I don't know how I feel one way or another about all those other articles, but an argument can be made for the GP that, war-related or not, American-related or not, this project shows what can be done if you don't waste precious tax dollars on bullshit such as war or what have you, regardless of what country is involved.
Nononono, if you gotta quote from the movie, get it right:
ED-209: Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
Dick Jones: I think you better do as he says, Mr. Kinney.
[Mr. Kinney drops the pistol on the floor]
ED-209: [advances, growling] You now have 15 seconds to comply.
Just for those who don't remember, the parent refers to the Uncanny Valley principle. It isn't so much that the brain sees the subject as "disfigured", rather, as the subject's appearance is improved and moved more toward the "realistic" end of the scale, the viewer starts seeing the flaws more readily than that which is "right" and begins to find the subject somewhat distasteful. That is, until you get past some arbitrary threshold, then the subject suddenly looks less disgusting, to the point of being pleasant to look at.
Didn't you get the memo? An apostrophe is just a warning that a word ends in 's' of course. That same memo declared that your and you're are one and the same word now, as are there/their/they're and its/it's.
At least, that's the impression one gets these days. I mean, even on brick-and-morter store signage that's visible from a few blocks away. *sigh*
I'll be watching the mail for my phone then. Please send two, as my husband will also need one, and don't forget to set up service. I assume you also plan on paying for said service also?
Someone else said it best: selective throttling is censorship. It is therefore a violation of the First Amendment.
As much as I agree that it is censorship, and as much as I would like to agree that it is a violation of the First Amendment, it is not. The First Amendment is explicitly intended to protect people from government interference when they choose to excercize their right to free speech. Comcast is not (oficially) a government entity, they are a private organization, and by extension, are not subject to the First Amendment.
Nevertheless, what they are doing is dishonest and downright disgusting. My ISP also throttles, but at least they publish their caps. Fwiw, the tier I subscribe to is 3M/300k, but if you download more than about 1.3 GB between 11:59am midnight, they throttle you back from the moment you exceed that threshold, to 1.5M/150k, until after midnight. Their cap/timer resets every night at midnight.
Because there might be grammar mistakes? Not everyone is an English major, but that doesn't make them a monkey.
While I may not write perfectly clean English all of the time, this is a major pet peeve of mine. Maybe most of us aren't English scholars today, but, speaking from an American standpoint for a moment, just about every* single child here was an English major throughout most of their later school years, to say nothing of the children schooled in certain other countries which simply put our educational system to shame. We were all* taught how to write and speak proper English. Many of us (myself excluded) were even taught to speak and write fluently in at least one other language as well. Every* single one of us was also taught to spell.
Call me an elitist, but I would much rather hear/read a report done by a professional than something that reads to the effect of "OMG like everyone ch3ck out that car that bloo up! i hope that never happenz 2 any of u LOLOLOL!!1". After reading dozens of comments on a Route 66 blog/website early this morning, about half of which were of that horrible form, I felt like I had temporarily lost 20 points off my IQ.
* Yeah, yeah, I know not every single person went to school, but they all were supposed to, and parents weren't exactly treated nicely if they let their kids skip too many classes. So, for the sake of this conversation, let's assume everyone did.
Well, here's a clue: being an Engineer means that when you screw up, people die.
Oh, you mean like that pilot a few years ago who was flying some high-end military jet and nearly bought the farm because the guidance system in said jet decided that he should suddenly nose-down 90 degrees when he crossed the International Date Line? Here's a clue for ya: It sure as hell wasn't his engine or wings that failed that day - it was a piece of software.
Ignoring for the moment that "monopoly" is being used incorrectly here (it does, after all, imply that there is only one contender in a given market), it can and will make Microsoft bigger in the sense that they would then have control of more resources than before. That translates to more income and more power, no matter how you slice it. Now, if the question were whether or not company "A" can become bigger than company "B" through mergers and acquisitions, the answer is absolutely yes. All it would take is a scenerio like this:
Company "A": 20% of the market
Company "B": 45%
Company "C": 15%
Company "D": 12%
All others: 8% in total
All company "A" needs in this scenerio is yo buy off companies "C" and "D" and instantly, they control 20+15+12= 47% of the market - 2% larger than company "B".
Thankfully, MS/Google are not part of a scenerio like this, as Google already has over 60% of the search market. That said, MS could probably, if they really *really* wanted to, buy out pretty much everyone else become a close second.
That's not to say they might not find some way to buy enough shares of Google stock to become a controlling partner, but I don't really see that happening either. They'll surely put themselves out of business if they were to try.
[...] Linux was a way of keeping the cost down. And that's the only reason.
We all know that commercial businesses exist for exactly one purpose (once all the platitudes about benefitting humanity have worn off): to make a profit.
Making more profit means doing one or more of:
Focus on Microsoft and keep Linux et.al as a side offer. Seems to be working well so far.
Charge more for your products. Bad idea when it comes to tech hardware.
Spend less to supply them. Always a good idea no matter what your product or target market.
Find ways to draw in more customers. Damned hard to do without involving at least one other option in this list.
Get into some other market. Doesn't seem to work out too well for a lot of companies.
If you can't do any of the above, sooner or later you'll probably go out of business. Maybe in ten years or so, when Microsoft is dead and buried, we will see big names (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) going exclusively non-MS. Until then, let's just be thankful that at least *someone* big is starting to take notice of us, despite what their motives seem to be.
I don't think that he was referring to the TS's genetic code or sex characteristics, per se. Rather, he was asking if a M2F TS can use this method to 'conceive' a child in some manner. The answer is almost certainly "yes", if a surrogate mother is involved, since the technique (in the context of this article/method) for gathering the genetic material wouldn't be any different than with a natural male or female donor.
Now, if the M2F wants to carry the child herself, it really only comes down to whether a male can at all - regardless of whether that male is TS or not. Ignoring a certain 1994 Schwarzenegger/DeVito movie and that "art" experiment with the Asian guy from a few years ago, it is possible for a male to carry a child to term, if you pump him/her full of enough of the right chemicals.
I can see that you've forgotten that there are actually a few women on this website (or you've chose to ignore the feelings of those of us who are present).
Yes, we want financial security - name me just one person in this world, of either sex, who doesn't. Yes, most (but not all) of us want to raise families. Yes, we want you to share the workload of raising the kids - it's a damned hard job, as I'm sure you are aware, on top of whatever other 'duties' the woman of the house takes on (e.g. the stereotypical cook/clean/sew routine).
Yes, the mother-child bond is strong - damned strong - but the bond between the two partners is only as weak as the weakest member of that partnership. Period.
The simple fact is, we're not all the way you've described, and if you've been "lucky" enough to find only that subset of women that are, then you are surely looking in the wrong place(s), and/or you just don't know jack shit about women.
No, it would be more like having the user's web browser trap out 404's and similar and automatically redirect the user to some other URL on another server. I.e. client side, rather than server side. Still, haven't I seen something like that in use already?
I can't say that specialized parts have destroyed LEGO or even hurt it that much, considering they still seem to be doing well, but I'm one of those who prefers fewer custom parts. When I look at most newer parts, I don't see new possibilities like I probably should. Instead, I see parts that just look out-of-place next to regular bricks, plates, (studded) beams, and so on.
I'm sure many of us remember seeing pictures of a (really well-done) model of some guy's church that he'd built to minifig scale, or that other guy's working grandfather clock. Those things are *creative* and have inspired me to do the same (or at least, try). I want to build a scale model of my house of worship, and G*d knows I'll have to pour everything I know about LEGO physics into building it. But is it really that creative, since I'm essentially just doing what someone else has already done?
At what point do we, as adults, draw the line between "being creative" and just following someone else's lead?
While I'll admit to having called them "legos" in the past, today I just use the word "LEGO" like any other word that is self-plural, like "fish" or "deer", at least when the subject comes up. I mean, one might just as well say it right since it takes no measureable effort to do so.
Besides, overpricing issues aside, the company deserves the respect of just about everyone here, and you know it. So do them a favor and respect their trademark, just like you'd expect someone to respect the various OSS-related trademarks.
Oh this whole subject pisses me off, but this comment just takes the cake.
I see Medicare/Medicaid and state Medicaid patients all day, every day. They pay nothing.
Not to dispute your choice of profession, but you're just plain wrong here. My husband receives Medicare, and even with that coverage, we still have to pay money out-of-pocket for every single medicine, and for every other service he needs. Case in point: my husband needs surgery to re-position and/or fuse a couple of diseased vertebrae in his lower back. The one surgeon in the area who does this kind of surgery wanted about $70,000, but Medicare only covers 80% (sometimes less) of anything you claim, leaving us to pay a $14,000 balance. That doctor also expected an additional $17,000-ish for the hospital, none of which is covered by Medicare he told us. So, my husband's total bill would have been at least $17,400 if the hospital were covered at the usual 80%, or upwards of $31,000 if the doctor is right about lack of coverage.
We are both disabled, and that second (more likely) figure is well over two years' pay for us! How the hell are we supposed to afford that kind of expense and still pay for a roof over our heads? I mean, seriously, WTF!?
As for Medicaid, whether you pay anything or not depends on the particular implementation of that program where you live. Where I live now, I haven't been able to establish what costs there might be, but where I came from in Florida, you have to pay back every penny the government spends on you should you ever come into some money down the road, no matter how much or how little. Case in point: Over the course of a couple of years, I had accrued several thousand in medical bills, all of which the government agency providing my general medical coverage paid for. I ended up being injured in a car accident (other driver rear-ended us) and received a $10,000 settlement from the offending driver's auto insurance company. Well, I got about $3000 of that settlement, my lawyer took another $2500 or something, and the government agency providing my coverage took the rest. My medical coverage was then terminated because I got too much money from the settlement. I never got back onto that program.
Translation: I paid for no less than 70% of my medical expenses, despite supposedly having health coverage. And yes, it's a Medicaid-affiliated program.
As for Social Security, Your google search has sources which claim that there were errors in the government cost estimates. What no one seems to want to tell people is that we have a surplus of funding that had been built up decades ago, and which is expected to run dry in around 2020ish. At that point, the program will still be at break-even. Take a look at The US budget for 2008. Expenses add up to $2.9 trillion, while the government is showing receipts of only $2.66 trillion. What the Wikipedia article doesn't say is just how much of that spending is pork and how much actually gets spent properly (I'm guessing 50:50 or worse).
By this point, I really shouldn't have to say this, but I will anyway: Stop the wars, stop the government waste, tax the rich more than you tax the poor, and put a fucking cap on the raw cost of medical care. There is NO ETHICAL REASON WHATSOEVER that (quoting a previous poster) an MRI should cost $300 for an individual but $1500 for an insurance company, that a mass-produced vial of insulin should cost $75 for one month's supply, that any pill of any kind should cost more than a few cents each, or that the aforementioned back surgery should cost anywhere close to $96,000.
And to think, this is how I felt *before* I watched "SiCKO". What scares me the most is that practically everything in that movie as far as mainstream US health care is concerned is fact. I'd be better off dead than ill in this country.
Serves me right for staying up this late but I got a little bored... (discrepancies in precision are due to rounding for brievity's sake, bc was set for scale=50).
Let's see.. 2000" probably means the diagonal. Assuming it was a 4:3 display:
Since a^2+b^2=c^2, b=~1.3333333333a, and c=2000, then...
a^2+(1.3333333333a)^2=4000000
a^2+1.7777777778a^2=4000000
2.7777777778a^2=4000000
a^2=1439999.999988
a=1199.999999995
So Frank's TV measures 1600x1200 inches (viewable) or a minimum of 160000x120000 pixels. Since Frank was probably American, let's use NTSC DVD resolution, 720x480. The next multiple of that that beats 100 DPI and is a power of 2 is 256x, or 184320x122880 pixels (115.2x102.4 DPI).
Just to be a smartass, a high-def 16:9 screen would set b=~1.7777777778a, so:
...so the TV would measure about 1743.15x980.52 inches viewable, or 174315x98052 pixels at 100DPI. Assuming the pixels are square, the next largest power of 2 multiple of 1900x1080 would 128x, or 243200x138240 pixels (139.517x140.986 DPI). Close enough to call it square (why'd my math diverge here?).
/me hits "Submit" and prays her math is otherwise right. Algebra's a little rusty.
"...And in other news today, 3D Realms has announced the release of Duke Nukem Forever. Next up, scientists report that average ground temperature readings dove another 10 degrees centigrade, the second in such drop in the past 24 hours."
...the first thing that came to mind when I S(kimmed)TFA was those little flashlights that you shake up to charge. Could this tower design be expanded by, say, multiple magnets/coils along the length of the belt? I'm not talking about a large number of magnets, or anything particularly heavy of course, just something that will add a little extra kick to the single-magnet design shown in the article, without adding to the device's physical footprint.
The junk mail companies seem to know where to find me no matter where my husband and I go. In fact, I always seem to get the first couple of pieces of junk mail within the first week of a move, addressed to me, not forwarded, and often in my maiden name.
The only thing that was in my maiden name the last time this happened was the Verizon land line bill. So if it isn't Verizon that is sharing the data, then who else could it possibly be?
I'm glad we ditched them finally, the old prepaid phone we have ended up being cheaper in the long run.
I remember a guy mailing me with a patch to replace a really dumb subroutine (this was a Perl script) with a one liner. He was very polite and helpful about it, considering how awful it must have looked to him.
Um... it's PERL. Isn't aweful-looking code kind of unavoidable?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how I feel one way or another about all those other articles, but an argument can be made for the GP that, war-related or not, American-related or not, this project shows what can be done if you don't waste precious tax dollars on bullshit such as war or what have you, regardless of what country is involved.
ED-209: Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
Dick Jones: I think you better do as he says, Mr. Kinney. [Mr. Kinney drops the pistol on the floor] ED-209: [advances, growling] You now have 15 seconds to comply.
Just for those who don't remember, the parent refers to the Uncanny Valley principle. It isn't so much that the brain sees the subject as "disfigured", rather, as the subject's appearance is improved and moved more toward the "realistic" end of the scale, the viewer starts seeing the flaws more readily than that which is "right" and begins to find the subject somewhat distasteful. That is, until you get past some arbitrary threshold, then the subject suddenly looks less disgusting, to the point of being pleasant to look at.
At least, that's the impression one gets these days. I mean, even on brick-and-morter store signage that's visible from a few blocks away. *sigh*
I'll be watching the mail for my phone then. Please send two, as my husband will also need one, and don't forget to set up service. I assume you also plan on paying for said service also?
As much as I agree that it is censorship, and as much as I would like to agree that it is a violation of the First Amendment, it is not. The First Amendment is explicitly intended to protect people from government interference when they choose to excercize their right to free speech. Comcast is not (oficially) a government entity, they are a private organization, and by extension, are not subject to the First Amendment.
Nevertheless, what they are doing is dishonest and downright disgusting. My ISP also throttles, but at least they publish their caps. Fwiw, the tier I subscribe to is 3M/300k, but if you download more than about 1.3 GB between 11:59am midnight, they throttle you back from the moment you exceed that threshold, to 1.5M/150k, until after midnight. Their cap/timer resets every night at midnight.
Call me an elitist, but I would much rather hear/read a report done by a professional than something that reads to the effect of "OMG like everyone ch3ck out that car that bloo up! i hope that never happenz 2 any of u LOLOLOL!!1". After reading dozens of comments on a Route 66 blog/website early this morning, about half of which were of that horrible form, I felt like I had temporarily lost 20 points off my IQ.
* Yeah, yeah, I know not every single person went to school, but they all were supposed to, and parents weren't exactly treated nicely if they let their kids skip too many classes. So, for the sake of this conversation, let's assume everyone did.
Oh, you mean like that pilot a few years ago who was flying some high-end military jet and nearly bought the farm because the guidance system in said jet decided that he should suddenly nose-down 90 degrees when he crossed the International Date Line? Here's a clue for ya: It sure as hell wasn't his engine or wings that failed that day - it was a piece of software.
- Company "A": 20% of the market
- Company "B": 45%
- Company "C": 15%
- Company "D": 12%
- All others: 8% in total
All company "A" needs in this scenerio is yo buy off companies "C" and "D" and instantly, they control 20+15+12= 47% of the market - 2% larger than company "B".Thankfully, MS/Google are not part of a scenerio like this, as Google already has over 60% of the search market. That said, MS could probably, if they really *really* wanted to, buy out pretty much everyone else become a close second.
That's not to say they might not find some way to buy enough shares of Google stock to become a controlling partner, but I don't really see that happening either. They'll surely put themselves out of business if they were to try.
We all know that commercial businesses exist for exactly one purpose (once all the platitudes about benefitting humanity have worn off): to make a profit.
Making more profit means doing one or more of:
If you can't do any of the above, sooner or later you'll probably go out of business. Maybe in ten years or so, when Microsoft is dead and buried, we will see big names (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) going exclusively non-MS. Until then, let's just be thankful that at least *someone* big is starting to take notice of us, despite what their motives seem to be.
No, no, no, no..... You're a geek, you're supposed to use *electrical* tape. Jeeze, get with the program already.
Now, if the M2F wants to carry the child herself, it really only comes down to whether a male can at all - regardless of whether that male is TS or not. Ignoring a certain 1994 Schwarzenegger/DeVito movie and that "art" experiment with the Asian guy from a few years ago, it is possible for a male to carry a child to term, if you pump him/her full of enough of the right chemicals.
Robert Winston seems to agree that it is possible but others' evidence says that it's very risky and probably not likely to result in a viable baby at present.
Yeah, yeah, they're Wikipedia sources, sue me.
Yes, we want financial security - name me just one person in this world, of either sex, who doesn't. Yes, most (but not all) of us want to raise families. Yes, we want you to share the workload of raising the kids - it's a damned hard job, as I'm sure you are aware, on top of whatever other 'duties' the woman of the house takes on (e.g. the stereotypical cook/clean/sew routine).
Yes, the mother-child bond is strong - damned strong - but the bond between the two partners is only as weak as the weakest member of that partnership. Period.
The simple fact is, we're not all the way you've described, and if you've been "lucky" enough to find only that subset of women that are, then you are surely looking in the wrong place(s), and/or you just don't know jack shit about women.
No, it would be more like having the user's web browser trap out 404's and similar and automatically redirect the user to some other URL on another server. I.e. client side, rather than server side. Still, haven't I seen something like that in use already?
What would happen if you were to feed some hand-drawn images to this thing? I don't mean paintings as such, line-art. Anime. That sort of stuff.
I'm sure many of us remember seeing pictures of a (really well-done) model of some guy's church that he'd built to minifig scale, or that other guy's working grandfather clock. Those things are *creative* and have inspired me to do the same (or at least, try). I want to build a scale model of my house of worship, and G*d knows I'll have to pour everything I know about LEGO physics into building it. But is it really that creative, since I'm essentially just doing what someone else has already done?
At what point do we, as adults, draw the line between "being creative" and just following someone else's lead?
Besides, overpricing issues aside, the company deserves the respect of just about everyone here, and you know it. So do them a favor and respect their trademark, just like you'd expect someone to respect the various OSS-related trademarks.
Personally, I'd settle for 10 Mbps at $25/mo. As it stands, I am paying $35/mo for 3Mbps.
There, fixed that for you.
Not to dispute your choice of profession, but you're just plain wrong here. My husband receives Medicare, and even with that coverage, we still have to pay money out-of-pocket for every single medicine, and for every other service he needs. Case in point: my husband needs surgery to re-position and/or fuse a couple of diseased vertebrae in his lower back. The one surgeon in the area who does this kind of surgery wanted about $70,000, but Medicare only covers 80% (sometimes less) of anything you claim, leaving us to pay a $14,000 balance. That doctor also expected an additional $17,000-ish for the hospital, none of which is covered by Medicare he told us. So, my husband's total bill would have been at least $17,400 if the hospital were covered at the usual 80%, or upwards of $31,000 if the doctor is right about lack of coverage.
We are both disabled, and that second (more likely) figure is well over two years' pay for us! How the hell are we supposed to afford that kind of expense and still pay for a roof over our heads? I mean, seriously, WTF!?
As for Medicaid, whether you pay anything or not depends on the particular implementation of that program where you live. Where I live now, I haven't been able to establish what costs there might be, but where I came from in Florida, you have to pay back every penny the government spends on you should you ever come into some money down the road, no matter how much or how little. Case in point: Over the course of a couple of years, I had accrued several thousand in medical bills, all of which the government agency providing my general medical coverage paid for. I ended up being injured in a car accident (other driver rear-ended us) and received a $10,000 settlement from the offending driver's auto insurance company. Well, I got about $3000 of that settlement, my lawyer took another $2500 or something, and the government agency providing my coverage took the rest. My medical coverage was then terminated because I got too much money from the settlement. I never got back onto that program.
Translation: I paid for no less than 70% of my medical expenses, despite supposedly having health coverage. And yes, it's a Medicaid-affiliated program.
As for Social Security, Your google search has sources which claim that there were errors in the government cost estimates. What no one seems to want to tell people is that we have a surplus of funding that had been built up decades ago, and which is expected to run dry in around 2020ish. At that point, the program will still be at break-even. Take a look at The US budget for 2008. Expenses add up to $2.9 trillion, while the government is showing receipts of only $2.66 trillion. What the Wikipedia article doesn't say is just how much of that spending is pork and how much actually gets spent properly (I'm guessing 50:50 or worse).
By this point, I really shouldn't have to say this, but I will anyway: Stop the wars, stop the government waste, tax the rich more than you tax the poor, and put a fucking cap on the raw cost of medical care. There is NO ETHICAL REASON WHATSOEVER that (quoting a previous poster) an MRI should cost $300 for an individual but $1500 for an insurance company, that a mass-produced vial of insulin should cost $75 for one month's supply, that any pill of any kind should cost more than a few cents each, or that the aforementioned back surgery should cost anywhere close to $96,000.
And to think, this is how I felt *before* I watched "SiCKO". What scares me the most is that practically everything in that movie as far as mainstream US health care is concerned is fact. I'd be better off dead than ill in this country.
Let's see.. 2000" probably means the diagonal. Assuming it was a 4:3 display:
Since a^2+b^2=c^2, b=~1.3333333333a, and c=2000, then...
a^2+(1.3333333333a)^2=4000000
a^2+1.7777777778a^2=4000000
2.7777777778a^2=4000000
a^2=1439999.999988
a=1199.999999995
So Frank's TV measures 1600x1200 inches (viewable) or a minimum of 160000x120000 pixels. Since Frank was probably American, let's use NTSC DVD resolution, 720x480. The next multiple of that that beats 100 DPI and is a power of 2 is 256x, or 184320x122880 pixels (115.2x102.4 DPI).
Just to be a smartass, a high-def 16:9 screen would set b=~1.7777777778a, so:
a^2+(1.7777777778a)^2=4000000
a^2+3.160493827a^2=4000000
4.160493827a^2=4000000
a^2=961424.3323442
a=980.5224792651
"...And in other news today, 3D Realms has announced the release of Duke Nukem Forever. Next up, scientists report that average ground temperature readings dove another 10 degrees centigrade, the second in such drop in the past 24 hours."
...the first thing that came to mind when I S(kimmed)TFA was those little flashlights that you shake up to charge. Could this tower design be expanded by, say, multiple magnets/coils along the length of the belt? I'm not talking about a large number of magnets, or anything particularly heavy of course, just something that will add a little extra kick to the single-magnet design shown in the article, without adding to the device's physical footprint.
The only thing that was in my maiden name the last time this happened was the Verizon land line bill. So if it isn't Verizon that is sharing the data, then who else could it possibly be?
I'm glad we ditched them finally, the old prepaid phone we have ended up being cheaper in the long run.
Um... it's PERL. Isn't aweful-looking code kind of unavoidable?
Mods: it's funny. laugh.