Comment Re:The Streisand Effect (Score 1) 163
Yes, I'm fairly dim and even I predicted this would happen.
Yes, I'm fairly dim and even I predicted this would happen.
Touche!
Except that hothardware being tech geeks confuse cause and effect. The estimated cost of the 8GB of GDDR5 in the PS4 is ~$100, the hardware costs are almost the same and the "extra validation" mainly involves staying a little conservative with clock speeds and code optimizations. The real reason is market differentiation and if there is none you create one like with student and senior citizen discounts even though they all take up one seat. That lets you set entirely different prices based on the willingness to pay in workstation markets as opposed to gamer markets.
Of course to make it work, you must make sure that the workstation market won't use the gaming card so you make sure those features are absent or not working or not tested/validated/supported on the consumer cards. It's the same reason Intel won't give you ECC on a consumer motherboard/CPU like AMD does, it would be beneficial and cost next to nothing but it'd encourage penny-pinchers to use them as poor man's servers. It's all about steering customers to the "right" product, the rest is implementation details.
The hyperbole tends to be pretty thick around here, I've used software interfaces that weren't just bad but simply atrocious and if Microsoft could conjure up one so bad I couldn't make it work for me and still be usable outside a mental asylum seems highly unlikely. Hitting the start button to shut down the computer doesn't even register in the top 1000 silliest shit I've had to do in order to make semi-broken, bizarre and buggy applications work. So "broken and useless" is probably more like "temporarily a damper on productivity while my Google-fu figures it out".
I guess a lot of people here have Win8 forced upon them by external circumstances, which tends to put everyone in a sour mood. Particularly end users that hate change and tend to make life even more miserable for IT. Personally the forecast is that Win7 is good until 2020, so in five year's time I should figure out if Microsoft has made anything decent, jump to OS X or take another shot at YotLD. If work pushes it on me, I'll cope. Around here it sounds like they should be awarding war medals like "Survived the 2010 ribbon transition".
I guess there's a whole bunch of people where the OS doesn't really matter and it's just "Which [device/OS] lets me update Facebook and Twitter the easiest?" but personally I'm fairly stuck with Windows and so is my work. They could duct tape a Kinect to all copies of Windows 9 and insist all commands be done Minority Report style and we'd probably still upgrade eventually, as long as the applications don't have to buy into "Metro" or anything like that. I'd just have to learn a few Kung Fu moves to open the most used apps and I'd probably still hit 95% relative efficiency overall.
Nonsense. A company is a totally fictitious entity. The government created it and the government can make it do whatever they want.
(As it turns out, the corporation is also able to control the government, but that's another topic.)
I think we would probably survive if limited liability were rolled back just a tad. Sure, I'll admit that there probably is some benefit to having corporations with protected stockholders - in particular people who only buy or sell the stock and have little to no influence in the business. I don't see any reason to shield executives, board, or activist investors.
<dramatic music>New Horizons set out on an epic journey of <Carl Sagan voice>millions and millions</Carl Sagan voice> of miles to the most distant, coldest parts of the solar system. Its 5, er, 8 year mission, to explore the last unexplored and most difficult to reach Planet of them all, Pluto, and whatever planets may be discovered beyond Pluto.</dramatic music>
Suddenly, in 2006 Pluto was downgraded to dwarf planet status, and all the Planets were now explored.
Fight? What for? <glorious fanfare>Mission Accomplished!</glorious fanfare> It's over. Get a life!
Or so we are told by Israel.
We are told so by Hamas program documents. The question is to which extent those claims are up to date. On one hand, Hamas did suggest something akin to a two-state solution (in 1967 borders), but the problem is that their offer used words like "truce" instead of "peace" to describe what they would be signing up for. That, combined with their seeming lack of desire to amend the written documents of the party, cast the honesty of their intentions in doubt. There is even more doubt given their radical Islamist ideology that seems to have strong Salafi influence - if you've read Qutb, you know that for those guys, the existence of Israel in any shape or form is plainly unacceptable, and its destruction, on the other hand, is a divine prophecy.
The only thing is, the very existence of Hamas and their stance on recognizing Israel is a product of Israel's double-dealing with Fatah, and before that the PLO.
That is true, but does it really matter for any purpose other than assigning blame (mind you, it's a useful purpose and it would be nice to see it carried through all the way - but it's orthogonal to the peace process)? Either way, Hamas is now running things, and their propaganda is effected on new generations of Palestinian kids... which doesn't bode well at all for any sort of compromise to be achievable in the foreseeable future. I just don't see how they could "reboot" the whole thing and get people who can be negotiated with back in charge, even if they wanted to.
However, one doesn't read highway signs at arm's distance.
Also, lower resolution reduces the amount of information which one can fit on a given highway sign and diminishes legibility by obscuring finer details.
The human can distinguish the difference in character shapes at resolutions up to ~2,000 dpi --- see Smeijer's book _Counterpunch_ for an examination of this.
Current smart phones aren't quite able to adequately represent typeface designs w/ subtle curves such as Optima at text sizes, and engravings become a pixellated blurry mess compared to the sharp originals, some of which require extraordinary printing techniques such as two black plates to capture.
The really, really black stuff from yesterday is made with nanotubes.
It depends on your definition of "ethnic cleansing". I don't think that "people who launch shrapnel-loaded rockets" is a race or ethnicity per se, so killing them doesn't count as such. If it so happens that they all belong to a single ethnicity in practice, that is an unfortunate coincidence, but it's not the reason why they were targeted.
If you mean that "stealing land" amounts to ethnic cleansing (some people do believe that), then I suppose your formula is valid. Pretty much all land in Israel is claimed by either side, and which one gets to actually hold it is determined solely by "might is right". There doesn't seem to be any solution that would change that at this point - a compromise was possible with PLO of old, but Israel did not pursue it; Hamas, on the other hand, is not willing to compromise, and is now in charge because PLO got nowhere.
You have to live w/in a reasonable distance of an ``Amazon Storage Locker'' and have your account set up so as to allow it to be enabled:
While government certainly does enable giant chain corporations, I think you are overlooking the more obvious culprit: limited liability. Without the invention of "the corporation" - and the limited liability aspect in particular - nothing like Walmart would have ever scaled to that size. Hell, if all that was holding Walmart back was a common currency, we'd all be using "Wally Bucks" right now.
Even if mobility rate didn't change, it's still one of the lowest among developed countries.
"Just think of a computer as hardware you can program." -- Nigel de la Tierre