Indeed, and that's what I thought that people were going to be talking about, but instead they're yammering about dates, which I don't understand at all.
The implication seems to be that the other child can't also be a boy on Tuesday, which is just stupid. Yes, if you go around listing things in English, and don't include all of them, you're trying to mislead...
...but this is a standard math question 'I have two children, one is a boy', and the odds, in that case, are well understood in math to be 1/3 that the other is a boy. So apparently it's okay to use math to solve that 'misleading' question, where you 'undercounted' the boys you have, but when we add 'on Tuesday', we suddenly have to evaluate it entirely different and assume that you didn't 'undercount' the boys born on Tuesday?
That makes no sense. The entire point of these categories of questions is that they are logic puzzles, not things people walk around saying in real life.
In real life, if someone stays they 'have two kids, and one is a boy', the other is a girl, because people do not randomly pose logic problems for other people. Likewise, in real life, someone would say 'I have two kids, and the boy was born on Tuesday', with the implication that the other is a girl and not born on Tuesday. Note 'the', not 'a'. Or they'd say 'the youngest boy'. Real people do not actually keep you guessing as to whom they're talking about.
These, OTOH, are puzzles,and we have to calculate what could hypothetically be true, not what a sane person would be meaning if they said that.
I have no idea why we need to have any time limit at all. If the president does this, and Congress asks him why, he should have to respond, even if it's two hours later. And Congress can undo it at any time.
I don't understand why we'd give the president the ability to do shit like this for any amount of time without permission.
While I agree it's absurd for people to randomly assert people in their party don't belong...
...Joe Lieberman isn't actually in the Democratic party. He got voted out. And then conservative voters plus incumbent recognizance plus Democratic party cowardice got him reelected under a third party he invented.
Lieberman is not a Democrat. Really and truly. Democrats run and get elected on Democratic Party tickets.
As far as an off the cuff, is that such a bad metric?
YES.
The media should be reporting whatever they can figure out is true. It is not a place to let people just show up and assert things. That is not reporting.
Reporting is finding out what's true, and telling people that. Yes, they then give the guys a chance to respond, but there's a major difference between that and what they do. What they should be doing is portraying the actual facts as true, and then letting people talk about those facts.
Instead, they just report 'allegations', and responses to the allegations, and then, at the end, manage to talk more about whichever one fit their political viewpoint, so that people walk away with the idea that was the one that was true.
the difference being that one of them wants to do so in a way that increases their profits as much as possible potentially at the expense of anyone who isn't them, the other wants to do so in accordance with some set of ideals or another.
And the later is not some 'idealist' that you can't reason with, either. It's a generalized moving average of what society thinks is good. People can stand in public and make speeches for or against viewpoints.
It really is amazing how people claim to see no difference between that and an unaccountable corporation coming in and doing whatever they want, and how it's unfair that we, as society, might dare try to control those entities.
That doesn't really make a lot of sense as a comparison. There's no way to get power to the Americas.
Heck, it doesn't make any sense to run power to Asia. There are plenty of desert areas that are closer than the Sahara.
But, perhaps more to the point, there's plenty of already existing energy sources in Europe, a lot of them renewable, and there's no point in replacing them to send power from Africa!
PV cells make sense for reducing transmission costs, if the cost of the battery+solar panel is less than the cost of running wires. I see street sign flashing lights that use PV panels, and I know of one guy who charges a car battery via solar panel in a gardening shed across a field, so he's got a light there.
They also make sense for anything that could be deferred. For example, pumping water into water towers. Use whatever solar energy is available, whenever, to pump, and if you run out, then switch over to the grid. (I wish houses with wells would start having attic water-tanks installed for exactly that reason.)
Even, to some extent, AC. Go straight from solar to AC if there's solar available. Even do the reverse-radiator trick and cool down a large mass of water to run through pipes to suck heat during the night.
Same with charging batteries that need to be charged. Like electric cars. If you're going to charge a battery anyway, you might as well charge using solar.
Where PV panels don't make sense is putting it in a battery with the intent to use it later, or, as a more recent design, using it to pump water uphill with the intent of generating hydroelectric later. It only makes sense to use the electricity from PV now, at the moment you get it.
Which does restrict what it can be used for, but does not entirely eliminate it.
You're wrong now, because no one's proposing photovoltaic cells.
They're proposing setting up mirrors and running, essentially, steam engines.
No sane person has proposed setting up PV cells in a desert ever, or at least not in the last decade. PV cells are for putting on top of existing structures.
Interestingly, that's not quite as noble as you'd think it was.
Most coupons are manufacturer coupons, and the store 'sells' those back to the manufacturer and gets their money back. It's in the store's best interest for customers to use those coupons.
Now, you're talking about 'weekly' coupons, so it's possibly you're talking about store-issued coupons that do cost the store money, but even some of them are actually manufacturer coupons even if printed by the store.
For example, my local grocery store prints coupons with the receipt, but those are manufacturer coupons...you can even use them in a different grocery store.
I'm not sure if that contractor still does Verizon support, but they take pride in following such practices..."whatever the client wants" even if that client is plainly screwing the customer.
Frankly, if I worked was in charge of such a company, I'd make it policy to do whatever Verizon wanted...and I'd do it by having people informing the customers there is a solution, but I'm not allowed to tell them it.
You should try living in a place where there's one DSL provider...and they also own the cable company (So no cable internet.)
The problem with monopolies isn't really the price. The price tends to stay mostly reasonable, within 10%-20% of what you'd expect. Probably because they don't want people to actually set in and fix it, or set up a competitor.
That's not a support issue, that's a incompetence issue.
Support issues are when the problem is (reasonably) fixable, but you get dicked around, sometimes for days, before actually talking to someone who can fix it.
Or here, when there's an obvious solution to the problem 'I don't want a data plan, but my fucking phone has a big Internet button in the middle and no way to disable it, and I keep accidentally pressing it and loading your crap-fill start page', but support decides not to offer it, usually because of a policy that makes the company more money.
It sounds like, in your case, the problem is that Verizon is just totally incompetent and doesn't know how to set up an IPv6 connection.
The reason outsourcing development has little to do with whether or not people in third world countries 'can' write good code, and everything to do with the fact that paying someone for each line of code, without any relationship to if the code actually works or solves the problem, is just incredibly stupid.
It results in companies hiring people to code straight out of a book, and producing nonsense. It's cookie cutter shit, the sort of stuff you'd get if you kidnapped a bunch of freshmen CS students and forced them to write programs.
You cannot have unskilled software development, and that's what the offshoring coding houses are doing, with a few skilled guys to actually communicate with everyone else.
There's probably, statistically speaking, as many skilled coders in Indian...but they're working for actual Indian software development places that develop their own software. But Indian has managed to invent the equivalent of fast-food jobs in software, and Americans are dumb enough to buy the results. That doesn't mean that Indians can't actually cook....it means stop ordering from McDonalds if, you know, you want actual normal quality food.
Desktops won't disappear. They aren't as popular now, but it'll be a long time before they vanish entirely.
See, that's an entirely reasonable conclusion.
Unfortunately, the logic you used to get to it is:
I'm pretty sure I'm sane, and keep opting for desktops. When you can get twice the CPU/GPU power for less money, and get it in a form factor that doesn't make as much noise, that's worth buying. Being able to rip out and replace older or defective components is another perk.
Which is, um, pretty silly. As I keep having to repeat, over and over and fucking over again, the amount of people who care about how much CPU/GPU they get are less than 5% of all PC buyers, and are near identical to the people who replace broken components.
I'm sure the market will continue to exist. All sorts of niche markets continue to exist long after the rest of the world went somewhere else.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
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And what, exactly, are you unable to fit on a laptop's hard drive that is speed dependent? What sort of humorous programs are you using? Are you filling it with giant games?
Most people who 'need a lot of space' need it for things like ISOs and music and movies and TV shows. None of which are speed dependent...media just need to reach the minimum speed it's playing at, and ISOs...well, it's nice if they install fast, but you do that how often, exactly?
And, um...while USB might max at 480MB/s (Which incidentally is faster than almost all home networks.), hard drives max out at about 70MB/s, which is slower than most home networks.
Pulling something from a NAS, over a wired network, is maybe 10% slower than off a hard drive, thanks to network overheard. Same with pulling it from USB. It's not some huge speed decrease unless you're using it to launch programs from.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
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Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1
Most people who have '4TB' don't actually have 4TB of important stuff.
They have maybe 100GB of important stuff. Stuff that needs to go on their main hard drive, and has to be there for the computer to work.
I mean, fully installed Adobe is less than 10 gigs. People usually don't have more than 100GB-200GB of programs unless they're gamers, in which case they shouldn't be using a laptop. (But gamers are maybe 3% of the computer buying population.)
The rest of the '4TB' is movies and music and ISOs and stuff like that. It's data. It's usually not even personal data, unless you do video editing. (In which case you shouldn't have a laptop either, you 0.001% of the computer buying public.)
You can walk away from it, you can stick it on a USB drive or a NAS you leave behind. Nor do you really need high speed access to it...who cares how fast a movie file gets off the drive as long as it gets off faster than the playback needs?
Frankly, I rather suspect that this guy and his Super Amazing Computer(TM) doesn't need half the computer he has, he's one of those people who's decided that computer size correlates to the size of a certain body part.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
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Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1
Seriously, if you want anything at all other than a basic computer (e.g., really fast processors, multiple processors, RAID, multiple video cards, serious amounts of RAM, etc.), a laptop won't cut it.
So...the laptop market is only going to get 90%-95% of the PC market? Not 100%?
Well, damn. I've got to go and short their stock now!
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1
Yeah, that's a good point. I had forgotten that laptops have a 'num lock' that swaps what some actual letter keys mean. And thus if you toggled the num lock on some external device, it would stop those keys from still being letters, because there's only one num lock status.
I'm glad that some USB keyboard makers have gotten around it.
In an interesting aside about these keys and their single, computer-wide state, I have a USB KVM that flips screens with a double scroll-lock or num-lock press. Unlike my old KVM, this one apparently does it by reading the keyboard status, not the actual key press.
All well and good, except that when I fired up VMWare, I'd randomly flip to another screen.
Turns out that my computer boots up with num lock off, but the virtual machine was booting up with it on. So if I moved my mouse across the virtual machine, thus giving it focus, VMWare would toggle num lock on, and then off when I left, so if I moved quick enough, it would go on and then off, and, tada, I'd flip to another screen.
I solved the problem by turning num lock off on boot in the VMWare BIOS (And then just being careful when I did use it.), but it was a really strange problem to figure out.
I've never noticed any problem plugging USB devices in. In fact, I have a USB KVM that plugs and unplugs USB devices every time I switch screens.
Now, for some reason, some operating systems take 20 seconds or so the first time you plug a device into a new USB plug, which makes no sense, but you can either a) use a hub, which is easier anyway, b) just plug everything in in the same place (Which is easy enough if you have the wires actually positioned correctly.), or c) just wait it out, because eventually you'll have plugged everything into every socket, and it won't do that anymore.
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Indeed, and that's what I thought that people were going to be talking about, but instead they're yammering about dates, which I don't understand at all.
The implication seems to be that the other child can't also be a boy on Tuesday, which is just stupid. Yes, if you go around listing things in English, and don't include all of them, you're trying to mislead...
That makes no sense. The entire point of these categories of questions is that they are logic puzzles, not things people walk around saying in real life.
In real life, if someone stays they 'have two kids, and one is a boy', the other is a girl, because people do not randomly pose logic problems for other people. Likewise, in real life, someone would say 'I have two kids, and the boy was born on Tuesday', with the implication that the other is a girl and not born on Tuesday. Note 'the', not 'a'. Or they'd say 'the youngest boy'. Real people do not actually keep you guessing as to whom they're talking about.
These, OTOH, are puzzles,and we have to calculate what could hypothetically be true, not what a sane person would be meaning if they said that.
30 days is too long.
I have no idea why we need to have any time limit at all. If the president does this, and Congress asks him why, he should have to respond, even if it's two hours later. And Congress can undo it at any time.
I don't understand why we'd give the president the ability to do shit like this for any amount of time without permission.
While I agree it's absurd for people to randomly assert people in their party don't belong...
Lieberman is not a Democrat. Really and truly. Democrats run and get elected on Democratic Party tickets.
As far as an off the cuff, is that such a bad metric?
YES.
The media should be reporting whatever they can figure out is true. It is not a place to let people just show up and assert things. That is not reporting.
Reporting is finding out what's true, and telling people that. Yes, they then give the guys a chance to respond, but there's a major difference between that and what they do. What they should be doing is portraying the actual facts as true, and then letting people talk about those facts.
Instead, they just report 'allegations', and responses to the allegations, and then, at the end, manage to talk more about whichever one fit their political viewpoint, so that people walk away with the idea that was the one that was true.
THAT IS NOT HOW TRUTH WORKS.
If you're judging Nate Silver on anything except his demonstrated track record of statistics knowledge, you're an idiot.
The reason he can criticize Zogby is that he is better than Zogby.
the difference being that one of them wants to do so in a way that increases their profits as much as possible potentially at the expense of anyone who isn't them, the other wants to do so in accordance with some set of ideals or another.
And the later is not some 'idealist' that you can't reason with, either. It's a generalized moving average of what society thinks is good. People can stand in public and make speeches for or against viewpoints.
It really is amazing how people claim to see no difference between that and an unaccountable corporation coming in and doing whatever they want, and how it's unfair that we, as society, might dare try to control those entities.
That doesn't really make a lot of sense as a comparison. There's no way to get power to the Americas.
Heck, it doesn't make any sense to run power to Asia. There are plenty of desert areas that are closer than the Sahara.
But, perhaps more to the point, there's plenty of already existing energy sources in Europe, a lot of them renewable, and there's no point in replacing them to send power from Africa!
PV cells make sense for reducing transmission costs, if the cost of the battery+solar panel is less than the cost of running wires. I see street sign flashing lights that use PV panels, and I know of one guy who charges a car battery via solar panel in a gardening shed across a field, so he's got a light there.
They also make sense for anything that could be deferred. For example, pumping water into water towers. Use whatever solar energy is available, whenever, to pump, and if you run out, then switch over to the grid. (I wish houses with wells would start having attic water-tanks installed for exactly that reason.)
Even, to some extent, AC. Go straight from solar to AC if there's solar available. Even do the reverse-radiator trick and cool down a large mass of water to run through pipes to suck heat during the night.
Same with charging batteries that need to be charged. Like electric cars. If you're going to charge a battery anyway, you might as well charge using solar.
Where PV panels don't make sense is putting it in a battery with the intent to use it later, or, as a more recent design, using it to pump water uphill with the intent of generating hydroelectric later. It only makes sense to use the electricity from PV now, at the moment you get it.
Which does restrict what it can be used for, but does not entirely eliminate it.
You're wrong now, because no one's proposing photovoltaic cells.
They're proposing setting up mirrors and running, essentially, steam engines.
No sane person has proposed setting up PV cells in a desert ever, or at least not in the last decade. PV cells are for putting on top of existing structures.
That's a goddamn problem with subsidies, and has nothing at all to do with cabling.
People running around calling themselves 'environmentalists' are, once again, doing more harm than good because they're fucking imbeciles.
Interestingly, that's not quite as noble as you'd think it was.
Most coupons are manufacturer coupons, and the store 'sells' those back to the manufacturer and gets their money back. It's in the store's best interest for customers to use those coupons.
Now, you're talking about 'weekly' coupons, so it's possibly you're talking about store-issued coupons that do cost the store money, but even some of them are actually manufacturer coupons even if printed by the store.
For example, my local grocery store prints coupons with the receipt, but those are manufacturer coupons...you can even use them in a different grocery store.
For something like a telephone, where you pay a regular amount, this is really important.
Businesses don't try to maximize profit anymore.
They try to maximize short-term stock bumps, so their current stockholders can sell their stock to the next batch of suckers before the price drops.
I'm not sure if that contractor still does Verizon support, but they take pride in following such practices..."whatever the client wants" even if that client is plainly screwing the customer.
Frankly, if I worked was in charge of such a company, I'd make it policy to do whatever Verizon wanted...and I'd do it by having people informing the customers there is a solution, but I'm not allowed to tell them it.
You should try living in a place where there's one DSL provider...and they also own the cable company (So no cable internet.)
The problem with monopolies isn't really the price. The price tends to stay mostly reasonable, within 10%-20% of what you'd expect. Probably because they don't want people to actually set in and fix it, or set up a competitor.
But quality goes to hell.
That's not a support issue, that's a incompetence issue.
Support issues are when the problem is (reasonably) fixable, but you get dicked around, sometimes for days, before actually talking to someone who can fix it.
Or here, when there's an obvious solution to the problem 'I don't want a data plan, but my fucking phone has a big Internet button in the middle and no way to disable it, and I keep accidentally pressing it and loading your crap-fill start page', but support decides not to offer it, usually because of a policy that makes the company more money.
It sounds like, in your case, the problem is that Verizon is just totally incompetent and doesn't know how to set up an IPv6 connection.
No, you're thinking of the airport in the south of the US.
This is over in Europe. Or Asia. Or, possibly, both, or neither.
I'd say that, if you're looking for a libertarian paradise, it's one of the places closest to that.
I think that comment wins the 'inadvertently funny' prize for today.
You're a moron.
The reason outsourcing development has little to do with whether or not people in third world countries 'can' write good code, and everything to do with the fact that paying someone for each line of code, without any relationship to if the code actually works or solves the problem, is just incredibly stupid.
It results in companies hiring people to code straight out of a book, and producing nonsense. It's cookie cutter shit, the sort of stuff you'd get if you kidnapped a bunch of freshmen CS students and forced them to write programs.
You cannot have unskilled software development, and that's what the offshoring coding houses are doing, with a few skilled guys to actually communicate with everyone else.
There's probably, statistically speaking, as many skilled coders in Indian...but they're working for actual Indian software development places that develop their own software. But Indian has managed to invent the equivalent of fast-food jobs in software, and Americans are dumb enough to buy the results. That doesn't mean that Indians can't actually cook....it means stop ordering from McDonalds if, you know, you want actual normal quality food.
Desktops won't disappear. They aren't as popular now, but it'll be a long time before they vanish entirely.
See, that's an entirely reasonable conclusion.
Unfortunately, the logic you used to get to it is:
I'm pretty sure I'm sane, and keep opting for desktops. When you can get twice the CPU/GPU power for less money, and get it in a form factor that doesn't make as much noise, that's worth buying. Being able to rip out and replace older or defective components is another perk.
Which is, um, pretty silly. As I keep having to repeat, over and over and fucking over again, the amount of people who care about how much CPU/GPU they get are less than 5% of all PC buyers, and are near identical to the people who replace broken components.
I'm sure the market will continue to exist. All sorts of niche markets continue to exist long after the rest of the world went somewhere else.
And what, exactly, are you unable to fit on a laptop's hard drive that is speed dependent? What sort of humorous programs are you using? Are you filling it with giant games?
Most people who 'need a lot of space' need it for things like ISOs and music and movies and TV shows. None of which are speed dependent...media just need to reach the minimum speed it's playing at, and ISOs...well, it's nice if they install fast, but you do that how often, exactly?
And, um...while USB might max at 480MB/s (Which incidentally is faster than almost all home networks.), hard drives max out at about 70MB/s, which is slower than most home networks.
Pulling something from a NAS, over a wired network, is maybe 10% slower than off a hard drive, thanks to network overheard. Same with pulling it from USB. It's not some huge speed decrease unless you're using it to launch programs from.
Most people who have '4TB' don't actually have 4TB of important stuff.
They have maybe 100GB of important stuff. Stuff that needs to go on their main hard drive, and has to be there for the computer to work.
I mean, fully installed Adobe is less than 10 gigs. People usually don't have more than 100GB-200GB of programs unless they're gamers, in which case they shouldn't be using a laptop. (But gamers are maybe 3% of the computer buying population.)
The rest of the '4TB' is movies and music and ISOs and stuff like that. It's data. It's usually not even personal data, unless you do video editing. (In which case you shouldn't have a laptop either, you 0.001% of the computer buying public.)
You can walk away from it, you can stick it on a USB drive or a NAS you leave behind. Nor do you really need high speed access to it...who cares how fast a movie file gets off the drive as long as it gets off faster than the playback needs?
Frankly, I rather suspect that this guy and his Super Amazing Computer(TM) doesn't need half the computer he has, he's one of those people who's decided that computer size correlates to the size of a certain body part.
Seriously, if you want anything at all other than a basic computer (e.g., really fast processors, multiple processors, RAID, multiple video cards, serious amounts of RAM, etc.), a laptop won't cut it.
So...the laptop market is only going to get 90%-95% of the PC market? Not 100%?
Well, damn. I've got to go and short their stock now!
Yeah, that's a good point. I had forgotten that laptops have a 'num lock' that swaps what some actual letter keys mean. And thus if you toggled the num lock on some external device, it would stop those keys from still being letters, because there's only one num lock status.
I'm glad that some USB keyboard makers have gotten around it.
In an interesting aside about these keys and their single, computer-wide state, I have a USB KVM that flips screens with a double scroll-lock or num-lock press. Unlike my old KVM, this one apparently does it by reading the keyboard status, not the actual key press.
All well and good, except that when I fired up VMWare, I'd randomly flip to another screen.
Turns out that my computer boots up with num lock off, but the virtual machine was booting up with it on. So if I moved my mouse across the virtual machine, thus giving it focus, VMWare would toggle num lock on, and then off when I left, so if I moved quick enough, it would go on and then off, and, tada, I'd flip to another screen.
I solved the problem by turning num lock off on boot in the VMWare BIOS (And then just being careful when I did use it.), but it was a really strange problem to figure out.
You probably have a shitty desktop.
I've never noticed any problem plugging USB devices in. In fact, I have a USB KVM that plugs and unplugs USB devices every time I switch screens.
Now, for some reason, some operating systems take 20 seconds or so the first time you plug a device into a new USB plug, which makes no sense, but you can either a) use a hub, which is easier anyway, b) just plug everything in in the same place (Which is easy enough if you have the wires actually positioned correctly.), or c) just wait it out, because eventually you'll have plugged everything into every socket, and it won't do that anymore.