Cable company DVR must record accurately. The three models I've tried have a 10% loss rate, meaning they just can't be bothered to record 1/10th of the shows they get set up to watch. The shows that DID work would often end up with periods of dead audio or would stop short and/or start late. Sometimes everything on the HDD would become inaccessible. So long, entire series that I was going to watch this summer.
The solution to this is to get a genuine TiVo instead of the imitation TiVo that the cable company wants to rent you. I've found TiVo to be pretty near 100% reliable.
Overpriced? Probably a nonstarter. Similarly priced to other major manufacturer TV sets with a novel and improved user experience? That could sell.
I have to laugh when DirecTV talks about the interface they spent the last 10 years working on, because basically they are talking about trying to copy the two-decades old TiVo interface and doing a mediocre job of it. Fortunately, DirecTV now offers an authentic TiVo that is only slightly inferior to stand-alone TiVos. The TiVo interface is marvelous, and well up to the standard of Apple's user interface design, but it has advanced only modestly in two decades. So if Apple has indeed come up with the next step in user interface design, the time is right.
So since the MPAA rips off creators, I shouldn't feel guilty about ripping them off myself? That doesn't really work for me. I learned that two wrongs don't make a right by the time I was eight years old.
If you DON'T think smartphones will eventually last days and weeks or longer on a single charge, then YOU'RE delusion.
Seems fairly unlikely. There are certainly some potential substantial improvements in battery technology that can be expected. But consumers seem to be more interested in increased computer power than longer battery life. I think that current phones are probably pretty much in the "sweet spot" in terms of consumer preferences for balancing phone battery life with computing power. Plugging in your phone while you sleep is simply not that much of an inconvenience to make consumers willing to give up speed and bright high-resolution displays.
Agreed, these are fairly typical symptoms of mass hysteria (although I don't much care for the term). I wouldn't be surprised if the blood tests show nothing. And given that a number of the girls have already been released, if it was actual poisoning, the perpetrators don't seem to have used enough to have done serious harm, which doesn't really sound like the Taliban. I wonder if the previous event was genuine? In that case, some of the girls were reported to be in critical condition, but I haven't heard whether they recovered.
The basic tenet behind evolution is that a mutation helps an organism survive better and thus is kept.
Not quite. The tenet is that a mutation that causes that same mutation to be more common in the next generation will increase in prevalence. Mechanistically, this can happen in numerous of ways: an organism may reproduce more effectively, it can increase the number of years it is reproductively active, it share its genes more widely (e.g. by sex), it can increase the number of its offspring that survive to reproductive age, either by having more of them, or increasing their ability to survive, it can help other individuals who share the same mutation to do the same thing.
How does this explain the reproductive system? Without pretty much every part of the male and female anatomy working perfectly, none of it would help an organism survive, and in fact some argument can be made that requiring a baby to be carried around and live birth to happen hurts survivability.
This predicts that the reproductive system probably evolved in a stepwise manner, from simple mechanisms for trading genes (which is advantageous as it makes one's offspring more diverse and less likely to fall prey to the same diseases or predators) to more complex ones, one step at a time, with each step being initially "backward compatible" with what has gone before. And indeed, we see a whole range of gene sharing strategies, ranging from simple to complex, in nature, demonstrating that gene-sharing does not have to be complex at the outset. Live birth can be advantageous in many circumstances, as there are many predators that prey upon eggs and nests. By reducing the period of vulnerability, the number of offspring surviving to the next generation is increased.
Likewise I've heard descriptions of how eyes formed from light sensitive cells. If those light sensitive cells were not hooked to anything that caused the organism to survive better why would they be selected for?
Quite simply--by a mutation that enhances light sensitivity of a neuron that is already connected and likely serving some kind of sensory role. Light sensitivity turns out to be one of those things that can evolve very easy, because the structure of certain amino acids causes them to absorb light, and this is true for many other types of biological molecules as well. For example, if you study neurotransmitter receptors, you discover that many receptors that do not play any role in light sensing nevertheless possess some degree of light sensitivity. So from the standpoint of natural selection, evolution of vision is pretty much unavoidable
This seems like a potential niche. However, Android based smartphones are now available pretty much free with a contract. What's keeping out potential low-end buyers is not the cost of the phone, but the cost of the contract. One possibility would be a phone that updates your Facebook feed only when WiFi is available, and otherwise functions as a generic low-end phone
I guess now that the efforts of a handful of researchers to blame video games for violence has become pretty much discredited given the way that rates of actual violence have dropped consistently as video games have become more popular and more realistic, they are trying to blame video games for problems young men have relating to women (although I notice the article tries once again to push the old insinuation that "aggression" -- in nonviolent laboratory tests -- is somehow predictive of violence). Once again, where is the actual real-world evidence that young men are having any more difficulty relating to women than they ever have?
Yes, it is still true that men tend to like stimulating activities like playing sports, watching sports, watching action shows on TV, and, yes, playing videogames. And sometimes, they do it to excess, to the point of causing problems in their lives, and particularly with respect to their relationships with women. And doubtless this involves the basal ganglia of the brain, just like everything else that people like doing. Maybe if you somehow conflate this with a genuinely serious social problem--drug addiction--you can get support for even more research funds for the kind of laboratory studies of videogames that have so far utterly failed to yield any useful insights. I'd love to see somebody studying this general issue, and developing genuinely effective therapeutic strategies for men who are having trouble balancing these pleasurable activities with the rest of their lives. But seizing upon and demonizing one particular activity out of the many stimulating activities that men enjoy, simply because that happens to be enjoyed by young men (it's always easier to get the older generation worked up about something that modern teenagers do) does not strike me as a productive approach.
Yeah, I'm sure the 6 cents the people that actually CREATED the show receive will be sorely missed. You know, as opposed to the 97% that will get sucked up by middle men that don't contribute a fucking thing to the medium?
If the show gets cancelled because it doesn't make enough money to justify its budget (as has happened to a number of top quality HBO series, including Deadwood and Rome), it very likely will be sorely missed. Probably especially by Peter Dinklage, who doing a fantastic job acting the role of a lifetime—a rare opportunity to play the hero of a dramatic series. Perhaps while he (and the many other actors, set designers, costume artists, special effects artists, scriptwriters, etc., etc. whose efforts combine to create a major production like this) is pounding the pavement looking for his next gig, he will have time to ruminate about your principled concern for his level of compensation. Somehow, I doubt if he will be grateful to you.
But who cares about how they feel when you have the opportunity to save a few bucks and enjoy the show they created a few months earlier? Fuck 'em!
Hardship has nothing to do with it. The reality is that HBO (and most other media creators) are clinging to an outdated business model, and the longer they cling to it, the more people will pirate their shows. I'm not saying it's legal, or even morally right, but it's reality. And really, since when has what's morally right ever influenced the corporations more than the all-mighty dollar? There is a certain irony in watching as all these people download Game of Thrones instead of paying for it simply because they CAN'T pay for it yet, and even if they did, they'd still have to deal with the annoying things like DRM and FBI warnings, etc. It's not one single thing that drives people to download, it's the sum total.
While this is entirely true, the outdated business model of the distributors is still a pretty lame rationalization for ripping off the creators of a work. I like the series and I'd like to see the adaptations if "Game of Thrones" continue, and that is dependent upon the distributor being able to sell the product, however outdated their distribution model might be. So I refuse to personally contribute, in however small a way, to the failure of the series by ripping them off. One can make a moral choice whether or not to participate in the tragedy of the commons.
Actually, it is possible to rent and watch the entire season for considerably less than $159.99. Just rent it from your local Redbox or video store. If you are a Netflix subscriber in the US, it costs you nothing extra.
And is it really such a horrible hardship to go to the bathroom during the FBI warning?
They've changed some minor things, generally to move the story along faster. But so far, the major plot developments--the sort of things that people think of as "spoilers"-- have matched the books.
Uh, the major spoilers for the entire season (and for the three seasons to follow if it gets reviewed) are already widely known, because the series is based on a popular series of novels.
In the litigation happy world we live in the caution applies more to the legal liability than the risk from radiation. I.E. the risk of litigation is so very high there is often more attention given it then the patient.
Strange as it may seem to people outside the profession, most physicians are more concerned about health than litigation. Remember, these are guys who swear to a Hippocratic-style oath based on the tenet, "First, do no harm." And physicians are likely to recognize and respect that their patients may not wish not to place others--and particularly their own children or grandchildren--at any kind of risk.
In practice, the risk from legal liability from consequences of this kind of exposure is pretty small. Consequences are not certain, and if they occur it would likely be years after exposure, and the type of harm most likely to result could arise from other causes. It would be very difficult to make a strong legal case that the exposure was at fault.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make about alpha emitters. These are unlikely to be detected in this manner anyway, so they are irrelevant to the topic at hand. The isotopes most associated with thyroid damage are I-125 and I-131 (the latter of which is used medically), which concentrate in the thyroid and emit gamma and fairly high energy beta, which would be potentially detectable. And I don't think that anybody is suggesting that X-ray analysis of pipelines should not be done, so I don't understand what this has to do with anything.
Terrorists are hardly the sole concern. It is quite possible that hazardous radiation could be emitted as a result of accidental contamination, improper transport of radioactive materials or accidental damage of shielding. As a scientist who has personally worked with hazardous radioisotopes, I would certainly want somebody to investigate if they happened to detect radioactivity significantly above background being emitted from me or from my vehicle.
Actually, the 4th Amendment does not state that a warrant is required for a search to be "reasonable," although it sets requirements for what a warrant must include.
I hate to break this to you, but the 4th Amendment does not actually guarantee you freedom from searches, only freedom from unreasonable searches. And the courts have established that "reasonable" includes a lot of things more benign than emitting potentially hazardous ionizing radiation
It's not a matter of what I think. It is well established legally that if a police officer happens to see something in a car that resembles illegal drugs, he has sufficient cause to detain the individual and investigate whether the items in question are in fact illegal--even though for virtually every illegal drug, there are many legal items that could look similar.
You can't just ignore the problem in an urban area. Even iodine-125 (half life two months) would cause major disruption. And a big fraction of the public doesn't understand half-life and will be prone to disbelieve you if you try to tell them that the radiation went away of its own accord
Yes, there have been cases in which people unknowingly (and innocently) became contaminated with a radioactive substance and suffered grave harm or death. If I drive by emitting enough radioactivity over background to set off a detector outside my car, I would very much want the police to stop me and investigate why. If there's a benign medical reason, I'll show him my doctor's note and be on my way
So what's your point? People who receive such treatments are routinely cautioned to keep their distance from children and women who might be pregnant. Do you think their doctors are lying to them?
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The solution to this is to get a genuine TiVo instead of the imitation TiVo that the cable company wants to rent you. I've found TiVo to be pretty near 100% reliable.
Overpriced? Probably a nonstarter. Similarly priced to other major manufacturer TV sets with a novel and improved user experience? That could sell.
I have to laugh when DirecTV talks about the interface they spent the last 10 years working on, because basically they are talking about trying to copy the two-decades old TiVo interface and doing a mediocre job of it. Fortunately, DirecTV now offers an authentic TiVo that is only slightly inferior to stand-alone TiVos. The TiVo interface is marvelous, and well up to the standard of Apple's user interface design, but it has advanced only modestly in two decades. So if Apple has indeed come up with the next step in user interface design, the time is right.
So since the MPAA rips off creators, I shouldn't feel guilty about ripping them off myself? That doesn't really work for me. I learned that two wrongs don't make a right by the time I was eight years old.
Seems fairly unlikely. There are certainly some potential substantial improvements in battery technology that can be expected. But consumers seem to be more interested in increased computer power than longer battery life. I think that current phones are probably pretty much in the "sweet spot" in terms of consumer preferences for balancing phone battery life with computing power. Plugging in your phone while you sleep is simply not that much of an inconvenience to make consumers willing to give up speed and bright high-resolution displays.
Agreed, these are fairly typical symptoms of mass hysteria (although I don't much care for the term). I wouldn't be surprised if the blood tests show nothing. And given that a number of the girls have already been released, if it was actual poisoning, the perpetrators don't seem to have used enough to have done serious harm, which doesn't really sound like the Taliban. I wonder if the previous event was genuine? In that case, some of the girls were reported to be in critical condition, but I haven't heard whether they recovered.
Not quite. The tenet is that a mutation that causes that same mutation to be more common in the next generation will increase in prevalence. Mechanistically, this can happen in numerous of ways: an organism may reproduce more effectively, it can increase the number of years it is reproductively active, it share its genes more widely (e.g. by sex), it can increase the number of its offspring that survive to reproductive age, either by having more of them, or increasing their ability to survive, it can help other individuals who share the same mutation to do the same thing.
This predicts that the reproductive system probably evolved in a stepwise manner, from simple mechanisms for trading genes (which is advantageous as it makes one's offspring more diverse and less likely to fall prey to the same diseases or predators) to more complex ones, one step at a time, with each step being initially "backward compatible" with what has gone before. And indeed, we see a whole range of gene sharing strategies, ranging from simple to complex, in nature, demonstrating that gene-sharing does not have to be complex at the outset. Live birth can be advantageous in many circumstances, as there are many predators that prey upon eggs and nests. By reducing the period of vulnerability, the number of offspring surviving to the next generation is increased.
Quite simply--by a mutation that enhances light sensitivity of a neuron that is already connected and likely serving some kind of sensory role. Light sensitivity turns out to be one of those things that can evolve very easy, because the structure of certain amino acids causes them to absorb light, and this is true for many other types of biological molecules as well. For example, if you study neurotransmitter receptors, you discover that many receptors that do not play any role in light sensing nevertheless possess some degree of light sensitivity. So from the standpoint of natural selection, evolution of vision is pretty much unavoidable
This seems like a potential niche. However, Android based smartphones are now available pretty much free with a contract. What's keeping out potential low-end buyers is not the cost of the phone, but the cost of the contract. One possibility would be a phone that updates your Facebook feed only when WiFi is available, and otherwise functions as a generic low-end phone
I guess now that the efforts of a handful of researchers to blame video games for violence has become pretty much discredited given the way that rates of actual violence have dropped consistently as video games have become more popular and more realistic, they are trying to blame video games for problems young men have relating to women (although I notice the article tries once again to push the old insinuation that "aggression" -- in nonviolent laboratory tests -- is somehow predictive of violence). Once again, where is the actual real-world evidence that young men are having any more difficulty relating to women than they ever have?
Yes, it is still true that men tend to like stimulating activities like playing sports, watching sports, watching action shows on TV, and, yes, playing videogames. And sometimes, they do it to excess, to the point of causing problems in their lives, and particularly with respect to their relationships with women. And doubtless this involves the basal ganglia of the brain, just like everything else that people like doing. Maybe if you somehow conflate this with a genuinely serious social problem--drug addiction--you can get support for even more research funds for the kind of laboratory studies of videogames that have so far utterly failed to yield any useful insights. I'd love to see somebody studying this general issue, and developing genuinely effective therapeutic strategies for men who are having trouble balancing these pleasurable activities with the rest of their lives. But seizing upon and demonizing one particular activity out of the many stimulating activities that men enjoy, simply because that happens to be enjoyed by young men (it's always easier to get the older generation worked up about something that modern teenagers do) does not strike me as a productive approach.
If the show gets cancelled because it doesn't make enough money to justify its budget (as has happened to a number of top quality HBO series, including Deadwood and Rome), it very likely will be sorely missed. Probably especially by Peter Dinklage, who doing a fantastic job acting the role of a lifetime—a rare opportunity to play the hero of a dramatic series. Perhaps while he (and the many other actors, set designers, costume artists, special effects artists, scriptwriters, etc., etc. whose efforts combine to create a major production like this) is pounding the pavement looking for his next gig, he will have time to ruminate about your principled concern for his level of compensation. Somehow, I doubt if he will be grateful to you.
But who cares about how they feel when you have the opportunity to save a few bucks and enjoy the show they created a few months earlier? Fuck 'em!
A friend of mine just began watching the series on his Netflix subscription. The disks arrived promptly in the mail.
While this is entirely true, the outdated business model of the distributors is still a pretty lame rationalization for ripping off the creators of a work. I like the series and I'd like to see the adaptations if "Game of Thrones" continue, and that is dependent upon the distributor being able to sell the product, however outdated their distribution model might be. So I refuse to personally contribute, in however small a way, to the failure of the series by ripping them off. One can make a moral choice whether or not to participate in the tragedy of the commons.
Disk 1 of the first season? That's odd. My friend put it on his list and it came immediately?
Game of Thrones is available from Netflix as a physical DVD or blu-ray disk.
You mean, aside from the ripping off the people who created them thing?
Actually, it is possible to rent and watch the entire season for considerably less than $159.99. Just rent it from your local Redbox or video store. If you are a Netflix subscriber in the US, it costs you nothing extra.
And is it really such a horrible hardship to go to the bathroom during the FBI warning?
They've changed some minor things, generally to move the story along faster. But so far, the major plot developments--the sort of things that people think of as "spoilers"-- have matched the books.
Uh, the major spoilers for the entire season (and for the three seasons to follow if it gets reviewed) are already widely known, because the series is based on a popular series of novels.
Strange as it may seem to people outside the profession, most physicians are more concerned about health than litigation. Remember, these are guys who swear to a Hippocratic-style oath based on the tenet, "First, do no harm." And physicians are likely to recognize and respect that their patients may not wish not to place others--and particularly their own children or grandchildren--at any kind of risk.
In practice, the risk from legal liability from consequences of this kind of exposure is pretty small. Consequences are not certain, and if they occur it would likely be years after exposure, and the type of harm most likely to result could arise from other causes. It would be very difficult to make a strong legal case that the exposure was at fault.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make about alpha emitters. These are unlikely to be detected in this manner anyway, so they are irrelevant to the topic at hand. The isotopes most associated with thyroid damage are I-125 and I-131 (the latter of which is used medically), which concentrate in the thyroid and emit gamma and fairly high energy beta, which would be potentially detectable. And I don't think that anybody is suggesting that X-ray analysis of pipelines should not be done, so I don't understand what this has to do with anything.
Terrorists are hardly the sole concern. It is quite possible that hazardous radiation could be emitted as a result of accidental contamination, improper transport of radioactive materials or accidental damage of shielding. As a scientist who has personally worked with hazardous radioisotopes, I would certainly want somebody to investigate if they happened to detect radioactivity significantly above background being emitted from me or from my vehicle.
Actually, the 4th Amendment does not state that a warrant is required for a search to be "reasonable," although it sets requirements for what a warrant must include.
I hate to break this to you, but the 4th Amendment does not actually guarantee you freedom from searches, only freedom from unreasonable searches. And the courts have established that "reasonable" includes a lot of things more benign than emitting potentially hazardous ionizing radiation
It's not a matter of what I think. It is well established legally that if a police officer happens to see something in a car that resembles illegal drugs, he has sufficient cause to detain the individual and investigate whether the items in question are in fact illegal--even though for virtually every illegal drug, there are many legal items that could look similar.
You can't just ignore the problem in an urban area. Even iodine-125 (half life two months) would cause major disruption. And a big fraction of the public doesn't understand half-life and will be prone to disbelieve you if you try to tell them that the radiation went away of its own accord
Yes, there have been cases in which people unknowingly (and innocently) became contaminated with a radioactive substance and suffered grave harm or death. If I drive by emitting enough radioactivity over background to set off a detector outside my car, I would very much want the police to stop me and investigate why. If there's a benign medical reason, I'll show him my doctor's note and be on my way
So what's your point? People who receive such treatments are routinely cautioned to keep their distance from children and women who might be pregnant. Do you think their doctors are lying to them?