checoivan

You're right, My bad. I was thinking of narc as "Narco", the drug lords.

What I was saying is that, given how much money comes in from drugs, they are already able to own plenty. Even when drug money can't be spent freely or things done openly. If drugs are legal then 100% of the money is available freely to a handful of people from cartels, who may even own a significant % of Mexico's Gdp. I'm imagining a situation similar to Italy, there are articles on the Naples trash monopoly owned by the mafia for example. With so much money, cartels can easily own larger industries in Mexico and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

This. The root of all the cartel's power is the army of kids who would rather trade their lives for a couple years of fast money. Lack of education,poverty, and all the other unresolved problems are biting back hard. Let's hope there's a realization that things need to change from the root, with no people willing to hold a gun there's no war. Giving chance to people to have good education, good lives, make it not worthy for them to trade their life for a couple of years of fast riches.

They already do it, but it's the extend of it the worrying thing. There's plenty of known "Narc owned" businesses in mexico. I'm from there and it's quiet a thing to see strange things like 3 car washes in the same block, with no clients, open 24/7 and some escalades parked. Now imagine if they had a steady flow of clean fully open income to invest and the doors open to become public persons.

There are so many ramifications, specially with what happens in terms on the national relationships once the money flow is cut to some with drugs being made legal. We don't know how bad things could get for Mexico, and which strings are being pulled when the wrong people being left out of the money. There's also the people. It's easy to think a narc will become a happy member of society and do the nice drugs business once it's legal and stay there in a bubble. You're talking about people knowingly poisoning others and murdering by the hundred. Legalizing the substance won't make those people ethical well behaved persons caring for society. With truckloads of capital to move to other industries, imagine if the doors are fully open for top cartel people to move freely and move to rule the food, communications, or health industries. They're not the kind of people who would rather loose money to stop producing a bad batch of food that poisons people or avoid making people sick to increase profits.They can easily threaten a government inspector, wipe whoever gets in their way since they already do that, plus they have many of the law enforcers in their payroll. It's not like making new law will stop them from doing things their way. If legalization is the solution, at least first their economy and power can't be big enough so that they won't wreck other hubs in the country. So far seems like a fight to make cartels as small as possible to be controllable.

Since buying phones mid-air is though, I'd suggest an app that does binaural beats like ambi-science, or one that generates white noise like the sound of a waterfall or a fountain, that would drown the noise and the mind wanders off instead of focusing on the sound.

Oh, this explains the results when I asked "Siri, Find me some girl scout cookies".

Thanks for doing this and putting them up, the talks are amazing.

Title should be: SpaceX Falcon9 manages to reach its destination despite the engine failure, delivers a pack of home made ice cream.

Doesn't make much sense to me. What would prevent people from giving away 2 gifts,one of item one of money, or a giving away to a 3rd party as escrows?

On the upside there are more visas, the side effect is it makes it harder for early startups to hire H1Bs due to the increased cost. 10K for the H1 plus 15K for the green card. Usually both are done together or really close since you need a green card application in place to extend an H1 past 6 years. That's 25K per employee only for processing vs ~ 2K today.

I think it was a good thing. No, the maps aren't perfect, but neither were gmaps( though way more polished). I can remember a the times where gmaps sent me to some random location. 3D generation is HARD, compare it with the google earth or maps and apple's shows more resolution,less artifacts. 3D was always a cool side feature despite the glitches in other programs and maybe the bad idea was integrating this into the main experience of one of the most used apps. They added some awesome features but in the end people just want maps that work, and eye candy doesn't trump that. They could have taken the typical route trying to brainwash customers with ads or PR releases, the CEO talking about the best product ever w/o believing, instead I admire that they took the rout of "We did a great effort, you didn't like it, sorry and we'll make a bigger effort until you do".

In the end all the effort ,features, and niceties doesn't matter if people simply doesn't like it.

I hope the products aren't discountinued. I use silver effex quite often, it's the best back and white converter I've tried yet.

There was also a statistic about the percentage of people who open facebook for their dogs. I wonder if dog and stalker accounts are in that fake count, or if they do count as active as they generate puppy treat ad revenue.

Some might not see how awesome this is, but for example: My dad'd blood work came up perfect year after year, zero symptoms. Even 1 year before pancreatic cancer metastasize. There are already markers to detect it and it only takes adding blood to it ,but the price is prohibiting so it's not a standard test.

The idea of sets of super cheap markers which can are included all the time by default in blood tests is incredible.

There's a talk by Dr Donald W. Miller regarding how the original study claiming low fat diets lowered cholesterol was wrong, yet it was taken as basis for dietary guidelines by the USDA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRe9z32NZHY&feature=my_li...

They're assuming high level people don't know who, or where the cartel people are.

Stand outside of the ferrari dealership and jewelry stores in MX, I'll bet they'll find plenty of what they're supposed to.

Well, I've to admit I don't know the details of their closing, just what I've read. That they sold about 1.2 million copies according to VGchartz and an article quoted they needed 3 million to break even. Still, 1.2 million copies in 5 months that's a lot of copies. I've some friends doing games, and it boggles me how often I hear another AAA game studio shut down.

I agree, people seem negative focusing too much in outermost layer like memory size, or that it isn't as powerful as an xbox.

take a look at this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170237/Annual_US_game_ret...

The trend is game sales are down year over year. Studios are closing because massive multi million dollar productions are simply unsustainable. You see games being more expensive, have ads and sponsors on it, gameplay is cut down and sold as expensive downloadable content, and every game is using gimmicks like plastic toys to be able to sell a game copy for 99 or 150 bucks. And every year publishers have to one up in themselves like Charlie sheen going from a week long to a month long party.

Another concrete example: Kingdom of Amalur's developer Studio 38. The game has an epic franchise, great reviews, strong first month sales. The studio closed down because it would need to sell way too many copies just to break even. Even "top" consoles are selling at unprofitable levels and trying to make it even with tons of DLC.

Development for consoles is very inaccesible. Even for XBox which uses DirectX and can be downloaded. How many of people you know that programmed a ps3 game in college? '

There has to be a reversal of this trends and a console like this seems like a step in the right direction. So far seems like only nintendo figured out it's all about delivering fun that people like, not who has the biggest processor.

People doubt the 99 dollar price. Maybe it comes out being 150 or slightly more expensive, we don't know. It can definitively be cheap. Supposedly a Nexus 7 costs 184 dollars to make, 57 are just for the screen. Take out the screen, sensors,camera, battery, cut down memory...It sounds reasonable it could hit the price point.

Underpowered? I think not. Look at Nintendo DS: 67mhz Arm9. Who cares? Only developers because it's a pain in the butt to program for the thing. Other than that it delivers fun games and prints money(or so the meme says).

Quad core and an easy API seem like 1000x a better choice than a ps3 with 8 cores, a not so easy api, and a 10,000usd dev kit.

Yes, graphics won't compete with the next gen games, but there's more to a game than eye candy.

Establishing a connection and doing the full successful authentication through a client, pop, or web counts as a login.

Incoming mail or a simple ping to the mail server won't counted as a user view. With all the spam, fake mails, and mail bomb pings, views would then report bajillions of hits and nothing would expire.

If you don't login, it's not counted. If you don't log in for over a year then the account would be deleted.

Spoken like a boss. Look up an awesome photographer, like Sam Abell from Natgeo. Until recently he used 2 olympus film cameras, and 2 fixed lenses. No zooms. Which btw cost around 150 bucks on ebay each.

Some dig into the "technical" details like it was a computer, forgetting It's about making an image that looks good and people like.

I'd recommend 1x.com instead for tutorials.

Even if they use ingredients from a single store it'll look 1000 times better in the picture.

The photog gets to choose the best bun out of hundreds, the best tomatoes, greenest lettuce. In the end photograph, the bun will look perfect and fluffy, the tomato sparkles, and the meat seems fresher than a live cow. Plus they may or may not, but there are "tricks" to simulate things like fake steam coming out of food, spraying glicerin or corn syrup to make it look moist(looks like water droplets), or simply cold food photographs better. On top of all that, good lighting does wonders as well.

Kudos to them for promoting women in engineering. What I don't understand why calling it a gambit?

It's more of a good thing and an achievement rather than a gambit.

This looks amazing.I tip my hat to those guys, and would love to see this in a Burnout game.

I wonder how easy it is to incorporate this in a game model. In the truck model looks like each piece of the car is modeled individually and might be a lot harder for the artists to make models. And wonder how are materials calculated, some things in the model bend in different ways.

Yes. it's very,very difficult, expensive, and takes a long time to develop drugs. Though I still don't believe a hard problem justifies those sale prices.

R&D is expensive but what % of the pharma company income goes to it? Let's take the largest one Pfizer: ~9 billion total out of 67 billion income in FY11.

Even for medical expenses it's not that much of a COST. A Top of the line MRI machine costs 1 to 3 mil Usd. Let's say a hospital scans 5 to 10 people a day. The machine pays itself in 2 to 4 months at that 3K pricepoint.

Drugs also don't have to be made in the US and go through the whole FDA loop jumping.

What I'm saying is pricing seem very wrong to me. There's people with deseases all around the world and supply of drugs is being limited to a very slim percentage of people from 1st world countries due to pricing, because there's people willing to pay those price. Maybe if these cheap drugs companies get to be some sort of "the walmart of pharmaceuticals". Earning way more than current pharmas on mass sales rather than steep prices might turn the balance.

Even when some of these drugs are very expensive to produce and R&D is expensive, some retail prices are in one word greedy.

Looking up a chemotherapy compound priced bulk online will show you how big of a markup these drugs are being sold at. For example: a quick search shows Everolimus costing USD1341.27 per gram to the public bulk, and one retail box of 30 - 0.010 gram tablets costing around 5,000 usd. And I honestly doubt the bulk chemical is being sold at a loss.

Now mind these aren't aspirins, but the only option to a slim chance of living for many people. Ideal for drugs companies since whoever can afford it will pay any outrageous price.

The problem has gotten big enough that now there are counterfeit chemo drugs being sold, and given this chemo compounds may or may not work for everybody it's hard to track them. That is another problem which may be solved by these companies by selling affordable drugs.

Every person has a different reason to like them or not. I can speak of my case: I work making software in one of the supposed "right ways" on a daily basis. I also like getting together with buddies or new people, and code something exciting that keeps you up until the wee hours with some good food and drinks.

I don't go with the expectations of having a full blown product ready for market release in 24 hours. I certainly know I might learn something new from experimenting or from others, come out with a good prototype, and simply be back on sunday very happy after doing something really fun.

Also don't underestimate some engineers abilities. I've seen guys crank out things in days that would take months to others.

Combine this with the fact that some times syncing your iPhone in a corporate server brings the whole company address book to the phone. They must have a lot of contacts stored.