"Pick someone with a tax plan that adds up, low spending, little war-lust, and who understands what a disaster the "personhood" amendment would be, and then you'll have a race."
Except that it won't reduce the number of such cards. If you stick your Google Card into a random ATM, will it work? No. What's the chance that it will work in a large number of places? Zero. Will it ever? No, because all the card acceptors which expect a single account number to come up won't know how to read something which has multiple account numbers and requires a choice from the user. All the varied card acceptor software systems won't be upgraded to allow this, especially if many of them come from institutions whose economic interests are opposed to Google's.
It takes N cards to N+1 cards.
A moneyclip plus a few key cards reduces the physical burden for a dozen or two dollars, with no information leakage.
What problem does this technology and initiative solve? Whose problem does it solve?
As far as I can tell the only problem these things "solve" is that some intermediary wants to take some of some other intermediary's free money.
There seems to be no benefit to the person they are trying to convince to use it, unless the competition lowers interchange fees to merchants and merchants pass some of it back. And that is about as likely as new developments in simian rectal aviation.
IQ or psychometric 'g' means something specific and robust: that within a single person the performance on some categories of cognitive skills (and other even low level neurological tests) are quite correlated with the performance of other cognitive skills. Think of a test with dozens of subscores, each with one kind of problem.
Why is it that people who are good at word analogies somehow are also good at number sequences? No a priori reason, but it's true. Which is why the common human experience for thousands of years is that some people are smart and others are dumb.
Clearly this correlation does not extend as strongly or at all (barring major developmental defects) to other tasks which certainly involve neurological capability, such as catching a ball, recognizing faces rapidly, recognizing emotions in faces, tapping rhythm accurately, or seducing women.
"Taliban represents the views of Pakistanis the way Terry Jones and skinheads represent the views of the U.S."
The U.S. government does not supply military weapons to Terry Jones and skinheads to kill people of the type they hate in Mexico, and then get "shocked, shocked" when they start killing people of the type they hate in USA, and then the U.S. government doesn't withdraw from Texas and Louisiana and let Skinhead militias terrorize their own people.
"There is nothing to suggest that changing course and going with in-house-customized Android would have somehow been a magical panacea"
Why does it have to be a "magical panacea"? How about "not as bad as the other alternatives?"
Going with Android---even if it were not customized in the slightest but just reasonably modern build from Google would have resulted in this thing which they really need, called "money".
"was going to magically correct their course and turn back to profitable, when pursuing that course had ALREADY put them well down the road to ruin?"
Well, if the problem were that they weren't sure about the mass-market appeal of Meego, that applies twice as much to Windows Phone. Maybe being a #2 in Android phones to Samsung wouldn't be so bad, and they can play with Meego and Windows 8 on the side.
It did look like Elop took an action which was optimal for Microsoft and not for Nokia.
"And why does everyone feel the need to state that a "supersonic" missile would do the trick? Are there any that would be used that aren't these days? Hypersonic might be a different story."
It most certainly is, when it is a long-range ballistic missile. An ICBM warhead upon re-entry falls from stratosphere to sea-level in about 3 seconds. Nearly straight down. This has been indefensible since the 1960's. Now the medium-range ballistic missiles won't be *quite* as fast (who knows 6, 10 seconds?) but the defense problem is still nearly impossible. Much much harder than even a hypersonic sea-skimming missile, which is already very difficult to defend against.
It's not clear to me how the supposed Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile guidance will work, as you have to target accurately in space from 100 kilometers up, but if they have licked this problem then they win--they can launch deep inside their homeland in well defended regions and hit half the Pacific.
"Suicide bombers in speed boats are a bigger threat to naval ships at the moment as it's generally frowned upon when you sink every ship that gets close to you."
This is not a serious wartime threat to a carrier. The aircraft would attack. The F-18 and helicopter aviators will compete like Legolas and Gimli over how many dozen they can sink. F-18 might not even bother using the expensive missiles, guns only just to be macho.
WW2 had aircraft, but no guided anti-ship missiles, other than the Japanese kamikaze (which were very serious threats).
The accuracy rate of missiles and torpedoes today is far far higher and their range better. They are much better at armor piercing and detonating in the most vulnerable spot.
A single modern torpedo will sink a destroyer-sized ship in a minute, and has a very high chance of impact once fired. It has up to a 50 kilometer range---a huge area for anti-submarine operations. It locates the most vulnerable point. Against a carrier it will destroy the reactor and spread all the waste as aquatic fallout. Given that naval nuclear reactors work on very highly-enriched weapons-level uranium, it could create a criticality accident irradating the nearby ships. Other than aircraft crews in the air, survival is likely negligible. It's not like in WW2 where a carrier could take a few hits, and some of the crew could be evacuated in the few hours they were fighting fires. It's likely to be one and done.
"It helps the US factories compete, but does it help the US workers compete?"
It doesn't matter.
Why would a company install robots in an old US factory when it can install them in a new offshore Asian factory, and gain low-cost loans/subsidies from the local government, and also bypass their domestic protectionist tariffs?
Argentina is completely screwed up now. There is no logic other than figuring out strange ways for the government to steal. Oddly enough the president has a huge approval rating. It's an Economic Reality Distortion Field.
It's pretty pathetic, because Argentina has tremendous natural resources compared to its population size and an educated population and few internal ethnic problems (they exterminated their natives in the 19th century). And to the north of them, without those advantages, Brazil is leaving them far behind despite having a robust social welfare state.
Source: in-laws in Buenos Aires; reading Economist.
Is that Price/Earnings ratio of the stock has not been exceptionally high even when Apple's revenue increased dramatically.
"When the media starts calling Apple at a $1 trillion market cap or how about $2000 a share it’s the same thing as the cabbie telling you to buy Apple."
Not quite. You can get $1 trillion market cap by a fairly simple extrapolation of iPhone penetration further into world markets. No large changes in Apple's business model or assumptions about large changes in customer's behavior.
Current market cap is currently over $600 billion.
"If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's also going to drive up labor costs since they'll have to start paying out bonuses to keep employees happy as well as hire replacements for those that quit. Higher operating costs mean there's even more pressure to bring in more revenue."
Fortunately, they have $10B in cash which Zuckerberg (I will use his name personally as he is Facebook as much as Louis XIV was imperial France) raised at an abnormally high price.
A friend of mine knew Shin (as he was known then) when he was an undergraduate. The guy was obscene insane-clown-level genius prodigy. Not the prodigy in the sense of the people who can shoot the lights out of the Putnam Competition but even far deeper than that, and jumping into very difficult and profound concepts by age 17 or 18. He did a small stint doing independent research with Ed Witten before moving up to pure mathematics. By 2nd or 3rd year undergrad (age 17 or so), he was already at an advanced graduate level.
At least some time ago, that may have been become Office for Mac developers were in California with the rest of the company in Washington. So they may have been less affected by the stench of strange practices and ideology.
"I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple."
Probably not but they might have wanted the option. It's not hard to imagine some case where sharing development code might have given competitors information about upcoming Apple hardware designs, and Apple is as freakishly paranoid about that as the FSF is about people using unfree software.
The legal means that GCC used to prohibit various technical circumventions which the FSF believed would benefit "not-free" software, also prohibited a modular design which Apple wanted to, and then later exploited for significant benefit.
The FSF thought that ideology was more important than technical flexibility and capability. As a result, the experience of developing with gcc is about the same as 1989, whereas XCode can do many more things, because compiling programs to machine code is not the alpha and omega of software development tools.
People learn French because people speak French in France.
For programming langauges it's the same.
Programming languages become popular when they come attached to something else that is already popular---and for reasons independent of programming languages. In a nutshell, connecting to operating system facilities which are connected to popular hardware.
If Apple iPhones were programmed in object COBOL, the language would be popular. And after all, few people used Objective-C outside NeXTSTEP/MacOS/iOS. If Apple hadn't bought NeXT for its next operating system, Objective-C would be nearly dead.
Slashdot Mirror
| Iran has strong religious values, and gas at 50 cents a gallon and the most polluted capital city anywhere.
That is what they wish for.
"Pick someone with a tax plan that adds up, low spending, little war-lust, and who understands what a disaster the "personhood" amendment would be, and then you'll have a race."
Sorry, but Bill Clinton is not eligible to run.
Except that it won't reduce the number of such cards. If you stick your Google Card into a random ATM, will it work? No. What's the chance that it will work in a large number of places? Zero. Will it ever? No, because all the card acceptors which expect a single account number to come up won't know how to read something which has multiple account numbers and requires a choice from the user. All the varied card acceptor software systems won't be upgraded to allow this, especially if many of them come from institutions whose economic interests are opposed to Google's.
It takes N cards to N+1 cards.
A moneyclip plus a few key cards reduces the physical burden for a dozen or two dollars, with no information leakage.
What problem does this technology and initiative solve? Whose problem does it solve?
As far as I can tell the only problem these things "solve" is that some intermediary wants to take some of some other intermediary's free money.
There seems to be no benefit to the person they are trying to convince to use it, unless the competition lowers interchange fees to merchants and merchants pass some of it back. And that is about as likely as new developments in simian rectal aviation.
IQ or psychometric 'g' means something specific and robust: that within a single person the performance on some categories of cognitive skills (and other even low level neurological tests) are quite correlated with the performance of other cognitive skills. Think of a test with dozens of subscores, each with one kind of problem.
Why is it that people who are good at word analogies somehow are also good at number sequences? No a priori reason, but it's true. Which is why the common human experience for thousands of years is that some people are smart and others are dumb.
Clearly this correlation does not extend as strongly or at all (barring major developmental defects) to other tasks which certainly involve neurological capability, such as catching a ball, recognizing faces rapidly, recognizing emotions in faces, tapping rhythm accurately, or seducing women.
Osama?! You're back! Praise be to Allah, we love you Sheik Osama!
"Remember, we never entered the war until Japan bombed us, and then we immediately turned around and... declared war on Germany."
In fact, Germany declared war on the U.S. after the Japanese attack, and before the U.S.'s declaration. It was a foolish idea for the Germans.
"Taliban represents the views of Pakistanis the way Terry Jones and skinheads represent the views of the U.S."
The U.S. government does not supply military weapons to Terry Jones and skinheads to kill people of the type they hate in Mexico, and then get "shocked, shocked" when they start killing people of the type they hate in USA, and then the U.S. government doesn't withdraw from Texas and Louisiana and let Skinhead militias terrorize their own people.
"There is nothing to suggest that changing course and going with in-house-customized Android would have somehow been a magical panacea"
Why does it have to be a "magical panacea"? How about "not as bad as the other alternatives?"
Going with Android---even if it were not customized in the slightest but just reasonably modern build from Google would have resulted in this thing which they really need, called "money".
"was going to magically correct their course and turn back to profitable, when pursuing that course had ALREADY put them well down the road to ruin?"
Well, if the problem were that they weren't sure about the mass-market appeal of Meego, that applies twice as much to Windows Phone. Maybe being a #2 in Android phones to Samsung wouldn't be so bad, and they can play with Meego and Windows 8 on the side.
It did look like Elop took an action which was optimal for Microsoft and not for Nokia.
that the intelligence services actually wanted to analyze the data and question people before making a conclusion?
"would be impossible for the CIA to use an online game like Eve to communicate in some circumstances?"
impossible of course not. Silly, certainly, and unnecessary and risky. If he guy had an IP connection he could ssh in somewhere.
"Unfortunately there are little choices (except C of course) if you want to write reasonably portable high performance code."
Sure there is. It's called Fortran. (Of course I mean at least Fortran 2003, and not some irrelevant ancient tome).
An ICBM warhead enters from nearly straight up. It takes about 3 seconds to go from stratosphere to sea level.
"And why does everyone feel the need to state that a "supersonic" missile would do the trick? Are there any that would be used that aren't these days? Hypersonic might be a different story."
It most certainly is, when it is a long-range ballistic missile. An ICBM warhead upon re-entry falls from stratosphere to sea-level in about 3 seconds. Nearly straight down. This has been indefensible since the 1960's. Now the medium-range ballistic missiles won't be *quite* as fast (who knows 6, 10 seconds?) but the defense problem is still nearly impossible. Much much harder than even a hypersonic sea-skimming missile, which is already very difficult to defend against.
It's not clear to me how the supposed Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile guidance will work, as you have to target accurately in space from 100 kilometers up, but if they have licked this problem then they win--they can launch deep inside their homeland in well defended regions and hit half the Pacific.
"Suicide bombers in speed boats are a bigger threat to naval ships at the moment as it's generally frowned upon when you sink every ship that gets close to you."
This is not a serious wartime threat to a carrier. The aircraft would attack. The F-18 and helicopter aviators will compete like Legolas and Gimli over how many dozen they can sink. F-18 might not even bother using the expensive missiles, guns only just to be macho.
WW2 had aircraft, but no guided anti-ship missiles, other than the Japanese kamikaze (which were very serious threats).
The accuracy rate of missiles and torpedoes today is far far higher and their range better. They are much better at armor piercing and detonating in the most vulnerable spot.
A single modern torpedo will sink a destroyer-sized ship in a minute, and has a very high chance of impact once fired. It has up to a 50 kilometer range---a huge area for anti-submarine operations. It locates the most vulnerable point. Against a carrier it will destroy the reactor and spread all the waste as aquatic fallout. Given that naval nuclear reactors work on very highly-enriched weapons-level uranium, it could create a criticality accident irradating the nearby ships. Other than aircraft crews in the air, survival is likely negligible. It's not like in WW2 where a carrier could take a few hits, and some of the crew could be evacuated in the few hours they were fighting fires. It's likely to be one and done.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRQNyDW15UA
"It helps the US factories compete, but does it help the US workers compete?"
It doesn't matter.
Why would a company install robots in an old US factory when it can install them in a new offshore Asian factory, and gain low-cost loans/subsidies from the local government, and also bypass their domestic protectionist tariffs?
Argentina is completely screwed up now. There is no logic other than figuring out strange ways for the government to steal. Oddly enough the president has a huge approval rating. It's an Economic Reality Distortion Field.
It's pretty pathetic, because Argentina has tremendous natural resources compared to its population size and an educated population and few internal ethnic problems (they exterminated their natives in the 19th century). And to the north of them, without those advantages, Brazil is leaving them far behind despite having a robust social welfare state.
Source: in-laws in Buenos Aires; reading Economist.
"While Android sources are available, that doesn't mean you can just take the source, change it as you see fit and sell it as your own."
Is it GPL or not? If it is, then yes you can do just that
Is that Price/Earnings ratio of the stock has not been exceptionally high even when Apple's revenue increased dramatically.
"When the media starts calling Apple at a $1 trillion market cap or how about $2000 a share it’s the same thing as the cabbie telling you to buy Apple."
Not quite. You can get $1 trillion market cap by a fairly simple extrapolation of iPhone penetration further into world markets. No large changes in Apple's business model or assumptions about large changes in customer's behavior.
Current market cap is currently over $600 billion.
"If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's also going to drive up labor costs since they'll have to start paying out bonuses to keep employees happy as well as hire replacements for those that quit. Higher operating costs mean there's even more pressure to bring in more revenue."
Fortunately, they have $10B in cash which Zuckerberg (I will use his name personally as he is Facebook as much as Louis XIV was imperial France) raised at an abnormally high price.
Probably extremely few.
A friend of mine knew Shin (as he was known then) when he was an undergraduate. The guy was obscene insane-clown-level genius prodigy. Not the prodigy in the sense of the people who can shoot the lights out of the Putnam Competition but even far deeper than that, and jumping into very difficult and profound concepts by age 17 or 18. He did a small stint doing independent research with Ed Witten before moving up to pure mathematics. By 2nd or 3rd year undergrad (age 17 or so), he was already at an advanced graduate level.
I think he may be a different species.
Oh yeah and for fun he learned ancient Sanscrit.
At least some time ago, that may have been become Office for Mac developers were in California with the rest of the company in Washington. So they may have been less affected by the stench of strange practices and ideology.
Democracy is a political system. Marxism is a financial system. Leninism is a criminal system.
Marxism appears to be unstable to Leninism in all circumstances.
"I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple."
Probably not but they might have wanted the option. It's not hard to imagine some case where sharing development code might have given competitors information about upcoming Apple hardware designs, and Apple is as freakishly paranoid about that as the FSF is about people using unfree software.
The legal means that GCC used to prohibit various technical circumventions which the FSF believed would benefit "not-free" software, also prohibited a modular design which Apple wanted to, and then later exploited for significant benefit.
The FSF thought that ideology was more important than technical flexibility and capability. As a result, the experience of developing with gcc is about the same as 1989, whereas XCode can do many more things, because compiling programs to machine code is not the alpha and omega of software development tools.
People learn French because people speak French in France.
For programming langauges it's the same.
Programming languages become popular when they come attached to something else that is already popular---and for reasons independent of programming languages. In a nutshell, connecting to operating system facilities which are connected to popular hardware.
If Apple iPhones were programmed in object COBOL, the language would be popular. And after all, few people used Objective-C outside NeXTSTEP/MacOS/iOS. If Apple hadn't bought NeXT for its next operating system, Objective-C would be nearly dead.