The shell is very stiff and strong. I've killed 3 laptops by weakening the case, which then flexes the motherboard and components when I pick it up. So this is worth extra money to me.
The trackpad is huge and supports gestures. I have a Fingerworks pad attached to my PC at work so needless to say this is worth extra money to me as well.
The CPU, memory, storage, and drive are all pretty fast, so I'm not going to compare this to the cheapest Dell or HP.
I like OS X better than Windows and that's a personal preference, but it's worth a bit extra to me.j
I have a MacBook Pro that is about 1.5 years old--one of the first ones that came out with this new form factor. I really like it and think it was worth the price, but I'm not planning to upgrade to the newest model.
You can save some money, but get the same quality and warranty coverage, by buying a refurbished machine through the Apple Store.
Unless a business is trying to serve the entire country, where they come in general topic searches does not matter that much. From a user's perspective, a broad general search IS best served by the largest and fastest sites.
For small local businesses, you've got to tune for the locality, which includes a whole 'nother set of Google tools on top of the standard SEO stuff like title, content, meta tags, etc. http://www.google.com/local/add/
She would also be well-served by using online tech to develop repeat customers in other ways, like an e-mail newsletter, or engaging on sites like Yelp.
Yeah, it's a shame he never borrowed ideas from Xerox.
Or Konqueror, or Unix, or Adobe, or Macromedia, or SoundJam, or Tony Fadell, or Fingerworks. And it's too bad Apple never thought to outsource their manufacturing to leverage the PC components designed and built by other companies like Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, Nvidia, ATI, Intel, etc.
Yeah, it's a shame Apple has insisted on inventing everything themselves.
iPhone...Android...sure we can fight about which platform is better. But the important thing is that we all determine our levels of happiness and pride by the relative merits of the software platforms of our phones.
I mean--let's keep our priorities straight here, people.
I can't believe my luck! To have ended up in the one universe, out of an infinity of other possibilities, in which I survived the activation of the Lar
Since copyrights and patents only protect the ability to profit from IP, not the IP itself, you would only need to enforce it where it deprives you of the opportunity to profit yourself--i.e. locally.
In an apocryphal primitive world, you could go down the hill and shoot the guy who is selling your tractor design as easily as you could shoot the guy who trespassed on your property. The copies in China wouldn't matter since you couldn't sell your own copies there anyway.
There's nothing in the concept of IP law that prevents people from singing songs they hear, by the way. It's only the distribution of tangible copies that is regulated--the act of trade.
I think what matters is what is done with the data. Just from the summary we can see a huge difference--similar data, but very different results between what happened to Japanese Americans and what didn't happen to Arab Americans.
Government has data on us. That could be bad, but it could also be good because data can help government work better. By analogy: the government has terribly powerful weapons. That could be bad if they were used against the citizenry, but it's good that they are available to be used in our defense.
Like weapons, data are just tools. What is needed are great and clear controls on what actions can arise from that data. After all without the census data, the government could have just as easily rounded up everyone who *looks* Japanese, or everyone who was reported by their neighbor to be Japanese. Not any better IMO.
By value the U.S. is still the #1 manufacturer in the world ( http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33962 ). And our research system, considered as the sum of government, corporate, and university research progams, is still very strong. (I'd say it's the best but don't have a citation...who's better?)
Citing the Congressional schedule for "days off" is like citing only the meetings on your calendar at work. If you're not in a meeting, you're not working, right?
Not exactly. Members of Congress are working pretty much any time they are not sleeping. When Congress is not in session they are in their DC offices working, or in their districts or states, meeting with constituents, raising money, and basically campaigning 24/7/365. This is a good thing--it is the system of accountability.
Almost every time a vote is taken, everyone knows if the bill is going to pass ahead of time. The vote counts on each side are monitored by the whips (a leadership position) on each side. So yeah, if a bill is going to pass unanimously, you might not see 100-0 on the vote record. It doesn't mean your member of Congress was taking his or her free military jet to Tahiti.
BTW, government aviation only covers official government travel, for instance when Senators go to visit troops oversees or foreign leaders. When members of Congress fly back and forth from their district or state, they fly commercial like the rest of us.
We see what we expect to see. In China, companies cannot become powerful and successful without some control and permission of the government. Therefore the Chinese government sees all powerful and successful companies through that lens. It is outside their experience that a private company could become as powerful and successful as Google has without any government patronage to speak of. They believe that they are simply exposing a truth that the rest of the world is too naive to see, or is not willing to admit.
U.S citizens might see them as hypocritical propagandists. But from their perspective they are being totally consistent.
"American culture" is generally considered fun stuff like: Consumerism. Corporatism. Obsession with money and violence. Fear of sex and drugs.
Yeah but those are not the values that China is complaining about. (They're happy to cooperate with consumerism and corporatism for instance.) They're complaining because Google is threatening to stop censoring their search results.
Those aren't exclusively US values, buddy. Though it's amusingly very American to claim ownership of those ideas...
Which is precisely the GP's point--China is trying to make this about international politics (U.S. vs China) but it's not. It's about broadly held values vs. Chinese censorship.
You (and Viacom apparently) are intently focused on whether YouTube management know that copyrighted materials were being posted to YouTube. But legally, IT DOESN'T MATTER, because the law presumes authorization when content is uploaded.
First of all, understand that every single video posted to YouTube is copyrighted. Everything! Copyright is automatically created when any piece of copyrightable content is created. So to say that the YouTube management knew that they were hosting copyrighted materials is practically a meaningless tautology. Slashdot's owners also know that they are hosting a ton of copyrighted material (like this comment for instance!).
The question of legal liability stems from whether the owner of the copyright has authorized the license that is created when material is posted to YouTube (see here). The applicable law is the DMCA, which presumes authorization. The law was written that way very intentionally, to allow the free flow of information. The alternative would be to force each uploader to legally prove that they are authorized--a HUGE burden that would cripple communication on the Internet. For instance, I would need to legally prove that I hold the copyright to this comment before I could post it to Slashdot. And so would you for your comments. I like posting to Slashdot, but not enough to go get each comment notarized and file a copyright registration BEFORE I post it.
The question in this specific case is whether YouTube management knew for a fact that Viacom's videos were being posted by agents who were not authorized to do so. Read all the stories about this case and you'll soon see that Viacom themselves took advantage of the DMCA presumption, by posting their own videos to YouTube in ways intended to hide the fact that it was Viacom doing the posting. They even had their lawyers issuing takedown notices for content that a different Viacom division had uploaded! If Viacom itself could not keep track of what was authorized or not, how is YouTube supposed to?
I think Google probably did a very thorough due diligence, and that they just understand the law better than you do. Suspicion that content is unauthorized does not create legal liability. In addition, if YouTube can show that they ALWAYS responded to takedown notices in a timely manner, the DMCA should insulate them from liability.
The LHC got built, right? It's functioning, right? Mission accomplished, my friend.
PR is not about being well-understood, it's about getting a desired, concrete result. The public is largely stupid and fickle. If you let little PR blips like this bother you, you'll never accomplish anything great. Ultimately if the LHC delivers new science, that is all anyone in future history will remember it for. It's aggravating to read bad press but most of it just doesn't matter over time.
The space race and moon landing projects had HUGE problems for years--rockets failing very publicly, shutdowns and delays, even the death of 3 astronauts. What is remembered now? While the deaths are remembered and regretted, the number one thing that people remember is that we walked on the fucking moon. How many people today could tell you how many failed launches the Saturn V had? Who cares?
Dollars are just buckets for wealth. When people sell off stocks en masse, you need more buckets (dollars) to catch all the wealth they pump out of them.
Imagine if buckets were made of gold. They wouldn't be much help in a flood because people would hoard them instead of using them. When that happens to dollars it's called deflation and it has a nasty effect on an economy.
But anyway, I believe we were talking about Treasury Secretary not Fed chairman. Ron Paul as Sec. Treasury would probably have a different problem--closing down all the regulators to let the market "fix itself."
The other respondents hit the nail on the head: Gelertner's point is about finding and querying expertise rather than written information--the difference between reading a book by Donald Knuth and being able to ask him a question directly.
However, that problem has a solution on the Internet already: communities of Interest. Dating back well before Web search engines, newsgroups allowed people to find each other according to subjects of interest and to share expertise. Web forums like Slashdot continue that user experience on the Web, with the advantage that many are also indexed by search engines.
The hard people problem is access. I might know exactly who can answer my question, but that doesn't mean they want to or have time to. And from the other side, we each have our own strategies and tools to filter the requests that are made of our time every day.
You've got to be kidding me. I've lived in the DC area my entire life and visit Baltimore quite a bit. The number of "gated communities" I've encountered could be counted on two hands. They're much more common out west, particularly in the Southwest like Vegas or Phoenix.
You really don't know what you're talking about. There are "bad" neighborhoods near DC (mostly in MD), but they are immediately adjacent to middle class neighborhoods with no barriers between. There are gangs and crime just like any urban area, but they are addressed with policing, youth centers, neighborhood watches, etc. Most of the cities you mention have seen dramatic drops in crime rates over the past 10-15 years.
The density of the planet could increase over time if the Earth's interior experiences a net loss of heat to the climate and thus to outer space. The interior is mostly hot iron, which shrinks as it cools.
Don't worry though, any speed up would be more than offset by the tidal drag from the moon.:-)
In Chaos Theory, a small change to the inputs can cause large changes to the results. However the changes are just as likelly to go in one direction as they are to go in the opposite direction: the butterfly effect is just as likelly to result in a typhoon instead of clear weather as it is to result in clear weather instead of a typhoon.
In a chaotic system, the long-term effects of small changes to the initial conditions cannot be deterministically predicted. (That's the "chaos" part.) However, it's not all even chances--some outcomes are more likely than others (that's the "theory" part.)
Any patent is a form of a monopoly, granted for a limited time. Many user interfaces have been patented, including one of the most enduring, the QWERTY keyboard. It gives the inventor a chance to make money from their idea, but ultimately releases it for broad public re-use. I have no problem with UI patents; UI matters a great deal to the functioning and success of a device.
The main modus of debate of AGW proponents from day one has been moralistic, not empirical.
I agree that's true for some AGW proponents, including some people here on Slashdot. I'd say that a good example argument from this point of view is something like "who cares if AGW is real, we shouldn't be polluting the Earth anyway." Not exactly a scientific argument.
But the scientists actually performing research are empirical, and let's face it, the online flamewars often gravitate to discussions of the science rather than the tactics (ironically I'd put this story in the tactics column since it's writer vs. writer).
When it comes around to the science, I agree with the GP--it is exhausting to see the same arguments over and over and over again, like these old tropes: "Maybe these scientists forgot about the sun." "How do we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?" "The greenhouse effect of CO2 doesn't matter compared to water vapor." "The earth was warmer in the past." "Volcanoes put out way more CO2 than mankind." "Other planets are warming just like Earth." "Mankind's activities are not big enough to change the climate." "It's just a natural cycle." Etc., etc. There are answers to each of these that are very easy to find with open mind and search bar.
"Skeptic" is a term that is self-applied by people who raise questions like these. When the rest of us use that term to group them, we are simply using the label they chose for themselves. Real skepticism though, I would point out, is not endless. Real skepticism is open to proof and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That sort of approach is the hallmark the scientific process, but let's face it, few people look beyond the flamewars anymore, including you apparently. I would encourage you not to confuse the enviros shouting slogans on the corner with Ph.D. scientists publishing in professional journals.
I did not pick that example, the reporter did. As I said, I have not read either book so I am going on TFA. If you're intent on debunking the debunking, go for it, but don't mistake me as the author. My point is to call attention to a footnote trick which, as someone who works in public policy, I can assure you is widely deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
The shell is very stiff and strong. I've killed 3 laptops by weakening the case, which then flexes the motherboard and components when I pick it up. So this is worth extra money to me.
The trackpad is huge and supports gestures. I have a Fingerworks pad attached to my PC at work so needless to say this is worth extra money to me as well.
The CPU, memory, storage, and drive are all pretty fast, so I'm not going to compare this to the cheapest Dell or HP.
I like OS X better than Windows and that's a personal preference, but it's worth a bit extra to me.j
I have a MacBook Pro that is about 1.5 years old--one of the first ones that came out with this new form factor. I really like it and think it was worth the price, but I'm not planning to upgrade to the newest model.
You can save some money, but get the same quality and warranty coverage, by buying a refurbished machine through the Apple Store.
Unless a business is trying to serve the entire country, where they come in general topic searches does not matter that much. From a user's perspective, a broad general search IS best served by the largest and fastest sites.
For small local businesses, you've got to tune for the locality, which includes a whole 'nother set of Google tools on top of the standard SEO stuff like title, content, meta tags, etc. http://www.google.com/local/add/
She would also be well-served by using online tech to develop repeat customers in other ways, like an e-mail newsletter, or engaging on sites like Yelp.
Yeah, it's a shame he never borrowed ideas from Xerox.
Or Konqueror, or Unix, or Adobe, or Macromedia, or SoundJam, or Tony Fadell, or Fingerworks. And it's too bad Apple never thought to outsource their manufacturing to leverage the PC components designed and built by other companies like Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, Nvidia, ATI, Intel, etc.
Yeah, it's a shame Apple has insisted on inventing everything themselves.
iPhone...Android...sure we can fight about which platform is better. But the important thing is that we all determine our levels of happiness and pride by the relative merits of the software platforms of our phones.
I mean--let's keep our priorities straight here, people.
I can't believe my luck! To have ended up in the one universe, out of an infinity of other possibilities, in which I survived the activation of the Lar
Yes they can. For someone so skeptical of the legitimacy of intellectual property, you are giving it ridiculous amounts of power.
Since copyrights and patents only protect the ability to profit from IP, not the IP itself, you would only need to enforce it where it deprives you of the opportunity to profit yourself--i.e. locally.
In an apocryphal primitive world, you could go down the hill and shoot the guy who is selling your tractor design as easily as you could shoot the guy who trespassed on your property. The copies in China wouldn't matter since you couldn't sell your own copies there anyway.
There's nothing in the concept of IP law that prevents people from singing songs they hear, by the way. It's only the distribution of tangible copies that is regulated--the act of trade.
What important data is stored within that Twitter account? What crucial lines of communication flow through it?
I think what matters is what is done with the data. Just from the summary we can see a huge difference--similar data, but very different results between what happened to Japanese Americans and what didn't happen to Arab Americans.
Government has data on us. That could be bad, but it could also be good because data can help government work better. By analogy: the government has terribly powerful weapons. That could be bad if they were used against the citizenry, but it's good that they are available to be used in our defense.
Like weapons, data are just tools. What is needed are great and clear controls on what actions can arise from that data. After all without the census data, the government could have just as easily rounded up everyone who *looks* Japanese, or everyone who was reported by their neighbor to be Japanese. Not any better IMO.
By value the U.S. is still the #1 manufacturer in the world ( http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33962 ). And our research system, considered as the sum of government, corporate, and university research progams, is still very strong. (I'd say it's the best but don't have a citation...who's better?)
Citing the Congressional schedule for "days off" is like citing only the meetings on your calendar at work. If you're not in a meeting, you're not working, right?
Not exactly. Members of Congress are working pretty much any time they are not sleeping. When Congress is not in session they are in their DC offices working, or in their districts or states, meeting with constituents, raising money, and basically campaigning 24/7/365. This is a good thing--it is the system of accountability.
Almost every time a vote is taken, everyone knows if the bill is going to pass ahead of time. The vote counts on each side are monitored by the whips (a leadership position) on each side. So yeah, if a bill is going to pass unanimously, you might not see 100-0 on the vote record. It doesn't mean your member of Congress was taking his or her free military jet to Tahiti.
BTW, government aviation only covers official government travel, for instance when Senators go to visit troops oversees or foreign leaders. When members of Congress fly back and forth from their district or state, they fly commercial like the rest of us.
We see what we expect to see. In China, companies cannot become powerful and successful without some control and permission of the government. Therefore the Chinese government sees all powerful and successful companies through that lens. It is outside their experience that a private company could become as powerful and successful as Google has without any government patronage to speak of. They believe that they are simply exposing a truth that the rest of the world is too naive to see, or is not willing to admit.
U.S citizens might see them as hypocritical propagandists. But from their perspective they are being totally consistent.
"American culture" is generally considered fun stuff like: Consumerism. Corporatism. Obsession with money and violence. Fear of sex and drugs.
Yeah but those are not the values that China is complaining about. (They're happy to cooperate with consumerism and corporatism for instance.) They're complaining because Google is threatening to stop censoring their search results.
Those aren't exclusively US values, buddy. Though it's amusingly very American to claim ownership of those ideas...
Which is precisely the GP's point--China is trying to make this about international politics (U.S. vs China) but it's not. It's about broadly held values vs. Chinese censorship.
http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/objectivec2.html
You (and Viacom apparently) are intently focused on whether YouTube management know that copyrighted materials were being posted to YouTube. But legally, IT DOESN'T MATTER, because the law presumes authorization when content is uploaded.
First of all, understand that every single video posted to YouTube is copyrighted. Everything! Copyright is automatically created when any piece of copyrightable content is created. So to say that the YouTube management knew that they were hosting copyrighted materials is practically a meaningless tautology. Slashdot's owners also know that they are hosting a ton of copyrighted material (like this comment for instance!).
The question of legal liability stems from whether the owner of the copyright has authorized the license that is created when material is posted to YouTube (see here). The applicable law is the DMCA, which presumes authorization. The law was written that way very intentionally, to allow the free flow of information. The alternative would be to force each uploader to legally prove that they are authorized--a HUGE burden that would cripple communication on the Internet. For instance, I would need to legally prove that I hold the copyright to this comment before I could post it to Slashdot. And so would you for your comments. I like posting to Slashdot, but not enough to go get each comment notarized and file a copyright registration BEFORE I post it.
The question in this specific case is whether YouTube management knew for a fact that Viacom's videos were being posted by agents who were not authorized to do so. Read all the stories about this case and you'll soon see that Viacom themselves took advantage of the DMCA presumption, by posting their own videos to YouTube in ways intended to hide the fact that it was Viacom doing the posting. They even had their lawyers issuing takedown notices for content that a different Viacom division had uploaded! If Viacom itself could not keep track of what was authorized or not, how is YouTube supposed to?
I think Google probably did a very thorough due diligence, and that they just understand the law better than you do. Suspicion that content is unauthorized does not create legal liability. In addition, if YouTube can show that they ALWAYS responded to takedown notices in a timely manner, the DMCA should insulate them from liability.
Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
He does an excellent job of describing and illustrating common research mistakes, statistical and otherwise.
The LHC got built, right? It's functioning, right? Mission accomplished, my friend.
PR is not about being well-understood, it's about getting a desired, concrete result. The public is largely stupid and fickle. If you let little PR blips like this bother you, you'll never accomplish anything great. Ultimately if the LHC delivers new science, that is all anyone in future history will remember it for. It's aggravating to read bad press but most of it just doesn't matter over time.
The space race and moon landing projects had HUGE problems for years--rockets failing very publicly, shutdowns and delays, even the death of 3 astronauts. What is remembered now? While the deaths are remembered and regretted, the number one thing that people remember is that we walked on the fucking moon. How many people today could tell you how many failed launches the Saturn V had? Who cares?
Dollars are just buckets for wealth. When people sell off stocks en masse, you need more buckets (dollars) to catch all the wealth they pump out of them.
Imagine if buckets were made of gold. They wouldn't be much help in a flood because people would hoard them instead of using them. When that happens to dollars it's called deflation and it has a nasty effect on an economy.
But anyway, I believe we were talking about Treasury Secretary not Fed chairman. Ron Paul as Sec. Treasury would probably have a different problem--closing down all the regulators to let the market "fix itself."
The other respondents hit the nail on the head: Gelertner's point is about finding and querying expertise rather than written information--the difference between reading a book by Donald Knuth and being able to ask him a question directly.
However, that problem has a solution on the Internet already: communities of Interest. Dating back well before Web search engines, newsgroups allowed people to find each other according to subjects of interest and to share expertise. Web forums like Slashdot continue that user experience on the Web, with the advantage that many are also indexed by search engines.
The hard people problem is access. I might know exactly who can answer my question, but that doesn't mean they want to or have time to. And from the other side, we each have our own strategies and tools to filter the requests that are made of our time every day.
You've got to be kidding me. I've lived in the DC area my entire life and visit Baltimore quite a bit. The number of "gated communities" I've encountered could be counted on two hands. They're much more common out west, particularly in the Southwest like Vegas or Phoenix.
You really don't know what you're talking about. There are "bad" neighborhoods near DC (mostly in MD), but they are immediately adjacent to middle class neighborhoods with no barriers between. There are gangs and crime just like any urban area, but they are addressed with policing, youth centers, neighborhood watches, etc. Most of the cities you mention have seen dramatic drops in crime rates over the past 10-15 years.
The density of the planet could increase over time if the Earth's interior experiences a net loss of heat to the climate and thus to outer space. The interior is mostly hot iron, which shrinks as it cools.
Don't worry though, any speed up would be more than offset by the tidal drag from the moon. :-)
In Chaos Theory, a small change to the inputs can cause large changes to the results. However the changes are just as likelly to go in one direction as they are to go in the opposite direction: the butterfly effect is just as likelly to result in a typhoon instead of clear weather as it is to result in clear weather instead of a typhoon.
In a chaotic system, the long-term effects of small changes to the initial conditions cannot be deterministically predicted. (That's the "chaos" part.) However, it's not all even chances--some outcomes are more likely than others (that's the "theory" part.)
Any patent is a form of a monopoly, granted for a limited time. Many user interfaces have been patented, including one of the most enduring, the QWERTY keyboard. It gives the inventor a chance to make money from their idea, but ultimately releases it for broad public re-use. I have no problem with UI patents; UI matters a great deal to the functioning and success of a device.
The main modus of debate of AGW proponents from day one has been moralistic, not empirical.
I agree that's true for some AGW proponents, including some people here on Slashdot. I'd say that a good example argument from this point of view is something like "who cares if AGW is real, we shouldn't be polluting the Earth anyway." Not exactly a scientific argument.
But the scientists actually performing research are empirical, and let's face it, the online flamewars often gravitate to discussions of the science rather than the tactics (ironically I'd put this story in the tactics column since it's writer vs. writer).
When it comes around to the science, I agree with the GP--it is exhausting to see the same arguments over and over and over again, like these old tropes: "Maybe these scientists forgot about the sun." "How do we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?" "The greenhouse effect of CO2 doesn't matter compared to water vapor." "The earth was warmer in the past." "Volcanoes put out way more CO2 than mankind." "Other planets are warming just like Earth." "Mankind's activities are not big enough to change the climate." "It's just a natural cycle." Etc., etc. There are answers to each of these that are very easy to find with open mind and search bar.
"Skeptic" is a term that is self-applied by people who raise questions like these. When the rest of us use that term to group them, we are simply using the label they chose for themselves. Real skepticism though, I would point out, is not endless. Real skepticism is open to proof and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That sort of approach is the hallmark the scientific process, but let's face it, few people look beyond the flamewars anymore, including you apparently. I would encourage you not to confuse the enviros shouting slogans on the corner with Ph.D. scientists publishing in professional journals.
I did not pick that example, the reporter did. As I said, I have not read either book so I am going on TFA. If you're intent on debunking the debunking, go for it, but don't mistake me as the author. My point is to call attention to a footnote trick which, as someone who works in public policy, I can assure you is widely deployed.