Long term trend is actually the reverse; although it might well be starting to turn around now for reasons that may or may not be related to streaming economics... but my grandparents and parents generations both lived with most hit music being sub-3 minutes. While my generation and my kids saw it climb to 4+ so its hardly a big deal its down a bit.
1850's: 30+ (a concerto tends to go for half an hour).
When recorded media came along, it introduced a little bit of a constraint over how much audio could be recorded, but this hasn't been a real issue since cassette tape, with streaming and digital media, there isn't a limit on length. Songs that were generally performed in concert were sometimes shortened for recording but songs that have been 4 minutes or more were commonplace since at least the 40's. They were just performed live rather than recorded.
And I think that is where the problem is. Albums are taking less time to record in a studio then they are being edited post recording. To cut down on the amount of work and money required to produce a song, they're simply cutting down the length. Also given that most performers, especially in the pop genre are not writers, the writers get to sell more songs if they make them shorter.
Could be that road conditions do not let you travel at 100KM on average.
So most likely they think it was a road where 100KM was not possible. Here a 450KM trip that would take 12.5 hours. 70KM more added 8 hours travel time.
That actually could be the what is going on. The locals are taking route 14 in 4 hours, but the tourists are being directed along route 12 and 83 for what ever reason and take 12 hours. And I compared apples to oranges.
One possible reason is that the locals are geared up for long distance driving with long range fuel tanks, but rental cars don't have them, so the locals can safely do a straight shot along a route with limited fuel stops and the tourists are being directed to the route that has more fuel stops that suit their shorter range tanks.
That route looks like it goes across a section of unsealed road... Going 30 KPH would risk killing most vehicles on those rutted tracks, even a modded Land Cruiser would be plodding along. You'd be proper daft to be taking a rental Corolla on it.
Also, a lot of rental car agreements in Australia prohibit taking cars far outside metropolitan areas. Certainly most of the cheap ones (stop laughing, I mean cheap for Australia) and doubly so around Perth.
Same for driving through the US's deserts and mountain ranges. Even the interstates have some danger; they will warn you with things like "last fuel / cell reception for 80 miles".
You're under-estimating the vastness of Australia here comparing it to the relatively populous US. No fuel for 200 KM (130 miles) isn't just a thing, it's normal for many parts of Australia's highways. In the US it would be hard to find a place where you could drive for 200 KM and not find another town. I'm sure there are a few places but in Australia those places are everywhere. Australia is a country approximately the same size as the continental US with only 23 million people, almost all of whom live on the coast. 9.2 million of that 23 million... Nearly half of the country lives in Sydney and Melbourne alone. Once you start going out of the cities in Australia, you often wont find much in the way of civilisation.
In addition to that, we have deadly wildlife and inhospitable weather. You might not think 40 degrees C isn't too bad on the one or two days a year you might experience it in California... But its pretty bloody bad when it's 40 every day and you've blown an alternator somewhere west of Fitzroy Crossing.
Foreign Tourists are regularly rescued from the outback, please don't get me wrong here, Australia loves foreign tourists but Australia is not the temperate woodlands of upstate New York nor the endless potato fields of Idaho... People really do die because they aren't prepared for the hostility of Australia's natural environment and I'll tell you what's bad for tourism... Dead tourists.
Now if seeing Australia is a thing you want to do please don't let me discourage you, rather let me offer a bit of advice.
1. Do not underestimate how dangerous it is in the outback. Google is doing you a favour by suggesting you to prepare.
2. Tell someone where you're going and when you expect to get back/arrive at your next destination. This is important as the difference between "American Tourists Rescued from Broken Down Car" and "American Tourists Found Dead on Stuart Highway" can easily be one of your relatives letting the cops know you're overdue before you die of thirst or exposure.
Your analogy is accurate-- about the only thing that never seems to have evidence Fads turning like a wind-vane in a twister is coffee. Coffee is just good for you.
One thing that makes me suspect that tans are not so bad is that it's often the case that sexual attractivness is also an indicator of health or wealth or success --- that is, the general suitability of a mate for enhanced fitness.
We go to great lengths in fact to look better than we are!
And generally, on white folks, a glowing tan is considered attractive, just as a healthy flush in the cheeks is more attractive than a goth palor or a crimson palor.
So if a Tan is such a leading indicator, it might be rooted in biological fitness. That might not mean health-- it might mean your mate is an active hunter not a cave surfer--but I'd bet on health as the indication it forecasts. IN modern times, tans also are indicators of Leisure and therefore wealth, but historically that wasn't the case-- rich folks were a whiter shade of pale to specifically not be farmer-tanned.
that is, how can something that looks good be bad? Surely many ways but there's a rule of thumb here.
This is entirely a cultural thing, nothing to do with biology.
Tans are considered attractive in western societies, a darker skin colour amongst white people is indicative of people having spent time in the sun enjoying themselves. Especially here in Norther European nations where the sun is something we dont see a lot of for over half the year.
If you take a look at asian cultures, look at the celebrities, the models... they're all the colour of porcelain. In most Asian cultures dark skin colour is an indication that you've had to spend a lot of your time in the sun, working, meaning you're lower class where as white skin means that you've rich enough to have spent lot of time out of the sun, not doing labour. If you look at Miss Universe, Miss America or Miss France is often darker than Miss China or Miss Thailand.
The truth is, your skin colour is determined mostly by your genetics. My history is Scottish, we are naturally a shade of pale blue, a white Scotsman has a tan. Despite being born in Australia my skin's never going to be any darker. OTOH, someone born with brown coloured skin in the Philippines is never going to have light skin (at least not without a lot of surgery), however like tanning creams in the west, a lot of Filipinas as well as other Asian cultures will spend a lot of money on skin lightening creams because porcelain coloured skin is their cultural idea of beauty.
If you look at the field of "voice assistants" Cortana may still have a chance over time.
Right now there are three:
Google "we know who you are, where you are and have been, what you search for, what you shop for, every website you visit and which pages, how long you spend there, everything. We don't just know everything you like including porn, we know what kind of porn you don't realize you like. We're going to use all of this to target ads at you. Oh, and now we're getting you to add our microphones to your home even without using your phone." If you're on an iPhone they may know slightly less about your physical movements.
Amazon's Alexa "We may not know as much about where you are, but we know everything you buy because even if you didn't buy it through us you looked at our reviews of it. We've had our voice assistants in your home for years now, they do all kinds of things, oh, and by the way now we're getting into advertising as the third largest online ad platform (for now) with better conversion rates than Google or Facebook. Oh, and would you like to get free shipping with that? Have you met Prime?"
Apple's Siri "If you've bought into our high-profit-margin phones and tablets you can do some things with voice recognition, but we don't do as much or as well as the other two. On the upside we're much better about hiding the fact that we've no respect for your privacy!"
So right now the voice assistant universe is pretty much covered by "creepy AF," "creepy and selly AF" and "not as good but hey isn't that a nice thousand dollar phone?" I'm pretty sure there's space in there if Microsoft wants to carve out its own niche if they handle it well.
TFTFY.
Apple are just as big on selling your personal data as Google, Amazon and Microsoft... they're just less open and honest about it. If you believe otherwise, I've a bridge to sell you.
When CEO's weren't worried about a recession leading up to the 2007 Great recession.
Might want to be worried about both, my bois.
Their arses are covered for a recession by golden handshakes/parachutes... A cyber security breach may lead them to being dismissed without their full payment.
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"? If boats might collide, would it not be better for them to rely on more than one source for this information? This article was politically motivated. When I first saw this article appear, the page was also littered with climate change propaganda.
Why does Paris have to be responsible for defining the kilogram?
It isn't.
The organisation responsible for that is the International Committee for Weights and Measures. The original prototype was held in Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud, but recently the KG has been redefined using Plank's Constant as a base. The Parisian government nor city of Paris have had no part in this what so ever aside from housing the prototypes.
Copies of the prototype are kept in various places around the world including one in a US NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Yeah, what self respecting geek would ever be interested in really fast electric vehicles that can (sorta) drive themselves, with ROCKETS ADDED!?!?!
What a silly idea.
Those of us interested in driving.
You can make a car fast in a straight line easily enough, but that won't make it fun to drive.
Seeing as we're talking about fun in cars, I'll quote rally legend, Colin McRae:
Straights roads are for fast cars, corners are for fast drivers
Having driven a Tesla, they're heavy and wallowy in the turns, they might be able to accelerate fast but you'll need to brake all of that off to take a corner at pedestrian speeds (otherwise you'll be going into a barrier). An MX-5 might not be as fast in a straight line, but you'll be able to carry most of that speed into and out of a corner.
Shiny whizbang marketing gimmick-convenience has no price, sell your mother's eyes for new improved magic beans.
Also late to the market... Every Android phone I've owned for the last 5 years has had wireless charging... using a standard that didn't tie me to a single vendor.
They said "dinosaur" just to get everyone's attention, but this is more like a selective breeding of an existing species,
God damn it.
I had my Ian Malcolm lines all set up, "this wasn't some tree killed by deforestation"... Well fuck me, it was.
Serious note though... As someone who was born in Australia the flagrant introduction of species into different environments can be devastating to the local wildlife. I know the idea is to save the Sequoias which are endangered, but we need to be careful that introducing them to foreign habitats isn't done at the detriment to that habitat (destroying the habitat may also be detrimental to the species your introducing as well).
Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines? Cause that's the message EA was trying to push with BFV.
Can you show me how many soldiers in WWII respawned? because that's the message EA was trying to push with BF V...
Battlefield was never about reality, reality makes for really crap gameplay (most historical battles are so lopsided that any recreation will always end in the same result, forcing one team to always lose does not make for a fun game).
The problem with BF 5 is that it's a shit game, gameplay wise. the Battlefield series has been since BF 3 (the BF game that made me abandon the series). The problem all the whiners shouting "SJW" have is an inferiority complex, the notion that somewhere someone you consider inferior is being treated as your equal. That is completely different and almost totally unrelated to the problem EA is encountering with BF 5. Battlefield is about multiplayer gameplay, had they got that right no-one would care. No-one buys a Battlefield game for it's story, the original Battlefield 1942 didn't even have a single player campaign (I believe that was added in BF 3). Ultimately the game is floundering because the gameplay is crap and everyone is finally realising it.
It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended.
There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that arent your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.
Nope.
The Battlefield series haven't been very good games for a while now. BF2 was the last decent one and since then we've had at least 4 progressively worse games. If gameplay had of been good, it wouldn't have mattered (Cluebyfour: No-one buys a multiplayer game like BF for the story... the original one didn't even have a single player campaign), EA has been killing the BF series for years, its just now finally reflected in the sales figures.
But that wont stop the likes of you that bleat about WSJ's or whatever insult, not insult you've invented today.
Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!
I found that out after Battlefield 3. The gameplay had been removed and replaced with a grind system that ensured as long as you played for long enough you got the upgrades to make you unstoppable. It stopped being a game where skill mattered and all you needed to do was suck long enough to unlock the upgrades.
I spend a bit of time in developing nations, there are a fair few people reselling Nexflix logins. You can easily resell a 4 screen account to 15-20 people by sharing the password. They change the password each month to ensure that people still pay. I think these are the people Netflix is looking for.
... at your friend's home after they returned with a full SD card?
I mean, the technology is great, but it should come with some mandatory training on how to delete all the crappy shots that no one wants to watch anyway;-)
SD cards have uses outside of home photography.
I've run fleets of vehicles with dashcams before. a 128GB card can hold about 20 hours of 1080p footage, given that these vehicles are in use 10-12 hours a day, we rely on drivers manually pressing a button to preserve footage of any incidents. It would be better if we could just keep up to a weeks worth of footage. Headless servers are another popular use, have ESXi, Linux binaries or whatever OS installed on a small SD card and keep your data/programs/VM's on the SAN, making the server essentially interchangeable.
Memorization is easy, especially if you start young. And that's exactly what this plan is about.
Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.
Memorisation is a problem as it does not impart an understanding of the language. However the problem with Mandarin is its extreme inflexibility. The language is tone dependent which makes it incompatible with the way non-Mandarin speakers talk.
The reason English is the international language isn't due to the fact that the English spread it, the French and Spanish were trying to do the exact same thing. Hell, there are more native Spanish speakers than native English speakers... English is the larger language because of all the L2 speakers (as a second language), there are 40 million L2 Spanish speakers but 740 million L2 English speakers. So why did English take off instead of Spanish? The key is in the flexibility of English, English is a language that allows for a totally foreign syntax to be used and yet remains intelligible to the native speaker. That kind of malleability that gave rise to Indian English, Spanglish, Chinglish and many others meant that it was easy for a person from a completely different language to learn English because they didn't need to learn a strict syntax to speak it. Spanish OTOH is a far more inflexible language and Spanish is nowhere near as bad as Sino and Asian languages which take inflexibility up to 11, which is why most of the language is learned by rote memorisation which is part of the problem.
However at the moment, this is just Kenyan schools offering the chance to learn Mandarin, not every student being forced to learn it.
It's no different from banning imports of toys painted with lead paint.
It's very, very different. Lead paint is demonstrably harmful, whereas the hysteria over "GMOs" and "teh kemikillzzz!" is just clever marketing.
By the sounds of that... You don't actually know what EU standards are. They aren't particularly high, Thailand can meet them, not sure why the US cant.
Your tag line is great. I assume you are trying to say if you want to regulate business and guns, and provide healthcare that you are a Nazi?
Here let me try.
The Nazi Party: Militaristic, anti-Immigrant, anti-Gay, anti-Minority, aggressive and resentful of how history has treated our kind. Make Germany Great Again!
Your description is the closest to the truth (pretty damn close).
The tenets of fascism are:
- Nationalism
- Totalitarianism
- Enforcement of political ideology by violence
- Enforcement of age and gender roles
- Changing definitions to suit them
The irony is, Lynwood is actually the fascist for trying to change the meaning of the word "Nazi" to suit his own ideology.
In reality, the Nazi's opposed social welfare, the closest thing they had to a social program was Action T4, the forced euthanasia of anyone considered a burden to the state (the disabled, infirm, feeble or handicapped).
But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
The problem here isn't the risk of terrorism on the M48 Severn crossing, rather the risk of some idiot falling out of a bridge tower (or throwing himself out) which would shut down the motorway for hours here in the UK.
Although this might explain why the M4 was so clear on the 31st... Everyone was using the M48.
What the hell is so challenging about automating trains? I can't believe train conductors are still a thing, and they're still crashing trains. What's simpler to automate than a train? The tracks are fixed. There are very few tracks or trains in any system. The trains can only go two directions on the tracks. Why aren't all trains automated by now?
Having lived up there the challenge is in both the distance they have to travel, the sheer length and weight of the train as well as the method of loading.
The trains are travelling through the most inhospitable places on earth. Unlike most other automated trains these are not well fenced in self contained units within easy reach of a control team. The trains will travel 400+ KM though areas that can get in excess of 40 degrees in the day and can have a temperature variance of 30 degrees between night an day. That tends to have quite and effect on iron rails. Beyond this, you have the Australian wildlife. Kangaroo's are common up there, imagine a moose that stands upright, jumps and is easily spooked.
The trains in question are 200-300 ore cars pulled by up to 9 locomotives (3 is typical for the Rio Tinto trains). The cargo weighs in at 25,000 tons and they easily exceed 2 KM in length. They can also take up to 9 KM to stop from their usual speed of around 100 KPH. So you've got a train that weighs over 25,000 tons and is 9 KM long to manage and control.
Finally, the trains are loaded 1-10 cars at a time depending on how the mine is set up. The train will need to keep track of loaded and unloaded cars. Compared to the previous two, this is really the least challenging to automate but trains often make several stops at different sites.
My view of the average person combined with Occam's razor says this probably isn't a scheme by a nefarious group hellbent on destruction, and is more likely just some random asshole who thinks he's absolutely *hilarious*. You know, like those folks who shine lasers at airplanes.
Its gone on far too long for that.
Its far more likely to be someone with a serious grudge against Gatwick Airport or one of the major airlines running out of Gatwick like EasyJet, BA or Ryanair... So that shortens the list of suspects to most people in Southern England.
It doesn't seem political as no statements or demands have been made but it is obviously deliberate and planned.
A random collection of characters would be superior to suggesting that you will be a blip at best.
Has anyone ever heard of these guys? Blipper indeed.
It's even worse... Blippar... Which is an absolutely terrible name for a UK company as that word does not fit comfortably into any UK accent. Company deserves to die for that alone.
You're both right. And so is Ellison. Just because everybody who uses Oracle wants to get away from it doesn't mean that there's an easy path for doing so. People don't use Oracle because they want to. They use it because they don't think there's a viable alternative, and because their business logic is built around the sorts of consistency guarantees provided by SQL and transactions and all that other fun stuff that alternatives either don't provide or don't provide as well.
Not quite true. People who use Oracle use it because it was put in years ago when some sales idiot convinced some CTO who evolved from a sales idiot that it would magically increase his bonus. People are still using it because it's a real pain in the arse to get rid of, Oracle are doing everything within their power to make it as difficult as possible to move from Oracle to any other product.
If that was true, they would simply sunset Edge and start shipping Windows with Chrome or Firefox. They didn't. They still want to be in the browser game.
Microsoft is trying to follow it's old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy but has lost the ability to do the "Extend" part, let alone achieve the "Extinguish" part.
Basically this is how Microsoft admits defeat, it recreates the thing it rallied against for years in a very poor way. Powershell was the biggest example, for years they cried that the GUI was superior to the commmand line... Now all their GUI tools just issue Powershell commands. MS is too proud to kill its terrible browser, so it's going to just reskin someone else's good browser and pretend they haven't given up.
Who in the recent decade of depression saw numerous companies a) let workers go with little to no warning and no compensation or b) witnessed the extremely common scenario where an employee informs their employer they are taking a new job, gives their two weeks notice, and are immediately escorted out the building and left with no job for two weeks.
Companies keep trying to pull shit on employees. I don't think these greedy CEO's realize that there are consequences for their policies. If employers fail to respect 2 weeks notice, than they cannot expect their employees to do so. If corporations find every loophole and means to pay their employees less regardless of the effect on their employees. Than employers can't complain when those same folks keep jumping jobs for more money - if YOU make it ALL about money, than expect it to be all about MONEY.
This means your industrial relations laws are broken. Where I live it would be illegal to fire an employee who has just resigned, in fact even if a company fires them for legitimate reasons and escorts them from the building they are still owed a paid notice period (I.E. if an employer stipulates I have to give 4 weeks notice when resigning, that is how much time I am owed if they dismiss me).
Slashdot Mirror
Long term trend is actually the reverse; although it might well be starting to turn around now for reasons that may or may not be related to streaming economics... but my grandparents and parents generations both lived with most hit music being sub-3 minutes. While my generation and my kids saw it climb to 4+ so its hardly a big deal its down a bit.
2010's: 4'26"
2000's: 4'10"
1990's: 4'14"
1980's: 4'08"
1970's: 3'55"
1960's: 2'59"
1950's: 2'36"
1940's: 2'41"
https://thelister.blogspot.com...
1850's: 30+ (a concerto tends to go for half an hour).
When recorded media came along, it introduced a little bit of a constraint over how much audio could be recorded, but this hasn't been a real issue since cassette tape, with streaming and digital media, there isn't a limit on length. Songs that were generally performed in concert were sometimes shortened for recording but songs that have been 4 minutes or more were commonplace since at least the 40's. They were just performed live rather than recorded.
And I think that is where the problem is. Albums are taking less time to record in a studio then they are being edited post recording. To cut down on the amount of work and money required to produce a song, they're simply cutting down the length. Also given that most performers, especially in the pop genre are not writers, the writers get to sell more songs if they make them shorter.
Could be that road conditions do not let you travel at 100KM on average.
So most likely they think it was a road where 100KM was not possible. Here a 450KM trip that would take 12.5 hours. 70KM more added 8 hours travel time.
That actually could be the what is going on. The locals are taking route 14 in 4 hours, but the tourists are being directed along route 12 and 83 for what ever reason and take 12 hours. And I compared apples to oranges.
One possible reason is that the locals are geared up for long distance driving with long range fuel tanks, but rental cars don't have them, so the locals can safely do a straight shot along a route with limited fuel stops and the tourists are being directed to the route that has more fuel stops that suit their shorter range tanks.
That route looks like it goes across a section of unsealed road... Going 30 KPH would risk killing most vehicles on those rutted tracks, even a modded Land Cruiser would be plodding along. You'd be proper daft to be taking a rental Corolla on it.
Also, a lot of rental car agreements in Australia prohibit taking cars far outside metropolitan areas. Certainly most of the cheap ones (stop laughing, I mean cheap for Australia) and doubly so around Perth.
Same for driving through the US's deserts and mountain ranges. Even the interstates have some danger; they will warn you with things like "last fuel / cell reception for 80 miles".
You're under-estimating the vastness of Australia here comparing it to the relatively populous US. No fuel for 200 KM (130 miles) isn't just a thing, it's normal for many parts of Australia's highways. In the US it would be hard to find a place where you could drive for 200 KM and not find another town. I'm sure there are a few places but in Australia those places are everywhere. Australia is a country approximately the same size as the continental US with only 23 million people, almost all of whom live on the coast. 9.2 million of that 23 million... Nearly half of the country lives in Sydney and Melbourne alone. Once you start going out of the cities in Australia, you often wont find much in the way of civilisation.
In addition to that, we have deadly wildlife and inhospitable weather. You might not think 40 degrees C isn't too bad on the one or two days a year you might experience it in California... But its pretty bloody bad when it's 40 every day and you've blown an alternator somewhere west of Fitzroy Crossing.
Foreign Tourists are regularly rescued from the outback, please don't get me wrong here, Australia loves foreign tourists but Australia is not the temperate woodlands of upstate New York nor the endless potato fields of Idaho... People really do die because they aren't prepared for the hostility of Australia's natural environment and I'll tell you what's bad for tourism... Dead tourists.
Now if seeing Australia is a thing you want to do please don't let me discourage you, rather let me offer a bit of advice.
1. Do not underestimate how dangerous it is in the outback. Google is doing you a favour by suggesting you to prepare.
2. Tell someone where you're going and when you expect to get back/arrive at your next destination. This is important as the difference between "American Tourists Rescued from Broken Down Car" and "American Tourists Found Dead on Stuart Highway" can easily be one of your relatives letting the cops know you're overdue before you die of thirst or exposure.
Your analogy is accurate-- about the only thing that never seems to have evidence Fads turning like a wind-vane in a twister is coffee. Coffee is just good for you.
One thing that makes me suspect that tans are not so bad is that it's often the case that sexual attractivness is also an indicator of health or wealth or success --- that is, the general suitability of a mate for enhanced fitness.
We go to great lengths in fact to look better than we are!
And generally, on white folks, a glowing tan is considered attractive, just as a healthy flush in the cheeks is more attractive than a goth palor or a crimson palor.
So if a Tan is such a leading indicator, it might be rooted in biological fitness. That might not mean health-- it might mean your mate is an active hunter not a cave surfer--but I'd bet on health as the indication it forecasts. IN modern times, tans also are indicators of Leisure and therefore wealth, but historically that wasn't the case-- rich folks were a whiter shade of pale to specifically not be farmer-tanned.
that is, how can something that looks good be bad? Surely many ways but there's a rule of thumb here.
This is entirely a cultural thing, nothing to do with biology.
Tans are considered attractive in western societies, a darker skin colour amongst white people is indicative of people having spent time in the sun enjoying themselves. Especially here in Norther European nations where the sun is something we dont see a lot of for over half the year.
If you take a look at asian cultures, look at the celebrities, the models... they're all the colour of porcelain. In most Asian cultures dark skin colour is an indication that you've had to spend a lot of your time in the sun, working, meaning you're lower class where as white skin means that you've rich enough to have spent lot of time out of the sun, not doing labour. If you look at Miss Universe, Miss America or Miss France is often darker than Miss China or Miss Thailand.
The truth is, your skin colour is determined mostly by your genetics. My history is Scottish, we are naturally a shade of pale blue, a white Scotsman has a tan. Despite being born in Australia my skin's never going to be any darker. OTOH, someone born with brown coloured skin in the Philippines is never going to have light skin (at least not without a lot of surgery), however like tanning creams in the west, a lot of Filipinas as well as other Asian cultures will spend a lot of money on skin lightening creams because porcelain coloured skin is their cultural idea of beauty.
If you look at the field of "voice assistants" Cortana may still have a chance over time.
Right now there are three:
Google "we know who you are, where you are and have been, what you search for, what you shop for, every website you visit and which pages, how long you spend there, everything. We don't just know everything you like including porn, we know what kind of porn you don't realize you like. We're going to use all of this to target ads at you. Oh, and now we're getting you to add our microphones to your home even without using your phone." If you're on an iPhone they may know slightly less about your physical movements.
Amazon's Alexa "We may not know as much about where you are, but we know everything you buy because even if you didn't buy it through us you looked at our reviews of it. We've had our voice assistants in your home for years now, they do all kinds of things, oh, and by the way now we're getting into advertising as the third largest online ad platform (for now) with better conversion rates than Google or Facebook. Oh, and would you like to get free shipping with that? Have you met Prime?"
Apple's Siri "If you've bought into our high-profit-margin phones and tablets you can do some things with voice recognition, but we don't do as much or as well as the other two. On the upside we're much better about
hiding the fact that we've no respect for your privacy!"
So right now the voice assistant universe is pretty much covered by "creepy AF," "creepy and selly AF" and "not as good but hey isn't that a nice thousand dollar phone?" I'm pretty sure there's space in there if Microsoft wants to carve out its own niche if they handle it well.
TFTFY.
Apple are just as big on selling your personal data as Google, Amazon and Microsoft... they're just less open and honest about it. If you believe otherwise, I've a bridge to sell you.
When CEO's weren't worried about a recession leading up to the 2007 Great recession.
Might want to be worried about both, my bois.
Their arses are covered for a recession by golden handshakes/parachutes... A cyber security breach may lead them to being dismissed without their full payment.
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"? If boats might collide, would it not be better for them to rely on more than one source for this information? This article was politically motivated. When I first saw this article appear, the page was also littered with climate change propaganda.
Why does Paris have to be responsible for defining the kilogram?
It isn't.
The organisation responsible for that is the International Committee for Weights and Measures. The original prototype was held in Pavillon de Breteuil in Saint-Cloud, but recently the KG has been redefined using Plank's Constant as a base. The Parisian government nor city of Paris have had no part in this what so ever aside from housing the prototypes.
Copies of the prototype are kept in various places around the world including one in a US NIST laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Yeah, what self respecting geek would ever be interested in really fast electric vehicles that can (sorta) drive themselves, with ROCKETS ADDED!?!?!
What a silly idea.
Those of us interested in driving.
You can make a car fast in a straight line easily enough, but that won't make it fun to drive.
Seeing as we're talking about fun in cars, I'll quote rally legend, Colin McRae:
Straights roads are for fast cars, corners are for fast drivers
Having driven a Tesla, they're heavy and wallowy in the turns, they might be able to accelerate fast but you'll need to brake all of that off to take a corner at pedestrian speeds (otherwise you'll be going into a barrier). An MX-5 might not be as fast in a straight line, but you'll be able to carry most of that speed into and out of a corner.
Shiny whizbang marketing gimmick-convenience has no price, sell your mother's eyes for new improved magic beans.
Also late to the market... Every Android phone I've owned for the last 5 years has had wireless charging... using a standard that didn't tie me to a single vendor.
They said "dinosaur" just to get everyone's attention, but this is more like a selective breeding of an existing species,
God damn it.
I had my Ian Malcolm lines all set up, "this wasn't some tree killed by deforestation"... Well fuck me, it was.
Serious note though... As someone who was born in Australia the flagrant introduction of species into different environments can be devastating to the local wildlife. I know the idea is to save the Sequoias which are endangered, but we need to be careful that introducing them to foreign habitats isn't done at the detriment to that habitat (destroying the habitat may also be detrimental to the species your introducing as well).
Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines? Cause that's the message EA was trying to push with BFV.
Can you show me how many soldiers in WWII respawned? because that's the message EA was trying to push with BF V...
Battlefield was never about reality, reality makes for really crap gameplay (most historical battles are so lopsided that any recreation will always end in the same result, forcing one team to always lose does not make for a fun game).
The problem with BF 5 is that it's a shit game, gameplay wise. the Battlefield series has been since BF 3 (the BF game that made me abandon the series). The problem all the whiners shouting "SJW" have is an inferiority complex, the notion that somewhere someone you consider inferior is being treated as your equal. That is completely different and almost totally unrelated to the problem EA is encountering with BF 5. Battlefield is about multiplayer gameplay, had they got that right no-one would care. No-one buys a Battlefield game for it's story, the original Battlefield 1942 didn't even have a single player campaign (I believe that was added in BF 3). Ultimately the game is floundering because the gameplay is crap and everyone is finally realising it.
It may not be a good game because of catering to the perpetually offended.
There is one fact I know: If you cater to the people that arent your customers at the expense of your customers, then you will absolutely lose customers, and the people you catered to will move on to fuck with something else.
Nope.
The Battlefield series haven't been very good games for a while now. BF2 was the last decent one and since then we've had at least 4 progressively worse games. If gameplay had of been good, it wouldn't have mattered (Cluebyfour: No-one buys a multiplayer game like BF for the story... the original one didn't even have a single player campaign), EA has been killing the BF series for years, its just now finally reflected in the sales figures.
But that wont stop the likes of you that bleat about WSJ's or whatever insult, not insult you've invented today.
Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!
I found that out after Battlefield 3. The gameplay had been removed and replaced with a grind system that ensured as long as you played for long enough you got the upgrades to make you unstoppable. It stopped being a game where skill mattered and all you needed to do was suck long enough to unlock the upgrades.
But facts won't stop the morons bleating "SJW".
I still share my Netflix with my ex.
I don't really think this is there problem.
I spend a bit of time in developing nations, there are a fair few people reselling Nexflix logins. You can easily resell a 4 screen account to 15-20 people by sharing the password. They change the password each month to ensure that people still pay. I think these are the people Netflix is looking for.
... at your friend's home after they returned with a full SD card?
I mean, the technology is great, but it should come with some mandatory training on how to delete all the crappy shots that no one wants to watch anyway ;-)
SD cards have uses outside of home photography.
I've run fleets of vehicles with dashcams before. a 128GB card can hold about 20 hours of 1080p footage, given that these vehicles are in use 10-12 hours a day, we rely on drivers manually pressing a button to preserve footage of any incidents. It would be better if we could just keep up to a weeks worth of footage. Headless servers are another popular use, have ESXi, Linux binaries or whatever OS installed on a small SD card and keep your data/programs/VM's on the SAN, making the server essentially interchangeable.
Memorization is easy, especially if you start young. And that's exactly what this plan is about.
Memorization isn't that bad either, but Western education simultaneously loves and hates memorization and have forgotten how to teach memorization, but still assess students based on what amounts to memorization.
Memorisation is a problem as it does not impart an understanding of the language. However the problem with Mandarin is its extreme inflexibility. The language is tone dependent which makes it incompatible with the way non-Mandarin speakers talk.
The reason English is the international language isn't due to the fact that the English spread it, the French and Spanish were trying to do the exact same thing. Hell, there are more native Spanish speakers than native English speakers... English is the larger language because of all the L2 speakers (as a second language), there are 40 million L2 Spanish speakers but 740 million L2 English speakers. So why did English take off instead of Spanish? The key is in the flexibility of English, English is a language that allows for a totally foreign syntax to be used and yet remains intelligible to the native speaker. That kind of malleability that gave rise to Indian English, Spanglish, Chinglish and many others meant that it was easy for a person from a completely different language to learn English because they didn't need to learn a strict syntax to speak it. Spanish OTOH is a far more inflexible language and Spanish is nowhere near as bad as Sino and Asian languages which take inflexibility up to 11, which is why most of the language is learned by rote memorisation which is part of the problem.
However at the moment, this is just Kenyan schools offering the chance to learn Mandarin, not every student being forced to learn it.
It's no different from banning imports of toys painted with lead paint.
It's very, very different. Lead paint is demonstrably harmful, whereas the hysteria over "GMOs" and "teh kemikillzzz!" is just clever marketing.
By the sounds of that... You don't actually know what EU standards are. They aren't particularly high, Thailand can meet them, not sure why the US cant.
Your tag line is great. I assume you are trying to say if you want to regulate business and guns, and provide healthcare that you are a Nazi?
Here let me try.
The Nazi Party: Militaristic, anti-Immigrant, anti-Gay, anti-Minority, aggressive and resentful of how history has treated our kind. Make Germany Great Again!
Your description is the closest to the truth (pretty damn close).
The tenets of fascism are:
- Nationalism
- Totalitarianism
- Enforcement of political ideology by violence
- Enforcement of age and gender roles
- Changing definitions to suit them
The irony is, Lynwood is actually the fascist for trying to change the meaning of the word "Nazi" to suit his own ideology.
In reality, the Nazi's opposed social welfare, the closest thing they had to a social program was Action T4, the forced euthanasia of anyone considered a burden to the state (the disabled, infirm, feeble or handicapped).
But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
The problem here isn't the risk of terrorism on the M48 Severn crossing, rather the risk of some idiot falling out of a bridge tower (or throwing himself out) which would shut down the motorway for hours here in the UK. Although this might explain why the M4 was so clear on the 31st... Everyone was using the M48.
What the hell is so challenging about automating trains? I can't believe train conductors are still a thing, and they're still crashing trains. What's simpler to automate than a train? The tracks are fixed. There are very few tracks or trains in any system. The trains can only go two directions on the tracks. Why aren't all trains automated by now?
One crashed earlier this year.
Having lived up there the challenge is in both the distance they have to travel, the sheer length and weight of the train as well as the method of loading.
The trains are travelling through the most inhospitable places on earth. Unlike most other automated trains these are not well fenced in self contained units within easy reach of a control team. The trains will travel 400+ KM though areas that can get in excess of 40 degrees in the day and can have a temperature variance of 30 degrees between night an day. That tends to have quite and effect on iron rails. Beyond this, you have the Australian wildlife. Kangaroo's are common up there, imagine a moose that stands upright, jumps and is easily spooked.
The trains in question are 200-300 ore cars pulled by up to 9 locomotives (3 is typical for the Rio Tinto trains). The cargo weighs in at 25,000 tons and they easily exceed 2 KM in length. They can also take up to 9 KM to stop from their usual speed of around 100 KPH. So you've got a train that weighs over 25,000 tons and is 9 KM long to manage and control.
Finally, the trains are loaded 1-10 cars at a time depending on how the mine is set up. The train will need to keep track of loaded and unloaded cars. Compared to the previous two, this is really the least challenging to automate but trains often make several stops at different sites.
My view of the average person combined with Occam's razor says this probably isn't a scheme by a nefarious group hellbent on destruction, and is more likely just some random asshole who thinks he's absolutely *hilarious*. You know, like those folks who shine lasers at airplanes.
Its gone on far too long for that.
Its far more likely to be someone with a serious grudge against Gatwick Airport or one of the major airlines running out of Gatwick like EasyJet, BA or Ryanair... So that shortens the list of suspects to most people in Southern England.
It doesn't seem political as no statements or demands have been made but it is obviously deliberate and planned.
A random collection of characters would be superior to suggesting that you will be a blip at best.
Has anyone ever heard of these guys? Blipper indeed.
It's even worse... Blippar... Which is an absolutely terrible name for a UK company as that word does not fit comfortably into any UK accent. Company deserves to die for that alone.
You're both right. And so is Ellison. Just because everybody who uses Oracle wants to get away from it doesn't mean that there's an easy path for doing so. People don't use Oracle because they want to. They use it because they don't think there's a viable alternative, and because their business logic is built around the sorts of consistency guarantees provided by SQL and transactions and all that other fun stuff that alternatives either don't provide or don't provide as well.
Not quite true. People who use Oracle use it because it was put in years ago when some sales idiot convinced some CTO who evolved from a sales idiot that it would magically increase his bonus. People are still using it because it's a real pain in the arse to get rid of, Oracle are doing everything within their power to make it as difficult as possible to move from Oracle to any other product.
If that was true, they would simply sunset Edge and start shipping Windows with Chrome or Firefox. They didn't. They still want to be in the browser game.
Microsoft is trying to follow it's old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy but has lost the ability to do the "Extend" part, let alone achieve the "Extinguish" part.
Basically this is how Microsoft admits defeat, it recreates the thing it rallied against for years in a very poor way. Powershell was the biggest example, for years they cried that the GUI was superior to the commmand line... Now all their GUI tools just issue Powershell commands. MS is too proud to kill its terrible browser, so it's going to just reskin someone else's good browser and pretend they haven't given up.
Who in the recent decade of depression saw numerous companies a) let workers go with little to no warning and no compensation or b) witnessed the extremely common scenario where an employee informs their employer they are taking a new job, gives their two weeks notice, and are immediately escorted out the building and left with no job for two weeks.
Companies keep trying to pull shit on employees. I don't think these greedy CEO's realize that there are consequences for their policies. If employers fail to respect 2 weeks notice, than they cannot expect their employees to do so. If corporations find every loophole and means to pay their employees less regardless of the effect on their employees. Than employers can't complain when those same folks keep jumping jobs for more money - if YOU make it ALL about money, than expect it to be all about MONEY.
This means your industrial relations laws are broken. Where I live it would be illegal to fire an employee who has just resigned, in fact even if a company fires them for legitimate reasons and escorts them from the building they are still owed a paid notice period (I.E. if an employer stipulates I have to give 4 weeks notice when resigning, that is how much time I am owed if they dismiss me).