So what if we can't get perfect a la carte options, I'll take the ability to select media company bundles over the terrible packages that the cable companies bundle together. Right now I have to get all the ESPN channels, all the network channels, all manner of other crap channels (E!, Hallmark channel, etc.), and a bunch of other stuff I don't want. I'd be glad to have the option of picking just the ESPN channels and HBO. A lot of people are stuck with an all or nothing option and at that point it's no longer solely the fault of the media conglomerates.
But those holes were rather small. This one is reported to by 80 meters wide, which coincidentally is rather similar to the dimensions of the (Royal) Albert Hall which is oval-shaped with a length and width of 83 and 72 meters according to Wikipedia.
This assumes that chimps aren't on their way there. However, without understanding how intelligence first arose in humans or what in our genes is responsible for it, there's no good way to determine what it would take chimps to get there other than enough time.
Also, what makes you think that stupidity has advantages? That humans exist on every continent on Earth and will probably have moved off planet within a thousand years and likely will have a least tried to move out of our solar system in the next ten thousand would suggest that intelligence ultimately confers more of an advantage. Other creatures are limited by their ability to adapt to new environments. Humans move there and adapt their environment to suit them. The only thing that really limits us is our own lack of understanding of the universe, but we've been amassing knowledge and continually peeling away the layers of mystery. The more we add to that pile, the better we're able to adapt our world to suit us.
It's getting cheaper than ever before, not more expensive and the asymmetry is narrowing. Before we had to fire a cruise missile, now we're using drone strikes. A laser guided bullet that can be fired from almost 2 miles away that does even less collateral damage is even cheaper to use both in terms of material cost and politically when there aren't any innocent civilian casualties.
Finding the target isn't going to be any more difficult. Imagine when something like Google Glass becomes ubiquitous and the government is spying on more than just phone calls. Even without that, it's not too difficult to imagine fleets of drones being used for surveillance, maybe even themselves being capable of painting a target once they find one.
It's not a matter of failing peer review, it's a general disinterest in publishing negative results. If you find a cure for cancer it's a big deal, but if you just found one more thing that doesn't work any better than a sugar pill, none of the journals are going to care about publishing it even if it's the most well-run study in the history of the world.
If someone starts doing some novel research that's going to take five years to possibly produce results and nothing pans out, they aren't going to get anyone to publish the findings.
Samsung's dominance in the Android market is legendary - it's what, 90% of all Android phones?
It's not that high. A C|net article from a few months ago puts them at slightly more than 30% of the global share, which is still pretty damned impressive. What's been impressive is that Samsung has been one of the only companies actually making money. HTC just posted that they were back in the black for the first time in a while and neither LG, Sony, or any of the other big players have done much better than break even. Motorola bled like stuck pig both before and after Google acquired them. Blackberry and Nokia all but disappeared.
In the first quarter of 2014, Apple and Samsung together had 106% of industry profits. That number only makes sense because all of the other companies (China wasn't included) lost money. That's what has been most incredible with the company.
It does explain Facebook and Twitter and the seeming need for some people to constantly spam the rest of the world with useless information that is of no consequence to anyone.
If the majority of people are extroverted, how would it not be considered normal or typical behavior? The problem comes from assuming that anyone who isn't normal must have something horribly wrong with them. The number of people who are normal in most every regard must be incredibly small, which by definition also means that they're not normal.
Either some attribute is the typical state for a person, so our brains will assume it's true unless given sufficient reason to believe otherwise, or there's another likely explanation for the behavior. In the case of the stick figure, assuming that it's drawn as plainly as possible, it better matches the mind's pattern for men due to a lack of hair and a lack of breasts. If we lived in a culture where women had flat chests and shaved their heads and men wore their hair long, most people would probably default to calling the stick figure a woman.
Our brains are fairly good at recognizing patterns and will often try to find them in places where none exist. Even if the number of introverts and extroverts are the same, it could be simple confirmation bias as you're far more likely to engage with extroverts while introverts will keep more to themselves.
There are a lot of people who the environment matters to....
Which doesn't matter one bit unless they have the money to build the wind farms, which they usually don't. The monetary cost and payback are what is going to be looked at when determining whether or not to build wind farms and how many will be built.
And why didn't you mark the post I responded to as "off topic"?
I'm going to guess because Slashdot doesn't have a "-1 Disagree" moderation option, but that's just my guess. That and Troll or Flamebait probably wouldn't stand up in meta-moderation, but Off-Topic might not get flagged.
The problem is that it appears to be rather arbitrary. What objective criteria is used to determine what popular culture is popular enough to warrant a Wikipedia page and what popular culture isn't popular enough so everything must go? In reality I think it comes down to whether or not it is more liked or more hated by editors who hold the power there.
The companies that are producing these incredibly pixel-dense phone screens are the same ones that are producing a lot of the panels for monitors. I think Samsung and LG are collectively responsible for about half of the global supply of LCD panels. A quick Google search shows that the top 4 companies make up roughly 80% - 85% of the market. They're probably perfectly happy making a healthy profit and not rocking the boat too much.
Probably not, given that most reviewers tend to focus on technical specs or other flashy points after spending perhaps a week with the device before moving on to something else. A lot of consumers are going to buy whatever costs them the least, even if they still end up paying the same ridiculous amount every month for a contract. Even then, a lot of them will take whatever the sales droid pushes on them.
When Google still owned Motorola they tried to make some quality designs that had a lot more polish than the typical Android phone, but the sales didn't follow because it didn't have the bells and whistles that attract tech geeks or the type of people who fill buy based on some shiny, new feature. Similarly, none of the sales people were pushing it for any reason (usually some kind of kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsales incentive) and so sales were poor and Google ended up dumping Motorola because they couldn't make a profit with the company.
That and if they make a quality device that lasts for three years, they can't sell you a new phone after two. Why do you think so many of the manufacturers and carriers stop providing Android updates even though the device could easily support them or a different version of the essentially the same hardware is getting the update?
It seems more likely that Microsoft is so large that parts of the company are on different wavelengths and act inconsistently with one and other. Also, no one brings a phone from conception to market in a few months. This was probably something in the pipeline from before Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. Microsoft could have axed it (and under Ballmer they probably would have) but I think they've realized that doing things like that for purely ideological reasons is poor business sense and that while they might have been able to get away with it in the past, the times have changed. Given that they recently made Windows Phone free for manufacturers (at least certain ones anyway) it's not like they're potentially losing out on revenue either.
I typically drink a lot of tea as well and it's possible to sip it at that temperature, but you wouldn't take a mouthful and swallow it. Also, when someone does drink something that hot in small quantities they're typically moving it around their mouth fast enough so that it's not staying in one spot for long enough to cause damage. Spilling it yourself is going to cause some of it to puddle or soak into clothing where it will remain in one spot for long enough to start burning.
It's very likely that there are dozens of other ways of achieving a similar effect, much like there are loads of different designs (and patents) for internal combustion engines.
Even if this patent is worthless in the sense that anyone can get around it, it provides protection for Amazon as it's significantly more difficult for anyone else to sue them for anything related to cameras when Amazon can point out that they received their own patent for the method that they're using which is legally recognized as different from existing methods. Considering the legal fees associated with patent litigation, this patent is far from worthless if it prevents millions of dollars spent fighting a court battle.
My understanding has been that they are capable of bypassing the OS restriction on unsuccessful login attempts before the phone's data is wiped. Since most people just use a 4-digit pin, it wouldn't take very long to brute force even if they don't know what the salt is.
It probably makes sense for Amazon to do it though considering they have their own infrastructure for handling payments and their own huge customer base. They don't own the content that's being sold either, so I imagine that Apple's 30% cut eats into potential profits by a large amount.
It seems to be a little of both, with some differences being attributed to social norms and others being related to sex-based developmental differences between girls and boys.
That said, I'm wondering if it's a moot point as we're begging the question to begin with as we're assuming that aggression is the important factor that accounts for the difference that we're seeing. I don't know if you could expect to get an answer, but it would probably be better to ask Bezos what skills he values in his employees and what qualities possessed by his current employees lead to their hiring. Once we know that, we can have a discussion about whether these are traits more frequently seen in men and how those attributes fall into that nature vs. nurture spectrum.
If they were a former employee, sure, but I can't imagine anyone currently working at either company who would be willing to throw their job away. They obviously won't be fired over the lawsuit, but in a few months some HR drone will have started to find some performance or behavior problems that will eventually lead to their termination.
Unions aren't inherently good or bad. They can accomplish both good in ensuring that workers receive fair wages and that companies provide a safe work environment, but they are just as capable of protecting incompetent workers and demanding their members out of their jobs.
Personally I believe that unions should neither be forbidden or required. However, like too many other things it seems that the people who feel strongly about such things want an all or nothing approach in one direction or the other.
To some degree it may become a requirement if your competition is willing to spend money lobbying. At that point it may become the case where not investing a certain amount of money to represent your interests will result in the government passing laws that will hurt your business at the expense of a competitor or another industry.
As an analogy, if there are no criminals it is not necessary to spend much money on security. However, if security is generally weak, it may encourage criminal activity. At some point it becomes less costly to spend money on some amount of security to prevent criminal activity. Eventually it reaches an equilibrium where spending more money on security will not provide a similar reduction in cost due to losses from criminal activity and criminal activity will become risky enough that fewer people view criminal enterprises as profitable. It's a little fuzzy as the parties involved don't always have perfect information and external factors will have some influence on the system, but on the whole it tends towards an equilibrium.
Like almost anything else in life, if some action is more efficient or profitable than the alternatives, people will gravitate towards doing it. The real question is whether there is an alternative form of governance that results in some net increase in overall efficiency such that there is less overall money being tied up in lobbying without an increase in negative outcomes for the involved parties for investing in other endeavors. Until we can answer yes to that question and validate it such that we can be quite sure of the answer (not to mention being able to develop a means of smoothly transferring to such a system) what we have now is probably more efficient than most other systems given the existing constraints.
Lobbying could certainly be made more transparent, but it beats some of the outright bribery and corruption that goes on in other countries. It might not be ideal, but it's probably a little bit closer to it.
It really depends on what is meant by computer science. A lot of CS degrees today contain a lot more software engineering and general programming than they do theory. A person can take a lot of more traditional CS classes (e.g. compiler theory, cryptography, automata, algorithm analysis, etc.) which are are fairly heavily math based, and probably learn a lot, but they won't necessarily help with programming ability or the kinds of things that are more generally useful today.
If someone just wants to build websites using some framework or some casual programming, odds are they won't need to know a lot of those things. I think that if you're going to be a professional software developer, those types of courses can open you up to new ways of thinking and problem solving that will be valuable.
To me there are really three different areas: computer science, which is mostly math and theory; programming, which is translating algorithms into code; and software engineering, which encompasses the entire software lifecycle and managing it. A software professional probably wants some knowledge of all three areas, but it's likely that they'll tend to specialize in one particular area.
What I don't get is that with this app there's actual evidence of the bullying that teachers can address. Sure it's "anonymous" but how much does anyone want to bet that there's enough information available that it wouldn't be too difficult to determine who was sending the messages?
I suppose it's just easier for them to sweep the problem under the rug rather than actually bothering to deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
So what if we can't get perfect a la carte options, I'll take the ability to select media company bundles over the terrible packages that the cable companies bundle together. Right now I have to get all the ESPN channels, all the network channels, all manner of other crap channels (E!, Hallmark channel, etc.), and a bunch of other stuff I don't want. I'd be glad to have the option of picking just the ESPN channels and HBO. A lot of people are stuck with an all or nothing option and at that point it's no longer solely the fault of the media conglomerates.
But those holes were rather small. This one is reported to by 80 meters wide, which coincidentally is rather similar to the dimensions of the (Royal) Albert Hall which is oval-shaped with a length and width of 83 and 72 meters according to Wikipedia.
This assumes that chimps aren't on their way there. However, without understanding how intelligence first arose in humans or what in our genes is responsible for it, there's no good way to determine what it would take chimps to get there other than enough time.
Also, what makes you think that stupidity has advantages? That humans exist on every continent on Earth and will probably have moved off planet within a thousand years and likely will have a least tried to move out of our solar system in the next ten thousand would suggest that intelligence ultimately confers more of an advantage. Other creatures are limited by their ability to adapt to new environments. Humans move there and adapt their environment to suit them. The only thing that really limits us is our own lack of understanding of the universe, but we've been amassing knowledge and continually peeling away the layers of mystery. The more we add to that pile, the better we're able to adapt our world to suit us.
It's getting cheaper than ever before, not more expensive and the asymmetry is narrowing. Before we had to fire a cruise missile, now we're using drone strikes. A laser guided bullet that can be fired from almost 2 miles away that does even less collateral damage is even cheaper to use both in terms of material cost and politically when there aren't any innocent civilian casualties.
Finding the target isn't going to be any more difficult. Imagine when something like Google Glass becomes ubiquitous and the government is spying on more than just phone calls. Even without that, it's not too difficult to imagine fleets of drones being used for surveillance, maybe even themselves being capable of painting a target once they find one.
It's not a matter of failing peer review, it's a general disinterest in publishing negative results. If you find a cure for cancer it's a big deal, but if you just found one more thing that doesn't work any better than a sugar pill, none of the journals are going to care about publishing it even if it's the most well-run study in the history of the world.
If someone starts doing some novel research that's going to take five years to possibly produce results and nothing pans out, they aren't going to get anyone to publish the findings.
Samsung's dominance in the Android market is legendary - it's what, 90% of all Android phones?
It's not that high. A C|net article from a few months ago puts them at slightly more than 30% of the global share, which is still pretty damned impressive. What's been impressive is that Samsung has been one of the only companies actually making money. HTC just posted that they were back in the black for the first time in a while and neither LG, Sony, or any of the other big players have done much better than break even. Motorola bled like stuck pig both before and after Google acquired them. Blackberry and Nokia all but disappeared.
In the first quarter of 2014, Apple and Samsung together had 106% of industry profits. That number only makes sense because all of the other companies (China wasn't included) lost money. That's what has been most incredible with the company.
It does explain Facebook and Twitter and the seeming need for some people to constantly spam the rest of the world with useless information that is of no consequence to anyone.
If the majority of people are extroverted, how would it not be considered normal or typical behavior? The problem comes from assuming that anyone who isn't normal must have something horribly wrong with them. The number of people who are normal in most every regard must be incredibly small, which by definition also means that they're not normal.
Either some attribute is the typical state for a person, so our brains will assume it's true unless given sufficient reason to believe otherwise, or there's another likely explanation for the behavior. In the case of the stick figure, assuming that it's drawn as plainly as possible, it better matches the mind's pattern for men due to a lack of hair and a lack of breasts. If we lived in a culture where women had flat chests and shaved their heads and men wore their hair long, most people would probably default to calling the stick figure a woman.
Our brains are fairly good at recognizing patterns and will often try to find them in places where none exist. Even if the number of introverts and extroverts are the same, it could be simple confirmation bias as you're far more likely to engage with extroverts while introverts will keep more to themselves.
There are a lot of people who the environment matters to....
Which doesn't matter one bit unless they have the money to build the wind farms, which they usually don't. The monetary cost and payback are what is going to be looked at when determining whether or not to build wind farms and how many will be built.
And why didn't you mark the post I responded to as "off topic"?
I'm going to guess because Slashdot doesn't have a "-1 Disagree" moderation option, but that's just my guess. That and Troll or Flamebait probably wouldn't stand up in meta-moderation, but Off-Topic might not get flagged.
The problem is that it appears to be rather arbitrary. What objective criteria is used to determine what popular culture is popular enough to warrant a Wikipedia page and what popular culture isn't popular enough so everything must go? In reality I think it comes down to whether or not it is more liked or more hated by editors who hold the power there.
The companies that are producing these incredibly pixel-dense phone screens are the same ones that are producing a lot of the panels for monitors. I think Samsung and LG are collectively responsible for about half of the global supply of LCD panels. A quick Google search shows that the top 4 companies make up roughly 80% - 85% of the market. They're probably perfectly happy making a healthy profit and not rocking the boat too much.
Probably not, given that most reviewers tend to focus on technical specs or other flashy points after spending perhaps a week with the device before moving on to something else. A lot of consumers are going to buy whatever costs them the least, even if they still end up paying the same ridiculous amount every month for a contract. Even then, a lot of them will take whatever the sales droid pushes on them.
When Google still owned Motorola they tried to make some quality designs that had a lot more polish than the typical Android phone, but the sales didn't follow because it didn't have the bells and whistles that attract tech geeks or the type of people who fill buy based on some shiny, new feature. Similarly, none of the sales people were pushing it for any reason (usually some kind of kickback^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsales incentive) and so sales were poor and Google ended up dumping Motorola because they couldn't make a profit with the company.
That and if they make a quality device that lasts for three years, they can't sell you a new phone after two. Why do you think so many of the manufacturers and carriers stop providing Android updates even though the device could easily support them or a different version of the essentially the same hardware is getting the update?
It seems more likely that Microsoft is so large that parts of the company are on different wavelengths and act inconsistently with one and other. Also, no one brings a phone from conception to market in a few months. This was probably something in the pipeline from before Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. Microsoft could have axed it (and under Ballmer they probably would have) but I think they've realized that doing things like that for purely ideological reasons is poor business sense and that while they might have been able to get away with it in the past, the times have changed. Given that they recently made Windows Phone free for manufacturers (at least certain ones anyway) it's not like they're potentially losing out on revenue either.
"If we're going to be able to do three products . . ."
Three products? Why not five?
I typically drink a lot of tea as well and it's possible to sip it at that temperature, but you wouldn't take a mouthful and swallow it. Also, when someone does drink something that hot in small quantities they're typically moving it around their mouth fast enough so that it's not staying in one spot for long enough to cause damage. Spilling it yourself is going to cause some of it to puddle or soak into clothing where it will remain in one spot for long enough to start burning.
It's very likely that there are dozens of other ways of achieving a similar effect, much like there are loads of different designs (and patents) for internal combustion engines.
Even if this patent is worthless in the sense that anyone can get around it, it provides protection for Amazon as it's significantly more difficult for anyone else to sue them for anything related to cameras when Amazon can point out that they received their own patent for the method that they're using which is legally recognized as different from existing methods. Considering the legal fees associated with patent litigation, this patent is far from worthless if it prevents millions of dollars spent fighting a court battle.
My understanding has been that they are capable of bypassing the OS restriction on unsuccessful login attempts before the phone's data is wiped. Since most people just use a 4-digit pin, it wouldn't take very long to brute force even if they don't know what the salt is.
It probably makes sense for Amazon to do it though considering they have their own infrastructure for handling payments and their own huge customer base. They don't own the content that's being sold either, so I imagine that Apple's 30% cut eats into potential profits by a large amount.
Wikipedia has a decent summary with some links to various research articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression#Gender
It seems to be a little of both, with some differences being attributed to social norms and others being related to sex-based developmental differences between girls and boys.
That said, I'm wondering if it's a moot point as we're begging the question to begin with as we're assuming that aggression is the important factor that accounts for the difference that we're seeing. I don't know if you could expect to get an answer, but it would probably be better to ask Bezos what skills he values in his employees and what qualities possessed by his current employees lead to their hiring. Once we know that, we can have a discussion about whether these are traits more frequently seen in men and how those attributes fall into that nature vs. nurture spectrum.
If they were a former employee, sure, but I can't imagine anyone currently working at either company who would be willing to throw their job away. They obviously won't be fired over the lawsuit, but in a few months some HR drone will have started to find some performance or behavior problems that will eventually lead to their termination.
Unions aren't inherently good or bad. They can accomplish both good in ensuring that workers receive fair wages and that companies provide a safe work environment, but they are just as capable of protecting incompetent workers and demanding their members out of their jobs.
Personally I believe that unions should neither be forbidden or required. However, like too many other things it seems that the people who feel strongly about such things want an all or nothing approach in one direction or the other.
To some degree it may become a requirement if your competition is willing to spend money lobbying. At that point it may become the case where not investing a certain amount of money to represent your interests will result in the government passing laws that will hurt your business at the expense of a competitor or another industry.
As an analogy, if there are no criminals it is not necessary to spend much money on security. However, if security is generally weak, it may encourage criminal activity. At some point it becomes less costly to spend money on some amount of security to prevent criminal activity. Eventually it reaches an equilibrium where spending more money on security will not provide a similar reduction in cost due to losses from criminal activity and criminal activity will become risky enough that fewer people view criminal enterprises as profitable. It's a little fuzzy as the parties involved don't always have perfect information and external factors will have some influence on the system, but on the whole it tends towards an equilibrium.
Like almost anything else in life, if some action is more efficient or profitable than the alternatives, people will gravitate towards doing it. The real question is whether there is an alternative form of governance that results in some net increase in overall efficiency such that there is less overall money being tied up in lobbying without an increase in negative outcomes for the involved parties for investing in other endeavors. Until we can answer yes to that question and validate it such that we can be quite sure of the answer (not to mention being able to develop a means of smoothly transferring to such a system) what we have now is probably more efficient than most other systems given the existing constraints.
Lobbying could certainly be made more transparent, but it beats some of the outright bribery and corruption that goes on in other countries. It might not be ideal, but it's probably a little bit closer to it.
It really depends on what is meant by computer science. A lot of CS degrees today contain a lot more software engineering and general programming than they do theory. A person can take a lot of more traditional CS classes (e.g. compiler theory, cryptography, automata, algorithm analysis, etc.) which are are fairly heavily math based, and probably learn a lot, but they won't necessarily help with programming ability or the kinds of things that are more generally useful today.
If someone just wants to build websites using some framework or some casual programming, odds are they won't need to know a lot of those things. I think that if you're going to be a professional software developer, those types of courses can open you up to new ways of thinking and problem solving that will be valuable.
To me there are really three different areas: computer science, which is mostly math and theory; programming, which is translating algorithms into code; and software engineering, which encompasses the entire software lifecycle and managing it. A software professional probably wants some knowledge of all three areas, but it's likely that they'll tend to specialize in one particular area.
What I don't get is that with this app there's actual evidence of the bullying that teachers can address. Sure it's "anonymous" but how much does anyone want to bet that there's enough information available that it wouldn't be too difficult to determine who was sending the messages?
I suppose it's just easier for them to sweep the problem under the rug rather than actually bothering to deal with it.