Also... #6 Merchandising! Works for Angry Birds and probably a few others I can't be bothered to think of at the moment.
Granted, it wouldn't work for most games, and is something you can get only if you're really really lucky and not something you can rely on when developing the game, but still... it could theoretically work out for a FOSS game if it was super popular.
Ok, you could also fold that into #3 if you push hard enough, but the difference is you're not paying for something you already have, but for something that doesn't exist yet, that you'd like to see created. Don't know if there's been any triple AAA level games funded this way, but I like to think it could happen.
I can't claim to be a shipping expert, but one of the reasons might be that our island is surrounded in many places by sandbanks and shallows of various sorts. This means the relatively few places that are deep enough for a sub to approach also tend to be well-policed shipping lanes ending in harbours and ports (or maybe estuaries which tend to have inconveniently large towns built on them).
Not to mention that we had this thing a while back where German U-Boats kept trying to sneak up on us, meaning there was good reason to make sure the authorities were well aware of all the places where this could happen.
I'll have to beg to differ on that one. I drive a 1.4L Ford Fusion (considered a fairly inexpensive family car over here). Granted it's far from being a sports car, but I've never had any problems accelerating when I've needed to. If you need a burst of speed pulling away from a junction you just stay in the lower gears for a few seconds longer.
If I'm reading these specs right this model is listed as 79HP (which I've neither known nor cared about until now!)
Get the trajectory just right and maybe you could 'catch' the object in the end of the catapult and slow it down using the electromagnets in a manner similar to the regenerative braking used in electric cars?
I can see scope for a website displaying live streams from camera phones etc. and allowing visitors to tag the "good" bits. That way by the time you're asked to turn off your phone, it's already too late for them to cover up whatever dodgy thing they were doing!
At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
That's because they know full well that if they ever hint that the Bible (and other religious texts) are not the "literal word of God" but were in fact written by an assortment of priests and clerics of varying knowledge and ability, some almost certainly with self-serving agendas to boot... then the whole house of cards collapses around them.
Strictly speaking, I wouldn't think that it was abstinence as such that worked, except maybe to an extent in Catholic communities, so much as with increased education people started learning about the Rhythm method. The Rhythm method isn't a particularly reliable form of birth control by today's standards, but it's still much better than none at all.
[...] is only slightly more expensive than the type of labor intensive manufacturing that we see in places like China. The problem is the high capital outlay for this equipment which no-one wants to front. It's not a problem while cheap labor is in plentiful supply.
Ultimately it's the 'slightly more expensive' part that's the problem here. There's a reason why no-one wants to front the capital outlay and that's because they can't expect to see a return on their investment if the company can't compete with others using cheap labour.
Automated manufacturing (ironically mostly pioneered in the East) has the potential to even the scales here - it doesn't matter how expensive workers are in the West if you only need a handful of them. It just needs someone to figure out how it can be done cheaper than outsourcing.
If you're ripped enough to hold a football field sized tub of heavy water, then I don't think anyone is going to argue with you about how you're holding it;-)
Take for example the question of where an electron orbits the nucleus. QM says we can't say where, only give a probability.
More accurately QM says there *is* no precise location, only the probabilities. This isn't a matter of the electron being at a particular point, where we lack the ability to determine where it is exactly. In essence the electron *is* a field of probabilities and left to its own devices (e.g. in a remote part of space) is theoretically at every position simultaneously. Only in the presence of other quantum fields does that change - so when an electron interacts with a proton in a hydrogen atom for example, the two sets of probabilities interact with the result that the probabilities associated with the electron are constrained to positions more or less associated with the classical notion of an orbit.
When we attempt to observe an electron's position we necessarily interact with it in a way that constrains its position probability to something close to a single point - this is the only sense in which an electron becomes a "particle". So in the 2-slit experiment, if we don't observe it, the probabilities remain (relatively) unconstrained and there remain possible paths through both slits, whereas if we do observe the electron we narrow the field of probabilities enough to make it almost certain it will only pass through one slit.
(it is therefore meaningless to say "only observe after the particle has passed thru the slit" since there is no "particle" until the observation is made)
The UK has a coalition government precisely because it has more than two parties! However it is also the first coalition we have had in decades, and it (arguably) only happened this time due to very particular circumstances that are unlikely to happen again any time soon.
This is most likely the reason why the LibDems were so keen on switching away from FPTP - it represented the only way they were likely to get another bite at the cherry in 2015. Sadly it was not to be, which is a shame as having more than two parties with a fighting chance of being elected would not only have been good for the LibDems, it would have been great for the UK.
Unionized industries are typically those either in the public sector or where the industry is dominated by one or a small number of large companies.
Industries where there are plenty of companies competing in the marketplace tend to have less need for unions, because employees can easily move to the companies offering the best pay and/or conditions and companies can compete on offering that in order to attract the best employees.
Looking it at that way, unions are a symptom of a larger problem - the way capitalism seems to have a tendency towards markets being dominated by large players as industries mature, which is bad for employees and bad for consumers.
The train can't even continue before the carriage meets back up because people who just got into it may have to move into other carriages in the same train.
Maybe trains are different in the US, but on the ones I'm familiar with one can easily change carriages while the train is in motion?
In the UK back in the late 1800s/early 1900s I believe that trains often used to drop off carriages as they passed stations so the people going to that station would roll into it and stop while the rest of the train carried on
This.
Why have trams catch up to HSTs, engage in a complex procedure of transferring passengers, then needing to circle back round (potentially taking ages to get back to their 'route')
Much better to have the trams double as carriages. When you want to get off at a destination you simply go and sit in one of the last few carriages and when the train passes the station they automatically detach and roll up to the platform. At the same time trams with new passengers leave the platform, catch up with the train and attach as replacement carriages to the end.
It's perfectly true that there isn't a "correct" temperature for the Earth. In the past the planet has been both much hotter than now and much colder and, well look at that, it seems to have come through OK.
However what with the predicted extensive desertification, rising sea levels, more extreme weather conditions and what have you, CC is likely to be somewhat inconvenient for the soon-to-be 7 billion people wandering about.
10. Wallpaper/paint. We're thinking of repainting the living room at the moment and just trying to pick a colour. As I sure everyone is aware not only is this a non-trivial amount of work, even with tester pots you can never be sure what the final result will look like until you've finished.
With full colour E-Ink you could pick a different shade or pattern at the press of a few buttons and change it every day (or have it constantly changing if you wanted).
Once subscribed they will stay if the service is good quality, not caring what OS or version is running in the background.
Or will they stay because MS doesn't allow them to download all their documents or transfer them to another service (or allows them to be downloaded, but they're in proprietary formats that are useless for migration purposes anyway)?
The trick is to define what you mean by "criminal exploitation".
Selling investors derivatives composed of sub-prime mortgages, but cunningly obfuscated so they appear to be valuable rather than nearly worthless - does that count as criminal exploitation?
Offering a high ranking government official a high paying job for when their term of office ends, with the unspoken understanding that the official votes or regulates in certain ways - does that count as criminal exploitation?
Producing report after report full of deliberately misleading facts and statistics, in order to convince politicians that your industry is losing billions and the economy is suffering as a result - to persuade them to enact unnecessary and dangerous legislation - does that count as criminal exploitation?
There is absolutely nothing written in the theory of capitalism that says the government cannot get involved in the game. In fact in its purest form capitalism argues that everyone is a free agent - including politicians.
The problem is this is not sort of government the founders envisioned and its not the government America (or any other country) needs. If we didn't already know that unfettered, largely unregulated capitalism isn't really what we should be aiming for, the recent banking crises should have made it clear.
The government is supposed to be "by the people, of the people, for the people" - while it's fine to allow the workings of capitalism a certain amount of latitude, it's supposed to curb it's excesses and rein it in where necessary and put the needs of society ahead of allowing individual people or corporations from accruing too much wealth or power.
I was under the impression that politicians took an oath to uphold this principle - apparently this sort thing is treated as a joke these days.
On that note, intelligent design, in a true scientists eye, will hold the same merit as the theory of evolution until one of the two is supported by facts and a deeper understanding of the world. Both could, essentially, have a lot of support going, one could pull ahead only to be overtaken by the other again.
Well... no. If only you hadn't picked ID you'd have been OK.
What you say is true as far as it goes - competing scientific theories are compared by gathering evidence and seeing which matches best. The bit you're missing is a little thing called "falsifiability".
A theory is only a true scientific theory if you are able to define what would be required to disprove it. TOE has this property - all you need is to find some lifeform that indisputably could not have got to where it is today through evolution.
Since an all-knowing omnipotent being can, by definition, counter any attempt to disprove his/her/its existence - ID is not and cannot be a scientific theory.
In case you think this is just sophistry, this actually happened to Newton's Theory of Gravitation not so long ago - Newton's theory held sway for centuries, but was displaced by General Relativity when it was discovered that (among other things) Newton's theory could not account for the precession of Mercury, whereas GR accurately predicts this effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Also ... #6 Merchandising! Works for Angry Birds and probably a few others I can't be bothered to think of at the moment.
Granted, it wouldn't work for most games, and is something you can get only if you're really really lucky and not something you can rely on when developing the game, but still ... it could theoretically work out for a FOSS game if it was super popular.
#5 Kickstarter or crowdfunding generally.
Ok, you could also fold that into #3 if you push hard enough, but the difference is you're not paying for something you already have, but for something that doesn't exist yet, that you'd like to see created. Don't know if there's been any triple AAA level games funded this way, but I like to think it could happen.
I can't claim to be a shipping expert, but one of the reasons might be that our island is surrounded in many places by sandbanks and shallows of various sorts. This means the relatively few places that are deep enough for a sub to approach also tend to be well-policed shipping lanes ending in harbours and ports (or maybe estuaries which tend to have inconveniently large towns built on them).
Not to mention that we had this thing a while back where German U-Boats kept trying to sneak up on us, meaning there was good reason to make sure the authorities were well aware of all the places where this could happen.
I'll have to beg to differ on that one. I drive a 1.4L Ford Fusion (considered a fairly inexpensive family car over here). Granted it's far from being a sports car, but I've never had any problems accelerating when I've needed to. If you need a burst of speed pulling away from a junction you just stay in the lower gears for a few seconds longer.
If I'm reading these specs right this model is listed as 79HP (which I've neither known nor cared about until now!)
As a European I can't help but wonder if this problem is at least partly down to American's obsession with automatic transmissions?
With a manual, if I need a quick burst of acceleration to, as you say "get me out of trouble", I downshift, goose the engine and shift back up.
Get the trajectory just right and maybe you could 'catch' the object in the end of the catapult and slow it down using the electromagnets in a manner similar to the regenerative braking used in electric cars?
Better yet, stream it directly to the internet!
I can see scope for a website displaying live streams from camera phones etc. and allowing visitors to tag the "good" bits. That way by the time you're asked to turn off your phone, it's already too late for them to cover up whatever dodgy thing they were doing!
At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
That's because they know full well that if they ever hint that the Bible (and other religious texts) are not the "literal word of God" but were in fact written by an assortment of priests and clerics of varying knowledge and ability, some almost certainly with self-serving agendas to boot ... then the whole house of cards collapses around them.
Strictly speaking, I wouldn't think that it was abstinence as such that worked, except maybe to an extent in Catholic communities, so much as with increased education people started learning about the Rhythm method. The Rhythm method isn't a particularly reliable form of birth control by today's standards, but it's still much better than none at all.
[...] is only slightly more expensive than the type of labor intensive manufacturing that we see in places like China. The problem is the high capital outlay for this equipment which no-one wants to front. It's not a problem while cheap labor is in plentiful supply.
Ultimately it's the 'slightly more expensive' part that's the problem here. There's a reason why no-one wants to front the capital outlay and that's because they can't expect to see a return on their investment if the company can't compete with others using cheap labour.
Automated manufacturing (ironically mostly pioneered in the East) has the potential to even the scales here - it doesn't matter how expensive workers are in the West if you only need a handful of them. It just needs someone to figure out how it can be done cheaper than outsourcing.
If you're ripped enough to hold a football field sized tub of heavy water, then I don't think anyone is going to argue with you about how you're holding it ;-)
I wouldn't know, I've never tried to butter one side of a cat.
More accurately QM says there *is* no precise location, only the probabilities. This isn't a matter of the electron being at a particular point, where we lack the ability to determine where it is exactly. In essence the electron *is* a field of probabilities and left to its own devices (e.g. in a remote part of space) is theoretically at every position simultaneously. Only in the presence of other quantum fields does that change - so when an electron interacts with a proton in a hydrogen atom for example, the two sets of probabilities interact with the result that the probabilities associated with the electron are constrained to positions more or less associated with the classical notion of an orbit.
When we attempt to observe an electron's position we necessarily interact with it in a way that constrains its position probability to something close to a single point - this is the only sense in which an electron becomes a "particle". So in the 2-slit experiment, if we don't observe it, the probabilities remain (relatively) unconstrained and there remain possible paths through both slits, whereas if we do observe the electron we narrow the field of probabilities enough to make it almost certain it will only pass through one slit.
(it is therefore meaningless to say "only observe after the particle has passed thru the slit" since there is no "particle" until the observation is made)
The UK has a coalition government precisely because it has more than two parties! However it is also the first coalition we have had in decades, and it (arguably) only happened this time due to very particular circumstances that are unlikely to happen again any time soon.
This is most likely the reason why the LibDems were so keen on switching away from FPTP - it represented the only way they were likely to get another bite at the cherry in 2015. Sadly it was not to be, which is a shame as having more than two parties with a fighting chance of being elected would not only have been good for the LibDems, it would have been great for the UK.
Unionized industries are typically those either in the public sector or where the industry is dominated by one or a small number of large companies.
Industries where there are plenty of companies competing in the marketplace tend to have less need for unions, because employees can easily move to the companies offering the best pay and/or conditions and companies can compete on offering that in order to attract the best employees.
Looking it at that way, unions are a symptom of a larger problem - the way capitalism seems to have a tendency towards markets being dominated by large players as industries mature, which is bad for employees and bad for consumers.
Maybe trains are different in the US, but on the ones I'm familiar with one can easily change carriages while the train is in motion?
This.
Why have trams catch up to HSTs, engage in a complex procedure of transferring passengers, then needing to circle back round (potentially taking ages to get back to their 'route')
Much better to have the trams double as carriages. When you want to get off at a destination you simply go and sit in one of the last few carriages and when the train passes the station they automatically detach and roll up to the platform. At the same time trams with new passengers leave the platform, catch up with the train and attach as replacement carriages to the end.
It's perfectly true that there isn't a "correct" temperature for the Earth. In the past the planet has been both much hotter than now and much colder and, well look at that, it seems to have come through OK.
However what with the predicted extensive desertification, rising sea levels, more extreme weather conditions and what have you, CC is likely to be somewhat inconvenient for the soon-to-be 7 billion people wandering about.
Google, champion of the browser-based app, is inadvertently showing us the dark side of the 'cloud' concept.
When a installed app is discontinued by the provider you still get to use the last version for as long as you want.
When a cloud app gets discontinued, it's just gone.
10. Wallpaper/paint. We're thinking of repainting the living room at the moment and just trying to pick a colour. As I sure everyone is aware not only is this a non-trivial amount of work, even with tester pots you can never be sure what the final result will look like until you've finished.
With full colour E-Ink you could pick a different shade or pattern at the press of a few buttons and change it every day (or have it constantly changing if you wanted).
Or will they stay because MS doesn't allow them to download all their documents or transfer them to another service (or allows them to be downloaded, but they're in proprietary formats that are useless for migration purposes anyway)?
The trick is to define what you mean by "criminal exploitation".
Selling investors derivatives composed of sub-prime mortgages, but cunningly obfuscated so they appear to be valuable rather than nearly worthless - does that count as criminal exploitation?
Offering a high ranking government official a high paying job for when their term of office ends, with the unspoken understanding that the official votes or regulates in certain ways - does that count as criminal exploitation?
Producing report after report full of deliberately misleading facts and statistics, in order to convince politicians that your industry is losing billions and the economy is suffering as a result - to persuade them to enact unnecessary and dangerous legislation - does that count as criminal exploitation?
The problem is you're exactly wrong.
There is absolutely nothing written in the theory of capitalism that says the government cannot get involved in the game. In fact in its purest form capitalism argues that everyone is a free agent - including politicians.
The problem is this is not sort of government the founders envisioned and its not the government America (or any other country) needs. If we didn't already know that unfettered, largely unregulated capitalism isn't really what we should be aiming for, the recent banking crises should have made it clear.
The government is supposed to be "by the people, of the people, for the people" - while it's fine to allow the workings of capitalism a certain amount of latitude, it's supposed to curb it's excesses and rein it in where necessary and put the needs of society ahead of allowing individual people or corporations from accruing too much wealth or power.
I was under the impression that politicians took an oath to uphold this principle - apparently this sort thing is treated as a joke these days.
Well ... no. If only you hadn't picked ID you'd have been OK.
What you say is true as far as it goes - competing scientific theories are compared by gathering evidence and seeing which matches best. The bit you're missing is a little thing called "falsifiability".
A theory is only a true scientific theory if you are able to define what would be required to disprove it. TOE has this property - all you need is to find some lifeform that indisputably could not have got to where it is today through evolution.
Since an all-knowing omnipotent being can, by definition, counter any attempt to disprove his/her/its existence - ID is not and cannot be a scientific theory.
In case you think this is just sophistry, this actually happened to Newton's Theory of Gravitation not so long ago - Newton's theory held sway for centuries, but was displaced by General Relativity when it was discovered that (among other things) Newton's theory could not account for the precession of Mercury, whereas GR accurately predicts this effect.