With everyone talking about the economics of paying up front vs paying over time via monthly fees, I think everyone is missing the real story here:
It's bundled with the Kinect. And that's because the Kinect's sales figures have gone flat. Early adopters bought the hell out of them (even set a record), but then the software failed to materialize and sales have begun to stagnate. This is not a ploy to grab an extra $75, it's a ploy to get Kinect machines in more households. The extra $75 is just tacked on to leverage the risk associated with monthly payment plans.
Why? Maybe MS hopes a larger user base will inspire more Kinect development. They might have decided the Kinect is the "universal remote" in their "Xbox as home entertainment hub" scheme. They could just be trying to move units and recoup their investment.
Well, look on the bright side: no one will have to worry about those Facebook timelines. With any luck there is a test tube somewhere ensuring we'll all be dead before the IPO when they'll actually raise the money to debug that shit.
Read the WSJ's publication of the actual policy. It essentially prohibits teachers from actively using the internet except in a professionally approved setting, unless they can be certain that their privacy (anonymity) is assured.
It's not just about Facebook. If you're a teacher and you have a blog (even one you intended to be anonymous) and you students comment on it you could face disciplinary action. The way it's worded even an unauthorized slashdot post could be construed as inappropriate contact if a student posts in the same thread and knows the teacher's handle.
Given the Emergency Alert System wasn't even used in Manhattan on 9/11, I don't think it ever will be. At the very least, I'm not losing sleep over it. If nukes start falling from the sky, I'm pretty much shit out of luck anyway.
I subscribe to Hulu Plus, but you're right in that paying for a service that also has commercials is a little annoying. There are only two commercials each break though, which isn't that bad. It's just enough time to hit mute and check my email.
Every time I see Hulu on my credit card bill, I do stop and think, "is this really something I want to pay for" (the same isn't true for Netflix). But the H+ subscription means that my wife can watch her shows on her iPad (freeing up my projector) and I can watch Hulu through the XBox, which saves me from having to rewire everything. Hulu isn't ideal but it does centralize a lot of content, keeping me from having to hunt it down at NBC.com, or ComedyCentral.com, etc.
I actually have cable, but it's not hooked up to anything. It comes included in the cost of the condo I rent. All I'd need to do is buy a TV to watch it on. And still, HELL NO.
This isn't to say that I don't watch TV, I actually have an HD projector with a 10 foot screen, surround sound, the whole bit. I do all my watching on Hulu, Netflix, or iTunes. Why? Because using those services I have to go online, actually select what I want to see, and make an active decision to watch it. So I only wind up watching one or two hours of TV a day.
The moment TV starts getting pumped in, one hundred channels of barely watchable crap, my wife is going to flip it on the second she gets home. Then I'll have the constant buzz of HGTV, The Food Network, or worse some stupid reality show. No one will even actively be watching, but with all that damn noise only a button press away, it'll get turned on.
These days I defintely cut right-handed, it's simply a matter of right-handed scissors being more common. And I'm a pretty precise cutter, these images were created by meticulously cutting apart dozens of 35mm negatives and painstakingly taping or gluing them back together. (The image gallery I liked to is SFW, but other image galleries on that site are NSFW, so careful, anyone that decides to go clicking around.)
I'm not trying to throw down an argument that hardness isn't a real thing. I know this is slashdot and people here can be quick to jump down your throat demanding double blind controlled studies. I'm only relating that based on my personal experience that only in very complex "muscle-memory" involved tasks like writing does it seem to make any difference to the average lefty I know. Every lefty I know claims to be at least somewhat ambidextrous.
If a child learned to type before they learned to write, would they ever consider which "handed" they are?
I'm left handed, but aside from handling pens (which these days don't do on a daily basis) I do pretty much everything with both hands equally. When I was a kid alot of todo was made of getting me a left handed baseball glove, left handed scissors, and even a left handed violin. None of those things were very useful. I can catch, cut, play, even shoot with both hands, more or less evenly. (I actually favor my right hand when shooting.)
Most left handed people I know say the same thing. I'm just guessing, but I'd imagine that a lot of right-handed people are more ambidextrous then they know, but unlike lefties they've never had to think about it.
With writing, handedness makes a huge difference. It's not a simple matter of inversion, forming a letter left-handed is completely different. There is a great deal of "muscle memory" that comes into play. But imagine a generation that grows up typing instead of writing. Would they ever know which handed they are?
It's interesting how The Wheel of Time has become the yardstick by which you measure your patience as a reader. Jordan's story is very entertaining, but his prose is extremely redundant and tedious, and his pacing is terrible. It takes a lot of effort to slosh through it and get to the good parts (and I say this as a huge fan).
I feel it's a pretty good unit of measure, or at least it will be once Sanderson finishes it. Let's formalize it. For now a "WoT" is the amount of patience required to read all the Wheel books Robert Jordan wrote before he died.
So having given up on The Baroque Cycle halfway through book 3, for me those books require at least 2.5 WoT to enjoy.
I have a feeling that the study's methodology might have involved cold-calling a lot of HR reps. That would explain "HR Manager" being #3. Who wouldn't prefer to be their boss?
Shakespeare is actually Modern English (and he'll Melt with You), not Middle English. Middle English is somewhat nebulously defined, but Chaucer would be a better example.
Yes, but the US affords much broader protection for nearly all forms of speech than the UK, or many other countries for that matter.
But lets not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. For every thing the US gets right, it gets two things wrong.
Not to mention that the free speech rights most US citizens take for granted are under constant assault. They are tested in the courts all the time. When Americans read about something like this happening overseas they shouldn't say, "what a bunch of backwards idiots" like some people in the previous threads are, they should be saying, "we better watch out or that sort of thing could start happening here too".
(Sorry this is kinda a double post, I accidently replied to the wrong parent before.)
Yes, evidently you can. The US affords much broader protection for nearly all forms of speech then the UK, or nearly any other country.
But lets not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. For every thing the US gets right, it gets two things wrong.
Not to mention that the free speech rights most US citizens take for granted are under constant assault. They are tested in the courts constantly. When you read about something like this happening overseas you shouldn't think, "what a bunch of backwards idiots", you should think, "I better watch out or that sort of thing could start happening here too".
I agree with KingMotley that cinematography will adapt, but I think the really exciting application would be communication. Imagine a wall-sized display using this display technology but where every tenth pixel is a lens feeding data into a light field camera. You could virtually join your living room or office with someone's on the other side of the world (kinda like the floor to ceiling 3D display on the TNG Enterprise). Speaking as someone who lives far away from many of my loved ones, I think that would be awesome.
It's alcohol/barbiturate withdrawal that can kill you, not opiate, but that aside you raise a good point.
My question is, what happens when the vaccinated person needs surgery at some point in the future? Heroin's just another painkiller, vaccinating against it should probably render all painkillers ineffective.
Savage made the comment in 2003, according to wiki (though I'd swear it happened in the late 90s). While Google certainly existed, it wasn't all that popular at that point. Calling it internet bullying before the internet was a driving popular force is problematic. Maybe newspaper bullying would be better.
I'm guessing that most of the country is pretty brown in January, excepting the lower latitudes and areas with a lot of evergreens. I suppose it also could be a product of the camera, for instance a lot of IR or something.
Take a step back, take a deep breath, and get a little perspective. You're complaining about a lack of expertise on a website that allows anonymous posting, where the standard is semi-anonymous posting. No experts to be found there. You are commenting in a thread about dark matter, which is called dark because very little is known about it. No experts on that either. You are also commenting in a sub-thread which only purpose is to call into question whether the author of the article is confused by the terminology "dark matter" and "antimatter". There isn't a shred of expertise anywhere in sight.
And that's all ok. The idea is to have a discussion, there is nothing to prove here. Discussion like this is the beginning of problem solving, not the final step. No one is going to write an article about the significant advances in particle physics made by geekoid (135745) or anyone else posting on Slashdot.
Not ether generally, but there are a lot of highly flammable ketones used to extract the psuedo-ephedrine from the tablets.
I don't see why now to go into details, it's not like the recipe for making meh isn't one Google search away. Rockstar Games even included a basic recipe in GTA4 (the lounge singer sings it).
Just think about the amount of energy that would be present in such a system. If two (nebulously defined) particles of dark matter can annihilate (probably the wrong word) each other to produce a particle of antimatter and a particle of matter, it follows that the dark matter particles must be as massive as regular matter/antimatter. So they wouldn't be very weakly interactive. And that's even assuming that absolutely no mass is converted to energy when the particles "annihilate" one another, which is unlikely.
If that statement were true dark matter would be anything but dark. You would haver massive strongly interactive particles dumping a huge amount of matter, antimatter, and energy (not to be confused with dark energy) into the universe. Then the matter and antimatter reacts, releasing still more energy. Such a reaction would be pretty easily observed. By comparison, WIMPs should be near massless, but abundant, and hence dark.
"Theorists generally believe that when two dark matter particles collide, they should annihilate each other to produce ordinary particles, such as an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. Thanks to Einstein's iconic equivalence between energy and mass, E=mc2, each of those particles should emerge with an energy essentially equal to the mass of the original dark matter particle."
I suspect that the author doesn't know that "dark matter" isn't a synonym for "antimatter". The above paragraph, if true, would make the universe a very explode-y place.
I grew up in Baltimore city during the race riots of the early 1990s, which (on a national level) cumulated with the LA riots in 1992. So it's completely possible that my standard for "isolated violence" is colored by that time period:
-Two kids I grew up with --I wouldn't call them friends-- were stabbed in in 1991.
-Worse, a 13 year old that I would call a friend was almost killed in 1991, when his throat was slit. I was was walking about 5-10 feet behind him at the time, and though luckily he survived it had a pretty devastating impact on me (and more-so him of course, but it could have very well have been me if I'd been walking faster).
-Between 1989 and 2001 I've stared down the barrel of exactly 7 handguns, 4 of which were wielded by police, one that was fired. Missed, thankfully.
So I've been pretty amazed by the amount of restraint on both sides of OWS. The police could be doing far worse (and get away with it) and the protestors could be "putting up a gallows in front of Federal Hall" as commenters have suggested, but I think those sort of comments can be dismissed as hyperbole or standard ITG-ing.
Slashdot Mirror
With everyone talking about the economics of paying up front vs paying over time via monthly fees, I think everyone is missing the real story here:
It's bundled with the Kinect. And that's because the Kinect's sales figures have gone flat. Early adopters bought the hell out of them (even set a record), but then the software failed to materialize and sales have begun to stagnate. This is not a ploy to grab an extra $75, it's a ploy to get Kinect machines in more households. The extra $75 is just tacked on to leverage the risk associated with monthly payment plans.
Why? Maybe MS hopes a larger user base will inspire more Kinect development. They might have decided the Kinect is the "universal remote" in their "Xbox as home entertainment hub" scheme. They could just be trying to move units and recoup their investment.
(probably all of the above)
Well, look on the bright side: no one will have to worry about those Facebook timelines. With any luck there is a test tube somewhere ensuring we'll all be dead before the IPO when they'll actually raise the money to debug that shit.
No. You will be deducted one letter grade for each hour your project is late. Two if I'm in a bad mood.
Read the WSJ's publication of the actual policy. It essentially prohibits teachers from actively using the internet except in a professionally approved setting, unless they can be certain that their privacy (anonymity) is assured.
It's not just about Facebook. If you're a teacher and you have a blog (even one you intended to be anonymous) and you students comment on it you could face disciplinary action. The way it's worded even an unauthorized slashdot post could be construed as inappropriate contact if a student posts in the same thread and knows the teacher's handle.
Given the Emergency Alert System wasn't even used in Manhattan on 9/11, I don't think it ever will be. At the very least, I'm not losing sleep over it. If nukes start falling from the sky, I'm pretty much shit out of luck anyway.
I subscribe to Hulu Plus, but you're right in that paying for a service that also has commercials is a little annoying. There are only two commercials each break though, which isn't that bad. It's just enough time to hit mute and check my email.
Every time I see Hulu on my credit card bill, I do stop and think, "is this really something I want to pay for" (the same isn't true for Netflix). But the H+ subscription means that my wife can watch her shows on her iPad (freeing up my projector) and I can watch Hulu through the XBox, which saves me from having to rewire everything. Hulu isn't ideal but it does centralize a lot of content, keeping me from having to hunt it down at NBC.com, or ComedyCentral.com, etc.
Seconded.
I actually have cable, but it's not hooked up to anything. It comes included in the cost of the condo I rent. All I'd need to do is buy a TV to watch it on. And still, HELL NO.
This isn't to say that I don't watch TV, I actually have an HD projector with a 10 foot screen, surround sound, the whole bit. I do all my watching on Hulu, Netflix, or iTunes. Why? Because using those services I have to go online, actually select what I want to see, and make an active decision to watch it. So I only wind up watching one or two hours of TV a day.
The moment TV starts getting pumped in, one hundred channels of barely watchable crap, my wife is going to flip it on the second she gets home. Then I'll have the constant buzz of HGTV, The Food Network, or worse some stupid reality show. No one will even actively be watching, but with all that damn noise only a button press away, it'll get turned on.
If Hulu does this, it's back to piracy.
These days I defintely cut right-handed, it's simply a matter of right-handed scissors being more common. And I'm a pretty precise cutter, these images were created by meticulously cutting apart dozens of 35mm negatives and painstakingly taping or gluing them back together. (The image gallery I liked to is SFW, but other image galleries on that site are NSFW, so careful, anyone that decides to go clicking around.)
I'm not trying to throw down an argument that hardness isn't a real thing. I know this is slashdot and people here can be quick to jump down your throat demanding double blind controlled studies. I'm only relating that based on my personal experience that only in very complex "muscle-memory" involved tasks like writing does it seem to make any difference to the average lefty I know. Every lefty I know claims to be at least somewhat ambidextrous.
If a child learned to type before they learned to write, would they ever consider which "handed" they are?
I'm left handed, but aside from handling pens (which these days don't do on a daily basis) I do pretty much everything with both hands equally. When I was a kid alot of todo was made of getting me a left handed baseball glove, left handed scissors, and even a left handed violin. None of those things were very useful. I can catch, cut, play, even shoot with both hands, more or less evenly. (I actually favor my right hand when shooting.)
Most left handed people I know say the same thing. I'm just guessing, but I'd imagine that a lot of right-handed people are more ambidextrous then they know, but unlike lefties they've never had to think about it.
With writing, handedness makes a huge difference. It's not a simple matter of inversion, forming a letter left-handed is completely different. There is a great deal of "muscle memory" that comes into play. But imagine a generation that grows up typing instead of writing. Would they ever know which handed they are?
It's interesting how The Wheel of Time has become the yardstick by which you measure your patience as a reader. Jordan's story is very entertaining, but his prose is extremely redundant and tedious, and his pacing is terrible. It takes a lot of effort to slosh through it and get to the good parts (and I say this as a huge fan).
I feel it's a pretty good unit of measure, or at least it will be once Sanderson finishes it. Let's formalize it. For now a "WoT" is the amount of patience required to read all the Wheel books Robert Jordan wrote before he died.
So having given up on The Baroque Cycle halfway through book 3, for me those books require at least 2.5 WoT to enjoy.
I have a feeling that the study's methodology might have involved cold-calling a lot of HR reps. That would explain "HR Manager" being #3. Who wouldn't prefer to be their boss?
Shakespeare is actually Modern English (and he'll Melt with You), not Middle English. Middle English is somewhat nebulously defined, but Chaucer would be a better example.
Yes, but the US affords much broader protection for nearly all forms of speech than the UK, or many other countries for that matter.
But lets not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. For every thing the US gets right, it gets two things wrong.
Not to mention that the free speech rights most US citizens take for granted are under constant assault. They are tested in the courts all the time. When Americans read about something like this happening overseas they shouldn't say, "what a bunch of backwards idiots" like some people in the previous threads are, they should be saying, "we better watch out or that sort of thing could start happening here too".
(Sorry this is kinda a double post, I accidently replied to the wrong parent before.)
Yes, evidently you can. The US affords much broader protection for nearly all forms of speech then the UK, or nearly any other country.
But lets not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. For every thing the US gets right, it gets two things wrong.
Not to mention that the free speech rights most US citizens take for granted are under constant assault. They are tested in the courts constantly. When you read about something like this happening overseas you shouldn't think, "what a bunch of backwards idiots", you should think, "I better watch out or that sort of thing could start happening here too".
I agree with KingMotley that cinematography will adapt, but I think the really exciting application would be communication. Imagine a wall-sized display using this display technology but where every tenth pixel is a lens feeding data into a light field camera. You could virtually join your living room or office with someone's on the other side of the world (kinda like the floor to ceiling 3D display on the TNG Enterprise). Speaking as someone who lives far away from many of my loved ones, I think that would be awesome.
It's alcohol/barbiturate withdrawal that can kill you, not opiate, but that aside you raise a good point.
My question is, what happens when the vaccinated person needs surgery at some point in the future? Heroin's just another painkiller, vaccinating against it should probably render all painkillers ineffective.
Savage made the comment in 2003, according to wiki (though I'd swear it happened in the late 90s). While Google certainly existed, it wasn't all that popular at that point. Calling it internet bullying before the internet was a driving popular force is problematic. Maybe newspaper bullying would be better.
Maybe because it's winter?
I'm guessing that most of the country is pretty brown in January, excepting the lower latitudes and areas with a lot of evergreens. I suppose it also could be a product of the camera, for instance a lot of IR or something.
Sure he's a spammer, but I think we're ignoring the larger issue here, which is: What the hell is this guy smoking and how can I get some?
Take a step back, take a deep breath, and get a little perspective. You're complaining about a lack of expertise on a website that allows anonymous posting, where the standard is semi-anonymous posting. No experts to be found there. You are commenting in a thread about dark matter, which is called dark because very little is known about it. No experts on that either. You are also commenting in a sub-thread which only purpose is to call into question whether the author of the article is confused by the terminology "dark matter" and "antimatter". There isn't a shred of expertise anywhere in sight.
And that's all ok. The idea is to have a discussion, there is nothing to prove here. Discussion like this is the beginning of problem solving, not the final step. No one is going to write an article about the significant advances in particle physics made by geekoid (135745) or anyone else posting on Slashdot.
Oops, I meant: ...why not to go into details... also "meth" shouldn't be corrected to "meh".
Not ether generally, but there are a lot of highly flammable ketones used to extract the psuedo-ephedrine from the tablets.
I don't see why now to go into details, it's not like the recipe for making meh isn't one Google search away. Rockstar Games even included a basic recipe in GTA4 (the lounge singer sings it).
You're right, I was using the term "strongly interactive" incorrectly.
Just think about the amount of energy that would be present in such a system. If two (nebulously defined) particles of dark matter can annihilate (probably the wrong word) each other to produce a particle of antimatter and a particle of matter, it follows that the dark matter particles must be as massive as regular matter/antimatter. So they wouldn't be very weakly interactive. And that's even assuming that absolutely no mass is converted to energy when the particles "annihilate" one another, which is unlikely.
If that statement were true dark matter would be anything but dark. You would haver massive strongly interactive particles dumping a huge amount of matter, antimatter, and energy (not to be confused with dark energy) into the universe. Then the matter and antimatter reacts, releasing still more energy. Such a reaction would be pretty easily observed. By comparison, WIMPs should be near massless, but abundant, and hence dark.
"Theorists generally believe that when two dark matter particles collide, they should annihilate each other to produce ordinary particles, such as an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. Thanks to Einstein's iconic equivalence between energy and mass, E=mc2, each of those particles should emerge with an energy essentially equal to the mass of the original dark matter particle."
I suspect that the author doesn't know that "dark matter" isn't a synonym for "antimatter". The above paragraph, if true, would make the universe a very explode-y place.
I grew up in Baltimore city during the race riots of the early 1990s, which (on a national level) cumulated with the LA riots in 1992. So it's completely possible that my standard for "isolated violence" is colored by that time period:
-Two kids I grew up with --I wouldn't call them friends-- were stabbed in in 1991.
-Worse, a 13 year old that I would call a friend was almost killed in 1991, when his throat was slit. I was was walking about 5-10 feet behind him at the time, and though luckily he survived it had a pretty devastating impact on me (and more-so him of course, but it could have very well have been me if I'd been walking faster).
-Between 1989 and 2001 I've stared down the barrel of exactly 7 handguns, 4 of which were wielded by police, one that was fired. Missed, thankfully.
So I've been pretty amazed by the amount of restraint on both sides of OWS. The police could be doing far worse (and get away with it) and the protestors could be "putting up a gallows in front of Federal Hall" as commenters have suggested, but I think those sort of comments can be dismissed as hyperbole or standard ITG-ing.