general sense:
1. Most communist countries have more public recreation space. Parks, squares, plazas, etc. are often more numerous and larger because the allocation of land is usually not based on "profit".
2. In communist countries, citizens only have 1 entity to worry about spying on them, collecting personal information, and controlling their life. Cubans worry about the government. Americans worry about the government, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc etc.
3. Culture and the arts often have a higher importance and more public funding. In most capitalist countries, art and culture has to pay for itself, or have the potential to pay for itself, or it doesn't get made. Many communist countries dedicate funding to this. Is it often self-serving? Sure. But art and culture have important roles in society and is often overlooked in capitalist countries.
4. Stronger, smarter, and more comprehensive city planning (not sure if Cuba does this well or not). In capitalist countries, city planning seems to be a lot more organic and chaotic compared to communist ones. Companies and people build where they want to build, and are motivated by cost. This can have serious problems with regards to "tragedy of the commons" where everyone is looking out only for themselves and the entire population suffers as a result. Many communist countries do a better job managing this and make choices that are better for society as a whole. Cities are often more dense, inefficient suburbs are frowned upon, things are built where they are needed and not where it is cheapest to do so, etc. See also point #1.
There are probably a lot more but this is just a few I could think of.
I have both 7zip and winrar installed, and I gotta say I much prefer using winrar over 7zip. The UI is just a lot more elegant and intuitive, and the shell integration works better.
Me too. Winrar's interface is just better for me. It has tons of options for fine-tuning or customizing your work flow. I don't like change and they haven't really changed the interface much in a very long time. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.
The RAR file format itself seems to have more features, probably because the guy makes money off his software and can afford to devote more time to responding to customer suggestions and requests. Winrar is paying the bills, Mr. Roshal and his brother are highly motivated to keep their customers happy. I can easily imagine an open source developer ignoring the feature/bugfix requests of others to work on whatever they feel like.
Way to leave us hanging on the ending of the cool story, bro.
They talk about choosing this corporate structure (in part) to prevent themselves from exploiting tax loopholes, yet they incorporated in Delaware (rather than the state their main office is actually in -- New York, apparently), which could be construed as exploiting loopholes (at least regulatory, if not directly tax-related) in and of itself. What gives?
Everybody incorporates in Delaware because it is easy and cheap to file the paperwork there. If you are selling things, or have employees, in almost any state, you have to register as a foreign corp/LLC in that state anyway, open worker's comp accounts, open tax accounts and pay income tax, etc. It really isn't cheating on tax, or a loophole, since you have to pay the corporate income tax in whatever state you made the income.
Containers are even less separate than jails, of course they're near the bottom of the barrel in terms of security. Why the Container fad when the overhead of proper virtualization is now so very low it's negligible on any modern server processor?
Containers are easy for weekend IT guys like me who run our own servers. I don't have time to bother with learning an entirely new IT paradigm and setting it all up myself. Home server software makes all of that unnecessary and Docker containers are handled almost like "apps" in some software (like Unraid). I have to set directories and manage the network port mapping but everything else is done for me. It does what I need it to do without requiring much new knowledge or skill.
It's not a technological problem. The real issues with this kind of technology is that it removes direction from the movie. Directors use different angles, aspect ratios, focal lenghts, etc to direct and control the viewer's attention. How do that do that if the viewer is in control of the camera.
They may partially try to do that and then you end up with the stupid situation like that scene in Avatar where the main character wakes from cryo. It was a classic change of focus from a water droplet to the main character, but in 3D it was distracting as heck as I was trying to focus on the water droplet but couldn't. This would not be helped if I could move the camera to not even look at the character in the first place.
Not just direction, but camerawork and editing skills also. In some movies, the camera is "handheld" (or at least edited later to have a "handheld" motion) and this motion is sometimes exploited to show different things in the scene. I noticed this in Blue is the Warmest Color, especially in many of the dialogue scenes. The camera will pan just a very small amount, seemingly randomly, as if it were handheld. But often there is something that was just out of view that is relevant to the current Dialogue.
For the sake of argument, this could have been done intentionally by writing it into the script, done impromptu by a skilled camera operator, requested by the director, or even added in editing. These small elements are the "polish" on a film and give it a unique character if done well. A format without a way to add these small elements is a big step backwards in storytelling.
The amount of fraud and incompetence in medical and psychological "studies" (along with the utter *fail* of peer review make me think that Medicine and Psychology drove off the rails into Snake Oil World many decades ago.
This reminds me of the joke "What do you call the medical student with a final GPA equivalent of D- ? Generally you have to call them 'doctor' ". More terrifying than funny, but half of all doctors are, by definition, below average.
Troll?? Really?? This is from the last link in the summary:
Unless you work for GSK or are one of the original authors, my summary of the conclusions is pretty damned accurate: they fucking lied about badly done science.
This is exactly why I have completely given up on most prescription medications for managing my mental problems. This is not the only one which has been proven to be useless. Most are no better, or only very slightly better, than nothing.
I'm now on prescription Vyvanse (speed) and marijuana to manage my condition. These are real drugs with real effects. I don't need to wonder "do these drugs do anything at all?". They definitely do "something". The only questions left to answer then are "Is this effect helpful for me?" and "Is the effect big enough to justify the side effects". People shouldn't need to question whether a drug works or not. These drug company shenanigans have stalled mental health treatment for decades.
they price that into their product.
just think how much more sales they would have today if they had heeded their own research and put some profits into solar panels. The long term outlook for solar panels is better than the long term outlook for oil. Don't believe me? Ask the saudis, with all the oil in the world they are still investing heavily in solar. Watch the world bypass the USA as it adapts solar and leaves us in the dust.
Why should we buy heavily into solar now? By continuing to pump oil even though the price is very low, the Saudi's are once again giving us a period of very cheap oil. Every few years they do this to slap the competition around. In addition to attempting to make US and Canadian high-cost competition go out of business, they are also slapping down the competition from renewables. The economics for an electric car don't look so great at current car and fuel prices.
They are investing in renewables because they have big piles of money and would prefer to export oil rather than burn it in their inefficient oil-powered power plants. Nobody else in the world burns so much oil for electricity. Oil is an expensive way to make electricity and it is better to sell the oil and make electricity some other way.
If and when solar takes over, it will be cheaper than it is now. That's pretty much a given if you look at any graph of price over time. In addition, we will have the time value of money on our side if we wait to invest in Solar. Until the economics work out in solar's favor, waiting and "being left in the dust" is the smart play. It is exactly the same as buying a hard drive. Waiting as long as possible is the right move. The future buyer will be better off than a buyer today, in almost all cases.
Some people care about the emissions from their car...
just like some people like low flow shower heads and low flow toilets.
There's a big problem with this comparison. In some places, water is more expensive than the "essentially free" that many of us enjoy. Low flow fixtures can save measurable amounts of money, just like CFL and LED lighting.
There is no direct cost for driving a car which is polluting more than it should. In very serious cases (black clouds of smoke) there might be a possible fine but I assume Volkswagen's problem is relatively minor and not visually noticeable.
...how about a "we don't give a shit about your oversized monetized data-vacuum" button?
Okay, maybe too harsh, and I get it - the website has become dominant, and most folks are on it at least 1-2x a day, if not longer. But honestly, when some tiny website feature becomes breathless news, maybe we got our priorities screwed up?
Maybe they should be working on something more useful, like a dating tab. They could bury all the other dating websites in a month if their matchmaking system was even halfway decent. And it could be very good, they have plenty of data to mine regarding both individuals and short/long term relationships.
I recall that Japan has a >99% conviction rate, which is pretty unhealthy for a democracy and is comparable to many totalitarian regimes. This probably means that for Karpeles his conviction will be a formality and it's just a question of how many years he's going to get.
Well, you have to ask *why* the conviction rate is so high before rushing to any judgement. I'm not an expert, but Plea bargaining is not allowed under Japanese law. So they can't use lower level criminals to help obtain evidence for higher level ones. There's no incentive for the low level criminal to cooperate, his sentence is the same no matter what. So they don't cooperate. Weak cases that rely on this sort of criminal cooperation just don't go forward due to lack of evidence.
If he can't keep a woman around while being a billionaire I'd say that mental illness is called "ego".
I knew someone who was a "mere millionaire" who had the same problem.
It's not ego. Women don't come labeled with tags that say "sincere" and "gold digger" so you can tell who loves you because you're a wonderful person and who merely loves your wallet.
That's the real ego problem. Most of us would like not to have the "love" leave when the money does. Or, for that matter, when a higher "bidder" comes along.
Not only that, but being friends with people of a different social status is not easy. I wasn't always very successful, but now I am at the point where I live a very comfortable life. The more successful I get, the more it seems that there are people who "want something" from me. It starts small, with people wanting to use my apartment complex's pool or other facilities. It has a way of snowballing into the expectation that my family will do all the driving and hosting of get-togethers. These problems only occur with friends who are of a lower economic status than us. If they reciprocated, we wouldn't care. I understand those friends aren't flush with cash, but a platter of home cooked baked chicken isn't that expensive, and some of them can't even be bothered with that. A cooler of cheap beer is within just about everyone's monetary reach; especially if I will offer you the same at a later date. But that isn't what I get out of many friendships with lower class people.
We don't have this problem with people on the same income level. They always reciprocate. I don't think about who is "up" and who is "down" monetarily, because they make an effort, and that is enough. Poor people don't seem to think about what I want in return for helping them. I don't count dollars, because I have plenty of my own. The effort in keeping a friendship is all I want to see returned. Sadly, that's very hard to find.
Rich people must struggle tremendously with the problem of someone always trying to get something from them for nothing. You see all the worst and selfish behaviors of humanity. If I were as wealthy as Notch, I would have to dress like a bum, travel the world inconspicuously, and hope nobody notices me. I don't think I would be able to handle all the "help a brother out" BS that he probably has to deal with. It must be exhausting.
You mean like how that show Under the Dome always has product placement integrated into the script? In fact, I have a working theory about the show's plot that hasn't been revealed yet:
If you notice, basically every character in that show goes around carrying a windows phone and/or a surface tablet. One of the aliens told the town that the dome was sent down to protect. My guess is that since so many Microsoft products were under the dome, somehow that billion dollars worth of surface tablets ended up there and not in customer's hands, the dome was sent to protect the world from surface tablets and windows phones by trapping them all inside. The people inside are screwed of course, but at least the rest of the world is safe.
So there, you don't need to watch that show anymore because you already know how it ends (besides, the directing and writing sucks anyways. They scored some good acting talent, but even good actors can't make that show look believable.)
They lose immersion every time that immaculately spotless Prius is in the scene. Not that I was that immersed anyway, with all the ridiculous things that go on in the show. My wife and I watch it as a comedy program now.
So, since the book contains instructions and reasons for filtering water and the pages get consumed as filters, what happens when you are 6 months in and half the book is gone? Why not just make a big stack of filters and a small pamphlet on how/why to use them?
It's perfect for any kind of outdoor survival book. If you manage to survive long enough to filter 100L of water, you probably can find time to memorize the information on the next page.
As somebody that in some respects would qualify as a "Rock Star", people looking for one are an immediate red flag. Not only are they buzzword-users, they likely messed something up to a serious degree and are now looking for a person to clean up that mess. Quite often, that will not be possible with the border conditions given, and the pay will often suck in addition.
Well, maybe they are overusing a buzzword, but more importantly, rockstars can recognize other rockstars and prefer to be among their own kind. Everybody wants superman but why would superman want to work for you? If they really are that good then money isn't a problem for them. Superman wants to roll with the Superfriends because it is annoying to constantly work with people who can't or won't be as effective/productive as Superman. I might not be a rockstar but I work with some heavy hitters. You could double my salary but if my current boss and coworkers wouldn't be working with me, I would be very hesitant to take the offer. Every one of them is in the top 5% in the industry at what they do. Maybe that's just what happens when you make Superman VP of operations and let him handpick his team.
Try to get someone to proactive you low-dose vyvansse or adderall. I can exercise for hours enjoying myself and it suppresses appetite. It is also now on-label used for binge eating so you shouldn't even have to lie to get it.
The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group. If they are not a good fit for the company there is a substantial legal risk to firing them and overhead for carefully creating a paper trail to CYA. It is much easier to hire people from non-protective groups. If they don't work out you fire them and try someone else. Of course for businesses they like the H1-B's the most because if you fire them they get deported which really puts them in a position of power.
There is a substantial risk in firing anyone. My company creates a paper trail for anyone who isn't performing. Making a bigger paper trail for someone in a protected group would be discrimination. We treat everybody the same. Not performing? We'll try to help them. If they can't help themselves, we start building a paper trail. The people who can't be bothered to help themselves usually make it pretty easy to document their ineptitude.
You really need to watch the behind the scenes features for Fury Road. Sure, there was some big obvious CGI (the giant sand storm) but for about 90% of the movie, the things you expect to be CGI (the car crashes, explosions, insane stunts) are real, and the CGI is limited to fleshing out the wasteland background and erasing some safety equipment.
It is a breathtaking movie precisely because it is so real. Action movie fans have been saturated with CGI for so long, we hardly know what the real thing is anymore. Most recent superhero movies have been a big yawn for me. It's all fake and the actors are not really in a scary situation. Nothing brings out good acting like actually driving at high speed through the desert with actual explosions and crashes all around you.
The Unified Korea actually set a Timezone of +8:30 GMT back in 1910. In 1912 when Japan took over, it was reset to Japanese +8:00 GMT. After liberation, South Korea briefly for a year or two went back to +8:30 for a few years in the 50's I believe, but reverted to Japanese +8:00 for economic reasons.
What possible economic reasons could there be? A 30 minute time difference isn't going to make the slightest difference to businesses. It isn't like clocks are sold with fixed time zones and sharing a time zone means they only have to design 1 model.
Our household spends a lot of money on Amazon, but we are not going to renew Prime this year. I ahve been rodering thing from Amazon since the 90s but my satisfaction level with the company peaked a couple years ago adn has been sliding down since. The reasons we are cancelling are varied: - Items listed as having Prime often do not arrive for 5-6 business days. This is typical for larger items. It annoys me that Amazon lists tham as prime (to me this means item will arrive 2-3 business days), and their practice of having fine print about extra handling time for some prime items is abrasive. Just don't list it as Prime if it won't be shipped for 3-4 days! - The streaming video options are weak and I don't like the picture quality - "Prime day" is a joke - They raised the annual price of Prime 3x since I signed up - Items shipped prime from Amazon have shown up obivously used or broken multiple many times over the past year (much more often than before) - Amazon's support people were really hard to deal with when things in the above bullet point happened - As far as I can tell "super saver" shipping usually only takes one additional day (and sometimes none) to arrive compared to prime - I have been finding better prices on many things from retailers like Costco and Walmart compared to what Amazon offers - Amazon uses a variety of tactics to make the camelcamlcamel plugin not work relably to show price history on an item. Maybe I will regret the decision and we will sign back up, but we are definitely going to try living without it.
Same here. I haven't had used or broken items arrive yet, but I am completely fed up with the 2 day delivery promise turning into 5 days or longer after I order an item. Especially frustrating when I order a bunch of things for a project, plan on starting the project on day X, then one item somehow doesn't arrive until the next week. I may still be eligible for student prime rates but it still isn't worth it. I live in Houston; there really is no excuse for the shipping delays. Maybe Amazon has subcontracted out a little too far, and therefore lost control. It doesn't matter, we're going to try to live without prime.
In a no-holds-barred fight, they have a HUGE bullseye painted on them, and will be easy to take out.
Easy being a relative term.
Keep in mind that in World War II, the Japanese had lots of bases on little tiny islands. And it took hundreds of thousands of Marines to take them away.
The only reason this was done was because carrier aircraft of the era didn't pack anywhere the same punch as land based aircraft. Land based aircraft didn't have the range to hit Japan from areas under US control and return to base. In-flight refueling was still very experimental. Island hopping is no longer necessary. These rocks are small enough to completely obliterate in an afternoon by air anyway. Anybody left is not going to be in a position to threaten high-flying aircraft or ships.
Can someone explain to me why none of the great apes that supposedly share so much with humans in terms of cognitive ability can be taught how to read and to write, not merely as a parlor trick that the creature utilizes so that it will receive some reward that might satisfy an immediate physiological craving such as hunger, but as a technique that the animal might use to communicate its own thoughts and ideas to others (can an ape write a creative story with a beginning, middle, and end, for example?), and in particular, be able to teach this ability to successive generations of apes who may then even surpass the ability of their own instructor? An ape that could read could then teach itself how to do many more things than what it currently knows simply by reading about them, rather than having to be explicitly instructed by someone else... it could learn the rules to a game like chess, for example.
Language is not the only indicator of intelligence. Fu Manchu (the chimp, not the movie character) not only figured out how to use a tool to pick a lock and escape from his exhibit, but also was intelligent enough to realize that he needed to keep his escape tool concealed from humans. In other words, he intentionally and deliberately deceived them. Nobody intentionally taught him to do that. Some animals do practice deception, but not usually in regards to unnatural (manmade) constructs like locks and lockpicks. Children are incapable of deception until they are about 3 years old. Children under 3 also generally can't pick a lock unless they see someone else do it first.
Monkeys aren't people, but some of them are genuinely more intelligent than a 3 year old human.
I expect a standard for big-rigs to be developed where there are modular battery compartments on the underside of the trailer for conventional van trailers, such that the truck pulls up, the batteries under the trailer and under the tractor are swapped, and they're on their way again. Depending on how they're designed they might also make for good under-ride protection, so cars can't drive under the trailers and get trapped or crushed.
That will require changes to the load limits in every state, or it won't be accepted by any trucking company. I am not involved in the trucking industry, but I had to load a semi with a bunch of my company's equipment several times. There are laws for loading on each axle, and the truck axle limits are different than the trailer axle limits. And every US state and Canadian province is different. My company's stuff isn't especially heavy but juggling the axle loads is a big pain. Many companies that ship equipment frequently (like my company) have sized their equipment for the max truck loads, based on the weight of the average step-deck trailer and the average truck. If you add even 2000 lb of batteries onto either the truck or the trailer it is going to be a problem for lots of people.