It doesn't matter because a synthetic diamond is going to be of better quality than anything you can dig out of the ground. About the only thing De Beers could do at this point is play up the whole blood diamond thing. I think some consumers would totally pay more if they knew their their diamond somehow financed a warlord that massacred an entire village. The only thing they're lacking is some way to quantify how much human suffering was caused, but given their history they should have a pretty good idea of how to construct an accurate measure.
Why anyone would spend thousands of dollars on a ring is beyond me anyways. Take all of the money you would have spent and put it towards a house or if that's not an issue, spend it traveling. Experiences together are worth more than a piece of carbon.
As a form of entertainment is it really any worse than watching television? You could pretty much make the same argument for any other widely accepted form of entertainment (e.g., watching a movie (i.e., watching other people pretend to be something they're not), listening to music (i.e., hearing a recording of some other people blowing air, physically striking, or using other means to produce vibration), reading a book, etc.) in that you could go outside instead. Of course if that's the crux of the argument, there's nothing stopping you from doing it while you're running on a treadmill.
Almost any form of human entertainment seems rather silly when you stop to look at it. Most don't produce anything of material worth or have an extrinsic value unless they're being done professionally.
You mean like the part of the population that has grown up playing Nintendo games or spending their free time gaming on a PC? A sizable portion of the upcoming generation already plays computer games. Eventually the people who didn't grow up playing computer games will die off.
Your exact argument could have been applied to basketball or football in their infancy, and yet they're some of the most popular sports in the U.S. at this point. Whether or not Overwatch, or any other computer game reaches anywhere near that level is debatable, but Valve's Dota 2 championship had a $20 million prize pool this year. Hard to scoff at that.
The 1997 film wasn't even based on the book, but was from an unrelated script called Bug Hunt at Outpost 9. About the only thing it has in common with the book is the title and that humanity is fighting some bug monsters. Apparently someone decided to buy the rights to the name so it could be marketed more easily and they incorporated a few concepts from the book.
However, it was still an enjoyable film even if it wasn't a faithful book adaptation. Even today, I'm skeptical that a faithful adaptation could work as a movie, so at best we get a vacuous CGI action movie.
I think there should be a requirement that all bills are read aloud in full before the legislative body that is to vote on them. At the very least, it ensures that all present are aware of the contents. It also has the nice side effect of keeping legislation concise and likely ends bundling various thing together that have nothing to do with each other.
If someone told me that NATO could dump Turkey and support a Kurdish state instead, I'd probably be for it. Right now they're one of the more moderate Muslim groups in the Middle East and they have been crapped on by every country in which their ethnic group resides to some degree. There's little doubt that Erdogan is a dictator now and his actions will seriously set Turkey back to the point where it's not worth keeping them around. Russia probably wouldn't object to the plan since it would let the push Turkey around a lot more due to a lack of NATO backing and having Kurdistan would still allow for a NATO presence in the region.
It seems like this is a plan that everyone could get on board with. Syria and Iraq have some serious territorial integrity problems right now with ISIS, so they can hardly complain. Iran probably wouldn't go for it without some concessions, but they might do it just to spite some of their neighbors or if embargoes were lifted. Turkey obviously wouldn't like it, but since they're well on the way to becoming a complete despotic shithole, I don't think we should care at this point.
I used to get well over a week out of a charge on some of my old Motorola flip phones. Yes, there aren't too many cases where I can't charge my phone on a daily basis, but it was nice to not have to care about always plugging in your phone without having to worry about your battery life the next day.
The (mid) upper class tech sector workers are also fearful of unchecked immigration, which is why every time an H1-B visa story gets posted to Slashdot, you see people talking about how awful it is and how badly its abused. Almost no one is in support of it and you frequently see the exact same type of comments applied to it that you would see the lower (mid) class apply to low-skill immigration. No one claims those posters are being racist when the exact same arguments are made.
However, the (mid) upper class can at least make an argument for allowing low-skill immigration. It drives down the cost of labor for having servants that can work as maids, gardeners, etc. It's at least in their financial interest, but I doubt many would actually state that as the reason for their support. I honestly don't think most of them really care or have given it any thought at all. It's just that their team, their political camp, is in support of it so they are, or maybe it's just that their political opponents, the other tribe is against it so they've decided to be for it so they're not like those other people who are bad.
I'm kind of curious to hear why people who are in favor of allowing in a large number of immigrants (or not deporting those who are here illegally) but are also against more H1-B visas have those positions, because outside of potential financial benefits it doesn't make much sense. The only other reason I can think of is because it allows people to consider themselves virtuous for being progressive or something like that when it doesn't potentially affect their own livelihood.
Trusted aides? I think you mean lobbyists from the various huge companies that spend millions of dollars on campaign contributions. It's pretty clear that neither candidate has the interest of the American people in mind and don't give two shits about stepping all over our Constitutional rights.
Or it was hacked and the information it contains is damaging enough that if you keep it secret you've got a President in your pocket. People who assume that Russia has dirt on Hillary and are just holding onto it until closer to the election are idiots. Why would Putin want Trump to win if they could keep Clinton from opposing them for the next 4+ years?
At least in Western Christianity, Halloween is typically celebrated as All Saints' Day, but like most other Christian festivals it has roots farther back into Pagan festivals that existed long before Christianity did. I think that the idea of it being a way of protesting churches was more of a byproduct of businesses trying to find a way to capitalize on the holiday than anything on the part of people looking to protest for its own sake. Either that or it has that connotation because Europe kicked out most of their hardline Christians of the day who ended up in the U.S. and there's still a bit of puritanical thought that permeates the broader culture.
Alternative hypothesis: This method is > 96% effective, and 4% of the study population is not actually in a monogamous relationship.
I can see why people would be hesitant to put that to the test, but you'd almost need to in order to figure out what caused the 4% failure rate. Was it not the treatment at all, a lapse in administering continued dosage, or some common biology that makes it less effective for some people?
Just because there may not be a genetic component to homosexuality doesn't mean that it isn't fixed or is somehow a choice. Neuroscientist, Simon LeVay found evidence for sexual orientation being connected to brain structure decades ago. It's entirely possible that homosexuality has nothing to do with genetics, but is rather the result of aberrations during fetal development that result these deviations from the norm.
To claim that it's a choice though is just wrong. If you believe otherwise, ask yourself if you you could change your sexual orientation. Sure, you could probably have sex with someone outside of your preferred group, but you wouldn't be attracted to them or have any imperative desire to do so of your own natural volition.
Trump and his supporters should just drop the whole thing already. The only people who keep going on about this are just whiny asshats that don't like Hillary because she's a woman and they can't stand the thought of a f president.
It sounds like you did the intelligent thing and quit. If you're the only person on call, it's time to immediately ask for a raise. Odds are the company can't afford to lose the last person who can deal with problems so your value as an employee has gone up immensely. If they don't recognize that, you should probably leave because you're no dealing with people with reasoning capabilities and they'll just keep making unreasonable demands of you as time goes on.
Indeed. This doesn't even begin to pass the smell test. I'll surely believe the Korean government is corrupt and is heavily influenced from the outside. Look into some of the charges leveraged against Samsung's chairman several years back and what came of that.
However an authoritarian cult of feminists is just beyond stupid. If someone told me the U.S. government was corrupt or involved in some shady practices, I'd believe it, but if they started telling me it was being run by a cult of lizard people or something like that, I'd probably start looking for an exit, or a popcorn vendor depending on my mood and the lunacy involved.
Hybrid drives are fine provided the operating system knows that it's dealing with one and can exploit that fact by keeping the commonly used files in the flash memory and rarely used files or those large files that can be streamed quickly enough from the spinning disk stored on that part of the drive.
However, as this seems to be a professional type device, they should be building in a different solution that involves some kind or RAID storage. Or perhaps they just assume anyone with a brain or the past experiencing of an untimely disk failure already has an external setup so why bother baking it into the system.
The linked article says it's got somewhere between a GeForce GTX 965M and 980M, so slightly old kit, but some of the best available as far as mobile GPUs go.
TouchID is nice (I have it on my iPad) but it's hardly anything new. I had a friend with a fingerprint reader on a notebook before iDevices were even a thing. Like most other things, Apple just made a really good implementation that didn't suck so badly that people just ignore it. I don't really get what people expect out of mobile devices beyond incremental upgrades every year. The things already do a damned good job of fulfilling their purpose. Tacking on new things for the sake of new or change is just idiotic.
Even cordless charging and sharper screens aren't really a big deal. The current solutions are more than adequate. I think the real game changer is a battery with an order of magnitude more capacity without requiring additional space. Prior to smart phones, it wasn't uncommon for your phone to run for a week or longer on a single charge. Smart phones are lucky to make it two days. That's something that changes how we interact with the device more than a better screen or not having to plug in a cord does.
Any significant game-changer is going to mean that smartphones go away. Maybe it's being able to put the components in something the size of a watch so we go with those instead of phones, or someone has figured out how to interface with the human brain and we just beam information directly to our neurons. Smart phones are pretty well defined, and additional features might be nice, but I don't think they change the game at all.
I secretly wonder if instead of invading Earth, aliens are instead filming us to produce some kind of nature show to laugh at how silly humans tend to be.
Hell, that would be a pretty cool show anyhow, aliens or not. Get David Attenborough to narrate and millions would watch.
The article mentions two specific Atom chips for a specific (smartphones) purpose. It could also be that they've killed development, but that this chip was already in production so it might as well be pushed out because humans are pretty bad about chasing a sunk cost with more money in some kind of idiotic hope. Now that they've pushed their latest stillborn child out into the world, Intel can hardly declare it a giant turd, so marketing comes up with some buzzwords or an intended purpose because they've got their own needful to do and then we paw over it on/. for a day before forgetting about it entirely until someone picks one of these up months later because they need a serviceable box that doesn't have significant CPU requirements and because these chips are being flogged off at bargain rates to clear shelf space.
Most of the (few) people I know with smart watches have them for some kind of fitness stuff, because they want a bit more than the bands have to offer. However, I'm of the opinion that they still don't offer enough to justify the added cost. The only reason I ever had to wear a watch died completely when cell phones became small enough to fit in a pocket, and that was over a decade prior to the advent of the modern smart phone.
If you could put a lot of really ridiculous health sensors or something else like that into a watch and find some other ways for it to be useful, I might be swayed to pick one up, but I can't think of anything else they offer that a cell phone isn't going to do better. At best smart watches become relevant when we've figured out how to miniaturize phones to the point where we strap them to our wrists.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter because a synthetic diamond is going to be of better quality than anything you can dig out of the ground. About the only thing De Beers could do at this point is play up the whole blood diamond thing. I think some consumers would totally pay more if they knew their their diamond somehow financed a warlord that massacred an entire village. The only thing they're lacking is some way to quantify how much human suffering was caused, but given their history they should have a pretty good idea of how to construct an accurate measure.
Why anyone would spend thousands of dollars on a ring is beyond me anyways. Take all of the money you would have spent and put it towards a house or if that's not an issue, spend it traveling. Experiences together are worth more than a piece of carbon.
As a form of entertainment is it really any worse than watching television? You could pretty much make the same argument for any other widely accepted form of entertainment (e.g., watching a movie (i.e., watching other people pretend to be something they're not), listening to music (i.e., hearing a recording of some other people blowing air, physically striking, or using other means to produce vibration), reading a book, etc.) in that you could go outside instead. Of course if that's the crux of the argument, there's nothing stopping you from doing it while you're running on a treadmill.
Almost any form of human entertainment seems rather silly when you stop to look at it. Most don't produce anything of material worth or have an extrinsic value unless they're being done professionally.
You mean like the part of the population that has grown up playing Nintendo games or spending their free time gaming on a PC? A sizable portion of the upcoming generation already plays computer games. Eventually the people who didn't grow up playing computer games will die off.
Your exact argument could have been applied to basketball or football in their infancy, and yet they're some of the most popular sports in the U.S. at this point. Whether or not Overwatch, or any other computer game reaches anywhere near that level is debatable, but Valve's Dota 2 championship had a $20 million prize pool this year. Hard to scoff at that.
The 1997 film wasn't even based on the book, but was from an unrelated script called Bug Hunt at Outpost 9. About the only thing it has in common with the book is the title and that humanity is fighting some bug monsters. Apparently someone decided to buy the rights to the name so it could be marketed more easily and they incorporated a few concepts from the book.
However, it was still an enjoyable film even if it wasn't a faithful book adaptation. Even today, I'm skeptical that a faithful adaptation could work as a movie, so at best we get a vacuous CGI action movie.
I think there should be a requirement that all bills are read aloud in full before the legislative body that is to vote on them. At the very least, it ensures that all present are aware of the contents. It also has the nice side effect of keeping legislation concise and likely ends bundling various thing together that have nothing to do with each other.
If someone told me that NATO could dump Turkey and support a Kurdish state instead, I'd probably be for it. Right now they're one of the more moderate Muslim groups in the Middle East and they have been crapped on by every country in which their ethnic group resides to some degree. There's little doubt that Erdogan is a dictator now and his actions will seriously set Turkey back to the point where it's not worth keeping them around. Russia probably wouldn't object to the plan since it would let the push Turkey around a lot more due to a lack of NATO backing and having Kurdistan would still allow for a NATO presence in the region.
It seems like this is a plan that everyone could get on board with. Syria and Iraq have some serious territorial integrity problems right now with ISIS, so they can hardly complain. Iran probably wouldn't go for it without some concessions, but they might do it just to spite some of their neighbors or if embargoes were lifted. Turkey obviously wouldn't like it, but since they're well on the way to becoming a complete despotic shithole, I don't think we should care at this point.
I used to get well over a week out of a charge on some of my old Motorola flip phones. Yes, there aren't too many cases where I can't charge my phone on a daily basis, but it was nice to not have to care about always plugging in your phone without having to worry about your battery life the next day.
It's completely true. Just look at how many people in Congress voted for the Patriot Act.
The (mid) upper class tech sector workers are also fearful of unchecked immigration, which is why every time an H1-B visa story gets posted to Slashdot, you see people talking about how awful it is and how badly its abused. Almost no one is in support of it and you frequently see the exact same type of comments applied to it that you would see the lower (mid) class apply to low-skill immigration. No one claims those posters are being racist when the exact same arguments are made.
However, the (mid) upper class can at least make an argument for allowing low-skill immigration. It drives down the cost of labor for having servants that can work as maids, gardeners, etc. It's at least in their financial interest, but I doubt many would actually state that as the reason for their support. I honestly don't think most of them really care or have given it any thought at all. It's just that their team, their political camp, is in support of it so they are, or maybe it's just that their political opponents, the other tribe is against it so they've decided to be for it so they're not like those other people who are bad.
I'm kind of curious to hear why people who are in favor of allowing in a large number of immigrants (or not deporting those who are here illegally) but are also against more H1-B visas have those positions, because outside of potential financial benefits it doesn't make much sense. The only other reason I can think of is because it allows people to consider themselves virtuous for being progressive or something like that when it doesn't potentially affect their own livelihood.
Trusted aides? I think you mean lobbyists from the various huge companies that spend millions of dollars on campaign contributions. It's pretty clear that neither candidate has the interest of the American people in mind and don't give two shits about stepping all over our Constitutional rights.
Or it was hacked and the information it contains is damaging enough that if you keep it secret you've got a President in your pocket. People who assume that Russia has dirt on Hillary and are just holding onto it until closer to the election are idiots. Why would Putin want Trump to win if they could keep Clinton from opposing them for the next 4+ years?
At least in Western Christianity, Halloween is typically celebrated as All Saints' Day, but like most other Christian festivals it has roots farther back into Pagan festivals that existed long before Christianity did. I think that the idea of it being a way of protesting churches was more of a byproduct of businesses trying to find a way to capitalize on the holiday than anything on the part of people looking to protest for its own sake. Either that or it has that connotation because Europe kicked out most of their hardline Christians of the day who ended up in the U.S. and there's still a bit of puritanical thought that permeates the broader culture.
Alternative hypothesis: This method is > 96% effective, and 4% of the study population is not actually in a monogamous relationship.
I can see why people would be hesitant to put that to the test, but you'd almost need to in order to figure out what caused the 4% failure rate. Was it not the treatment at all, a lapse in administering continued dosage, or some common biology that makes it less effective for some people?
Just because there may not be a genetic component to homosexuality doesn't mean that it isn't fixed or is somehow a choice. Neuroscientist, Simon LeVay found evidence for sexual orientation being connected to brain structure decades ago. It's entirely possible that homosexuality has nothing to do with genetics, but is rather the result of aberrations during fetal development that result these deviations from the norm.
To claim that it's a choice though is just wrong. If you believe otherwise, ask yourself if you you could change your sexual orientation. Sure, you could probably have sex with someone outside of your preferred group, but you wouldn't be attracted to them or have any imperative desire to do so of your own natural volition.
Dammit, the emale went missing again.
Sorry, I'll see myself out now.
Trump and his supporters should just drop the whole thing already. The only people who keep going on about this are just whiny asshats that don't like Hillary because she's a woman and they can't stand the thought of a f president.
It sounds like you did the intelligent thing and quit. If you're the only person on call, it's time to immediately ask for a raise. Odds are the company can't afford to lose the last person who can deal with problems so your value as an employee has gone up immensely. If they don't recognize that, you should probably leave because you're no dealing with people with reasoning capabilities and they'll just keep making unreasonable demands of you as time goes on.
Indeed. This doesn't even begin to pass the smell test. I'll surely believe the Korean government is corrupt and is heavily influenced from the outside. Look into some of the charges leveraged against Samsung's chairman several years back and what came of that.
However an authoritarian cult of feminists is just beyond stupid. If someone told me the U.S. government was corrupt or involved in some shady practices, I'd believe it, but if they started telling me it was being run by a cult of lizard people or something like that, I'd probably start looking for an exit, or a popcorn vendor depending on my mood and the lunacy involved.
Hybrid drives are fine provided the operating system knows that it's dealing with one and can exploit that fact by keeping the commonly used files in the flash memory and rarely used files or those large files that can be streamed quickly enough from the spinning disk stored on that part of the drive.
However, as this seems to be a professional type device, they should be building in a different solution that involves some kind or RAID storage. Or perhaps they just assume anyone with a brain or the past experiencing of an untimely disk failure already has an external setup so why bother baking it into the system.
The linked article says it's got somewhere between a GeForce GTX 965M and 980M, so slightly old kit, but some of the best available as far as mobile GPUs go.
TouchID is nice (I have it on my iPad) but it's hardly anything new. I had a friend with a fingerprint reader on a notebook before iDevices were even a thing. Like most other things, Apple just made a really good implementation that didn't suck so badly that people just ignore it. I don't really get what people expect out of mobile devices beyond incremental upgrades every year. The things already do a damned good job of fulfilling their purpose. Tacking on new things for the sake of new or change is just idiotic.
Even cordless charging and sharper screens aren't really a big deal. The current solutions are more than adequate. I think the real game changer is a battery with an order of magnitude more capacity without requiring additional space. Prior to smart phones, it wasn't uncommon for your phone to run for a week or longer on a single charge. Smart phones are lucky to make it two days. That's something that changes how we interact with the device more than a better screen or not having to plug in a cord does.
Any significant game-changer is going to mean that smartphones go away. Maybe it's being able to put the components in something the size of a watch so we go with those instead of phones, or someone has figured out how to interface with the human brain and we just beam information directly to our neurons. Smart phones are pretty well defined, and additional features might be nice, but I don't think they change the game at all.
I secretly wonder if instead of invading Earth, aliens are instead filming us to produce some kind of nature show to laugh at how silly humans tend to be.
Hell, that would be a pretty cool show anyhow, aliens or not. Get David Attenborough to narrate and millions would watch.
The article mentions two specific Atom chips for a specific (smartphones) purpose. It could also be that they've killed development, but that this chip was already in production so it might as well be pushed out because humans are pretty bad about chasing a sunk cost with more money in some kind of idiotic hope. Now that they've pushed their latest stillborn child out into the world, Intel can hardly declare it a giant turd, so marketing comes up with some buzzwords or an intended purpose because they've got their own needful to do and then we paw over it on /. for a day before forgetting about it entirely until someone picks one of these up months later because they need a serviceable box that doesn't have significant CPU requirements and because these chips are being flogged off at bargain rates to clear shelf space.
They have people skills.
Most of the (few) people I know with smart watches have them for some kind of fitness stuff, because they want a bit more than the bands have to offer. However, I'm of the opinion that they still don't offer enough to justify the added cost. The only reason I ever had to wear a watch died completely when cell phones became small enough to fit in a pocket, and that was over a decade prior to the advent of the modern smart phone.
If you could put a lot of really ridiculous health sensors or something else like that into a watch and find some other ways for it to be useful, I might be swayed to pick one up, but I can't think of anything else they offer that a cell phone isn't going to do better. At best smart watches become relevant when we've figured out how to miniaturize phones to the point where we strap them to our wrists.