I think you've nailed it. I was once a booster of web applications because of their portability and configuration independence. But after trying them both at home and at work, I've become a skeptic. Response is slow and erratic, AFAICS, no one has ever fixed web page caching although it ought to be fixable. (If disk caches worked as erratically internet caches, we'd be lucky to keep a computer up for five minutes). Even the best web applications are somewhat painful to use. The worst... well, they're really awful
Even assuming that bandwidth and latency problems are beaten down over the next decade, I have trouble envisioning Adobe's bloated applications running satisfactorily in a Web environment.
But what do I know? I projected in 1995 that Windows 9 would be a security and maintenance nightmare. I wasn't wrong about the product deficiencies (which are present to this day as legacy "features"). But boy did my projection that those deficiencies might discourage folks from buying and deploying Windows turn out to be a bit off.
Yes, that's correct. Tests in Canada have shown that as altitude increases, the likelyhood of getting a cellular connection drops to about zero. And at jet aircraft speeds, you'd have to switch from cell tower to cell tower much faster than is thought to be possible, so even if you got a connection, you probably couldn't keep it for more than 40 seconds or so.
I assume that they plan to put a cellular transceiver on the aircraft and use some specialized technology to get the signals from the airplane to the ground -- satellite or some special mode of dealing with ground stations or something.
Anyway, just when I thought that they couldn't find any more ways on top of miniscule seats with no leg room, long unexplained takeoff delays, intrusive security, losing baggage, scheduling impossible connections, overbooking, and chronically late flights to make airline travel more distasteful, they've come up with this. I rarely do airplanes any more, and the last time I did, it took me something like 36 hours to get from Burlington, VT to Seattle.
***Of course with no patent system at all the R&D budgets would vanish in almost every field.***
That's really not true. The 18 month or more time to market advantage that comes from being the inventor is critical in many industries. IT in particular. What would happen is that new technology would be protected as trade secrets and would not be freely published in a lot of cases. Probably that'd be an improvement.
The problem is that there are a few industries where patents really are an important element in "innovation". One of those is pharmaceuticals. No patents, means no money to test drug safety except in the rare case where the drug is so hard to synthesize that the company can expect to make a bundle before the competition manages to create a generic substitute. The only answer I can come up with is to tax pharmaceuticals and use the revenue to pay for safety tests. Hard to tell if that would work. Might. Might not. Something of a risk there.
***If you pay for the full end crap, yeah. You can still get cable for 45/month, which works out to about 540/year.***
Depends on where you live. I live in Northwestern Vermont and get hit for $63 a month for 60 or so commercial ridden channels. That's with no premium services. But, I'm lucky sort of. Folks in the next towns out from Burlington don't get any cable at all despite a lot of promises made back when the world was young and shiny and new. (I think fairly basic cable costs even more in many parts of the US).
The next lower service level is a lot cheaper, but it's basically just the eight local stations that I can mostly pull in from an antenna and -- I think -- three Montreal stations that I'd have to work hard to pull in off the air (there's a ridgeline in the way). I'd cancel, but right now, I pull in the full 60 channels, run the input through a broadband amplifier so as not to place a load on the Comcast network, and any of the six TVs in the house can tune to any channel without having to dink with set top boxes.
Comcast's vision of the future seems to be that I will install set top boxes for all the TVs and pay them to rent the boxes and for all sorts of premium services. My vision is that when Comcast eventually manages to make life without set top boxes intolerable, the Satellite antenna will go up on the roof looking through the notch between the two maple trees, and Comcast will be short one (more) customer.
***Apparently pregnancy and menopause are "diseases."***
Presumably pregnancy forces the arms out to the sides, thus bringing the hands in toward the keyboard at a wider angle which is compensated in the wrist and causes trouble. Probably it's also true that obesity can do that which would account for its presence in the list. (But being too skinny isn't in the list even though logically it might well be a problem for some people.)
As for menopause... beats me.
You're right. The list looks like an arbitrary compendium of the usual suspects for any poorly explained malady in early 21st century Western society. Personally, I was surprised that they left alcoholism, bad attitude, terrorists, drug addiction, and sedentary lifestyle out of the list.
***they've changed their URL, but it redirects pronto, and the new one isn't rememberable. . .
It seems to me you could benefit from english course as well. The word is memorable.***
Actually rememberable looks to be perfectly OK http://www.selfknowledge.com/80549.htm
If you asked me the difference between rememberable and memorable, I'd say the former implies can't remember whereas the latter implies not worth remembering. e.g. The difference between the words rememberable and memorable is subtle and not very rememberable. Neither is it memorable.
***Another thought I had is home schooling materials. I've never personally been involved in homeschooling, but as I understand it these kids can earn a highschool diploma at home.***
My daughter -- who is no mathematical genius (a lack of math genius runs in the family) -- home schooled herself through High School. She used the Math Advantage 2000 CDs and got an OK score on the math portion of the SAT. I looked at them a couple of times and they seem OK.
Just for kicks I took the Math Advantage 2000 CD and put it into my Win 98 PC. It installed OK, gave me a link to the software, let me log into it (it tracks some status and supports multiple users for use in families and schools -- so the login probably isn't pure obtuseness.) The first time I tried to look at the Tutorial, the program crashed. I tend to forget how often that happens on Windows. Second time, it ran. tutorial seems OK. Kind of dry, but compared to a lot of explanations of statistics, it's relatively comprehensible. I could follow it anyway. Not always true. Would MA2000 run under wine? Who knows?
Oops I see the point. Took a while because you have it slightly backwards. I was commenting on the original slashdot article at http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224763.html?series=37.
I didn't understand that the post I was responding to was talking about the technology in SubZero992's post. My fault, I should have figured that out.
Now that I understand that, I agree pretty much. It's possible that the kites wouldn't be a menace to birds -- probably depends on how fast they move. Birds manage not to get whacked by wind blown tree branches, but there are presumably limits on their ability to identify things that might hit them. Birds are not noted for their advanced intelligence. It's hard to believe that the cables wouldn't be a menace to aircraft. Presumably air traffic at lower altitudes could be restricted in their vicinity. But I still wouldn't want to be in an aircraft flying at night or in a cloud anywhere near those things.
Maybe there are some places on the planet that have reasonably reliable wind, no air traffic, no mountains suitable for putting conventional turbines on, and where it's possible to get the power generated to where people live without undue expense. But offhand, I can't think of many.
Didn't read the article, did we? Come on, admit it.
The device is specifically aimed at powering very low power devices in poor and developing countries -- radios, (very) low wattage lights, etc. The generators are projected to be relatively small and the illustration seems to show one hung on the side of a building. The major point is that conventional turbines are inefficient at very low power levels because of frictional losses whereas these windscreens are projected to be an order of magnitude or more better (10-30x according to the article).
You're correct, the device might not scale up to windfarm scale although it's hard to see it as more of a hazard to birds and aircraft than a rotating blade. I have my doubts that a big windscreen will be as efficient at the high end as a turbine, but that's just a guess.
Anyway, it looks to be a cute idea, and I hope it works out.
Sure a powerful program documentation package could be (probably has) been developed. But before we try to run marathons, how about we try learning to crawl -- i.e. writing basic, comprehensible, accurate documentation in English or some other widely read modern language? (i.e. Not Japanese or Hungarian. Nothing wrong with Nihongo but Babelfish does amazing things when translating Japanese to English and probably vice versa. And it doesn't do Hungarian, Finnish, Urdu at all)
Sure EMACS is powerful. But that's almost irrelevant to the needs of program documentation. Mostly documentation authors don't need a lot of power. They need a modicum of communication ability, a basic text editor, and a willingness to do a not especially fun job.
(I'll pass on vi. If you can't say something nice...)
***Can I sue some countries because they will not allow pork imports?***
Sure. If they have signed up with the WTO. And if they permit domestic pork sales. And you may have to raise your pigs someplace that is Trichinosis.free of the country in question is Trichinosis free and wants to stay that way. But basically, yes.
No you're not the only one wondering about that asserted 10000% productivity boost claim. Given that this is funded by DARPA, it's a safe bet that they are primarily interested in intelligence analysis rather than mapping. (The D in DARPA stands for 'Defense' which is post-WWII newspeak for 'War').
Yes, having a computer scan for and actually find tanks, aircraft, missile silos, and the like would be useful. Especially those that turn up in unexpected places. There's a lot of planet here and I assume that most of it is rarely if even scanned for military hardware because there aren't the resources to do that. But intelligence analysts do a lot of things. This might tell them that some African microstate is preparing to send both tanks and the airplane into combat against a neighbor. But it's unlikely to help much in the hunt for Osama bin Laden or in assessing how much of Afghanistan is planted in poppies this year.
It's an interesting idea, and if it works, it probably will make the life of intelligence analysts easier. But 100x? Sounds like hyperbole to me. One wonders how much of the rest of the article is similarly inflated.
***The fact that they both produce the same square root law, with coefficient values within three percent of each other, is actually (from a mathematics perspective) quite shocking. It indicates very strongly that their quantification of decay rates is right and likely to hold for future centures (much more strongly than if they had merely presented one statistical fit, which is the norm in most articles).***
It certainly could indicate that. Or, it could indicate that they fudged their data set (quite possibly unconsciously) to get that answer. Or it could be coincidence. I have some trouble believing that time series data on something as nebulous as language change are going to be bias free at the 3% level. There is such a thing as too good a match.
Doesn't mean that I think the general conclusion the lifetime of irregular verbs is a function of frequency of use is wrong. Or that the decay rate is something like an inverse square relationship But I'd like to see some other studies on independently derived data before I'd buy into the equation for decay rate having been unequivocally established.
They are just saying that over time "meeted" is more likely to replace "met" than "beed" is to replace "been". And, by implication a newly minted English verb has a very high probability of having an 'ed' past tense. Example: The past tense of to titanic (i.e. to make a really horrendous mistake through a combination of foolishness and overconfidence) would surely be "titaniced". As in "Motorola titaniced the Iridium project."
***Probably in the end it'll all end up where Korea is -- they have more or less given up on characters and switched to alphabet.***
Little chance of that I think. There is a lot of information content in those 'Chinese' characters that is lost when they are presented alphabetically. The problem is homonyms (same sound different meaning -- same alphabetic spelling, different Chinese character). Japanese has a lot of them and I believe that Chinese has a lot more.
The Japanese probably have more alphabets (Three -- Hirigana, Kataka, Romanji) in general use than anyone else in the universe, but my impression was that they pretty much universally hate alphabetic text presentation of Japanese nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Sort of like a European encountering long expositions in a flowery italicized font where each word has to be individually extracted from all the flourishes and curlicues. Maybe if text messaging becomes a major element of everyone's life. Otherwise, I think kanji are probably in East Asia to stay. That is not to say that they -- especially the irregular ones -- can not and will not be simplified.
***Japan is an ally because we were allowed to finish the job and did not "cut and run". Hell, we are still there!***
If the US had mismanaged the occupation of Japan and Germany to the extent that it has bungled things in Iraq, we'd have ended up fighting and losing 20 year long guerilla wars in both places. And we'd be looking at two important rearmed and hostile enemies.
Like Kenney Rogers says "You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em." In the case of Iraq we should have stayed out of the game and it's long past time to fold our hand just walk away. Stay a few more years and it'll be time to run.
BTW, I don't have any problem with sending the Iraqi's a bunch more money eventually to fix up their country. We broke it. We should pay for the damage. But they probably need to have (a) real functioning government(s) before air-dropping money will do any good. In the meantime, how about we focus on what went wrong in the US, and why, and how do we keep the clowns who are responsible from ever doing any decision making again?
A flying car isn't impossible, but it isn't easy. Basically, you have to get all the stuff that belongs on a car -- brakes, transmission, muffler, onto the vehicle, then add things like wings, control surfaces, etc. Problem is that any vehicle that does that is going to be heavy. Even a very light car -- empty and with no fuel -- weighs more than the maximum takeoff weight of a typical small private plane. Throw in some add-ons like a pilot and a tank of gas, and there are going to be problems.
Can a vehicle be built that can function as a fixed wing aircraft and also can trundle down the highway acting reasonably like the rest of the traffic? Maybe. But even if it can, it's likely to be a lousy aircraft and a worse car.
***So, I live in the Netherlands, and I want an iPhone.***
Why would you want one of those things when the manufacturer clearly isn't interested in what their customers want/need? Unless you are just interested in the fun of engaging in a brawl (which you will likely be on the losing side of) why not wait a while for someone to come up with an iPhone like device that actually does what you want/need it to do out of the box?
***The Mac is more expensive, true, but the hardware is also very high quality.***
Well, it's more expensive -- I'll give you that. High quality? My experience with Apple is fairly limited, but I've never seen any sign that Apple hardware is superior quality. It was certainly unmitigated junk back in Apple II days when I had to try to run an office using Apple hardware because we lacked the budget for IBM. I know that there are folks that remember the Apple II fondly, but I'd really have preferred something with interchangeable parts and software that worked. Based on what I've seen and what I read, I'm guessing that nowadays, Apple hardware isn't much if any better than say Acer. It just costs a bit more.
It is very hard to improve on cheap, mass-market computer hardware BTW -- more so now that discrete components that can be tinkered with by the owner are a thing of the past. Before I retired, I maintained a hundred plus mostly low end PCs. Repairing hardware was really a very small part of the job. Maybe a mouse every three weeks, an occasional monitor, and a CDROM drive once a month. Other than those there were typically about half a dozen hardware failures a year. Now software... that's an entirely different matter.
I think if one is buying Apple, the proper reason is to get clear of Windows, not because the hardware is superior.
From a business POV, Apple is a hardware company, but I don't see that lasting forever. I expect that eventually they will have to become an OS company in order to survive. On the plus side, they have a desktop OS that isn't a total horror show, and eventually is a long time.
***Don't people know most of the stuff in that book is a good way to get yourself blown up? Dangerous or not, though, censorship of any kind is just not acceptable in a free society. Everybody should read banned books.***
The Anarchist's Cookbook is one of the few solid examples that comes to mind of a book that really should be kept away from children. The problem isn't that it might warp the mind (based on the results, there's little justification for leaving that job to parents, churches and TV). It's that the mind in question may be splattered all over the fridge if kids try cooking up some of those recipies in the kitchen.
At what point do the dangers of censorship overcome the dangers of content? I'd say 16 years of age, but I'll settle for 18 or 21.
***Having read the Anarchist's Cookbook, I'd say anyone actually attempting to use the "recipes" to make explosives should be considered suicidal rather than terrorist.***
Amen. That's a book that we should encourage terrorists to own and experiment with. Be a lot fewer of them it they did.
***Ayn Rand would be so disappointed.Ayn Rand would be so disappointed.***
If I recall my Ayn Rand, high ticket prices wouldn't be a problem in a Randian paradise because artists whose artistic integrity has been transgressed would frequently blow up venues. That would, I am quite certain, discourage desire for tickets and therefore bring ticket prices down.
An interesting and unique solution to a vexing problem.
Note that we could achieve much the same affect by simply marking every 500th ticket with a black border and shooting the guy who buys it. Since scalpers buy many more tickets than ordinary people, we would wipe them out in short order.
At a guess, the problem is that system usage is very difficult to project for the first few days of school when it turns out that some kids are registered at two schools and show up at a third. Others are registered in the right school, but twice under two variants of their name. Others.... The number of possible scenarios that can cause trouble and have to be sorted out is impressive. Not only that, but many staff members are not going to be familiar with the system. There are a whole bunch of issues not the least of which is the school office knows who has excused absences, but not who has showed up for school whereas the teachers know who has showed up, but not who is at the dentist, is stuck on a bus that is being towed out of a ditch, etc.
I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see these huge systems fold when stressed. What is annoying is the arrogance of administrators and IT managers when it is suggested that new systems need to be extensively tested and phased in slowly. These beauties really believe that nothing serious is going to go wrong this time.
Slashdot Mirror
Even assuming that bandwidth and latency problems are beaten down over the next decade, I have trouble envisioning Adobe's bloated applications running satisfactorily in a Web environment.
But what do I know? I projected in 1995 that Windows 9 would be a security and maintenance nightmare. I wasn't wrong about the product deficiencies (which are present to this day as legacy "features"). But boy did my projection that those deficiencies might discourage folks from buying and deploying Windows turn out to be a bit off.
I assume that they plan to put a cellular transceiver on the aircraft and use some specialized technology to get the signals from the airplane to the ground -- satellite or some special mode of dealing with ground stations or something.
Anyway, just when I thought that they couldn't find any more ways on top of miniscule seats with no leg room, long unexplained takeoff delays, intrusive security, losing baggage, scheduling impossible connections, overbooking, and chronically late flights to make airline travel more distasteful, they've come up with this. I rarely do airplanes any more, and the last time I did, it took me something like 36 hours to get from Burlington, VT to Seattle.
That's really not true. The 18 month or more time to market advantage that comes from being the inventor is critical in many industries. IT in particular. What would happen is that new technology would be protected as trade secrets and would not be freely published in a lot of cases. Probably that'd be an improvement.
The problem is that there are a few industries where patents really are an important element in "innovation". One of those is pharmaceuticals. No patents, means no money to test drug safety except in the rare case where the drug is so hard to synthesize that the company can expect to make a bundle before the competition manages to create a generic substitute. The only answer I can come up with is to tax pharmaceuticals and use the revenue to pay for safety tests. Hard to tell if that would work. Might. Might not. Something of a risk there.
Depends on where you live. I live in Northwestern Vermont and get hit for $63 a month for 60 or so commercial ridden channels. That's with no premium services. But, I'm lucky sort of. Folks in the next towns out from Burlington don't get any cable at all despite a lot of promises made back when the world was young and shiny and new. (I think fairly basic cable costs even more in many parts of the US).
The next lower service level is a lot cheaper, but it's basically just the eight local stations that I can mostly pull in from an antenna and -- I think -- three Montreal stations that I'd have to work hard to pull in off the air (there's a ridgeline in the way). I'd cancel, but right now, I pull in the full 60 channels, run the input through a broadband amplifier so as not to place a load on the Comcast network, and any of the six TVs in the house can tune to any channel without having to dink with set top boxes.
Comcast's vision of the future seems to be that I will install set top boxes for all the TVs and pay them to rent the boxes and for all sorts of premium services. My vision is that when Comcast eventually manages to make life without set top boxes intolerable, the Satellite antenna will go up on the roof looking through the notch between the two maple trees, and Comcast will be short one (more) customer.
Presumably pregnancy forces the arms out to the sides, thus bringing the hands in toward the keyboard at a wider angle which is compensated in the wrist and causes trouble. Probably it's also true that obesity can do that which would account for its presence in the list. (But being too skinny isn't in the list even though logically it might well be a problem for some people.)
As for menopause ... beats me.
You're right. The list looks like an arbitrary compendium of the usual suspects for any poorly explained malady in early 21st century Western society. Personally, I was surprised that they left alcoholism, bad attitude, terrorists, drug addiction, and sedentary lifestyle out of the list.
It seems to me you could benefit from english course as well. The word is memorable.***
Actually rememberable looks to be perfectly OK http://www.selfknowledge.com/80549.htm If you asked me the difference between rememberable and memorable, I'd say the former implies can't remember whereas the latter implies not worth remembering. e.g. The difference between the words rememberable and memorable is subtle and not very rememberable. Neither is it memorable.
My daughter -- who is no mathematical genius (a lack of math genius runs in the family) -- home schooled herself through High School. She used the Math Advantage 2000 CDs and got an OK score on the math portion of the SAT. I looked at them a couple of times and they seem OK.
Just for kicks I took the Math Advantage 2000 CD and put it into my Win 98 PC. It installed OK, gave me a link to the software, let me log into it (it tracks some status and supports multiple users for use in families and schools -- so the login probably isn't pure obtuseness.) The first time I tried to look at the Tutorial, the program crashed. I tend to forget how often that happens on Windows. Second time, it ran. tutorial seems OK. Kind of dry, but compared to a lot of explanations of statistics, it's relatively comprehensible. I could follow it anyway. Not always true. Would MA2000 run under wine? Who knows?
Now that I understand that, I agree pretty much. It's possible that the kites wouldn't be a menace to birds -- probably depends on how fast they move. Birds manage not to get whacked by wind blown tree branches, but there are presumably limits on their ability to identify things that might hit them. Birds are not noted for their advanced intelligence. It's hard to believe that the cables wouldn't be a menace to aircraft. Presumably air traffic at lower altitudes could be restricted in their vicinity. But I still wouldn't want to be in an aircraft flying at night or in a cloud anywhere near those things.
Maybe there are some places on the planet that have reasonably reliable wind, no air traffic, no mountains suitable for putting conventional turbines on, and where it's possible to get the power generated to where people live without undue expense. But offhand, I can't think of many.
The device is specifically aimed at powering very low power devices in poor and developing countries -- radios, (very) low wattage lights, etc. The generators are projected to be relatively small and the illustration seems to show one hung on the side of a building. The major point is that conventional turbines are inefficient at very low power levels because of frictional losses whereas these windscreens are projected to be an order of magnitude or more better (10-30x according to the article).
You're correct, the device might not scale up to windfarm scale although it's hard to see it as more of a hazard to birds and aircraft than a rotating blade. I have my doubts that a big windscreen will be as efficient at the high end as a turbine, but that's just a guess.
Anyway, it looks to be a cute idea, and I hope it works out.
Sure a powerful program documentation package could be (probably has) been developed. But before we try to run marathons, how about we try learning to crawl -- i.e. writing basic, comprehensible, accurate documentation in English or some other widely read modern language? (i.e. Not Japanese or Hungarian. Nothing wrong with Nihongo but Babelfish does amazing things when translating Japanese to English and probably vice versa. And it doesn't do Hungarian, Finnish, Urdu at all)
(I'll pass on vi. If you can't say something nice ...)
And we should back that up with a 72 hour waiting period before stealing a vehicle that could be used to transport a bomb.
We can beat this terrorism thing if we just pull together.
(Maybe if we keep this up, the terrorists will find our antics so entertaining that they will decide to keep us around for a while).
Sure. If they have signed up with the WTO. And if they permit domestic pork sales. And you may have to raise your pigs someplace that is Trichinosis.free of the country in question is Trichinosis free and wants to stay that way. But basically, yes.
Yes, having a computer scan for and actually find tanks, aircraft, missile silos, and the like would be useful. Especially those that turn up in unexpected places. There's a lot of planet here and I assume that most of it is rarely if even scanned for military hardware because there aren't the resources to do that. But intelligence analysts do a lot of things. This might tell them that some African microstate is preparing to send both tanks and the airplane into combat against a neighbor. But it's unlikely to help much in the hunt for Osama bin Laden or in assessing how much of Afghanistan is planted in poppies this year.
It's an interesting idea, and if it works, it probably will make the life of intelligence analysts easier. But 100x? Sounds like hyperbole to me. One wonders how much of the rest of the article is similarly inflated.
It certainly could indicate that. Or, it could indicate that they fudged their data set (quite possibly unconsciously) to get that answer. Or it could be coincidence. I have some trouble believing that time series data on something as nebulous as language change are going to be bias free at the 3% level. There is such a thing as too good a match.
Doesn't mean that I think the general conclusion the lifetime of irregular verbs is a function of frequency of use is wrong. Or that the decay rate is something like an inverse square relationship But I'd like to see some other studies on independently derived data before I'd buy into the equation for decay rate having been unequivocally established.
They are just saying that over time "meeted" is more likely to replace "met" than "beed" is to replace "been". And, by implication a newly minted English verb has a very high probability of having an 'ed' past tense. Example: The past tense of to titanic (i.e. to make a really horrendous mistake through a combination of foolishness and overconfidence) would surely be "titaniced". As in "Motorola titaniced the Iridium project."
Little chance of that I think. There is a lot of information content in those 'Chinese' characters that is lost when they are presented alphabetically. The problem is homonyms (same sound different meaning -- same alphabetic spelling, different Chinese character). Japanese has a lot of them and I believe that Chinese has a lot more.
The Japanese probably have more alphabets (Three -- Hirigana, Kataka, Romanji) in general use than anyone else in the universe, but my impression was that they pretty much universally hate alphabetic text presentation of Japanese nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Sort of like a European encountering long expositions in a flowery italicized font where each word has to be individually extracted from all the flourishes and curlicues. Maybe if text messaging becomes a major element of everyone's life. Otherwise, I think kanji are probably in East Asia to stay. That is not to say that they -- especially the irregular ones -- can not and will not be simplified.
If the US had mismanaged the occupation of Japan and Germany to the extent that it has bungled things in Iraq, we'd have ended up fighting and losing 20 year long guerilla wars in both places. And we'd be looking at two important rearmed and hostile enemies.
Like Kenney Rogers says "You gotta know when to hold em and know when to fold em." In the case of Iraq we should have stayed out of the game and it's long past time to fold our hand just walk away. Stay a few more years and it'll be time to run.
BTW, I don't have any problem with sending the Iraqi's a bunch more money eventually to fix up their country. We broke it. We should pay for the damage. But they probably need to have (a) real functioning government(s) before air-dropping money will do any good. In the meantime, how about we focus on what went wrong in the US, and why, and how do we keep the clowns who are responsible from ever doing any decision making again?
Can a vehicle be built that can function as a fixed wing aircraft and also can trundle down the highway acting reasonably like the rest of the traffic? Maybe. But even if it can, it's likely to be a lousy aircraft and a worse car.
Why would you want one of those things when the manufacturer clearly isn't interested in what their customers want/need? Unless you are just interested in the fun of engaging in a brawl (which you will likely be on the losing side of) why not wait a while for someone to come up with an iPhone like device that actually does what you want/need it to do out of the box?
Well, it's more expensive -- I'll give you that. High quality? My experience with Apple is fairly limited, but I've never seen any sign that Apple hardware is superior quality. It was certainly unmitigated junk back in Apple II days when I had to try to run an office using Apple hardware because we lacked the budget for IBM. I know that there are folks that remember the Apple II fondly, but I'd really have preferred something with interchangeable parts and software that worked. Based on what I've seen and what I read, I'm guessing that nowadays, Apple hardware isn't much if any better than say Acer. It just costs a bit more.
It is very hard to improve on cheap, mass-market computer hardware BTW -- more so now that discrete components that can be tinkered with by the owner are a thing of the past. Before I retired, I maintained a hundred plus mostly low end PCs. Repairing hardware was really a very small part of the job. Maybe a mouse every three weeks, an occasional monitor, and a CDROM drive once a month. Other than those there were typically about half a dozen hardware failures a year. Now software ... that's an entirely different matter.
I think if one is buying Apple, the proper reason is to get clear of Windows, not because the hardware is superior.
From a business POV, Apple is a hardware company, but I don't see that lasting forever. I expect that eventually they will have to become an OS company in order to survive. On the plus side, they have a desktop OS that isn't a total horror show, and eventually is a long time.
The Anarchist's Cookbook is one of the few solid examples that comes to mind of a book that really should be kept away from children. The problem isn't that it might warp the mind (based on the results, there's little justification for leaving that job to parents, churches and TV). It's that the mind in question may be splattered all over the fridge if kids try cooking up some of those recipies in the kitchen.
At what point do the dangers of censorship overcome the dangers of content? I'd say 16 years of age, but I'll settle for 18 or 21.
Amen. That's a book that we should encourage terrorists to own and experiment with. Be a lot fewer of them it they did.
If I recall my Ayn Rand, high ticket prices wouldn't be a problem in a Randian paradise because artists whose artistic integrity has been transgressed would frequently blow up venues. That would, I am quite certain, discourage desire for tickets and therefore bring ticket prices down.
An interesting and unique solution to a vexing problem.
Note that we could achieve much the same affect by simply marking every 500th ticket with a black border and shooting the guy who buys it. Since scalpers buy many more tickets than ordinary people, we would wipe them out in short order.
I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see these huge systems fold when stressed. What is annoying is the arrogance of administrators and IT managers when it is suggested that new systems need to be extensively tested and phased in slowly. These beauties really believe that nothing serious is going to go wrong this time.
Slow learners. Really slow learners.