What annoys me about Adobe's splash screens isn't that they exist, but that they are so hideously ugly. Right now, Adobe welcomes me to its programs with this monstrous, abstract geometric shape. I know I'm running Photoshop if the geometric shape is blue. If I'm in illustrator, then the shape is colored orange.
But not so long ago, Adobe Illustrator would fire up and you'd get this picture of Botticelli's Venus gracing your screen. A piece of fine art. It provoked a lot of positive reactions- it was literally a familiar face that you saw every time you fired up the application. A sort of welcome. A reminder that even if you're doing something as boring as fixing up a bivariate plot, you're using some of the more artistically-inclined neurons in your head. You associated what you were doing with, well, art. And when you saw that face in your computer screen, your brain recognized it and started getting itself in its "lets-go-be-artistic" mode. Photoshop would have a picture of an eye and a camera lens- reminding you that you were manipulating pixels the same way that photographers used to manipulate film. The new splash screens look like something you'd see in a powerpoint presentation at a large corporation... they feel, in a word, soulless. They don't make you feel like an artist, they make you feel like a corporate drone.
As for the article's contention that splash screens are inherently bad... I disagree with that. They're sort of like the cover art for albums. Back in the day, music came on spinning discs, and people would put artwork on the sleeves that the disks came in. And you'd associate the artwork with that disk in your head, so that sometimes all you'd have to do is look at the art and it would evoke all the emotions of the music and the lyrics of the whole album. There were also these things called "books" that were made out of dead trees, and we were never supposed to judge books by what was on the cover, but a good book cover on a good book... it was like seeing the face of an old friend.
A good splash screen can do the same. I can't help but look at Botticelli's Venus and think warmly about hours spent tweaking teensy little handles on points with Illustrator.
If there are any Adobe people out there, I really, really wish you'd consider bringing back Venus and the eye-and-lens motif.
Am I the only one who finds the existence of this lawsuit a bit hypocritical? China isn't exactly known for its strict policy towards intellectual property. The New York Times recently did an article about how companies won't let their employees bring their personal laptops and cell phones to China, because they're worried that the Chinese will hack into them and steal their technology and designs. A few days ago there was a case where a Chinese programmer at the Fed stole a piece of software that they'd spent ten million dollars trying to develop. A couple months ago, the Wall Street Journal reported a case of a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer paying for control software stolen from an American firm. And are there even any estimates on how many pirated copies of Windows are in mainland China?
American companies and American taxpayers fund the development of technology, and then China turns around and steals the designs and makes a profit off of it. We're basically subsidizing Chinese industry, with U.S. corporations and taxpayers paying money to help China put U.S. workers out of business. The Chinese government turns a blind eye to all of this, or perhaps more likely, the government is actively encouraging this industrial espionage, just like the Soviets had a strategy of stealing Western technology during the Cold War.
Yes, Apple should obey the letter of the law, and perhaps they didn't do that in this case. But it seems remarkably hypocritical for a Chinese company to be dragging a Western company to court for intellectual property violations. Somehow when the theft goes the other way, nobody seems to notice.
The plan allegedly was to sell them to developing nations and dupe their governments. The mafia would create a circus theater filled with distractions to make them look like a legitimate outfit. Office space, limousines, fancy suits, lots of showmanship. They'd use foreign diplomats and politicians on their payroll to get presidents or warlords of a foreign country into a face to face meeting.
They get a leader of some inexperienced government, possibly even a wealthy warlord, of a developing nation, and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond.
Well, it was a pretty ingenious scheme, but it looks like Obama is going to have to find another way to pay off the U.S. debt...
WHAT???? A man has come forward who can see into the ultraviolet?!!??? This cannot be!!!
I, the evil mutant Darklight, am the only one with power over the ultraviolet spectrum. If another emerged with such powers, it would threaten my Ultimate Ultraviolet plot for world domination. I must alert my co-conspirators Nucleon and Cheetahface and see if they can learn more about this "xmas2003". A curious choice for a superhero name... the "x" suggests some affiliation with the X-men and yet when I sucked out Xavier's brain he revealed nothing of this mutant to me. It also implies some sort of holiday theme, which is simply baffling. Perhaps he wears an elf costume?
Very well, xmas2003. I will play your game. We will find you, and then we shall see if your powers are real. If I find that you have been toying with me with false claims, then I will kill you quickly. And if I find that you have been telling the truth, then I will kill you... slowly.
After taking out those precious, precious eyes of yours, of course.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAH!!!!
This makes a complete mockery of Interpol's constitution. This is taken directly from the constitution on their web site:
"Article 3.
It is strictly forbidden for the Organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character."
"It looks like you're trying to write a letter expressing your dissatisfaction with an escort service. Would you like help trying to bitch out this pimp?"
And the fact that you have to retort with personal attacks means that you don't really have a good answer to the argument, so you're resorting to shooting the messenger because you don't like the message.
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
The idea that we can either (a) move off of earth, or (b) economically harvest resources from space using anything like our current technology is almost more fantasy than science fiction at this point. Look at the basic structure of that Soyuz rocket: it's a huge metal cylinder, packed full of propellant, with a tiny capsule on the end. To get that capsule just to low Earth orbit (let alone to another planetary body), you are throwing away all that fuel and metal, not to mention all the resources and energy needed to build and launch each rocket.
And this is unlikely to change, because rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft. Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast. Similarly, a modern commercial airliner isn't radically faster than the first jetliners that flew in the late 1940s, maximum cruise speed of a 777 is about 600 mph, versus around 500 for the first jetliners. And rockets are the same way: the economics of rockets haven't changed radically since WWII when von Braun was lobbing V2s at London. Back then you were throwing away a lot of fuel and metal to launch a small payload, almost 70 years later we're still doing the same, just with bigger rockets. In short, a mature technology. It was extraordinarily expensive to launch stuff on a rocket 70 years ago, and it's still extraordinarily expensive, which suggests it will be extraordinarily expensive 70 years from now. To make space colonization or resource extraction practical, you'd need to increase the efficiency of space travel by multiple orders of magnitude. That's probably impossible with anything that remotely resembles existing rockets; instead if humans ever leave the planet it will require some completely new kind of technology.
The context is really important here; out of context it reads like the kind of thing an angsty teenager would tweet about his ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, neither the slashdot summary nor the article it cites really provide the proper context. The New York Times has an article but it still does a pretty poor job of explain what exactly he did. The best explanation I've found online is at Al Arabiya http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/10/193811.html
Here's how they explain it:
"Kashgari, a 23-year-old journalist with Al-Bilad newspaper in Jeddah, last week posted a series of tweets of imaginary conversations with the Prophet, in which he spoke to him as an equal, showing his admiration for the man but also confusion around his persona.
“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you” said one Tweet quoted by The Daily Beast."
Once you read that, it's sort of like, "oh shit, now I understand why they're pissed off." Basically he's just saying that Mohammed is just some guy- an inspirational figure, but just a human being, not necessarily divine or divinely inspired. In Western theological terms, that's like saying that Christ is an inspirational person with some really interesting teachings, but not the Son of God. That's about as blasphemous as you can get. I feel really sorry for this guy- it took a lot of courage, or a lot of stupidity, or maybe both to do what he did- but his life as he knew it may be effectively over. Even if he apologized and the Saudi government pardoned him, he would still face the threat of being murdered if he ever returned to Saudi Arabia.
All of which could have been done cheaper with unmanned rockets.
The only really significant thing the manned space program has done in 20 years is fix the Hubble. That was pretty awesome, and you couldn't have done that without a manned program. But according to the numbers on Wikipedia, building the Hubble cost around $2.5 billion, whereas the Shuttle program cost around $170 billion. For the cost of two shuttle missions you could have built a replacement Hubble.
Astronauts are basically a PR stunt, a way of literally putting a human face- and in particular, an *American* face on space exploration. Putting a man on the moon was a PR stunt, a way to show off America's power. The Saturn V was a monument to the power of the United States in the same way that the pyramids were a monument to the dynasties of the Egyptian pharaohs. I'm not arguing that this kind of stuff is meaningless. On the contrary, it's really important. The space program is a form of soft power that compliments the aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier projects power in the form of threat; the space program projects power in the form of inspiration. The aircraft carrier says we're more powerful than the other guys, the space program says that we're ultimately about something more than just brute force.
Here's my argument: the manned program has outlived its usefulness as an instrument of soft power. When you're flying Lord British and the dude who developed Microsoft Word on the ISS, the manned space program has degenerated into a form of adventure tourism for the superrich. That doesn't inspire the nation, and it doesn't inspire the world. The unmanned program, however, continues to project what's best about the United States as a country- our ingenuity, our creativity, our daring, our need to explore, and our refusal to settle for second place. I'm not arguing we should give up on space- I'm saying we should double down on the unmanned program, because that's where the real exploration, inspiration, and science is all happening.
The 2012 budget request is $5 billion for science (Earth Science, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, Heliophysics, James Webb Space Telescope) versus $9.6 billion for the manned program, which includes $3 billion for the International Space Station. That's a pretty staggering figure considering that NASA won't actually launch any manned vehicles into space in 2012.
There's your problem: everything meaningful that NASA has done in the past 20 years has come out of the science program- the Hubble, the Mars rovers, monitoring the earth from space- but we spend almost twice as much on the manned program, which has produced no meaningful science to speak of. Even from the whole inspiring-future-scientists standpoint, I would suspect that vastly more children get interested in science because of Spirit, Opportunity, and the Hubble than because of the International Space Station. At this point, the manned space program really serves no purpose, it is nothing but an entitlement program for the defense industry- welfare for aerospace corporations.
If a bunch of kids could hack into Syran government email by typing "12345", you'd imagine that at least one of the big cyberwarfare or intelligence units out there- the U.S., Israel, or China- would have thought of the same trick and has already been monitoring their communications for a while. At least you'd hope so. I'd hate to think that right now there are of a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying, "12345... hey, why didn't we think of that?"
I'd just like to point out that since this activity is taking place in Russia, technically the correct term is not "astroturfing", it should be "cosmoturfing"
There's pretty much no way these colonies can be 200,000 years old. During the last ice age, 15,000 years ago, the sea level was about 400 feet lower. That means that during the Ice Age, these seagrass meadows would have been on dry land, and you'd have regular old grass, not seagrass. There were literally Neanderthals and wooly rhinoceros walking around on this terrain. I was curious how the authors could possibly have missed this; it turns out they didn't; the Australian news article just does a bad job of summarizing the research.
From the PLOS article:
The scenario of a km-range spread achieved exclusively through clonal growth requires that the clones reach a minimum age of about 12,500 years. Applying the same estimates to the genets shared between the two pairs of meadows, located 7 km apart between Formentera and Ibiza and 15 km apart around a cape in Formentera (Fig. 3), yields a minimum age estimate between 80,000 and 200,000 years, projecting the origin of the clones well into the late Pleistocene. Although there is no biologically compelling reason to exclude this possibility, we consider it to be an unlikely scenario because local sea level changes during the last ice age (from 80,000 to 10,000 years) would place these sampling locations on land (the sea was 100 metres below its present level).
Anyway, it just drives home the point- if you really want to understand the issue, go back to the source material, not the media summary that was done on a tight deadline. It raises a question though- if seagrass really grows that slowly, how do you get these vast colonies? One possibility is storms. Since seagrasses are in nearshore environments, that means that storms can tear them up; currents can then pick up and move the plants, perhaps for miles. Every once in a while, some of those uprooted plants might luckily get transplanted into a hospitable habitat down current, and you can get a single colony rapidly spreading out over a huge area. Effectively, the plant could seed itself without actually using seeds.
Re:The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You've got to be joking. It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister, with an engine on the bottom, and a little crew capsule on top. They burned that entire canister's worth of fuel just to get that tiny little Apollo module to the Moon and back. Moving a mining operation into space, and then moving fuel out of a gravity well- even a shallow one like the Moon- is going to burn far more than you could ever transport; it's a losing proposition. To move fuel economically you need something like an oil tanker or a train- a vehicle that moves vast quantities of fuel, while burning only a little bit of fuel itself. And to do that, you'd need something like a highly efficient fusion engine, or some kind of fantastic Star Trek technology. And if you had that technology, why would you need to get fuel from space?
The same goes for pretty much any resource except maybe gold. It takes a huge amount of resources to go to space and back. The only way it's profitable is if the resources you bring back are more expensive than the resources you expend building and launching the rocket. Until that changes- until there's some radical change in launch technology that makes space travel cheaper — not by a factor of two or three, but orders of magnitude cheaper — the idea of resource extraction in space isn't even science fiction, it's fantasy.
That's the real reason that undersea colonies and space colonies didn't happen. It's definitely technologically possible, but it's just not economically possible.
from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money. I think it was $250 million or so NET profit on revenues of $1.5 BILLION.
for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.
but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, MOD PARENT DOWN!!!!! Facebook made a billion dollars in profit in 2011, *not* $250 million. Check the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-everything-you-need-to-know/ . Just on principle, it pisses me off to no end that this moron is talking out of his ass about stuff he clearly knows nothing about, and has somehow gotten modded to a +5. There's not even an excuse, you could have found the real statistic in 15 seconds on Google instead of just making stuff up.
All I can say is, if completely inaccurate statements like this can somehow get modded to "+5 Insightful", then the basic premise of Slashdot is fundamentally unsound.
No idea where you got those numbers come from, but the actual numbers (from the Wall Street Journal) are $606 million in earnings on $1.97 billion in revenues for 2010, and $1 billion in earnings on $3.71 billion in revenue for 2011.
That means 1) Facebook is making a lot of money, 2) Facebook has huge profit margins- about 25-30% profit, and 3) Facebook is growing very, very fast. Those are some damn impressive numbers. Assuming a P/E of 30 or even 40, which is reasonable for a rapidly growing, highly profitable company, that would justify a valuation of 30 or 40 billion dollars.
But a valuation of $75-$100 on $1 billion in earnings implies a P/E of 75 or 100... and that's the kind of P/E ratios you used to see back at the height of the internet bubble. Basically, you're subscribing to the Greater Fool Theory, which is that you'd have to be a fool to buy at those prices... but you can make a profit if you find an even greater fool who buys into the hype, and who will buy at an even higher price. That'll keep going for a while, but sooner or later the company makes a misstep, and people panic because they realize they won't be able to sell the stock at a higher price- the bubble bursts, and then it's a race to the doors. This is what happened with Netflix- it shot up to $300 a share (80 P/E) on at which point a couple of blunders caused the stock to plunge to under $70 in a matter of 6 months.
Facebook might be a decent investment as a company (Zuckerberg seems like the same kind of unstoppable evil genius that Bill Gates used to be back before Gates wussed out and discovered that whole helping-other-human-beings thing) but only if you get at the right price. At half the price, Facebook would probably be a good investment, but at the prices they're talking about, it's speculating, not investing.
The Internet Bubble was launched by the IPO of Netscape. People bought the stock because they looked at what Netscape did- they made a "browser" program that allowed you to access these things called "web pages" via this whole "internet" thing, and it was pretty clear that this was the Next Big Thing. It was going to change society, business, *everything*. And it did... so what went wrong?
Well, one problem was that Netscape didn't actually have a history of making money. The other problem is that they didn't even have a clear idea of how they were going to make money. There wasn't a clear business model. It was basically "hey, this is the Next Big Thing! Get in on the ground floor, and we'll figure out that whole profitability thing later. But hey, this is after all the Next Big Thing, how can you lose?"
Now, that's not how IPOs are supposed to work. You're supposed to go public *after* you have a proven track record- consistent profitability, a history of growth. But Jim Clark really wanted to cash in, so he decided he'd just skip those steps. And that basically set the model for the Internet Bubble. Profitability was meaningless, sound business models were meaningless, the only thing that mattered was getting lots of people to use your software/web site/service. The profitability thing, well, they'd just figure that out later. Except, of course, most of them didn't. Inevitably people realized that most of these companies weren't the Next Big Thing, and the market tanked. The only stocks that ended up being worth anything were the old-fashioned ones. You know, the ones with business models. The ones that made a profit.
So how does FaceBook stack up? Well, according to Reuters, Facebook raked in $1.2 billion in revenue the first 9 months of 2010, and earned $355 million on that, a profit of 30%. That's a lot of money, and that's a really good profit margin. And they're growing. According to a Reuters article, Facebook earned $500 million in just the first six months of 2011. FaceBook is not another Internet Bubble company. They actually know how to make money, and a lot of it. Whether the stock is a good investment will depend entirely on how much you pay for it. Right now, a typical company trades at around 20 times earnings- that is, for $20 for every dollar of profit. This is the P/E (price/earnings) ratio, which is the single most important number to know in looking at stocks. Anyway, If you're paying several times that- 50, 60, or 80 P/E- FaceBook will have to increase its earnings massively in the future to justify that price.
So it's all about how cheaply you can get it. A terrible company can be a great investment if you can get it really cheap. A great company can be a terrible investment if you pay too much. The Wall Street Journal and other publications are going to be chattering a lot about how much the company is really worth. The reality is that the average Slashdot reader probably has just as much clue as they do about Facebooks long-term viability.
So I'm curious. What do people here think- is FaceBook here to stay? Or is this just another social media fad that will go the way of Friendster and Myspace, as soon as something better goes along? Do people still use FaceBook, or have people sort of reached a saturation point with it?
You pretty much summed it up. I fear that Facebook is a one-trick pony. "And now, for our next act... uh... hm... where's that card..." What more can they realistically do, other than poach internet services from competitors like Google?
The question isn't whether Facebook is a one-trick pony, the question is whether that trick is one they can consistently make money off of.
Look at newspapers. They were a one-trick pony. They gave away content (news stories) and made money by selling space to advertisers. Until the rise of the internet and Craigslist, it was a very, very profitable trick. TV networks? One trick pony, same trick. Give away content (news, sitcoms, talk shows) and sell space to advertisers. Google... same pony, same trick all over again. Give away content (Google search, Youtube videos), sell space to advertisers.
Anyone care to guess how Facebook makes money? You got it. Give away content, sell ads. It's a rock-solid, highly profitable business model proven by more than a century of newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, Google, Youtube- and now FaceBook. But the real beauty of it is that they don't even have to generate any content themselves. The users do all that, all Facebook does is provide a platform for it. Facebook doesn't really need to diversify, they just need to figure out how to do this single trick- give away content, sell ads- over and over again.
Personally, it's a company I'd strongly consider investing in. They have a good business model, they're profitable, they have rapid revenue growth. The big issue is whether the stock can be had at a price that's reasonable, or whether it's going to be Internet Bubble Part II, with speculators driving the share price to absurd levels of 50, 60, 80 times earnings. If you can get the stock at 30 times earnings or less, I would say buy as much as you can; in my experience that's a reasonable price for a profitable, rapidly growing tech company.My guess is that it will get hyped like crazy and trade at substantially more than that, in which case the best bet is to wait until the market tanks and hope you can get some stock at fire-sale prices. But the market is very, very jittery right now, so there's a good chance of doing just that.
The math suggests we're a long way off. According to Wikipedia, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers together cost about 1 billion to build, launch and operate. According to a quick Google search, gold currently costs 56,000 dollars per kilo. Imagine we had somehow managed to include the ability to mine and return metals into the mission at no additional cost, and that Spirit and Opportunity ran into some rich gold deposits. They would together have to send back 16,800 kilograms worth of pure gold, or roughly 100 times the weight of a rover in gold, for the mission to start turning a profit.
Let's imagine we set them to mining some less valuable stuff. Even valuable rare earths cost in the hundreds of dollars per kilo, not thousands, so if you're mining coltan or whatever, you'd need to bring thousands of times more of the stuff back to turn a profit. Now, if you're mining nickel, at 23$ a kilo, Spirit and Opportunity would have to mine 40,000,000 kilos of the stuff to run a profit. 40,000 metric tons, or the equivalent of 200,000 rovers worth of metal. Keep in mind that this is all wildly speculative and hypothetical, since neither robot has the ability to mine or return anything.
For mining in space to be profitable, you'd have to see dramatic improvements of our ability to work in space, and at the same time, cut costs by literally orders of magnitude. It would require that our ability to build and launch would improve in a Moore's Law like fashion. That is, we would have to get to the point where we could bring the cost of putting a robot or human in space down by 50% every 18 months, for two, three, four decades. Companies like SpaceX are making progress in bringing down launch costs, but it's not happening at a Moore's Law like rate. Unless we see some fundamental changes in space technology- not just better rockets, but a truly transformative technology (like a space elevator or some exotic new Star-Trek technology that makes 20th century rocket science look like paleolithic hand axes) mining and colonization in space are going to remain generations away.
And it's time for that to stop. That's why I promise that if I receive the nomination of my party and am elected, then by 2016, I will put a stop to politicians promising things that they cannot possibly deliver!
Do I really have to explain this to you guys? When you play Lego, everything's in Lego scale. So for instance, if you send the cat rampaging through your Town sets, he's like a godzilla-sized monster. And the drop off the sofa to the carpet isn't a foot or two off the ground, it's like a huge cliff, and will totally kill your dude (and he totally will NOT survive that, no matter what my so-called-friend Brian Schwarz says, and that is why I don't play Lego with Brian anymore, because he's just really stupid). So are we clear now on how Lego scale works then?
OK, so let's do the math. Low earth orbit is 200-500 miles up, and a minifig is 1.5 inches tall, which is 1/44 the height of an average person. So in Lego scale, 88,000 feet is 3,872,000 feet, or like 733 miles, and so he's totally in space.
I recently had an insight about Anon's activities. The reason hactivisim is gaining strength as a movement is because people are disenfranchised with society and seen conventional avenues of affecting change as a waste of time. The 'man' has a tight grip on the media, politicians and the police are being increasingly militarized for use on peaceful protesters. People are unhappy with the status quo. Unless change starts happening now and fast, I predict Anon's numbers and targets to grow substantially in the coming years.
And these people are protesting what, exactly? That they might have to pay $8 in a theater to see the latest, oppressively stupid instalment of the "Transformers" franchise instead of getting to download it for free? Yeah, these guys are real crusaders for social justice.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do online activism. Google and Wikipedia showed the right way to do it with their protests of SOPA. Their protests made a powerful statement about online freedom without attacking anyone, and it was amazing to see how quickly Congress retreated. By comparison, the Anonymous attacks just seem like a vindictive act of petty vandalism, by a bunch of kids who are angry because their parents have taken their toys away from them. It's not helping anything, if anything it's destructive. People are going to think "if this is what they mean by freedom of speech, then maybe I'm in favor of a little censorship".
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, what can I say? I guess I'm just a bad seed."
But not so long ago, Adobe Illustrator would fire up and you'd get this picture of Botticelli's Venus gracing your screen. A piece of fine art. It provoked a lot of positive reactions- it was literally a familiar face that you saw every time you fired up the application. A sort of welcome. A reminder that even if you're doing something as boring as fixing up a bivariate plot, you're using some of the more artistically-inclined neurons in your head. You associated what you were doing with, well, art. And when you saw that face in your computer screen, your brain recognized it and started getting itself in its "lets-go-be-artistic" mode. Photoshop would have a picture of an eye and a camera lens- reminding you that you were manipulating pixels the same way that photographers used to manipulate film. The new splash screens look like something you'd see in a powerpoint presentation at a large corporation... they feel, in a word, soulless. They don't make you feel like an artist, they make you feel like a corporate drone.
As for the article's contention that splash screens are inherently bad... I disagree with that. They're sort of like the cover art for albums. Back in the day, music came on spinning discs, and people would put artwork on the sleeves that the disks came in. And you'd associate the artwork with that disk in your head, so that sometimes all you'd have to do is look at the art and it would evoke all the emotions of the music and the lyrics of the whole album. There were also these things called "books" that were made out of dead trees, and we were never supposed to judge books by what was on the cover, but a good book cover on a good book... it was like seeing the face of an old friend. A good splash screen can do the same. I can't help but look at Botticelli's Venus and think warmly about hours spent tweaking teensy little handles on points with Illustrator.
If there are any Adobe people out there, I really, really wish you'd consider bringing back Venus and the eye-and-lens motif.
American companies and American taxpayers fund the development of technology, and then China turns around and steals the designs and makes a profit off of it. We're basically subsidizing Chinese industry, with U.S. corporations and taxpayers paying money to help China put U.S. workers out of business. The Chinese government turns a blind eye to all of this, or perhaps more likely, the government is actively encouraging this industrial espionage, just like the Soviets had a strategy of stealing Western technology during the Cold War.
Yes, Apple should obey the letter of the law, and perhaps they didn't do that in this case. But it seems remarkably hypocritical for a Chinese company to be dragging a Western company to court for intellectual property violations. Somehow when the theft goes the other way, nobody seems to notice.
The plan allegedly was to sell them to developing nations and dupe their governments. The mafia would create a circus theater filled with distractions to make them look like a legitimate outfit. Office space, limousines, fancy suits, lots of showmanship. They'd use foreign diplomats and politicians on their payroll to get presidents or warlords of a foreign country into a face to face meeting.
They get a leader of some inexperienced government, possibly even a wealthy warlord, of a developing nation, and try to get them to transfer $1 billion worth of wealth in exchange for a $1 billion U.S. treasury bond.
Well, it was a pretty ingenious scheme, but it looks like Obama is going to have to find another way to pay off the U.S. debt...
I, the evil mutant Darklight, am the only one with power over the ultraviolet spectrum. If another emerged with such powers, it would threaten my Ultimate Ultraviolet plot for world domination. I must alert my co-conspirators Nucleon and Cheetahface and see if they can learn more about this "xmas2003". A curious choice for a superhero name... the "x" suggests some affiliation with the X-men and yet when I sucked out Xavier's brain he revealed nothing of this mutant to me. It also implies some sort of holiday theme, which is simply baffling. Perhaps he wears an elf costume?
Very well, xmas2003. I will play your game. We will find you, and then we shall see if your powers are real. If I find that you have been toying with me with false claims, then I will kill you quickly. And if I find that you have been telling the truth, then I will kill you... slowly.
After taking out those precious, precious eyes of yours, of course. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAH!!!!
-Darklight, Evil Mutant Overlord
"Article 3. It is strictly forbidden for the Organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character."
"It looks like you're trying to write a letter expressing your dissatisfaction with an escort service. Would you like help trying to bitch out this pimp?"
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
And this is unlikely to change, because rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft. Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast. Similarly, a modern commercial airliner isn't radically faster than the first jetliners that flew in the late 1940s, maximum cruise speed of a 777 is about 600 mph, versus around 500 for the first jetliners. And rockets are the same way: the economics of rockets haven't changed radically since WWII when von Braun was lobbing V2s at London. Back then you were throwing away a lot of fuel and metal to launch a small payload, almost 70 years later we're still doing the same, just with bigger rockets. In short, a mature technology. It was extraordinarily expensive to launch stuff on a rocket 70 years ago, and it's still extraordinarily expensive, which suggests it will be extraordinarily expensive 70 years from now. To make space colonization or resource extraction practical, you'd need to increase the efficiency of space travel by multiple orders of magnitude. That's probably impossible with anything that remotely resembles existing rockets; instead if humans ever leave the planet it will require some completely new kind of technology.
Here's how they explain it:
"Kashgari, a 23-year-old journalist with Al-Bilad newspaper in Jeddah, last week posted a series of tweets of imaginary conversations with the Prophet, in which he spoke to him as an equal, showing his admiration for the man but also confusion around his persona.
“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you” said one Tweet quoted by The Daily Beast."
Once you read that, it's sort of like, "oh shit, now I understand why they're pissed off." Basically he's just saying that Mohammed is just some guy- an inspirational figure, but just a human being, not necessarily divine or divinely inspired. In Western theological terms, that's like saying that Christ is an inspirational person with some really interesting teachings, but not the Son of God. That's about as blasphemous as you can get. I feel really sorry for this guy- it took a lot of courage, or a lot of stupidity, or maybe both to do what he did- but his life as he knew it may be effectively over. Even if he apologized and the Saudi government pardoned him, he would still face the threat of being murdered if he ever returned to Saudi Arabia.
The only really significant thing the manned space program has done in 20 years is fix the Hubble. That was pretty awesome, and you couldn't have done that without a manned program. But according to the numbers on Wikipedia, building the Hubble cost around $2.5 billion, whereas the Shuttle program cost around $170 billion. For the cost of two shuttle missions you could have built a replacement Hubble.
Astronauts are basically a PR stunt, a way of literally putting a human face- and in particular, an *American* face on space exploration. Putting a man on the moon was a PR stunt, a way to show off America's power. The Saturn V was a monument to the power of the United States in the same way that the pyramids were a monument to the dynasties of the Egyptian pharaohs. I'm not arguing that this kind of stuff is meaningless. On the contrary, it's really important. The space program is a form of soft power that compliments the aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier projects power in the form of threat; the space program projects power in the form of inspiration. The aircraft carrier says we're more powerful than the other guys, the space program says that we're ultimately about something more than just brute force.
Here's my argument: the manned program has outlived its usefulness as an instrument of soft power. When you're flying Lord British and the dude who developed Microsoft Word on the ISS, the manned space program has degenerated into a form of adventure tourism for the superrich. That doesn't inspire the nation, and it doesn't inspire the world. The unmanned program, however, continues to project what's best about the United States as a country- our ingenuity, our creativity, our daring, our need to explore, and our refusal to settle for second place. I'm not arguing we should give up on space- I'm saying we should double down on the unmanned program, because that's where the real exploration, inspiration, and science is all happening.
The 2012 budget request is $5 billion for science (Earth Science, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, Heliophysics, James Webb Space Telescope) versus $9.6 billion for the manned program, which includes $3 billion for the International Space Station. That's a pretty staggering figure considering that NASA won't actually launch any manned vehicles into space in 2012.
There's your problem: everything meaningful that NASA has done in the past 20 years has come out of the science program- the Hubble, the Mars rovers, monitoring the earth from space- but we spend almost twice as much on the manned program, which has produced no meaningful science to speak of. Even from the whole inspiring-future-scientists standpoint, I would suspect that vastly more children get interested in science because of Spirit, Opportunity, and the Hubble than because of the International Space Station. At this point, the manned space program really serves no purpose, it is nothing but an entitlement program for the defense industry- welfare for aerospace corporations.
If a bunch of kids could hack into Syran government email by typing "12345", you'd imagine that at least one of the big cyberwarfare or intelligence units out there- the U.S., Israel, or China- would have thought of the same trick and has already been monitoring their communications for a while. At least you'd hope so. I'd hate to think that right now there are of a couple of NSA agents looking at each other and saying, "12345... hey, why didn't we think of that?"
I'd just like to point out that since this activity is taking place in Russia, technically the correct term is not "astroturfing", it should be "cosmoturfing"
From the PLOS article:
The scenario of a km-range spread achieved exclusively through clonal growth requires that the clones reach a minimum age of about 12,500 years. Applying the same estimates to the genets shared between the two pairs of meadows, located 7 km apart between Formentera and Ibiza and 15 km apart around a cape in Formentera (Fig. 3), yields a minimum age estimate between 80,000 and 200,000 years, projecting the origin of the clones well into the late Pleistocene. Although there is no biologically compelling reason to exclude this possibility, we consider it to be an unlikely scenario because local sea level changes during the last ice age (from 80,000 to 10,000 years) would place these sampling locations on land (the sea was 100 metres below its present level).
Anyway, it just drives home the point- if you really want to understand the issue, go back to the source material, not the media summary that was done on a tight deadline. It raises a question though- if seagrass really grows that slowly, how do you get these vast colonies? One possibility is storms. Since seagrasses are in nearshore environments, that means that storms can tear them up; currents can then pick up and move the plants, perhaps for miles. Every once in a while, some of those uprooted plants might luckily get transplanted into a hospitable habitat down current, and you can get a single colony rapidly spreading out over a huge area. Effectively, the plant could seed itself without actually using seeds.
The same goes for pretty much any resource except maybe gold. It takes a huge amount of resources to go to space and back. The only way it's profitable is if the resources you bring back are more expensive than the resources you expend building and launching the rocket. Until that changes- until there's some radical change in launch technology that makes space travel cheaper — not by a factor of two or three, but orders of magnitude cheaper — the idea of resource extraction in space isn't even science fiction, it's fantasy.
That's the real reason that undersea colonies and space colonies didn't happen. It's definitely technologically possible, but it's just not economically possible.
from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money. I think it was $250 million or so NET profit on revenues of $1.5 BILLION.
for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.
but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, MOD PARENT DOWN!!!!! Facebook made a billion dollars in profit in 2011, *not* $250 million. Check the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-everything-you-need-to-know/ . Just on principle, it pisses me off to no end that this moron is talking out of his ass about stuff he clearly knows nothing about, and has somehow gotten modded to a +5. There's not even an excuse, you could have found the real statistic in 15 seconds on Google instead of just making stuff up.
All I can say is, if completely inaccurate statements like this can somehow get modded to "+5 Insightful", then the basic premise of Slashdot is fundamentally unsound.
That means 1) Facebook is making a lot of money, 2) Facebook has huge profit margins- about 25-30% profit, and 3) Facebook is growing very, very fast. Those are some damn impressive numbers. Assuming a P/E of 30 or even 40, which is reasonable for a rapidly growing, highly profitable company, that would justify a valuation of 30 or 40 billion dollars.
But a valuation of $75-$100 on $1 billion in earnings implies a P/E of 75 or 100... and that's the kind of P/E ratios you used to see back at the height of the internet bubble. Basically, you're subscribing to the Greater Fool Theory, which is that you'd have to be a fool to buy at those prices... but you can make a profit if you find an even greater fool who buys into the hype, and who will buy at an even higher price. That'll keep going for a while, but sooner or later the company makes a misstep, and people panic because they realize they won't be able to sell the stock at a higher price- the bubble bursts, and then it's a race to the doors. This is what happened with Netflix- it shot up to $300 a share (80 P/E) on at which point a couple of blunders caused the stock to plunge to under $70 in a matter of 6 months.
Facebook might be a decent investment as a company (Zuckerberg seems like the same kind of unstoppable evil genius that Bill Gates used to be back before Gates wussed out and discovered that whole helping-other-human-beings thing) but only if you get at the right price. At half the price, Facebook would probably be a good investment, but at the prices they're talking about, it's speculating, not investing.
Of course the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet, who's trying to destroy a laser dot?!
Probably a cat.
Well, one problem was that Netscape didn't actually have a history of making money. The other problem is that they didn't even have a clear idea of how they were going to make money. There wasn't a clear business model. It was basically "hey, this is the Next Big Thing! Get in on the ground floor, and we'll figure out that whole profitability thing later. But hey, this is after all the Next Big Thing, how can you lose?"
Now, that's not how IPOs are supposed to work. You're supposed to go public *after* you have a proven track record- consistent profitability, a history of growth. But Jim Clark really wanted to cash in, so he decided he'd just skip those steps. And that basically set the model for the Internet Bubble. Profitability was meaningless, sound business models were meaningless, the only thing that mattered was getting lots of people to use your software/web site/service. The profitability thing, well, they'd just figure that out later. Except, of course, most of them didn't. Inevitably people realized that most of these companies weren't the Next Big Thing, and the market tanked. The only stocks that ended up being worth anything were the old-fashioned ones. You know, the ones with business models. The ones that made a profit.
So how does FaceBook stack up? Well, according to Reuters, Facebook raked in $1.2 billion in revenue the first 9 months of 2010, and earned $355 million on that, a profit of 30%. That's a lot of money, and that's a really good profit margin. And they're growing. According to a Reuters article, Facebook earned $500 million in just the first six months of 2011. FaceBook is not another Internet Bubble company. They actually know how to make money, and a lot of it. Whether the stock is a good investment will depend entirely on how much you pay for it. Right now, a typical company trades at around 20 times earnings- that is, for $20 for every dollar of profit. This is the P/E (price/earnings) ratio, which is the single most important number to know in looking at stocks. Anyway, If you're paying several times that- 50, 60, or 80 P/E- FaceBook will have to increase its earnings massively in the future to justify that price.
So it's all about how cheaply you can get it. A terrible company can be a great investment if you can get it really cheap. A great company can be a terrible investment if you pay too much. The Wall Street Journal and other publications are going to be chattering a lot about how much the company is really worth. The reality is that the average Slashdot reader probably has just as much clue as they do about Facebooks long-term viability.
So I'm curious. What do people here think- is FaceBook here to stay? Or is this just another social media fad that will go the way of Friendster and Myspace, as soon as something better goes along? Do people still use FaceBook, or have people sort of reached a saturation point with it?
You pretty much summed it up. I fear that Facebook is a one-trick pony. "And now, for our next act... uh... hm... where's that card..." What more can they realistically do, other than poach internet services from competitors like Google?
The question isn't whether Facebook is a one-trick pony, the question is whether that trick is one they can consistently make money off of.
Look at newspapers. They were a one-trick pony. They gave away content (news stories) and made money by selling space to advertisers. Until the rise of the internet and Craigslist, it was a very, very profitable trick. TV networks? One trick pony, same trick. Give away content (news, sitcoms, talk shows) and sell space to advertisers. Google... same pony, same trick all over again. Give away content (Google search, Youtube videos), sell space to advertisers.
Anyone care to guess how Facebook makes money? You got it. Give away content, sell ads. It's a rock-solid, highly profitable business model proven by more than a century of newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, Google, Youtube- and now FaceBook. But the real beauty of it is that they don't even have to generate any content themselves. The users do all that, all Facebook does is provide a platform for it. Facebook doesn't really need to diversify, they just need to figure out how to do this single trick- give away content, sell ads- over and over again.
Personally, it's a company I'd strongly consider investing in. They have a good business model, they're profitable, they have rapid revenue growth. The big issue is whether the stock can be had at a price that's reasonable, or whether it's going to be Internet Bubble Part II, with speculators driving the share price to absurd levels of 50, 60, 80 times earnings. If you can get the stock at 30 times earnings or less, I would say buy as much as you can; in my experience that's a reasonable price for a profitable, rapidly growing tech company.My guess is that it will get hyped like crazy and trade at substantially more than that, in which case the best bet is to wait until the market tanks and hope you can get some stock at fire-sale prices. But the market is very, very jittery right now, so there's a good chance of doing just that.
Let's imagine we set them to mining some less valuable stuff. Even valuable rare earths cost in the hundreds of dollars per kilo, not thousands, so if you're mining coltan or whatever, you'd need to bring thousands of times more of the stuff back to turn a profit. Now, if you're mining nickel, at 23$ a kilo, Spirit and Opportunity would have to mine 40,000,000 kilos of the stuff to run a profit. 40,000 metric tons, or the equivalent of 200,000 rovers worth of metal. Keep in mind that this is all wildly speculative and hypothetical, since neither robot has the ability to mine or return anything.
For mining in space to be profitable, you'd have to see dramatic improvements of our ability to work in space, and at the same time, cut costs by literally orders of magnitude. It would require that our ability to build and launch would improve in a Moore's Law like fashion. That is, we would have to get to the point where we could bring the cost of putting a robot or human in space down by 50% every 18 months, for two, three, four decades. Companies like SpaceX are making progress in bringing down launch costs, but it's not happening at a Moore's Law like rate. Unless we see some fundamental changes in space technology- not just better rockets, but a truly transformative technology (like a space elevator or some exotic new Star-Trek technology that makes 20th century rocket science look like paleolithic hand axes) mining and colonization in space are going to remain generations away.
And it's time for that to stop. That's why I promise that if I receive the nomination of my party and am elected, then by 2016, I will put a stop to politicians promising things that they cannot possibly deliver!
OK, so let's do the math. Low earth orbit is 200-500 miles up, and a minifig is 1.5 inches tall, which is 1/44 the height of an average person. So in Lego scale, 88,000 feet is 3,872,000 feet, or like 733 miles, and so he's totally in space.
I recently had an insight about Anon's activities. The reason hactivisim is gaining strength as a movement is because people are disenfranchised with society and seen conventional avenues of affecting change as a waste of time. The 'man' has a tight grip on the media, politicians and the police are being increasingly militarized for use on peaceful protesters. People are unhappy with the status quo. Unless change starts happening now and fast, I predict Anon's numbers and targets to grow substantially in the coming years.
And these people are protesting what, exactly? That they might have to pay $8 in a theater to see the latest, oppressively stupid instalment of the "Transformers" franchise instead of getting to download it for free? Yeah, these guys are real crusaders for social justice.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do online activism. Google and Wikipedia showed the right way to do it with their protests of SOPA. Their protests made a powerful statement about online freedom without attacking anyone, and it was amazing to see how quickly Congress retreated. By comparison, the Anonymous attacks just seem like a vindictive act of petty vandalism, by a bunch of kids who are angry because their parents have taken their toys away from them. It's not helping anything, if anything it's destructive. People are going to think "if this is what they mean by freedom of speech, then maybe I'm in favor of a little censorship".