Entirely depends where they get their marching orders from.
Kansas? Or Tokyo?
What IS Sprint, now, exactly? They're just a brand name. They were bought out. "Sprint" is the color of the shell that the Softbank hermit crab moved into.
Wikipedia NO, but thorough scouring of the Internet for information coming from peer reviewed medical journals - U.S., and foreign - greatly reduces the informational advantage that physicians used to enjoy over patients. Furthermore it puts up to the minute information in patients' hands, vs. docs who are so overloaded with patients they scarcely get time to go to conferences or view lectures to satisfy continuing education requirements. Doctors also tend be highly opinionated people who quickly discount information shared by lay people.
Several years ago, I was diagnosed with Borellia Burgdorferi (Lyme Disease) by a family practice doctor at a walk-in Urgent Care outpatient facility. After 28 days of Doxycycline - the "standard protocol" - my symptoms returned significantly worse.
Had I followed the generally held beliefs of the medical community, I would probably be in a wheel chair right now, unable to work or function. Instead I aggressively scoured the Internet for more information, for weeks. On an out -of-the-way antiquated looking Lyme support website, I found recommendations for a Lyme specialist 3 1/2 hours away in another state that was willing to risk the wrath of insurance companies and even loss of his medical license by treating patients in the manner known to actually WORK - Profoundly high dosages of combination antibiotics over extended periods of time (many months) and radical dietary changes with added nutritional supplements.
I sit here today - now several years later - in perfect health thanks to "Internet Medical Information" and a courageous doctor that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
Should you listen to your doctor? Yes. Far more often than not, they are going to be correct. However, "trust but verify" should be your approach- particularly if you are faced with life changing, life altering, or potentially life-ending medical care decisions.
Your physician is but one person, while the internet contains the collected wisdom of millions.
No, because you can never be a child again. So you will never view Star Wars through the lens of the young person you were when Ep. 4/5/6 were released.
Lucas had stuffed teddy bear people, cute robots and cartoonish muppet alien characters in all of the original films. Fans loved them. Lucas put silly characters in Ep. 1/2/3 and they were panned.
Did Star Wars change?
No.
You did.
Gen. Keith Alexander,
Sadly, we have cultures scattered around the world that still bring the middle ages mindset of "large families / large national population = a different kind of wealth and power" to the world table.
We've all probably seen those projections that predict within the next 50 years several middle eastern and african countries will experience such explosive population growth that they will leapfrog 1st world countries like Russia, which is currently 2-3x larger than most of the example countries, but is experiencing slow negative population growth.
The problem is, we haven't seen much agricultural, industrial, structural or political stability or foreign policy good will within many of the countries slated to "grow explosively", so good news, everyone! War, famine, destruction, genocide, mans' inhumanity to man - it'll just keep right on trucking as we add more and more and more players to a finite-sized playing field.
- Children. Title solves global population problems. Two children to replace two parents, with the odd accident or illness to either parents or children statistically causing slow population shrink.
Japanese families tend to be fairly careful with money, and as a result - as used to be the case with many WW2 generation elderly Americans - are sitting on piles of assets. What will occur is simply the balloon "inflate / deflate" effect. You work your entire life to amass savings and assets, you become elderly and require medical care or living assistance, and the balloon begins to deflate.
So, good news, unemployed Japanese youth - Head off to city college and pick up that 2 year nursing assistant certification or complete a 4 year degree in anything medically relevant, and their deflating balloon will inflate yours.
(Joke) you can just fast forward about 100 years, when the entire Western world will just be a giant medical service economy with only 3 types of entities: Elderly, people providing medical or living assistance to elderly, and semi sentient robots doing everything else.
As the Dalai Lama once said, paraphrased, "People in their youth spend their health pursuing money only to become elderly and spend their money pursuing health."
On one hand, you can look at this and wonder why anyone would want to undertake the incredible expense of a sub oceanic tunnel across the Bering Strait. What, with Anchorage already housing one of the world's busiest international airports, particularly for cargo aircraft.
However, completion of such a tunnel would have profound, long-reaching consequences, both negative and positive:
Chinese manufactured goods would presumably have shipping time cut in half. Even given the considerable distances, a 2km long freight train maintaining 110 km/h is a wee bit faster than a stacked & loaded Maersk container ship wallowing across the girth of the Pacific at a leisurely 20 km/h, and those trains can be run back to back separated only by a few km with basic logistics tools.
Rail and Trucking distribution arteries from Alaska down to the lower 48 would become among the busiest in the world.
American manufacturing jobs would be murdered. Already bled nearly to death, the ability to Skype an engineer in Guangdong, email schematics and have 14 boxcars of finished goods on your back dock in less than 2 weeks would be a deathblow to a lot of American jobs.
The economies of the U.S. and China would become increasingly tightly woven together, possibly creating a stabilizing effect diminishing the possibility of armed conflict - essentially the draft purpose of the European Union, after Germany went out on two world tours. The U.S. would be the loser in this scenario, as Chinas ascendancy would only continue on the world stage, while the U.S. ability to project and maintain power would suffer in the face of a diminished economy.
Americas incredible military would become unaffordable, and go through many rounds of contractions, until the U.S ends up a peer to countries like Russia or combined UK, FR and Germany - regionally powerful, globally insignificant.
So essentially this tunnel represents another step in a trade arrangement largely favoring only one partner, leading the other to contract, economy foundering, military eventually becoming unsustainable at current levels, heading into France-like levels of global insignificance excepting cultural impact.
Rome 2.0
Wait, wha.. OH! For a second I thought this was another zany article about John.
"Figuring Out the iPad's Place" ?
The bathroom. So you can browse while you download.
For years we've had snobbish hipster tech journalists gleefully informing us that we are now in the "Post-PC era", that our watt-hungry desktop dinosaurs are on the way out, that they are being replaced by a constellation of sexy, small gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Except it isn't happening.
Every one of those goddamned articles was written on a laptop or desktop computer. You, fair reader, do your job or schoolwork on a laptop or desktop PC. The many limitations of tablets makes the idea of performing any meaningful work on them downright laughable.
I have an iPad Air and Zagg keyboard case for it. Toys. Both of them, toys. Poor keyboard experience meets poor word processing experience (unless having Lou Ferrigno sized deltoids from constant arm extension is your thing) meets horrendously poor multitasking meets a giant bucket of buyers remorse.
If I didn't really enjoy playing Hearthstone on my iPad Air, I would have eBayed it weeks ago. I rarely use it for anything else.
With factory refurb'd Macbook Airs popping up on Apple's "Special Deals" page now at $599 (when in stock), the argument for buying a $500 iPad Toy to play Angry Birds on the toilet and watch "Sherlock" on that flight to Denver to visit your in-laws just.. doesn't make good sense anymore, when for $100 more you can get a real computer.
So my operating theory is - Not only are people holding on to the tablets they already own, softening sales of new models, but they have also already discovered they're horrible to type on, make overweight poor quality e-readers, have games that you tire of after 1 hour and you feel no urgent need to run out and drop $500 on a new one that will only continue to do all those things poorly, but is a tiny bit thinner.
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Carbon Monoxide. The cost is negligible and the effect inarguable. You feel drowsy, you fall asleep, and you die.
It's so sneaky and lethal, the CDC estimates it killed > 16,000 people in the U.S. in a five year time period alone.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
That's cute - you think rules apply to the government?
"National Security."
Just utter those two words, and brush everything aside. "In The Interest / Not In The Interest of __National Security___. "
I have a friend - who is quite possibly reading this, Hi, Beavis - who has Top Secret security clearance and a tidy officers' rank in the U.S. military. Many years ago, while undergoing the personal reference interview portion of his background check, I had a man from the Department of Defense come to my house. The guy arrived about 15 minutes late. He apologized, saying he had just come from an interview in Cleveland.
"That part of Cleveland is an hour away - did you really leave the appointment 40 minutes ago??" I asked, incredulously, working the mental math that he would must have driven 90-100+ MPH down Route 77 South - Posted 65 MPH at the time - to arrive when he did.
"Weren't you worried about the police?" I asked naively.
"Oh..." he said, with a soft smile - "they have no authority over me." I processed that slowly as he settled onto the sofa and began opening his briefcase. Seeing the confusion on my face, he winked and said
"
I suspect the current arrangement with the Russians providing lift tickets to the ISS performs a similar function to the intelligence treaties we signed in the 90s allowing the U.S. and Russia to perform overflights of each others' countries to verify ICBM numbers and troop movements, plus the CIAs fanatical attention to assist the Russians in tracking and controlling any and all nuclear materials to keep it from wandering off in the hands of men like Viktor Bout, "Lord of War" arms dealer.
By subsidising the Russian space program with this sweetheart no-bid contract, we, the U.S., help ensure that dozens of very highly skilled engineers and scientists with the ability to lead a team interested in designing and building short, medium, or long-range rockets - for whatever purpose - are kept "on payroll" and reasonably content safely and securely inside Russia. Exactly where we want them. Instead of helping a potential aggressor nation like Iran, North Korea, or theocratic / military dictatorship Du Jour develop accurate, long range weapons for suitcases full of cash, women, mansions and national hero-worship.
The current deal also forces a certain level of cooperation between the space agencies, governments, and builds political good will on both sides. Good Will that Putin is destroying at the moment, but will return providing he doesn't go all Poland '39 on the remainder of Ukraine.
Sir,
You are factually incorrect. Go watch Twitch.TV and favorite some of the worlds' top Hearthstone players, like TrumpSC, who
1, has ~ 20,000 live viewers at any given point in time
2, has an engineering degree but plays games on Twitch all day for a living
3, was a world top-ranked StarCraft tournament player
4, often plays ranked games using only Free To Play cards that any player can unlock with only a couple hours of game play, and has a ~77% win ratio.
Hearthstone is one of the most balanced, NON "pay to win" Free To Play games in existence.
Disclaimer: I have an iPad Air, and the Zagg keyboard case for it.
So, if you look at my comment history from way back when the original iPad was released (which I also owned) I was wildly disappointed, as I felt it was just a 10" iPod Touch with limited usefulness.
My opinion remains largely unchanged.
Had Blizzard not released Hearthstone for the iPad - with me being a Hearthstone addict - I would have eBayed it by now. Yep. Stood in line Black Friday to buy it, and already bored of it / barely using it.
I told myself I would use it to read eBooks from my Kindle / Google Play Books / iBooks library. Nope. Even with its reduced weight, it's still too heavy and awkward to hold comfortably for hours. It's a much poorer experience than a Kindle Paperwhite.
I told myself I would use it to work on. I bought the $100 Zagg keyboard case for it. What a wretched experience. Poor quality keyboard meets the horrible user experience of stretching your arm for constant tap-tap cut/copy/paste editing. Do you use Excel at work? Let me introduce you to Numbers, a tool made for fourth graders. Getting files on or out of the device to work with is a nightmare due to Apple's ecosystem lock in. The closest glimpse of freedom comes from installing DropBox to move files out, open them on computer. Or vice-versa.
"But Wait! iOS 7 has 'AirDrop' " , you say. Sure it does, and it *STILL* won't allow you to copy files between iOS and OSX devices. Only iOS iOS, and then only certain file types. Because Apple knows you want to copy mp3s, video files, and other stuff between your phone and your Mac, and Apple wants to keep your ass locked firmly into iTunes.
So yeah, I have buyers remorse. I spent $500 on something I sometimes use to read Slashdot in the bathroom.
Do you remember those rumors a couple months ago that Apple was making a 12" iPad? They aren't. Those are probably the new panels being made for the new MacBook Air that will be announced this summer. But what would really intrigue me would be if the new MacBook Air was running iOS 8, with the new A8 processor, came with a full keyboard and trackpad ala existing form factor MacBook Airs, & came with full iWork suite free. Apple has been watching people for the past several years buying clunky third-party keyboard cases for their iPads in a desperate bid to turn them into light, portable cheap laptops. Why not just make one?
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
