I hope Assange is as well-protected as he seems to be. He may already have the US Gov't after him, but if it's banks and pharmaceutical companies too, things are only going to get worse.
I really hope some of this stuff makes people stop saying "We hate wikileaks" and start saying "hey thanks for letting us know we were all getting fucked."
The general public needs to be reminded that censorship isn't the answer. It seems to be the only thing they want nowadays. -Taylor
Can it play regular CDs or DVDs? Can you easily plug a thumb drive into it or otherwise upload additional information without needing a fast network connection or another computer running inside the car? There are lots of things tablets *don't* do well yet. Cellphone docks for cars have been around a long time, they probably do everything you want (except having an extra large screen) and have the added benefit of being more portable (trust me you really don't want to leave your ipad inside your car unless your car never leaves your garage)...
So not surprisingly, the iPad/Galaxy Tab are nice (as are car computers, and traditional stereos) but it's all up to the user to say what's important and what's not.
The new Dell Duo might work really well for this. It acts as either a tablet or a netbook, but with a much better hinge design than traditional convertibles, so it looks a lot nicer when in tablet mode. It also runs a touch friendly media skin by default when in tablet mode, which may (or may not) be nice for in car use. Then, with a well-designed dash dock, you could pop the thing out and use it as a regular windows 7 netbook (or keep using it as a tablet) when you needed to.
It would be cool to set up your system to just play all audio received from a bluetooth connection, so that the tablet wouldn't need to be hard wired to anything (except power).
"Edelman notes that Google cites its use of unbiased algorithms to dismiss antitrust scrutiny, and he recalls the DOJ's intervention in airlines providing favorable results for its own flights in customer reservation systems they owned."
Er, airlines sell tickets for profit. What exactly does Google make from you when you use their search engine?
What do they make? Eight billion dollars a year. (bah, can't paste still. slashdot hates chrome. I was going to cite my source.)
Do you think they do it just for fun? By keeping you in their services for longer, they continue to show you ads and make their money.
Seems to me that quantifying decayed isotopes in rocks is actually more straightforward. With the added bonus of giving THE CORRECT ANSWER.
His point is that even if you believe the bible word for word, there really isn't any evidence that the earth is the supposed 6000 years old. Even believing the bible, it could be 6 billion years old.
Of course most of us (on slashdot, specifically) don't believe the bible word for word or maybe at all, but its a powerful argument to say that even if you do, most interpretations are flawed. -Taylor
Even if they're passengers, there's no technology available (now or ever) which can distinguish between a cell being used by a driver and a cell being used by a passenger. Selective disabling is not possible, so passengers will also be affected.
Not now or ever? Thats ridiculous. Mandate the installation of a special sensor chip in all new phones and mandate some kind of sensor in each car that can tell if a phone is in the front seat or the rear. Then only let the phone work if its in the rear seat. Its too hard to let the front seat passenger still use a phone because the driver could just hold his phone over there, which is more dangerous. There are a variety of technologies that could work for that, RFID being just one. A visible IR beacon is also possible, but easier to foil.
Hell, L5 GPS can tell where you are to within a few inches. In a few years those chips will be in every cell phone, so they'll know where they are. Put in a local repeater in the car and define a zone near the driver where it doesn't allow the phone to be used, and boom, you're good.
I'd never advocate doing any of the above (i'm against overreaching legislations like that and costly annoying mandates that make technology worse, among other things), and actually think it would be fucking stupid as all hell to do, but lets not get confused between "possible" and a "good idea." It is absolutely possible if you design the whole system properly. There would be ways to circumvent any of the above methods but that would always be the case.
Its silly to say we couldn't do something like that. Nearly anything is possible with enough effort. This one wouldn't even be that difficult (technologically). -Taylor
OMG! A toradno iz comin. proced 2 teh nearest evacushun sheltr
You joke, but actually twitter is extremely useful for these kinds of things. Since you're hearing direct from other people, you get news of everything pretty much immediately. If there's an earthquake, its all over twitter in seconds (assuming you follow people that live in the relevant area). -Taylor
Maybe punching through those boards the way he does in the video requires a 17-fold increase in strength, but you could just teach a guy proper board-breaking alignment and get the same result. Make him punch a hole in a telephone pole or a sidewalk or something.
Bruce Lee was never a fan of board breaking for exactly this reason. Yes, if you line them up perfectly you can do this without the suit. However, as you can plainly see in the video, these were not lined up in this way, and were in fact compressed together in a vice. Maybe your suggestion is correct - they would have done well to stay away from the showmanship employed by 'martial artists' to break boards. But it seems to me that it wasn't necessarily intended to draw those comparisons.
I was more annoyed by the fact that the same thing could have been done with a hammer - which the big heavy suit would have acted like even if it wasn't powered. Three pine boards aren't that hard to break, its just going to hurt your hand. That suit protected the guy's hand, which was all that was really needed. It was basically a big battering ram. I bet a pair of brass knuckles would do the same thing. -Taylor
Are extremely easy to break, which is why we use them in tae kwon do. Little kids have to break them for testing. Adults would often punch or kick through 3 or 4 boards like this. Not impressed.
Yeah. I was noticing that they're oriented to favor the grain, and they're not attached to eachother, so you mostly have to break the first one and the others will break with not much more effort, I would imagine.
I have a feeling that a pair of brass knuckles would be enough to do what he did comfortably. You just need a hard impact with something to protect your hand. The suit would have provided that whether it was powered or not.
I hate hacky news shows. I also hate slashdot articles that keep the sensationalized descriptions.
Also, the only thing holding us back from a functioning Iron Man suit is the power supply. If we had Tony's Arc Reactor, we could pretty much do the rest. So we're no steps closer until that is done. -Taylor
Sure, for a little while. What you're describing, though, is a case of money completely leaving our economy, and not generally for anything that improves our productivity.
Money is just a proxy, and long-term, we need to be providing roughly as much value to other economies as they provide to us. Otherwise, we're just expecting tribute from all those other countries.
Well sure, but thats why we specialize. They have cheap labor, we have Google, Apple, etc. People buy our ipods, and search with adwords, and we make money. There's a billion people in India. If we give them jobs, they can affod iPods, and the money comes back. We don't *need* to be good at making t-shirts, if we can design ipods and search engines. Its specialization. We do what we're good at, they do what they're good at. It might have some caveats, but its better than locking ourselves in and insisting everything be USA only. People need to understand that. -Taylor
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
Actually, Obama is right. Yes, its counter-intuitive, but if you actually study economics, it makes perfect sense. The gist of it is that if a job gets offshored to a country that can do the same job for cheaper, Americans benefit by having access to that cheaper product or service (there may or may not be a reduction in quality, but for many things this may not be an issue. I hate offshore call-centers though.) You may think: who gives a shit if I have cheaper goods if I'm out of a job!? Well, fair enough, losing a job is a shitty thing, and if you have to get a lower paying job, you won't be directly better off, but overall, America is better off for it. Look at the chair you're sitting on, the desk your computer is at, the clothes you're wearing. Most likely, many of those things were not made in the US, and you probably benefitted greatly from it. I recently went to a Renaissance Faire around here and bought a traditional Renaissance Style outfit. It was all handmade, right here in america, by small local vendors. It also cost me $300. It was high quality, but very expensive. Day to day, I don't need that kind of quality. At the moment I'm wearing a pair of $5 pajama pants from Target. There would be no $5 pants if everything were made in the US.
What I'm getting at is that offshoring lowers the *cost of living*, by giving regular people access to nicer goods at lower prices, which in turn means that even if you get a job as a janitor, you're certainly living a better life than even the rich people from 100 years ago. If you walk into Target today, all that stuff, clean and nice and made for middle america, is because of offshoring. You don't *need* to make as much money with offshoring because everything is dirt cheap now.
That said, losing your job will *not* make your life better, obviously. In general, losing jobs is a crappy side effect. But losing jobs is kind of a one time thing. Many people may have lost manufacturing jobs in the 80's when things started to be made elsewhere, but in the current generation of kids, there won't be a huge number of them who will lose a factory job, because they won't be trying to *get* a factory job. They'll be trying to get some other job that the US is more capable of. They'll get an engineering job or something that is more likely to stay here. Or they will be a happy janitor because even janitors have a good life nowadays. But it doesn't make sense for us to make things that someone else could make for cheaper - that is an inefficient use of our economy, and it causes bloat and wastes money. If someone else is better at doing something, we should let them do it. That's called specialization, and pretending it doesn't make sense it hurting our economy.
Globalization helps us all overall. It has lowered the standard of living accross the world for generations. Losing your job is really shitty, but the answer is not to just move backward and resist globalization. What we *should* do is find some way to keep globalizing without hurting individuals in the US, but I haven't heard of a good solution to that yet. No american should be left behind, but we also can't make our economy less efficient by trying to protect everyone. -Taylor
Never. There's no need. You can own the hardware. You just can't use any of the software included until you agree to the license, and thereby agree to Apple's restrictions on how you use the hardware.
That's the cleverness, really. They don't control your ownership of the hardware. So to a naive observer, you're completely in charge. But the moment you actually try to use any functionality embodied in the included software (i.e., anything capability beside "crappy doorstop" and "blender fodder"), Apple owns you. As long as your path coincides with Apple's decisions, you're golden. But try to do anything they don't want you to do... "You get nothing! you lose! Good day, Sir!"
That's why I liked the first iPhone. They sold it for $200 on the assumption that you'd go home and activate it with a new contract. I bought mine for $200 and then just unlocked it with the cracks online.
Never had to agree to anything.:)
Too bad they immediate figured out that it was a terrible way to do business. -Taylor
By reading more than five words of this post, you now owe me $50. Additionally, I consider blinking to be a second viewing. Successive views cost $(50^n) where n is the number of sandwiches in the nearest bakery. -Taylor
Seriously, well done sir. I love it when I solve problems in real time with engineering.
Bah, this whole article annoys me. It wasn't engineering, and he didn't need to "kick into engineer mode" like the summary says.
He just said: if I get in front of that guy and slam on my brakes, I can stop him. Except he had to make it nerdy, because he's probably a bit weird. Its not like he wouldn't have figured that out if he wasn't an engineer.
It's a great and heroic thing that he did, but saying he applied any engineering or physics is like saying I decided to apply biology by eating an apple and then sh*tting it out. -Taylor
The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?
Jesus christ you're lazy!
I don't know, poke around. They even list a number to call to get a rebroadcast version of the press conference:
"Media Telecon: LCROSS and LRO Science Science Results of Lunar Impact10.21.10 Date: Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 Time: 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT A replay of the teleconference will be available until Nov. 4, 2010 by dialing 888-566-0674 from within the United States, or 203-369-3084 internationally. Passcode is 6267."
You complained about not being able to access the information that we have a legal right to access freely (everything NASA does is public domain, or something like that).
I guess i figured my point went without saying, but i must have been wrong. My point was: If you look around, the information *is* available. It just might not be in the format you want. Some reporter for a newspaper sat around and listened to that press conference though, and made the data easier to get to. That paywall pays for that man's time. If you don't want to pay, NASA provides the number to call and listen yourself. Or, the other point I was trying to make, is that you could just google around. A quick search for "nasa lcross gold" brought up: http://www.universetoday.com/76329/water-on-the-moon-and-much-much-more-latest-lcross-results/
I'm sure NASA will put the data online at some point, but people have to write reports and all that. Until then, your options are pretty clear, and I don't see any cause to complain, except to be annoying. -Taylor
TFA is saying that one of the reasons the valley won't manufacture cars is because they'll have to import engineers from elsewhere since the ones already in the place are only qualified in microelectronics and aren't qualified in the heavy duty engineering needed for manufacturing.
Silicon Valley's already full of imported engineers who were brought in to work as coders. I'm one of them. I don't see why they couldn't import the necessary skills. The valley is a very attractive proposition to someone living in India, or in England as was the case for me.
Yeah, that was a pretty weak point. ALL of the engineers ONLY do microelectronics? I'm pretty sure that a smart Silicon Valley company can find enough engineers skilled with real world electrical systems to make a car. -Taylor
I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.
Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?
I think a certain university network I know has (had?) 10 GB/day. However, that did not apply to intra-campus bandwidth so it only encouraged people to access the ridiculous amounts available locally.
Aww man, that just reminded me of the private P2P network my buddies setup in college a few years ago. It was totally local and private, and it was invite only, so there was basically no risk of getting caught. Very much content was shared over that link.
I'm surprised fragmentation is his choice of argument against Android. There are several things iOS does better than Android, but it's getting harder and harder to develop for iOS because of fragmentation. Hell, it used to be called iPhone OS, not iOS, but now you have to make sure your code works on previous generation iPhones, the 4's retina display, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Resolution differences, support for multitasking, and camera differences are all getting more difficult to manage!
Yes, but "fragmented" is so believable if you don't actually have any experience with android - it makes great FUD! I mean, there's lots of phones running android, so they must all be different and incompatible. Look at all the laptops running windows that weren't intercompatible! I mean, once Windows 7 came out, Windows XP became basically unusable!/s -Taylor
iOS does things one way, Android does things another way. Some people prefer one, some people prefer the other. Some like Coca-cola. Some like Pepsi. Just pick the one you want.
Wait, let me sensationalize that for you:
Some people like Android, Some people like iOS. Just like some people like Coca-Cola, and some people like being ravaged by a pack of rabid wildebeests. -Taylor
You might be right Taylor.. but if an industry company starts to throw big resources at this idea.. it might happen sooner than you think. There's always the following breakthroughs.. You know? Where you are sitting on the pot and go whoops! I didn't think of that before! Additionally, he may not be disclosing the truth.. let people know about it but surprise them (the competition) when it comes up..
This is pretty much never how it happens. If the scientist doesn't think it will happen soon, it's really unlikely to happen soon. Hell, even processors that are *done* still take a year to come to market. This guy is talking about maybe having a working version of an entirely new transistor in 5 years... There is usually not much rushing that kind of thing, and scientists like this guy know that.
And those breakthroughs you speak of never seem to happen. This year's technology always seems to be just a little bit faster than last years. Moore's law has gone pretty much unchanged for more than 50 years. There simply hasn't been any single large jump in computing power like what this article suggests may happen. I would love it if it did, but it is just very unlikely. -Taylor
So, this is becoming a trend. Bad summary. It's not an outright lie, just misleading. From reading the article, one might get the sense that we might see this in products in 5 years. However, the article actually states that the guy said: "I'm one of those researchers that really cringes at the thought of saying this [new technology] can be useful. I think for us, maybe within five years we can get one device working."
So, the guy is realistic, and not a douche. "We can maybe get one working in 5 years" is not the same as seeing it in devices in 5 years (which, again, wasn't explicitly stated in the summary, but i feel like thats what people would think).
In reality, we might get something in products in 10 years. -Taylor
While everything mentioned is a big detractor, that doesn't mean that Linux on the Desktop is dead. At some point, someone could come up with a way to make it work. Ubuntu was certainly more of a leap than a step in the right direction. It's moving closer every year. Of course, the desktop seems to be moving away every year too, it's a catch-up race with MS and Apple in the lead. Overall, it does seem Linux is gaining ground, just slowly.
I agree. What about the current state of linux says anything about the race being over?
I have always imagined that in 10 or 20 years, microsoft will lose popularity, and linux will creep up just ready to take over.
More specifically, with all these new mobile devices trying out new interfaces, I imagine that today's youth will be much more likely to pick up a new interface. That means they won't have the same aversion to something new as people who have, say, only used windows or mac os for the last 15 years.
So some day, linux will get there. Just don't keep thinking it's next year. -Taylor
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
I never have figured out how those 3 colored buttons work. Always confusing for me. Easy to remember I'm sure, if I bothered, but not intuitive, that's for sure. -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
But what if my children are exposed to the hateful words being passed around in all this!?
Your openness is causing my property value to go down!
Arse!
I hope Assange is as well-protected as he seems to be. He may already have the US Gov't after him, but if it's banks and pharmaceutical companies too, things are only going to get worse.
I really hope some of this stuff makes people stop saying "We hate wikileaks" and start saying "hey thanks for letting us know we were all getting fucked."
The general public needs to be reminded that censorship isn't the answer. It seems to be the only thing they want nowadays.
-Taylor
And a "Windows ME" sticker next to the Gateway one.
Or "Vista Capable".
Can it play regular CDs or DVDs? Can you easily plug a thumb drive into it or otherwise upload additional information without needing a fast network connection or another computer running inside the car? There are lots of things tablets *don't* do well yet. Cellphone docks for cars have been around a long time, they probably do everything you want (except having an extra large screen) and have the added benefit of being more portable (trust me you really don't want to leave your ipad inside your car unless your car never leaves your garage)...
So not surprisingly, the iPad/Galaxy Tab are nice (as are car computers, and traditional stereos) but it's all up to the user to say what's important and what's not.
The new Dell Duo might work really well for this. It acts as either a tablet or a netbook, but with a much better hinge design than traditional convertibles, so it looks a lot nicer when in tablet mode. It also runs a touch friendly media skin by default when in tablet mode, which may (or may not) be nice for in car use. Then, with a well-designed dash dock, you could pop the thing out and use it as a regular windows 7 netbook (or keep using it as a tablet) when you needed to.
It would be cool to set up your system to just play all audio received from a bluetooth connection, so that the tablet wouldn't need to be hard wired to anything (except power).
Now I'm wanting to do this...
"Edelman notes that Google cites its use of unbiased algorithms to dismiss antitrust scrutiny, and he recalls the DOJ's intervention in airlines providing favorable results for its own flights in customer reservation systems they owned."
Er, airlines sell tickets for profit. What exactly does Google make from you when you use their search engine?
What do they make? Eight billion dollars a year.
(bah, can't paste still. slashdot hates chrome. I was going to cite my source.)
Do you think they do it just for fun? By keeping you in their services for longer, they continue to show you ads and make their money.
Of course, I'm fine with all that.
-Taylor
Seems to me that quantifying decayed isotopes in rocks is actually more straightforward. With the added bonus of giving THE CORRECT ANSWER.
His point is that even if you believe the bible word for word, there really isn't any evidence that the earth is the supposed 6000 years old. Even believing the bible, it could be 6 billion years old.
Of course most of us (on slashdot, specifically) don't believe the bible word for word or maybe at all, but its a powerful argument to say that even if you do, most interpretations are flawed.
-Taylor
Even if they're passengers, there's no technology available (now or ever) which can distinguish between a cell being used by a driver and a cell being used by a passenger. Selective disabling is not possible, so passengers will also be affected.
Not now or ever? Thats ridiculous. Mandate the installation of a special sensor chip in all new phones and mandate some kind of sensor in each car that can tell if a phone is in the front seat or the rear. Then only let the phone work if its in the rear seat. Its too hard to let the front seat passenger still use a phone because the driver could just hold his phone over there, which is more dangerous. There are a variety of technologies that could work for that, RFID being just one. A visible IR beacon is also possible, but easier to foil.
Hell, L5 GPS can tell where you are to within a few inches. In a few years those chips will be in every cell phone, so they'll know where they are. Put in a local repeater in the car and define a zone near the driver where it doesn't allow the phone to be used, and boom, you're good.
I'd never advocate doing any of the above (i'm against overreaching legislations like that and costly annoying mandates that make technology worse, among other things), and actually think it would be fucking stupid as all hell to do, but lets not get confused between "possible" and a "good idea." It is absolutely possible if you design the whole system properly. There would be ways to circumvent any of the above methods but that would always be the case.
Its silly to say we couldn't do something like that. Nearly anything is possible with enough effort. This one wouldn't even be that difficult (technologically).
-Taylor
OMG! A toradno iz comin. proced 2 teh nearest evacushun sheltr
You joke, but actually twitter is extremely useful for these kinds of things. Since you're hearing direct from other people, you get news of everything pretty much immediately. If there's an earthquake, its all over twitter in seconds (assuming you follow people that live in the relevant area).
-Taylor
Maybe punching through those boards the way he does in the video requires a 17-fold increase in strength, but you could just teach a guy proper board-breaking alignment and get the same result. Make him punch a hole in a telephone pole or a sidewalk or something.
Bruce Lee was never a fan of board breaking for exactly this reason. Yes, if you line them up perfectly you can do this without the suit. However, as you can plainly see in the video, these were not lined up in this way, and were in fact compressed together in a vice. Maybe your suggestion is correct - they would have done well to stay away from the showmanship employed by 'martial artists' to break boards. But it seems to me that it wasn't necessarily intended to draw those comparisons.
I was more annoyed by the fact that the same thing could have been done with a hammer - which the big heavy suit would have acted like even if it wasn't powered. Three pine boards aren't that hard to break, its just going to hurt your hand. That suit protected the guy's hand, which was all that was really needed. It was basically a big battering ram. I bet a pair of brass knuckles would do the same thing.
-Taylor
Are extremely easy to break, which is why we use them in tae kwon do. Little kids have to break them for testing. Adults would often punch or kick through 3 or 4 boards like this. Not impressed.
Yeah. I was noticing that they're oriented to favor the grain, and they're not attached to eachother, so you mostly have to break the first one and the others will break with not much more effort, I would imagine.
I have a feeling that a pair of brass knuckles would be enough to do what he did comfortably. You just need a hard impact with something to protect your hand. The suit would have provided that whether it was powered or not.
I hate hacky news shows. I also hate slashdot articles that keep the sensationalized descriptions.
Also, the only thing holding us back from a functioning Iron Man suit is the power supply. If we had Tony's Arc Reactor, we could pretty much do the rest. So we're no steps closer until that is done.
-Taylor
Sure, for a little while. What you're describing, though, is a case of money completely leaving our economy, and not generally for anything that improves our productivity.
Money is just a proxy, and long-term, we need to be providing roughly as much value to other economies as they provide to us. Otherwise, we're just expecting tribute from all those other countries.
Well sure, but thats why we specialize. They have cheap labor, we have Google, Apple, etc. People buy our ipods, and search with adwords, and we make money. There's a billion people in India. If we give them jobs, they can affod iPods, and the money comes back. We don't *need* to be good at making t-shirts, if we can design ipods and search engines. Its specialization. We do what we're good at, they do what they're good at. It might have some caveats, but its better than locking ourselves in and insisting everything be USA only. People need to understand that.
-Taylor
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
Actually, Obama is right. Yes, its counter-intuitive, but if you actually study economics, it makes perfect sense. The gist of it is that if a job gets offshored to a country that can do the same job for cheaper, Americans benefit by having access to that cheaper product or service (there may or may not be a reduction in quality, but for many things this may not be an issue. I hate offshore call-centers though.) You may think: who gives a shit if I have cheaper goods if I'm out of a job!? Well, fair enough, losing a job is a shitty thing, and if you have to get a lower paying job, you won't be directly better off, but overall, America is better off for it. Look at the chair you're sitting on, the desk your computer is at, the clothes you're wearing. Most likely, many of those things were not made in the US, and you probably benefitted greatly from it. I recently went to a Renaissance Faire around here and bought a traditional Renaissance Style outfit. It was all handmade, right here in america, by small local vendors. It also cost me $300. It was high quality, but very expensive. Day to day, I don't need that kind of quality. At the moment I'm wearing a pair of $5 pajama pants from Target. There would be no $5 pants if everything were made in the US.
What I'm getting at is that offshoring lowers the *cost of living*, by giving regular people access to nicer goods at lower prices, which in turn means that even if you get a job as a janitor, you're certainly living a better life than even the rich people from 100 years ago. If you walk into Target today, all that stuff, clean and nice and made for middle america, is because of offshoring. You don't *need* to make as much money with offshoring because everything is dirt cheap now.
That said, losing your job will *not* make your life better, obviously. In general, losing jobs is a crappy side effect. But losing jobs is kind of a one time thing. Many people may have lost manufacturing jobs in the 80's when things started to be made elsewhere, but in the current generation of kids, there won't be a huge number of them who will lose a factory job, because they won't be trying to *get* a factory job. They'll be trying to get some other job that the US is more capable of. They'll get an engineering job or something that is more likely to stay here. Or they will be a happy janitor because even janitors have a good life nowadays. But it doesn't make sense for us to make things that someone else could make for cheaper - that is an inefficient use of our economy, and it causes bloat and wastes money. If someone else is better at doing something, we should let them do it. That's called specialization, and pretending it doesn't make sense it hurting our economy.
Globalization helps us all overall. It has lowered the standard of living accross the world for generations. Losing your job is really shitty, but the answer is not to just move backward and resist globalization. What we *should* do is find some way to keep globalizing without hurting individuals in the US, but I haven't heard of a good solution to that yet. No american should be left behind, but we also can't make our economy less efficient by trying to protect everyone.
-Taylor
Never. There's no need. You can own the hardware. You just can't use any of the software included until you agree to the license, and thereby agree to Apple's restrictions on how you use the hardware.
That's the cleverness, really. They don't control your ownership of the hardware. So to a naive observer, you're completely in charge. But the moment you actually try to use any functionality embodied in the included software (i.e., anything capability beside "crappy doorstop" and "blender fodder"), Apple owns you. As long as your path coincides with Apple's decisions, you're golden. But try to do anything they don't want you to do... "You get nothing! you lose! Good day, Sir!"
That's why I liked the first iPhone. They sold it for $200 on the assumption that you'd go home and activate it with a new contract. I bought mine for $200 and then just unlocked it with the cracks online.
Never had to agree to anything. :)
Too bad they immediate figured out that it was a terrible way to do business.
-Taylor
By reading more than five words of this post, you now owe me $50. Additionally, I consider blinking to be a second viewing. Successive views cost $(50^n) where n is the number of sandwiches in the nearest bakery.
-Taylor
In a CHiPs episode!
Seriously, well done sir. I love it when I solve problems in real time with engineering.
Bah, this whole article annoys me. It wasn't engineering, and he didn't need to "kick into engineer mode" like the summary says.
He just said: if I get in front of that guy and slam on my brakes, I can stop him. Except he had to make it nerdy, because he's probably a bit weird. Its not like he wouldn't have figured that out if he wasn't an engineer.
It's a great and heroic thing that he did, but saying he applied any engineering or physics is like saying I decided to apply biology by eating an apple and then sh*tting it out.
-Taylor
The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?
Jesus christ you're lazy!
I don't know, poke around. They even list a number to call to get a rebroadcast version of the press conference:
"Media Telecon: LCROSS and LRO Science Science Results of Lunar Impact10.21.10
Date: Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010
Time: 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT
A replay of the teleconference will be available until Nov. 4, 2010 by dialing 888-566-0674 from within the United States, or 203-369-3084 internationally. Passcode is 6267."
You complained about not being able to access the information that we have a legal right to access freely (everything NASA does is public domain, or something like that).
I guess i figured my point went without saying, but i must have been wrong. My point was: If you look around, the information *is* available. It just might not be in the format you want. Some reporter for a newspaper sat around and listened to that press conference though, and made the data easier to get to. That paywall pays for that man's time. If you don't want to pay, NASA provides the number to call and listen yourself. Or, the other point I was trying to make, is that you could just google around. A quick search for "nasa lcross gold" brought up:
http://www.universetoday.com/76329/water-on-the-moon-and-much-much-more-latest-lcross-results/
I'm sure NASA will put the data online at some point, but people have to write reports and all that. Until then, your options are pretty clear, and I don't see any cause to complain, except to be annoying.
-Taylor
TFA is saying that one of the reasons the valley won't manufacture cars is because they'll have to import engineers from elsewhere since the ones already in the place are only qualified in microelectronics and aren't qualified in the heavy duty engineering needed for manufacturing.
Silicon Valley's already full of imported engineers who were brought in to work as coders. I'm one of them. I don't see why they couldn't import the necessary skills. The valley is a very attractive proposition to someone living in India, or in England as was the case for me.
Yeah, that was a pretty weak point. ALL of the engineers ONLY do microelectronics? I'm pretty sure that a smart Silicon Valley company can find enough engineers skilled with real world electrical systems to make a car.
-Taylor
I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.
Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?
Thanks to google, I can find it all by myself.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/main/oct_21_media_telecon.html
-Taylor
I think a certain university network I know has (had?) 10 GB/day. However, that did not apply to intra-campus bandwidth so it only encouraged people to access the ridiculous amounts available locally.
Aww man, that just reminded me of the private P2P network my buddies setup in college a few years ago. It was totally local and private, and it was invite only, so there was basically no risk of getting caught. Very much content was shared over that link.
Ahh, the good ol days.
-Taylor
I'm surprised fragmentation is his choice of argument against Android. There are several things iOS does better than Android, but it's getting harder and harder to develop for iOS because of fragmentation. Hell, it used to be called iPhone OS, not iOS, but now you have to make sure your code works on previous generation iPhones, the 4's retina display, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Resolution differences, support for multitasking, and camera differences are all getting more difficult to manage!
Yes, but "fragmented" is so believable if you don't actually have any experience with android - it makes great FUD! I mean, there's lots of phones running android, so they must all be different and incompatible. Look at all the laptops running windows that weren't intercompatible! I mean, once Windows 7 came out, Windows XP became basically unusable! /s
-Taylor
iOS does things one way, Android does things another way. Some people prefer one, some people prefer the other. Some like Coca-cola. Some like Pepsi. Just pick the one you want.
Wait, let me sensationalize that for you:
Some people like Android, Some people like iOS. Just like some people like Coca-Cola, and some people like being ravaged by a pack of rabid wildebeests.
-Taylor
You might be right Taylor.. but if an industry company starts to throw big resources at this idea.. it might happen sooner than you think. There's always the following breakthroughs.. You know? Where you are sitting on the pot and go whoops! I didn't think of that before! Additionally, he may not be disclosing the truth.. let people know about it but surprise them (the competition) when it comes up..
This is pretty much never how it happens. If the scientist doesn't think it will happen soon, it's really unlikely to happen soon. Hell, even processors that are *done* still take a year to come to market. This guy is talking about maybe having a working version of an entirely new transistor in 5 years... There is usually not much rushing that kind of thing, and scientists like this guy know that.
And those breakthroughs you speak of never seem to happen. This year's technology always seems to be just a little bit faster than last years. Moore's law has gone pretty much unchanged for more than 50 years. There simply hasn't been any single large jump in computing power like what this article suggests may happen. I would love it if it did, but it is just very unlikely.
-Taylor
So, this is becoming a trend. Bad summary. It's not an outright lie, just misleading. From reading the article, one might get the sense that we might see this in products in 5 years. However, the article actually states that the guy said:
"I'm one of those researchers that really cringes at the thought of saying this [new technology] can be useful. I think for us, maybe within five years we can get one device working."
So, the guy is realistic, and not a douche. "We can maybe get one working in 5 years" is not the same as seeing it in devices in 5 years (which, again, wasn't explicitly stated in the summary, but i feel like thats what people would think).
In reality, we might get something in products in 10 years.
-Taylor
While everything mentioned is a big detractor, that doesn't mean that Linux on the Desktop is dead. At some point, someone could come up with a way to make it work. Ubuntu was certainly more of a leap than a step in the right direction. It's moving closer every year. Of course, the desktop seems to be moving away every year too, it's a catch-up race with MS and Apple in the lead. Overall, it does seem Linux is gaining ground, just slowly.
I agree. What about the current state of linux says anything about the race being over?
I have always imagined that in 10 or 20 years, microsoft will lose popularity, and linux will creep up just ready to take over.
More specifically, with all these new mobile devices trying out new interfaces, I imagine that today's youth will be much more likely to pick up a new interface. That means they won't have the same aversion to something new as people who have, say, only used windows or mac os for the last 15 years.
So some day, linux will get there. Just don't keep thinking it's next year.
-Taylor
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
I never have figured out how those 3 colored buttons work. Always confusing for me. Easy to remember I'm sure, if I bothered, but not intuitive, that's for sure.
-Taylor