I don't know how much I would even use calling built into Gmail, but I surely won't complain about added functionality. The problem I've found with using computers as phones is that you are tied sitting down in one location, most likely stuck with a headset on since using speakers would result in lots of echo.
Lots of people already make phone calls while sitting in front of a computer -- and use the computer while making the phone call. In those cases, not needing to go to a separate device to place the call has obvious utility. And, as an email app, GMail is a place where people are likely to receive a communication that they might want to follow up via another medium -- text and voice chatting are already integrated into GMail, so adding voice calling to phones is a fairly obvious extension.
Applications like Teamspeak and Ventrilo make sense because usually when you're using them, you're already at a computer.
If you are using GMail, you're already at a computer, too.
Why can't a big action flick have a decent script?
If you think that no actual big action movies have decent scripts, then the reason is probably that the number of people that share your subjective taste in scripts that also would be willing to watch a big action movie in any case, regardless of script quality, don't represent a big enough demographic to support such films in the market.
Guessing at the literacy rates in 1229, what are the chances that a sticky-fingered thief would also be able to read the curse in order to feel the dread that it was meant to create?
I suspect the literacy rate among people who would be inclined to steal books was pretty high.
Baen, a publishing house that specializes in fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a militaristic bent, says that they've found that e-books significantly increase profits, even though they sell their (DRM-free) e-books for substantially less than they sell dead-tree versions.
Where "substantially less" sometimes means "free" (for instance, as I recall, several of the most recent _Honor Harrington_ hardbacks came, in their initial release, with CDs of the entire previous run of the series (and several titles outside) in multiple e-book formats.)
Of course, one of the reasons people might be relunctant to buy a new book in a series is that they haven't read the prior books, and often its very hard to find prior books in the series in stores. So packaging ebooks of the rest of the series with the hardback may well be a good way to increase hardback sales.
option a: Sell book X with adds for $1, and without for $10. Ad mone makes $9 per book, average net for each book sold: $10
option b: only sell book X with adds for $10 because the only three other e-book retailers are doing the same. Ad money still makes $9 per book, average net is $19.
Depends. If only 100,000 people who are willing to pay $10 for a title without ads, only 50,000 are willing to pay $10 for it with ads, and 500,000 are willing to pay $1 with ads, but only 50,000 of the last group prefer $1 with ads to $10 without, then option b makes $19 x 50,000 = $950,000 on the title, and option a makes $10 x 450,000 + $10 x 50,000 = $950,000. So they would both be equal.
Its pretty easy to change any of those parameters and make either option b or option a the winner.
You seem to presume that option b will always be the winner because it maximizes the profit per copy sold. But a rational profit-maximizing firm wants to maximize total profit, not profit per copy.
Worse still they have to do their budgets every year and frequently they'll end up with a new budget just before the end of the year that it was supposed to represent.
Well, no.
The most-delayed California budget ever was for the 2009 State Fiscal Year (July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009) and was passed on September 23, 2008 -- extremely late, but less than 1/4 of the way through the year, not "just before the end of the year it was supposed to represent."
And that's the worst case ever (to date, at any rate), not a regular occurrence.
If it stops anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose (except maybe SFO airport - which could help make it a lot more useful), then it isn't going to be particularly high speed.
Both the north end and south end have fairly closely spaced stations and won't, as I understand it, reach the full speed that the long run through the central valley with much less frequent stations will reach.
Why the hell can't we just have taxes for the purpose of paying for government? Rather than these "I don't like what you do with your life so I'm going to try to hinder you from doing it through a passive-aggressive tax measure"
The reason taxes are directed at activities that impose costs on people other than those who voluntarily participate in the activity is to internalize the external costs of the activity. External costs are a source of economic inefficiency in markets (as are external benefits, which are internalized through subsidies.)
California voters approved a high-speed rail ballot initiative recently that would build really high-speed trains from San Francisco to LA to San Diego, and also to points in between and Sacramento. The initiative approved $10Billion in bonds for construction - but the official estimated cost was about $30B, and the followup Oops-you-mean-the-WHOLE-Cost cost was about $40B, so they're depending on $30B of Federal money to magically fall from the sky.
Well, that would be true if Prop. 1A funds and Federal funds were assumed to be the only funds in the universe that could be used for the project. In fact, according to the High Speed Rail Authority, the current estimate is $45 billion:
$9 billion from Prop. 1A (about $1 billion of the Prop. 1A funds were for conventional rail improvements, not High Speed Rail per se.) $17-19 billion in federal funds $4-5 billion in local funds $10-12 billion in private funds
They've gotten approval for something like $2B of that $8B the Feds want to spend in the whole country,
Not quite true. California was awarded approximately $2.35 billion of the $8 billion in rail awards issued last year -- it had requested something like $3 billion, IIRC, of about $100 billion in requests from across the nation. Of the $2.35 billion California got last year, $2.25 billion was for the High Speed Rail project, and the remainder was for unrelated upgrades to existing rail service.
California has applied for around $1 billion of the $2.5 billion available this year in rail awards, out of $8.5 billion in requests from States (requests are lower this year because this years awards require a minimum 20% state commitment, while last years did not.)
I don't know what kind of maths they do in the Wall St Journal (yeah, I actually RTFA), but according to the maths that I do from the unfashionable side of my mother's basement, the actual number of offspring after 5 years starting with a single unspayed female cat is zero.
Now, if one starts with two cats however, the number could well be higher...
Not if all that changes is the number of cats involved, it couldn't.
CodeBuster is referring to this: http://www.sonomamarintrain.org/ [sonomamarintrain.org] It may not be "high speed" but everything else he said is accurate.
Its somewhat different that wealthy suburbanites in the North Bay redirected the path of a local commuter rail service that serves primarily the wealthy suburbs of the North Bay than that they redirected a high-speed rail system dependent on long, straight routes designed to connect the major urban areas of the State.
So, if that is what CodeBuster was referring to it would be "accurate" except in all the ways that are relevant to the present discussion.
Running new lines might be practical in a few shorter corridors, but it would be extremely difficult to get either the land or the money to buy such land for longer high-speed runs, such as cross-country.
Yes, its expensive. That's why California's High Speed Rail project is expected to cost a total of $40 billion. Nevertheless, the plan is to build new track for virtually all of the high speed runs, and even for a lot of the new lower-speed feeder runs that are intended to support the main high-speed routes.
No, the federal government gave out $8 billion dollars to State high-speed rail programs last year. (No specific level of matching funds from the States was required, though many of the State projects that were funded already had State funds committed.)
It's giving out $2.3 billion in additional funds this year. (Part of the requirements for this years funds was a commitment that at least 20% of the costs of the project sought to be funded had to come from local funds.)
Most of the funding, though, won't come from the feds, it will come from the states.
"If it was really cost effective some private company would have already built it."
Maybe in the XIX century... Hell, they did it!!!
Much of the US rail network was built by private industry in the 19th Century, true, but even then with it was done with, and only because of, the considerable federal government subsidies that supported it.
Why do that for a short haul trip, I could have just taken my car and not had to fart with any of that.
Because if you take your car, you have to "fart with" traffic and parking and other hassles on both ends of the trip (and traffic potentially in between.) If you take a train with public transit at the endpoints, you don't have to deal with that.
This is, naturally, a bigger deal in urban-urban situations, but then, that's what most of the rail projects are aimed at, anyhow.
Now if I am traveling to a city with decent public transportation like ny and where finding parking is hell then yes I might would do it.
Yeah, well, big cities are pretty popular endpoints for travel, and some of the money going into "high-speed rail" is actually going into the local transit systems that would support the high-speed rail lines. So, yeah, this is pretty much exactly the main focus of the effort, connecting cities.
Even then I can smoke in my car and cannot anyone say shit about it, so the chances of taking the train at least for me are zero.
This may be an important consideration for you, but the inability to smoke in the conveyance is clearly not a dealbreaker for lots of people with travel.
And now they are going to cover the entire nation for $8 billion?
No. $8 billion were awarded last year in grants which did not have matching requirements in the first round of high-speed rail grants (there were $100 billion in State requests for these funds.)
There is another $2.3 billion available to be awarded this year in federal grants -- these require programs to demonstrate 20% local funding to be demonstrated. (There 77 separate applications -- some states submitted multiple applications for different projects within the state -- totalling $8.5 billion have been submitted for this years round.)
The total cost of national high speed rail will be much more than $8 billion: the program which is proceeding in California has an estimated $40 billion total price tag.
No, rail COULD work in the US - it's just that no big company will make $$$$ from it, so no CongressCritters are motivated to do anything about it.
This is kind of a strange in a thread where TFS concerns the billions of dollars that the federal government -- that is, those CongressCritters you are saying aren't motivated to do anything about rail -- have devoted to doing something about high speed rail.
There are other issues besides subsidies. For example, here in California wealth NIMBYs in southern Marin County (near San Francisco) have successfully lobbied to have the proposed high speed rail line either routed around or tunneled under their wealthy suburban communities, at great additional expense, so as not to disrupt their perfect neighborhoods or negatively impact their property values.
Since none of the proposed routes for California's high speed rail have ever come anywhere near Marin County (the two northern termini being San Francisco and Sacramento, and Marin County being north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate), your description is rather implausible.
The only thing even close to that was, IIRC, a lawsuit over the procedures used in the the impact report supporting the part of the Bay Area to Central Valley route, which has forced the High Speed Rail Authority to have the report redone and then reconsider the route based on the new report. But even that isn't anyone successfully lobbying (or suing) to get the route changed, since its quite possible that the original routing decision will be maintained.
Anonymity is lost pretty quickly with IPv6, along with ISPs seeing how many systems you have running on their network, and it exposes systems to OS flaws. no more "hardware firewall" that I can see.
Even if no one makes dedicated IPv6 NAT/Firewall systems, it seems to me it would be pretty straightforward to take an inexpensive box (even a "Wall Wart") with dedicated software to do that, stick it between the rest of your network and the outside world, and acheive exactly the same thing that commercial IPv4 NAT/Firewall devices do.
And its the kind of need I'd expect the community to fill pretty quickly via specialized open-source software stacks (probably built around Linux) if commercial vendors don't (and, quite likely, even if they do.)
I'm reminded that in very small doses (like around 1/6th of the standard dose), valium acts as a stimulant. I had the reason explained to me once (by a doctor) but have since forgotten the mechanism.
As I understand, most depressants that seem to a certain extent to act as stimulants do so by the reverse of the mechanism describe by FreelanceWizard for Ritalin acting as a depressant for ADHD -- they depress the function of areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, resulting in disinhibition.
For xDSL technologies, it depends on your phone line (which the ISP can't predict obviously).
Given as how usually the dominant xDSL provider in any areas is usually the same as the company whose wire telephone service runs on (because of telephone open access rules, they may not be the person you pay your phone bill too, but that's immaterial), I'm not sure that I would agree with the comment about their inability to predict anything about your phone line.
Been there, done that. Analog computers existed 50 years ago because digital computers were too slow. Even then, they were a nice market. Calibration is a big issue, and even with a perfectly calibrated machine you don't have a lot of accuracy. With the speed of today's digital computers, this is a (poor) solution in search of a problem.
Unless, of course, they've improved the calibration suitably, and, by implementing them in silicon rather than with the techniques used 50 years ago, also kept the speed advantage vs. digital computers. Because, even with the speed of todays digital computers, there's always a market for doing specialized applications faster as long as you aren't trading off too much to get it.
Just because it existed before and faded doesn't mean new implementations won't find a role in the current market (as the recent resurgency of non-relational databases illustrates.)
No, Google will still win, but not as big. And that is why Chrome won't just sit there and languish.
Chrome doesn't compete directly with Firefox anywhere that Google derives revenue from it, so Google doesn't win any less if Firefox gets near Chrome.
Nevertheless, I agree that Chrome won't sit there and languish simply because Chrome exists largely for the purpose of creating pressure on browser manufacturers to make better browsers for the kind of apps Google wants to deliver over the web, so for it to do that well, its got to actually create pressure.
OTOH, JavaScript speed may not be the area where Chrome continues to push forward in now, because with the latest rounds of improvements made by browser manufacturers on that front, it may no longer be the biggest deficiency they see.
Just curious, given all these advances in JS speed, are there technical reasons why stuff like Python, Ruby and Perl aren't getting similar improvements in speed?
Python, IIRC, got "similar improvements in speed" before JavaScript. Ruby is getting improvements in speed in newer implementations, but because it isn't as widely used as JavaScript (Ruby isn't built into every browser) not as many resources are being poured into it. I would assume the same is true of Perl, though I don't follow it as closely.
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Lots of people already make phone calls while sitting in front of a computer -- and use the computer while making the phone call. In those cases, not needing to go to a separate device to place the call has obvious utility. And, as an email app, GMail is a place where people are likely to receive a communication that they might want to follow up via another medium -- text and voice chatting are already integrated into GMail, so adding voice calling to phones is a fairly obvious extension.
If you are using GMail, you're already at a computer, too.
If you think that no actual big action movies have decent scripts, then the reason is probably that the number of people that share your subjective taste in scripts that also would be willing to watch a big action movie in any case, regardless of script quality, don't represent a big enough demographic to support such films in the market.
Largely because the costs of materials used to create books have gone up faster than the general rate of inflation.
Where "substantially less" sometimes means "free" (for instance, as I recall, several of the most recent _Honor Harrington_ hardbacks came, in their initial release, with CDs of the entire previous run of the series (and several titles outside) in multiple e-book formats.)
Of course, one of the reasons people might be relunctant to buy a new book in a series is that they haven't read the prior books, and often its very hard to find prior books in the series in stores. So packaging ebooks of the rest of the series with the hardback may well be a good way to increase hardback sales.
Depends. If only 100,000 people who are willing to pay $10 for a title without ads, only 50,000 are willing to pay $10 for it with ads, and 500,000 are willing to pay $1 with ads, but only 50,000 of the last group prefer $1 with ads to $10 without, then option b makes $19 x 50,000 = $950,000 on the title, and option a makes $10 x 450,000 + $10 x 50,000 = $950,000. So they would both be equal.
Its pretty easy to change any of those parameters and make either option b or option a the winner.
You seem to presume that option b will always be the winner because it maximizes the profit per copy sold. But a rational profit-maximizing firm wants to maximize total profit, not profit per copy.
Well, no.
The most-delayed California budget ever was for the 2009 State Fiscal Year (July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009) and was passed on September 23, 2008 -- extremely late, but less than 1/4 of the way through the year, not "just before the end of the year it was supposed to represent."
And that's the worst case ever (to date, at any rate), not a regular occurrence.
Both the north end and south end have fairly closely spaced stations and won't, as I understand it, reach the full speed that the long run through the central valley with much less frequent stations will reach.
The reason taxes are directed at activities that impose costs on people other than those who voluntarily participate in the activity is to internalize the external costs of the activity. External costs are a source of economic inefficiency in markets (as are external benefits, which are internalized through subsidies.)
Well, that would be true if Prop. 1A funds and Federal funds were assumed to be the only funds in the universe that could be used for the project. In fact, according to the High Speed Rail Authority, the current estimate is $45 billion:
$9 billion from Prop. 1A (about $1 billion of the Prop. 1A funds were for conventional rail improvements, not High Speed Rail per se.)
$17-19 billion in federal funds
$4-5 billion in local funds
$10-12 billion in private funds
Not quite true. California was awarded approximately $2.35 billion of the $8 billion in rail awards issued last year -- it had requested something like $3 billion, IIRC, of about $100 billion in requests from across the nation. Of the $2.35 billion California got last year, $2.25 billion was for the High Speed Rail project, and the remainder was for unrelated upgrades to existing rail service.
California has applied for around $1 billion of the $2.5 billion available this year in rail awards, out of $8.5 billion in requests from States (requests are lower this year because this years awards require a minimum 20% state commitment, while last years did not.)
Not if all that changes is the number of cats involved, it couldn't.
Its somewhat different that wealthy suburbanites in the North Bay redirected the path of a local commuter rail service that serves primarily the wealthy suburbs of the North Bay than that they redirected a high-speed rail system dependent on long, straight routes designed to connect the major urban areas of the State.
So, if that is what CodeBuster was referring to it would be "accurate" except in all the ways that are relevant to the present discussion.
Yes, its expensive. That's why California's High Speed Rail project is expected to cost a total of $40 billion. Nevertheless, the plan is to build new track for virtually all of the high speed runs, and even for a lot of the new lower-speed feeder runs that are intended to support the main high-speed routes.
No, the federal government gave out $8 billion dollars to State high-speed rail programs last year. (No specific level of matching funds from the States was required, though many of the State projects that were funded already had State funds committed.)
It's giving out $2.3 billion in additional funds this year. (Part of the requirements for this years funds was a commitment that at least 20% of the costs of the project sought to be funded had to come from local funds.)
Most of the funding, though, won't come from the feds, it will come from the states.
Much of the US rail network was built by private industry in the 19th Century, true, but even then with it was done with, and only because of, the considerable federal government subsidies that supported it.
Because if you take your car, you have to "fart with" traffic and parking and other hassles on both ends of the trip (and traffic potentially in between.) If you take a train with public transit at the endpoints, you don't have to deal with that.
This is, naturally, a bigger deal in urban-urban situations, but then, that's what most of the rail projects are aimed at, anyhow.
Yeah, well, big cities are pretty popular endpoints for travel, and some of the money going into "high-speed rail" is actually going into the local transit systems that would support the high-speed rail lines. So, yeah, this is pretty much exactly the main focus of the effort, connecting cities.
This may be an important consideration for you, but the inability to smoke in the conveyance is clearly not a dealbreaker for lots of people with travel.
No. $8 billion were awarded last year in grants which did not have matching requirements in the first round of high-speed rail grants (there were $100 billion in State requests for these funds.)
There is another $2.3 billion available to be awarded this year in federal grants -- these require programs to demonstrate 20% local funding to be demonstrated. (There 77 separate applications -- some states submitted multiple applications for different projects within the state -- totalling $8.5 billion have been submitted for this years round.)
The total cost of national high speed rail will be much more than $8 billion: the program which is proceeding in California has an estimated $40 billion total price tag.
This is kind of a strange in a thread where TFS concerns the billions of dollars that the federal government -- that is, those CongressCritters you are saying aren't motivated to do anything about rail -- have devoted to doing something about high speed rail.
Since none of the proposed routes for California's high speed rail have ever come anywhere near Marin County (the two northern termini being San Francisco and Sacramento, and Marin County being north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate), your description is rather implausible.
The only thing even close to that was, IIRC, a lawsuit over the procedures used in the the impact report supporting the part of the Bay Area to Central Valley route, which has forced the High Speed Rail Authority to have the report redone and then reconsider the route based on the new report. But even that isn't anyone successfully lobbying (or suing) to get the route changed, since its quite possible that the original routing decision will be maintained.
But nice try.
Even if no one makes dedicated IPv6 NAT/Firewall systems, it seems to me it would be pretty straightforward to take an inexpensive box (even a "Wall Wart") with dedicated software to do that, stick it between the rest of your network and the outside world, and acheive exactly the same thing that commercial IPv4 NAT/Firewall devices do.
And its the kind of need I'd expect the community to fill pretty quickly via specialized open-source software stacks (probably built around Linux) if commercial vendors don't (and, quite likely, even if they do.)
As I understand, most depressants that seem to a certain extent to act as stimulants do so by the reverse of the mechanism describe by FreelanceWizard for Ritalin acting as a depressant for ADHD -- they depress the function of areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, resulting in disinhibition.
Given as how usually the dominant xDSL provider in any areas is usually the same as the company whose wire telephone service runs on (because of telephone open access rules, they may not be the person you pay your phone bill too, but that's immaterial), I'm not sure that I would agree with the comment about their inability to predict anything about your phone line.
Unless, of course, they've improved the calibration suitably, and, by implementing them in silicon rather than with the techniques used 50 years ago, also kept the speed advantage vs. digital computers. Because, even with the speed of todays digital computers, there's always a market for doing specialized applications faster as long as you aren't trading off too much to get it.
Just because it existed before and faded doesn't mean new implementations won't find a role in the current market (as the recent resurgency of non-relational databases illustrates.)
Chrome doesn't compete directly with Firefox anywhere that Google derives revenue from it, so Google doesn't win any less if Firefox gets near Chrome.
Nevertheless, I agree that Chrome won't sit there and languish simply because Chrome exists largely for the purpose of creating pressure on browser manufacturers to make better browsers for the kind of apps Google wants to deliver over the web, so for it to do that well, its got to actually create pressure.
OTOH, JavaScript speed may not be the area where Chrome continues to push forward in now, because with the latest rounds of improvements made by browser manufacturers on that front, it may no longer be the biggest deficiency they see.
Python, IIRC, got "similar improvements in speed" before JavaScript. Ruby is getting improvements in speed in newer implementations, but because it isn't as widely used as JavaScript (Ruby isn't built into every browser) not as many resources are being poured into it. I would assume the same is true of Perl, though I don't follow it as closely.