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Comment Re:There might not be Proper English (Score 3, Insightful) 667

I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.

If governments and institutions really wanted to slow down the fragmentation of the English language, then they would just standardize on American Los Angeles Hollywood English.

As it stands, most people are selfish and most people are the center of their own little worlds. They're perfectly willing to make their own dialect the new standard that everybody else has to abide to, especially to get jobs and government benefits, they're perfectly willing to make their language a marker of group identity and group pride, but they're unwilling to change their own language when it is found that another dialect is becoming the new standard.

A perfect manifestation of this kind selfishness is the British queen. Why can't she just learn proper Hollywood english like everybody else? She's just holding her own people back if she continues on this path.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 95

I am as anti-spying as the next guy,but monitoring public postings to prevent cheating is not spying. If you re going to lie, cheat or steal, pass your notes in a private location.

The intent is not to prevent cheating. The intent is to only prevent the appearance of cheating. The intent is to prevent students from talking about the test after they've taken it and after they've gotten out of school already. Apparently, Pearson is cutting corners by selling the same test to all the schools no matter what time zone they're located in, or on what day the test is administered, which is the real problem here.

And so instead of revising its business model, it's spying on students and urging schools to penalize students when they're found to be talking about the test publicly online. Never mind, that they have no way to monitor private messages, or private emails, or other private communications, so their real intent here is to prevent the appearance of cheating, not the cheating itself -- which will continue underground because of the inherent flaw in their system.

Comment Re:Define "Lackluster" (Score 1) 205

It's gotten lackluster support across the board.

I'm curious why you think an HBO exclusive deal to stream without a cable subscription on AppleTV is "lackluster". I wasn't ever going to get an AppleTV myself but that sealed it (along with the price drop).

Hopefully, your ISP isn't Comcast.

Comcast has blocked access to "HBO Go" on Amazon, Roku, and Sony Playstation. It's likely that they'll block "HBO Now" on Apple TV as well. That's actually one of the reasons HBO made this three-months exclusivity deal with Apple, because it's hoping that Comcast backs down against Apple.

If Comcast doesn't back down, I guess you'll be stuck watching Game of Thrones just like the rest of us through your TV screen via your computer, because Comcast doesn't block computers, it just blocks specialized TV devices.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 239

This is a simple case of regulatory capture. The FAA is staffed by pilots, whose friends are pilots, and they regulate pilots. .

You're implying that pilots are all commercial pilots, when in fact many pilots are actually just private pilots. Private pilots are not even allowed to charge passengers for their own expenses as pilots. The most they can do is an even split of direct expenses (not indirect ones) making sure that they can never make any money on a particular plane-pooling or a plane-sharing arrangement

61.113(c): A private pilot may not pay less than the pro-rata share of a flight with passengers, provided the expenses involve only fuel, oil, airport expenditures, or rental fees.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 5, Informative) 239

simply posting the video to youtube does not in and of itself, generate income.

Yes, but he is a registered ad affiliate of Youtube. In other words, he has given his name, his mailing address, and his social security number in the hope of one day, having enough subscribers and viewers to receive an actual check through the mail.

From his own attorney:

Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.

Granted, the number of video views hasn't met the minimum threshold to be cut an actual check yet, but his intent is there. And the fact that he hasn't cancelled his affiliate status with Youtube yet, which would solve the entire problem in one swoop without needing to delete his existing channel, just means that he's hoping to generate enough page views through an artificially created controversy.

Comment Re:The strategy against Assange has worked (Score 2) 169

If the US had grabbed him, tried him in some kangaroo court and imprisoned him, he'd stay relevant as a sort of journalistic martyr.

Yes, Chelsea/Bradley Manning is having a great time of it.

It's really cool to be a journalistic martyr and have all the accolades. I'm told the suicide watch time period of his life was his/her favorite part.

Either way Wikileaks has been killed without its killers having done anything that looks like a heavy-handed suppression of journalism.

And yet, leaks still happen.

Stopping wikileaks was about as successful as plugging a failed river damn with half a square of toilet paper.

The US may have gotten its childish revenge, but this kind of treatment only pushed a future whistleblower like Snowden to work for our enemies.

Comment Re:Unfair comparison (Score 1) 447

Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy). Often people taking placebo, homeopathy, etc. will *report* feeling better - but this does not mean they are better in any meaningful sense of the word. It is very unethical to sell somebody a treatment which does not *treat* anything.

Assuming that research says one day that foot massages have the same effect as placebo, or have the same effect as just resting your feet, no more and no less, at least not anything that can be effectively measured objectively on the longterm health of people, I guess that you would consider therapeutic foot massage establishments unethical as well. Because obviously, the customer is not always right, the customer can't be trusted to evaluate his own feelings objectively, and that we should probably shut down all establishments that only make people feel better and do not *treat* anything else.

Comment Re:I don't get the pricing? (Score 3, Interesting) 71

A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?

Here is an answer from someone on Quora.

Dropbox offers no Service Level Agreement. Actually they specifically provide no warrantees whatsoever about their service (http://www.dropbox.com/terms). This is a non-starter for many CIOs.

Beyond that, the fact that Dropbox doesn't "own" the underlying cloud storage architecture -- Amazon S3 -- could be an issue, although they advertise it as secure via in-transit and on-disk encryption (https://www.dropbox.com/help/27).

If it still is the case that Dropbox uses S3 itself, then that wouldn't make business sense for them to pay more for storage than they're charging their own customers (even if they've decided not to offer a Service Level Agreement).

So my guess is that this has to do with the way they count the storage for customers. Assuming that their customers do not encrypt their data before they place it on DropBox (which would make sense because DropBox customers are rarely CIOs themselves), then DropBox is most likely hashing the content and only storing a single copy of a file even if there are thousand virtual instances of that same file throughout their system.

Also note that in the special case where a company is footing the bill and DropBox can't count the same file multiple times within that same company, otherwise the customer company would complain, then DropBox actually advertises a rate of $15 per 5 terabytes per month per user (with no Service Level Agreement of any kind even for business users).

Comment Re:This ex-Swatch guy doesn't have a clue (Score 1) 389

Me, I think the Apple watch is interesting but it is ten times more expensive than it should be
and is not waterproof, and these two facts mean I will never ever own one.

An Apple watch is really a bargain next to most Rolexes, and it does so much more than them. Hopefully, it will have a better anti-theft capability than a Rolex. Rolexes are nice, but sometimes thieves will chainsaw your arm right off in order to get the Rolex intact.

Comment Re:What if the leader/decision maker is incompeten (Score 3, Insightful) 255

What makes things difficult, is that the people who are wrong don't know they're wrong.

No, that's not the difficult part. That's just a given.

The difficult part is trying to control something you have no control over.

Once you're willing to ignore that "destructive" blogger. And once you're willing to accept that you won't be able to change that person's mind, everything will be infinitely easier for you.

Comment Re:Cart before horse. (Score 1) 115

Low Earth orbit Musk believes he can launch and maintain a constellation of 4,000 satellites in low earth orbit and still make a profit while others are pursuing simpler and cheaper broadband solutions, which can be deployed more rapidly and with less environmental impact and no one sees a problem in this?

It wouldn't be the first time that the US government recruited an eccentric billionaire as a figure head and funded his private enterprise through back channels to maintain the illusion of corporate independence.

Take a look at Iridium or GlobalStar, the only two Low Earth Orbit satellite phone companies I know of. How come do they keep on finding new investors when they have such a poor track record at making money?

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