FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D
I would disagree with you there, fairly vehemently. 4E certainly has it's flaws, but I think those in d20 are far more severe.
Problems with 4E largely stem from two areas: 1) overemphasis on combat, and 2) vastly increased demands on players to master the system. Both of these two situations can be boiled down into one basic fact: there are too many powers to choose from and characters have too many powers overall. A lot of players liked the simplicity of earlier editions for, well, any non-spellcasting class. 4E forces that to change, but it gives too many options. There are too many races, too many classes, and too many powers. They should have started simpler, and tried to keep the number of classes as low as possible rather than maximizing choice and trying to instantly make 4E comparable to 3E. The Paradox of Choice means that every time you level up, every time it's your turn in combat you must re-examine all your choices and make a new decision. I think the martial classes in particular could benefit from having far fewer powers at each level. One at-will, one encounter, one daily, class powers, and that's it. Combat simply takes too long in 4E to be enjoyable, and while you can do some things to speed it up, if you focus on speeding up the game too much you sap all the enjoyment out of it. It feels like work.
There are some minor issues as well. Skill Challenges is the obvious one, which are cool in concept but simply doesn't work well in execution outside of very few situations (tracking over long distances, opening a complex lock) and completely fail for skills which involve interaction. It also has the side effect of making your players want roleplaying encounters to just be more dice rolling, and that's not very fun. Lack of compelling magic outside of combat; making all rituals cost money made them feel useless. Solo encounter monsters are designed badly. The monsters are supposed to represent 5 individual monsters, but can easily be crowd controlled. They should be immune to stuns and most cc, and able to deal out damage in ways which really threaten the party. As it is now, solo encounters are about 5 rounds of terror and 10-20 rounds of cutting through all that HP while not really threatened because the buffs and debuffs are in place. 4E also seems significantly more delicately balanced. A simple +1 to some die rolls can be game breaking simply because those die rolls happen so often. I don't think that would ever happen in previous editions.
Things 4E does right or improves on: basic class progression, skills, character creation, feats (barring bad ones like Expertise), hit points. Minions. Emphasis on making the DM's life easier. Emphasis on position and movement in combat, and the ability to actually tank enemies. Working to make sure PCs get treasure they want rather than using random tables. Better healing system. Better balance between classes. The character generator was absolutely amazing. Overall I consider 4E to be a very good first edition of a new RPG system. I haven't kept up with the more recent books which introduce different class styles as my play group had abandoned 4E by the time it came out. We played it for a year and were tired of two encounter nights.
Problems with 3.5, on the other hand, are IMO far more severe and fair more inherent to the system. Class balance is and always will be a huge problem as long as Vancian casters are present. Prestige classes and the lack of multiclassing restrictions completely defeat the purpose of having classes. Lack of good heavier armors. Difficulty in healing. Difficulty in identifying magic treasure. The arbitrary alignment system. The skill system is completely ridiculous (Search, Spot and Listen... but most classes only get about 4 skills per level after modifiers). I think there a
You can argue the cleverness of it all day but Windows servers don't work without graphics. AFAIK they don't even boot.
All x86 computers don't boot without a video adapter. It's not a matter of the operating system. It's the POST. The motherboard must detect a CPU, must detect RAM, and must detect a video display device. Those are the devices all PC compatible style x86 computers require to complete the POST. This is why "no display" is a common beep code and also why the video BIOS show is before the motherboard BIOS show. One can hardly blame MS for expecting the POST to complete successfully.
These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Oh, you never simply rebuild a whole city. The only time you do anything like that is when the city has been completely obliterated by war or natural disaster.
So the only way we will get a future city is: a) War or disaster destroys the city; b) All the old buildings are individually replaced over time; c) Some crazy person decides to build a new instant city (e.g., Brasilia, Dubai).
The most annoying thing about taking the train (or a public bus or subway, for that matter) is when it stops to let other people on or off. To a passenger, that's just a huge waste of time that could be spent actually moving towards his or her destination.
The reason continental rail travel in the US is so slow compared to auto travel is because it has to stop all the time to let people on and off. When your train weighs 50+ tons per rail car, it takes a long time to speed up and slow down. I've heard it said that the trains themselves almost never reach full speed because they have to begin decelerating before they ever reach full speed.
words are things with single, hard definitions that never change and must conform
This absolutely must be the case. Imagine how useless mathematics would be if numbers arbitrarily changed value. Words are the tools we use to communicate. Just because someone thinks he's clever going around and changing the definition of words doesn't actually help progress, it hinders it.
Er, most English words have multiple definitions. It is absolutely, unequivocally not the case. Indeed, the more commonly a word is used, the more definitions it tends to have. While a mathematic set means only one thing, the word "set" itself has nearly 120 distinct meanings and can function as a noun, verb, or adjective. How do we know the difference? The same way a computer program understands which overloaded function or operator to use: context. Without that context, the words lose concreteness, which is why Wikipedia has all those nice disambiguation pages. This is why we see all those qualifiers on GNU sites for "free (as in speech)" vs "free (as in beer)." The most famous example I can think of for multiple meanings of the same word is the famous grammatically correct sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" although that sentence is also generally used as an example of semantic saturation.
This inherent ambiguity in language is what causes jargon to come in to being. When language needs to be precise, such as mathematics, science, engineering, medicine, and so on, we use specialized languages which contain words that only have one meaning which has been agreed upon. In that sense, we define an overall context so that when we say "protocol" we know if we mean "protocol (medicine)" or "protocol (computing)."
An interesting thing to note is that one of the major causes of confusion in communication is when the context or meaning of words is not agreed upon. The fact that this happens reveals how complex communication actually is. As a speaker/writer, not only must I phrase my message using words and syntax that I understand, I must do so in a way which I believe my listener/reader will then translate back into the same meaning I'm trying to communicate. On some level I must anticipate how the words I use will be interpreted by the listener/reader, including things such as my tone of voice, inflection, pauses, punctuation, etc. As a reader or listener, I must account for this inherent ambiguity of language and try to pick up on the clues left in the message to try to interpret what is actually meant based on what I have heard. Accurate communication, then, requires near empathic levels of understanding. Words do not mean what only the speaker says or only the listener. Both are valid meanings. The art of communication is getting those two meanings as close to identical as possible.
The tax in this case is almost certainly import tariffs. The purpose behind tariffs is to protect our businesses from dumping and other anti-competitive business practices. It would not be a good idea to allow China (the world's #1 food exporter) to completely destroy agricultural industry in the US and create a food cartel that could make OPEC look like UNICEF if relations between our two countries sour.
Look, we've spent the last 30 years sending all as many science, technical and engineering jobs overseas that we can and shutting down commercial research labs. Now you're going to argue we're going to lose our science and technology advantage because government is cutting spending? If science and technology suffer in America's future it's because bean counters gave our edge to the rest of the world in exchange for 2% profits and million dollar bonuses.
This is just MIT selfishly bitching about losing funding. If you really care about barriers to education, how about you lower your goddamn tuition, assholes?
Case law is not the same as legislated law. The fundamental difference is one of scope: the Court is obligated to justify itself using other existing laws, the legislature can do whatever it would like (although it may need to amend the constitution to do so). Even the most extreme examples of case law such as Miranda v. Arizona or Plessy v. Ferguson or Roe v. Wade the court still justifies it's actions using existing laws.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: the Court is obliged to stick to the law; Congress isn't.
The legislative branch can and has overridden regulations, rulings, and the constitution. It does that by passing new laws. In the case of the US Constitution, new amendments must be passed. The most obvious example is the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution, but . You can also consider the example of the judicial interpretation of Eminent Domain in Kelo v. City of New London. Several states have since passed amendments to State Constitutions (Michigan, for example) which restrict or bar the state's ability to use eminent domain.
The judicial branch interprets the law, which includes removal of laws which are proscribed by other laws. It does not get a choice about what the law is, only how to interpret it and how each law interacts with the others or how a law applies in a given case.
The executive branch executes an enforces existing laws, and is allowed to issue rules and regulations that enable executing the laws. It does not get a choice about what the law is, only how to go about executing it.
The legislative branch exists solely to create new laws. It alone determines what the law is. It alone is given the power to amend the Constitution (Article 5). Neither the judicial nor the executive branch is given that power. Indeed, the executive branch doesn't even get veto power for constitutional amendments. Additionally, the legislature alone is given the power of impeachment (Article I), which may be used to remove any civil servant from office, including a President or Supreme Court Justice.
Congress has the ultimate trump card. The problem is that it's legislation by committee, meaning they spend all their time talking and very little actually doing anything. This, I think, is simultaneously the greatest and worst idea the founding fathers had.
In my opinion, this will all work itself out. Technology is going to evolve on its own to beat the cable companies.
The core problem is cable monopolies. Consumers can't fight back against the bandwidth cappers if government continues to say you have no choices.
It's the corporations saying we don't have choices. Government isn't saying anything at all, which allows these corporations to develop local monopolies. When competitive markets have failed in this manner we rely on government to be the only remaining cudgel to browbeat these corporations into serving the public good rather than their own pocketbooks.
Personally I've been very happy with my SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip. I originally owned a Clip+, and my clip on that broke very quickly. The Clip Zip has been much better thus far (only ~2 months owned, but used every day). The device allows you to switch the USB mode from MTP (media transfer protocol, the default) to MSC (mass storage class). The latter makes it function like a USB disk. I would recommend keeping the firmware updated as they do actually fix and improve things. The original firmware would sometimes play static between songs, but this was fixed within the first month after release (the updated firmware was available when I purchased it). There are people working on Rockbox for it, too.
My only complaint about the device was that if you power it on and press play before the device is fully turned on, the pause function doesn't work. You have to cycle the device power to get it working again. The device thinks it's pausing, but the sound continues to play. It did the same thing on the Clip+, so I was kind of hoping it had been fixed. Other than that I'm kind of bummed I can't plug the device into a PC and keep playing the music, although you can if you connect it to just a USB charger. The device does have a miniSD slot, but it seems to kill the battery more than I'd like (from ~12 hours to ~6-8) so I don't use it much.
I don't understand your answer. Solaris and Azure are not hosting providers, they are technologies. You can have geographical diversity with either one.
Azure is both a technology and a cloud hosting service, and in the question I was responding to it wasn't being compared to Solaris. It was being compared to a hypothetical Solaris cloud. Whether or not if it makes any technological sense to program across two platforms wasn't the question I was answering. The point is that a cloud service still has a geographic location and a service from a single hosting company could still be shut down by bankruptcy or court order.
If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
This question, at least, is easy. There's no such thing as "too big to fail". If you ever have to start counting your nines on more than one hand or you have to start planning for century events, you might need to think about multiple redundant hosting. The hosting company could fail or be shut down by court order, or the hosting location could be hit by natural disaster, or there could be a catastrophic accident. What if the Asian slice of the global database you're mandated by law and by mission to have always available is located in Fukushima because the power supply was convenient?
My personal favorite is still Joe Foss's experience. He was the former governor of South Dakota, a retired Brigadier General and WWII Ace. He was detained in Arizona (where he moved later in life) and nearly missed a flight when the TSA discovered a suspicious metal item in his coat pocket that they thought looked suspiciously like a weapon. The item?
His Congressional Medal of Honor.
That the loyalty of a man who has spent his entire life in service to his country and had been a recipient of the highest military award for valor in combat would be questioned because he carried his medal... words simply escape me.
The issue here -- even if your case were typical -- is that a colonoscopy is probably much more accurate and reliable for identifying treatable terminal cancers than the screening test for prostrate cancer. Again, the argument isn't "don't screen" it's "screening sucks if the tests suck". The screening tests for many cancers currently suck.
How would you have felt if you found out after treatment that your cancer would have killed you in about 150 years instead of 5? How would your family have felt if you had died due to complications of treatment for a cancer that was never going to impact your life? Wouldn't you ask "why couldn't you determine this beforehand?" That's the point here.
People read these articles and too many come away with "we shouldn't be screening for cancer". That's not what it's saying at all. It's saying "we shouldn't rely on our current screening tests". That's the key. Screening isn't a problem. Early detection isn't a problem. Inaccurate screening tests that encourage treatment when none would be necessary is the problem. That's what the US Preventive Services Task Force is trying to say: shitty tests create shitty outcomes.
It's like trying to use just a thermometer to diagnose H1N1 or Ebola. Well, you'd also catch the standard flu, or a head cold, or appendicitis, or a thousand other things that cause a fever. The prostrate screening test just tests for the known prostrate cancer antigen... but it's not very specific to the type of cancer present. That's the problem. Doctors and patients are stuck in the mindset of If (Cancer == True) { CancerTreatment(); }. That said, cancer treatment involves really dangerous and destructive things to the human body. Many cancer patients die from treatment as much as from the disease. They're akin to poisoning the whole body and hoping that you kill the cancerous bits before you kill the patient. This means that that Cancer == True test better damn well be pretty reliable and accurate. It's a reminder of the basis of medical ethics: primum non nocere -- first, do no harm. The data says doctors are doing a lot of harm if 120,000 of 138,000 cases (87%) have unwarranted treatments.
So, again, they're not saying "don't screen". They're saying "don't screen with shitty tests; get better tests, then screen."
They'd just pay the fines and pass on the cost to the consumer, or donate to a few Congressional campaigns to get the oversight committees to yell at the FCC if the fines were actually relative to the resources Verizon has. It'd be far more effective for the FCC to go to court to get an injunction, but that kind of thing would just get Verizon to donate to a few Congressional campaigns....
Go to store.apple.com. As far as laptops, you have two choices: the Air, which starts at $1,000 (for the 11-inch model), and the MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,200 (for the 13 inch model). After that it's about $250/inch, with the upgraded versions adding another $300 or so. Frankly, I have a really hard time justifying that, particularly when you can get a decent business grade HP for under $500.
The problem, though, is that as soon as you do this tuition costs will increase about 25% in a few short years. This change increases the buying power of the students. That's not what needs to happen. What needs to happen is the costs of tuition need to be depressed. The problem is colleges are basing their tuition on what students (typically young persons with no debt) can pay, rather than on what it actually costs to pay faculty, pay staff, and maintain facilities.
You can't fix the problem by giving students more money because colleges will just take it. You must fix the problem by preventing colleges from charging so much. This is what is known economically as collusive price fixing.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D
I would disagree with you there, fairly vehemently. 4E certainly has it's flaws, but I think those in d20 are far more severe.
Problems with 4E largely stem from two areas: 1) overemphasis on combat, and 2) vastly increased demands on players to master the system. Both of these two situations can be boiled down into one basic fact: there are too many powers to choose from and characters have too many powers overall. A lot of players liked the simplicity of earlier editions for, well, any non-spellcasting class. 4E forces that to change, but it gives too many options. There are too many races, too many classes, and too many powers. They should have started simpler, and tried to keep the number of classes as low as possible rather than maximizing choice and trying to instantly make 4E comparable to 3E. The Paradox of Choice means that every time you level up, every time it's your turn in combat you must re-examine all your choices and make a new decision. I think the martial classes in particular could benefit from having far fewer powers at each level. One at-will, one encounter, one daily, class powers, and that's it. Combat simply takes too long in 4E to be enjoyable, and while you can do some things to speed it up, if you focus on speeding up the game too much you sap all the enjoyment out of it. It feels like work.
There are some minor issues as well. Skill Challenges is the obvious one, which are cool in concept but simply doesn't work well in execution outside of very few situations (tracking over long distances, opening a complex lock) and completely fail for skills which involve interaction. It also has the side effect of making your players want roleplaying encounters to just be more dice rolling, and that's not very fun. Lack of compelling magic outside of combat; making all rituals cost money made them feel useless. Solo encounter monsters are designed badly. The monsters are supposed to represent 5 individual monsters, but can easily be crowd controlled. They should be immune to stuns and most cc, and able to deal out damage in ways which really threaten the party. As it is now, solo encounters are about 5 rounds of terror and 10-20 rounds of cutting through all that HP while not really threatened because the buffs and debuffs are in place. 4E also seems significantly more delicately balanced. A simple +1 to some die rolls can be game breaking simply because those die rolls happen so often. I don't think that would ever happen in previous editions.
Things 4E does right or improves on: basic class progression, skills, character creation, feats (barring bad ones like Expertise), hit points. Minions. Emphasis on making the DM's life easier. Emphasis on position and movement in combat, and the ability to actually tank enemies. Working to make sure PCs get treasure they want rather than using random tables. Better healing system. Better balance between classes. The character generator was absolutely amazing. Overall I consider 4E to be a very good first edition of a new RPG system. I haven't kept up with the more recent books which introduce different class styles as my play group had abandoned 4E by the time it came out. We played it for a year and were tired of two encounter nights.
Problems with 3.5, on the other hand, are IMO far more severe and fair more inherent to the system. Class balance is and always will be a huge problem as long as Vancian casters are present. Prestige classes and the lack of multiclassing restrictions completely defeat the purpose of having classes. Lack of good heavier armors. Difficulty in healing. Difficulty in identifying magic treasure. The arbitrary alignment system. The skill system is completely ridiculous (Search, Spot and Listen... but most classes only get about 4 skills per level after modifiers). I think there a
You can argue the cleverness of it all day but Windows servers don't work without graphics. AFAIK they don't even boot.
All x86 computers don't boot without a video adapter. It's not a matter of the operating system. It's the POST. The motherboard must detect a CPU, must detect RAM, and must detect a video display device. Those are the devices all PC compatible style x86 computers require to complete the POST. This is why "no display" is a common beep code and also why the video BIOS show is before the motherboard BIOS show. One can hardly blame MS for expecting the POST to complete successfully.
These fantastic cities of the future will never actually happen unless we suddenly have unlimited cheap energy or resources ... the cost of rebuilding any major city would be absolutely ridiculous.
Oh, you never simply rebuild a whole city. The only time you do anything like that is when the city has been completely obliterated by war or natural disaster.
So the only way we will get a future city is:
a) War or disaster destroys the city;
b) All the old buildings are individually replaced over time;
c) Some crazy person decides to build a new instant city (e.g., Brasilia, Dubai).
The most annoying thing about taking the train (or a public bus or subway, for that matter) is when it stops to let other people on or off. To a passenger, that's just a huge waste of time that could be spent actually moving towards his or her destination.
The reason continental rail travel in the US is so slow compared to auto travel is because it has to stop all the time to let people on and off. When your train weighs 50+ tons per rail car, it takes a long time to speed up and slow down. I've heard it said that the trains themselves almost never reach full speed because they have to begin decelerating before they ever reach full speed.
words are things with single, hard definitions that never change and must conform
This absolutely must be the case. Imagine how useless mathematics would be if numbers arbitrarily changed value. Words are the tools we use to communicate. Just because someone thinks he's clever going around and changing the definition of words doesn't actually help progress, it hinders it.
Er, most English words have multiple definitions. It is absolutely, unequivocally not the case. Indeed, the more commonly a word is used, the more definitions it tends to have. While a mathematic set means only one thing, the word "set" itself has nearly 120 distinct meanings and can function as a noun, verb, or adjective. How do we know the difference? The same way a computer program understands which overloaded function or operator to use: context. Without that context, the words lose concreteness, which is why Wikipedia has all those nice disambiguation pages. This is why we see all those qualifiers on GNU sites for "free (as in speech)" vs "free (as in beer)." The most famous example I can think of for multiple meanings of the same word is the famous grammatically correct sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" although that sentence is also generally used as an example of semantic saturation.
This inherent ambiguity in language is what causes jargon to come in to being. When language needs to be precise, such as mathematics, science, engineering, medicine, and so on, we use specialized languages which contain words that only have one meaning which has been agreed upon. In that sense, we define an overall context so that when we say "protocol" we know if we mean "protocol (medicine)" or "protocol (computing)."
An interesting thing to note is that one of the major causes of confusion in communication is when the context or meaning of words is not agreed upon. The fact that this happens reveals how complex communication actually is. As a speaker/writer, not only must I phrase my message using words and syntax that I understand, I must do so in a way which I believe my listener/reader will then translate back into the same meaning I'm trying to communicate. On some level I must anticipate how the words I use will be interpreted by the listener/reader, including things such as my tone of voice, inflection, pauses, punctuation, etc. As a reader or listener, I must account for this inherent ambiguity of language and try to pick up on the clues left in the message to try to interpret what is actually meant based on what I have heard. Accurate communication, then, requires near empathic levels of understanding. Words do not mean what only the speaker says or only the listener. Both are valid meanings. The art of communication is getting those two meanings as close to identical as possible.
The tax in this case is almost certainly import tariffs. The purpose behind tariffs is to protect our businesses from dumping and other anti-competitive business practices. It would not be a good idea to allow China (the world's #1 food exporter) to completely destroy agricultural industry in the US and create a food cartel that could make OPEC look like UNICEF if relations between our two countries sour.
Look, we've spent the last 30 years sending all as many science, technical and engineering jobs overseas that we can and shutting down commercial research labs. Now you're going to argue we're going to lose our science and technology advantage because government is cutting spending? If science and technology suffer in America's future it's because bean counters gave our edge to the rest of the world in exchange for 2% profits and million dollar bonuses.
This is just MIT selfishly bitching about losing funding. If you really care about barriers to education, how about you lower your goddamn tuition, assholes?
Yes, because the judge totally won't do anything about that when the other party notifies him.
Case law is not the same as legislated law. The fundamental difference is one of scope: the Court is obligated to justify itself using other existing laws, the legislature can do whatever it would like (although it may need to amend the constitution to do so). Even the most extreme examples of case law such as Miranda v. Arizona or Plessy v. Ferguson or Roe v. Wade the court still justifies it's actions using existing laws.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: the Court is obliged to stick to the law; Congress isn't.
Uh, that isn't wrong. You're wrong.
The legislative branch can and has overridden regulations, rulings, and the constitution. It does that by passing new laws. In the case of the US Constitution, new amendments must be passed. The most obvious example is the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution, but . You can also consider the example of the judicial interpretation of Eminent Domain in Kelo v. City of New London. Several states have since passed amendments to State Constitutions (Michigan, for example) which restrict or bar the state's ability to use eminent domain.
The judicial branch interprets the law, which includes removal of laws which are proscribed by other laws. It does not get a choice about what the law is, only how to interpret it and how each law interacts with the others or how a law applies in a given case.
The executive branch executes an enforces existing laws, and is allowed to issue rules and regulations that enable executing the laws. It does not get a choice about what the law is, only how to go about executing it.
The legislative branch exists solely to create new laws. It alone determines what the law is. It alone is given the power to amend the Constitution (Article 5). Neither the judicial nor the executive branch is given that power. Indeed, the executive branch doesn't even get veto power for constitutional amendments. Additionally, the legislature alone is given the power of impeachment (Article I), which may be used to remove any civil servant from office, including a President or Supreme Court Justice.
Congress has the ultimate trump card. The problem is that it's legislation by committee, meaning they spend all their time talking and very little actually doing anything. This, I think, is simultaneously the greatest and worst idea the founding fathers had.
In my opinion, this will all work itself out. Technology is going to evolve on its own to beat the cable companies.
The core problem is cable monopolies. Consumers can't fight back against the bandwidth cappers if government continues to say you have no choices.
It's the corporations saying we don't have choices. Government isn't saying anything at all, which allows these corporations to develop local monopolies. When competitive markets have failed in this manner we rely on government to be the only remaining cudgel to browbeat these corporations into serving the public good rather than their own pocketbooks.
Personally I've been very happy with my SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip. I originally owned a Clip+, and my clip on that broke very quickly. The Clip Zip has been much better thus far (only ~2 months owned, but used every day). The device allows you to switch the USB mode from MTP (media transfer protocol, the default) to MSC (mass storage class). The latter makes it function like a USB disk. I would recommend keeping the firmware updated as they do actually fix and improve things. The original firmware would sometimes play static between songs, but this was fixed within the first month after release (the updated firmware was available when I purchased it). There are people working on Rockbox for it, too.
My only complaint about the device was that if you power it on and press play before the device is fully turned on, the pause function doesn't work. You have to cycle the device power to get it working again. The device thinks it's pausing, but the sound continues to play. It did the same thing on the Clip+, so I was kind of hoping it had been fixed. Other than that I'm kind of bummed I can't plug the device into a PC and keep playing the music, although you can if you connect it to just a USB charger. The device does have a miniSD slot, but it seems to kill the battery more than I'd like (from ~12 hours to ~6-8) so I don't use it much.
I don't understand your answer. Solaris and Azure are not hosting providers, they are technologies. You can have geographical diversity with either one.
Azure is both a technology and a cloud hosting service, and in the question I was responding to it wasn't being compared to Solaris. It was being compared to a hypothetical Solaris cloud. Whether or not if it makes any technological sense to program across two platforms wasn't the question I was answering. The point is that a cloud service still has a geographic location and a service from a single hosting company could still be shut down by bankruptcy or court order.
If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
This question, at least, is easy. There's no such thing as "too big to fail". If you ever have to start counting your nines on more than one hand or you have to start planning for century events, you might need to think about multiple redundant hosting. The hosting company could fail or be shut down by court order, or the hosting location could be hit by natural disaster, or there could be a catastrophic accident. What if the Asian slice of the global database you're mandated by law and by mission to have always available is located in Fukushima because the power supply was convenient?
My personal favorite is still Joe Foss's experience. He was the former governor of South Dakota, a retired Brigadier General and WWII Ace. He was detained in Arizona (where he moved later in life) and nearly missed a flight when the TSA discovered a suspicious metal item in his coat pocket that they thought looked suspiciously like a weapon. The item?
His Congressional Medal of Honor.
That the loyalty of a man who has spent his entire life in service to his country and had been a recipient of the highest military award for valor in combat would be questioned because he carried his medal... words simply escape me.
They must have meant 1000 in base 2.
Amazon's lending is not free. It's a new feature of being a member of Amazon Prime, which costs $50/yr or so.
Yeah, no true Scots-- er, uh, no true nerd would ever care about that.
Thankfully it's still covered by copyright, or the whole market would implode!
> Kids these days don't know the meaning of a kilobyte.
Shouldn't that be a kibibyte?
Kids these days don't know the meaning of that, either, but the reasons are different.
The issue here -- even if your case were typical -- is that a colonoscopy is probably much more accurate and reliable for identifying treatable terminal cancers than the screening test for prostrate cancer. Again, the argument isn't "don't screen" it's "screening sucks if the tests suck". The screening tests for many cancers currently suck.
How would you have felt if you found out after treatment that your cancer would have killed you in about 150 years instead of 5? How would your family have felt if you had died due to complications of treatment for a cancer that was never going to impact your life? Wouldn't you ask "why couldn't you determine this beforehand?" That's the point here.
People read these articles and too many come away with "we shouldn't be screening for cancer". That's not what it's saying at all. It's saying "we shouldn't rely on our current screening tests". That's the key. Screening isn't a problem. Early detection isn't a problem. Inaccurate screening tests that encourage treatment when none would be necessary is the problem. That's what the US Preventive Services Task Force is trying to say: shitty tests create shitty outcomes.
It's like trying to use just a thermometer to diagnose H1N1 or Ebola. Well, you'd also catch the standard flu, or a head cold, or appendicitis, or a thousand other things that cause a fever. The prostrate screening test just tests for the known prostrate cancer antigen... but it's not very specific to the type of cancer present. That's the problem. Doctors and patients are stuck in the mindset of If (Cancer == True) { CancerTreatment(); }. That said, cancer treatment involves really dangerous and destructive things to the human body. Many cancer patients die from treatment as much as from the disease. They're akin to poisoning the whole body and hoping that you kill the cancerous bits before you kill the patient. This means that that Cancer == True test better damn well be pretty reliable and accurate. It's a reminder of the basis of medical ethics: primum non nocere -- first, do no harm. The data says doctors are doing a lot of harm if 120,000 of 138,000 cases (87%) have unwarranted treatments.
So, again, they're not saying "don't screen". They're saying "don't screen with shitty tests; get better tests, then screen."
Class action, maybe?
Mandatory arbitration clause.
Or FCC fines, that'd probably more effective.
They'd just pay the fines and pass on the cost to the consumer, or donate to a few Congressional campaigns to get the oversight committees to yell at the FCC if the fines were actually relative to the resources Verizon has. It'd be far more effective for the FCC to go to court to get an injunction, but that kind of thing would just get Verizon to donate to a few Congressional campaigns....
MacBooks have one major flaw: $$$$$$$$$$.
Go to store.apple.com. As far as laptops, you have two choices: the Air, which starts at $1,000 (for the 11-inch model), and the MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,200 (for the 13 inch model). After that it's about $250/inch, with the upgraded versions adding another $300 or so. Frankly, I have a really hard time justifying that, particularly when you can get a decent business grade HP for under $500.
The problem, though, is that as soon as you do this tuition costs will increase about 25% in a few short years. This change increases the buying power of the students. That's not what needs to happen. What needs to happen is the costs of tuition need to be depressed. The problem is colleges are basing their tuition on what students (typically young persons with no debt) can pay, rather than on what it actually costs to pay faculty, pay staff, and maintain facilities.
You can't fix the problem by giving students more money because colleges will just take it. You must fix the problem by preventing colleges from charging so much. This is what is known economically as collusive price fixing.