California has the biggest surplus in nearly a decade.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

"bankrupt" is the exact opposite of what you think it means

Since California has so much extra money, what should they pay to build to make sure their infrastructure survives over the long-term?

We have a surplus because us big-government statists voted a big-government statist into power. Us big-government statists are always better at building economies and societies than freedom-loving libertarians.

Had a freedom-loving libertarian been elected, California definitely would be bankrupted, because freedom-loving libertarians are terrible at economic policy, since they don't like to tax people and think people make their own money, which is incorrect. We big-government statists know that government is the source of all money and is the reason people are allowed to make money in the first place.

Never vote for a freedom-loving libertarian, because that's how people become poor.

Always vote for big-government statists if you want to be rich.

And most people don't want to be poor.

Without the mannequin driver of course..

"DRIVE!!"

"I do not understand that address"

"GO! DRIVE!!!"

How is reducing profit to authors a "fight for consumers"?

You do realize that when writers don't get paid, they don't write?

Publishers have to take risks on authors, because only a few authors actually profit a publisher. And when Amazon cuts their margins, they take less risks and do things like eliminate advances and reduce royalties to where they're insignificant. Or they might cut marketing for that author.

And when that happens, that writers you liked starts working at Starbucks instead of writing.

So how does NOT having your book help consumers?

I don't think so.

Stability of ordinary matter is well explained by other more traditional theories (strong/weak forces for nucleus, electromagnetic for atoms and molecules, gravity for even larger structures). This theory described stable states that initially no one believed existed.

Morever, these configurations are stable but quite fragile.

I found the summary confusing but the article made more sense.

The theory was that there exist configurations of three particles that is stable in a strange sort of way. The strange part is that if a certain configuration was stable then putting the particles in the same configuration but the distances blown up by a certain factor (22.7 if the three particles were the same) gives another stable configuration. So you can keep blowing up the distances in multiples of 22.7 and would get an infinite sequence of stable configurations. These configurations are necessarily quantum and not classical since the distances involved would be much larger than the range of the forces between the particles. (Although even the initial distances are large too, if i understood correctly, you would agree that they _will_ get pretty large at some point).

Now some independent groups have shown the existence of such states with the required blowup. Since similar-particle setup required cooling things down to the limit of present day technology, only _one_ configuration was observed initially. Someone used a system of different particles resulting in a blowup factor less than 22.7 allowing them to observe _three_ of these configurations, essentially validating the theory.

Hope that made sense (IANAP).

Sorry to burst your bubble, but people expect things that are completely unfair, such as how pretty you are, or your family lineage, to be rewarded.

Your work you do in life isn't the only thing that should be rewarded.

Be glad that this intrinsic unfairness exists in life.. it causes you to work harder. The worst thing you can do is to make everyone equal.

The fact that princesses and Kardashians exist is EXACTLY what gives life its meaning. Your work you do in life is nothing without them.

How is power-seeking depraved?

Do you expect everyone to have NO power?

It's sad to see the moderation system failing time and time again on Slashdot.

No -- that's certainly not why people buy newspapers, except for those people who just want the coupon section (which is generally segregated from the rest of the paper). Who the heck buys a newspaper just for the ads?

People buy the sunday paper because of the ads. The big coupon supplement is the whole reason to buy it.

As for magazines, there are some which clearly seem to be able the ads -- particularly style magazines and such. Mostly it's something to allow people to drool over clothes and other luxury fashion items they can't afford (or could barely afford). But yeah -- SOME magazines seem to be bought for the ads.

Not just some, MOST magazines that have a growth business model exist because people buy them for the ads.

The ones that people don't buy for the ads, like news magazines, are the only ones that are dying. Look at the MPA reports on magazine circulation numbers by years, and you can spot the trend. The ones people buy for the ads, like fashion, home shit, etc.. are all actually growing.

In sum -- yeah, sometimes people buy things that have ads when they want to see ads. But on the internet, people often just want to get tasks done too -- whether it's sending email via webmail or interacting on Facebook or whatever. I have NEVER EVER in my life heard a person say, "Gee -- I really love how Facebook keeps adding more ads to my newsfeed" or "I really wish that my webmail would have more pop-ups to get in my way when I'm trying to read a message."

You're not in the target market for the ads you see, then.

You really should study how people in the real world respond to advertising... they fucking love it. A fashion shopper goes apeshit when they see their favorite Miu Miu shoes go on sale at Net-a-porter. They get so excited that they email their friends about telling them to buy it.

Do you? Of course not, because you are a narcissist libertarian geek. You think you are important, even though you are a lowly geek.

It is only the narcissist libertarian geek that tries to avoid ads. "I'm so important, look at me, I hate advertising because i am more important than advertisers. I am so important that I don't want ads on the website I don't pay to visit! Look at me! WEEE!"

Do you think people watch the Superbowl, the BIGGEST EVENT on television, because of the teams?

It's amazing how little narcissistic libertarian geeks know about real-world social norms. Just amazing.

There's a reason your favorite ad-blockers aren't used by fashion shoppers, aka the majority of the population that prefers to look good with expensive clothes than look like an ugly nerd with no sense of fashion taste and low social status because of their lack of taste.

Cookie tracking means you're getting spammed with ads you DO want, instead of the ads you don't want.

Do-not-track only means you're going to end up with ads you hate. It's not a "do-not-advertise". It's not going to stop ads at all.

Right now, most geeks think of advertising as bad things, because they hate the ads served to them as geeks are a horrible audience demographic. They don't know, that in the real world, people actually WANT advertising. That's why people buy things like newspapers and magazines, BECAUSE of the ads.

Besides, it's the website that decides how they want to treat their audience, not the viewer. The only thing the viewer can/should do is to not visit the website in the first place if they feel their usage rights are violated, and right now, no one is going to miss losing an audience demographic of geeks.

1) DRM is bad.

Did you nerds think your cunning plan all the way through to make this statement?

It's a very democratic thing to say DRM is bad, because it treats information as a free resource, allowing the poor and the weak to gain information. This is why RMS wants information to be free.

But the opposite is actually better: information should NOT be free. There should be costs associated with gaining information.

You can obviously figure out the many reasons why there should be costs for information. But the BEST reason to keep information expensive is so that it maintains an imbalance among people.

Free information allows everyone to be equal. That actually is a TERRIBLE thing, because it treats everyone equally.

But the key thing in life, is that, NO ONE wants to be treated equally. Instead, EVERYONE wants to gain power over others. This is the basic law of life: to gain power over others. You do this in everything you do. You brush your teeth in the morning because you want to be better than the uglies that don't. You get a job because you want to be better than the homeless people that don't. And so on.

Evolution is why this happens. Animals, and you, find mates because you are able to project a gain of power over others.

It's amazing how people say they want equality in life, when they do everything they can to be unequal.

Socially clueless and inept nerds obviously haven't figured this out, as their low social status demonstrates, but the real world is filled with people gaining power over you. There is no such thing as a person that wants to reduce power.

Gaining power is the fundamental meaning of life, as evolution has shown. It is not the content of your character that matters in life. It is your power.

And treating information as a valuable resource, instead of a commodity, is a way to maintain power over others.

And that's something you, and everyone else in the world, wants.

This is why those in power, who control expensive content, want DRM.

I guess maybe in your next life, you will have more power, and you will know why DRM is a good thing. But right now, most people don't want to be treated the same as a homeless person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

finally we can gather all the traitors in a movie theatre and arrest them.

Us big-government types wins again, as always. =^D

Apple is large enough to make entire peripheral markets. They're the reason FireWire survived so long. Right now Thunderbolt is going to do just fine with Apple leading the way.

The commodity PC market doesn't need Thunderbolt, but the premium market of professional editors and other mass data users are already using it and are moving their Firewire devices over.

Really, the high-speed external storage market is going to be dominated by Thunderbolt anyways because of the Apple market. Do people even use USB for high-speed external RAID data storage? It was always FireWire (for Apple) or eSATA (for PCs), and now Thunderbolt. Not sure what USB 3.1 is going to be used for? Maybe throw-away USB keys?

Latency is a terrible problem on the Internet.

And it's not just for phone/video conferencing.

Try driving a car with a remote control over the Internet.

Games also need deterministic latency.