As the AC comment noted, different custom ROMs offer astonishing differences in battery life, to the point where it boggles the mind that the ROMs shipped with the phones haven't been tweaked (or even tested) to get at least somewhat better battery life. I mean, it's not like these ROMs offer less functionality - usually it's far more functionality (unless you consider Motoblur and other crap like that essential functionality I guess).
I have a Nexus One which originally provided about 15 hours of battery life given moderate use. I've used three or four custom ROMs since then; one was abysmal with battery life (lasting less than 8 hours - e.g. almost useless if you aren't able to constantly plug in), but the one I'm using now gives me 40+ hours with the same moderate use as I did with the original stock ROM when it gave me ~15 hours. And this with a battery that's been wearing down over the past year or so.
Newegg has good, quick service, but it's more complicated and costs you more to do returns or exchanges, such that many times it isn't worth it. Newegg charges you the shipping fees for returns and exchanges, Amazon doesn't.
Newegg does ship quickly (depending on where you live) and the selection and prices are generally good, but all the people who give them rave reviews must not have ever tried to return anything!
California and New York (the two places I've lived) both have sales tax of at least 8.25% in urban and suburban areas. It's been at least 8.5% in the particular cities I've lived in.
Also, both states have some of the highest state income and other taxes around. And both states have budget issues, quite severe ones actually.
Now, I do like the idea of no income tax but a higher sales tax, but I'm not sure it would work out to be feasible. And many of the rich would end up with an effective tax cut - if you're a miser and don't spend any money, then you wouldn't pay any tax. You'd need the sales tax percentage to vary by each person's income, which is entirely infeasible.
You missed the point - you ask for people to go out and experience the world rather than learning from snopes. This makes no sense because you can't learn e.g. where the width of rail tracks came from by experiencing it, unless learning from experience includes experiencing a book, and snopes has already done that research so why bother?
I suppose there are things on snopes that you could learn from experience - to pick an obvious example, you could experience what happens when you eat pop rocks and soda. Most of the interesting stuff, though, and the things that get referenced elsewhere on the internet - such as where did rail track widths come from - are not in that category. You may know everything and not be interested in trivia like this, but many (most, I would wager) are.
Realizing that someone's statement is passed-on information of dubious quality is an important skill, yes, but that's not what you were talking about and that's not what FrkyD was asking for with his comment.
The point of the OED is that it includes information about how English is actually used, meaning it includes slang and such things. So if you're just learning English, you can consult it while reading someone's poorly written English on the internet and understand fairly well.
Not that you can't easily find definitions for slang and acronyms elsewhere, but the OED is a respected (if not authoritative) source, and when you're learning another language (or just improving your knowledge of your native language) you want to have an authoritative source. Many authoritative sources, second-language courses, etc. don't contain slang, and it's a major hindrance to actually learning practical use of the language, so I applaud their efforts.
Whether or not "l33t" or just "leet" qualifies as important or widespread slang is the real debate, not whether or not slang and widely used acronyms belong in the dictionary in the first place.
Two things - first, look at urbandictionary.com. Yes, you can find essentially any slang term there if you already heard it - but you'll get hundreds of alternate definitions, and then there are thousands of terms people have added that are not actually widely used slang. If you were unfamiliar with English slang and tried to use that source, you'd have major problems. That's not to say that a better implementation isn't possible (and there are printed slang dictionaries already that are carefully edited), it just illustrates many of the problems in undertaking such a task.
Second, the OED apparently wishes to be a source of information about how the language is actually used - it updates things as meanings change over time. So you can read something written in not-necessarily-the-Queen's-English, probably online, and look up new words and slang and understand them. Other dictionaries don't do this as aggressively. The OED contains *many* slang terms, but only adds them once they've gained demonstrable widespread cultural impact. Whether or not "leet" or "l33t" qualifies is a separate debate, but you have to understand what the OED is trying to do in order to say whether or not such slang should be included at all, and they've already decided that it should be.
I don't generally use much slang, nor do I often consult a dictionary, but I agree that widespread slang belongs in a dictionary of actual English usage and in other respects the OED is certainly a fine dictionary as far as I can tell.
Re:So, no one is going to say this?
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I fell into that trap too, was reading for years before registering. Then I saw a comment from a user with an id past 1,000,000 and thought crap, I need to register! Now we're near 2,000,000 so those of us with low 1,000,000's won't have to feel as inadequate anymore:)
Joystick steering exists, designed for people with disabilities making turning a steering wheel difficult (as I recall). I'm not sure if they ever went into actual use, but I saw a video of one driving in traffic years and years ago on one of those silly Discovery/Science Channel shows about new technologies (possibly "Beyond Tomorrow").
I guess it may be specific to computer science, which is not my field, and perhaps I'm just reading into it differently than intended, but I think you might have missed part of the point of the comic. The academic in the comic will take the result and turn it into papers and grad student theses - for other people, with the professor's name attached. The guy who wrote the original code may be credited but is incidental to the other people who will be involved. Too much work, not enough pay, is exactly right!
The point though is that in academia, you can turn almost anything into a source of further research (which means further funding). Every grad student (and the programmer in the comic is implied to be a grad student) feels that their work is special, but they lack the perspective to realize it probably isn't - but, even the smallest things can be turned into more research and more funding if you're good at writing grants, which is what the professor is excited about, not the code itself.
I mean, actually the comic is primarily a dig at the business perspective on research problems (and it is truly a problem in many industries that businesses don't share their basic research), but the way academia is portrayed is derisive as well, just not as transparently.
I don't doubt this is particularly true in biology, since there are so many students pursuing that, but just wanted to say it's also true in geology which is my field.
My thesis research resulted in a negative result. It's not absolute - it wouldn't be outright lying to say more study could reveal something I missed - but it's certain enough that it makes doing anything with it (e.g. publishing) practically impossible. It was incredibly disheartening, and I got no encouragement from anyone regarding what to do about it.
I'm not willing to lie or embellish, and as a result, I'm stuck with no future in academia, and an impossible job market where this failed research prevents me from getting a job.
Yep, it's definitely not true in the rest of the world. I'm from the US and went to grad school in the US, but spent a lot of time at a university in Thailand while doing research there, and got some insight into how their upper education system works. It was very much like your description of Malaysia (no surprise).
I envied the Thai grad students, and I'm seriously considering going there for a PhD. It seemed like a much more sane place than US universities, the main reason being that it isn't a cutthroat atmosphere.
You don't see as much epic, ground-breaking research out of countries like that as you do out of the US. However, very, very few people in the US are doing that research either - most are doing second or third tier research, the same as in Malaysia or Thailand (not to knock any research done there). And the second or third tier people in SE Asia have no problem finding relatively fulfilling work. If you're second or third tier in the US, you're probably not going to end up with a job related to what you studied. I can't find a job doing *anything* - even working retail - with a master's degree from a second or third tier state school!
On the other hand, it's a fairly privileged few who are able to go into these fields in places like SE Asia. The researchers there are great and very smart, but there's not cutthroat competition because fewer people have the opportunity to give it a go in the first place. The US has such competition because more people have the opportunities to try, which IMO is ultimately a good thing - but funding has to scale with it and it's lagging behind.
I agree with your point entirely, but I also have to say that most of your examples are of positive role models. I've certainly had thoughts like "what would Sherlock Holmes or The Doctor do in this situation" when confronted with real-world problems, and I'm sure many people take positive cues from Star Trek characters ("what's the logical solution?"), and even superheroes.
The problem comes when people have fictional role models that aren't "good", with the stereotypical example being any Grand Theft Auto character. I don't know if anyone uses zombies as a role model; vampires certainly (Twilight etc.)... but that seems pretty benign compared to murderous GTA gangsters:)
I don't think anyone who has looked at Android phones can deny that the iPhone's locked down, Apple-specified (rather than carrier) nature has been a huge advantage. Most Android phones are loaded with garbage.
Even at the most benign level of carrier/manufacturer customization - skins and visualization stuff - they fuck it up. Different skins and whatever is fine, and there are some nice community-made options, but it's clear that the carriers and manufacturers make things different just to be different, not to improve anything - because the base Android version is almost always superior.
I love my unlocked, rooted Nexus One. I use a custom ROM, but the base ROM that Google pushes out is perfectly fine and very nice to use. I read about what other Android phones are like, and I'm sometimes shocked - it would not be a phone experience that I would enjoy. It's often radically different from the base Android experience, and not for the better (not that there couldn't be improvements with base Android, as there certainly could be - same with iOS, though).
So I am glad that Google has recognized the problem and is doing something about it. It's not like Android phones are anywhere near great examples of open-source philosophy, since most of it isn't even open, so it's hard to object on those grounds. If they attempted to restrict the ability to customize things, that'd be one thing, but that's not what they're doing. They're dictating to the carriers and manufacturers that they don't want Android phones messed up with their shitty customizations, because to the general public that gives all of Android a bad name, not just the specific phone.
I think it's pretty clever, since it's pointless and quite buggy... kind of like the rest of Slashdot's recent UI changes. So it's quite the meta-joke:)
I'll concede that it's well done, but regardless, it isn't at all convincing to me. It felt entirely artificial, the same way most of a movie like District 9 feels artificial no matter how outstanding the effects are. Even the interviews at the beginning of that movie - no special effects, just talking heads - felt artificial. I didn't see Cloverfield, but I saw the previews and felt the same way (I don't think they show the monster at all in the previews, even).
Besides the unnatural "shakiness" of the videos (which apparently was done in post-processing, which makes sense), the behavior of the object itself feels quite off, and then the movement at the end looks totally fake. Also, the audio from the people supposedly watching felt staged.
We have an instinctual understanding of what's physically possible and/or realistic, which is how we can tell things are fake in the movies or in things like this. How strongly the "fake" response comes depends on how well done it is of course, and I suspect it varies from person to person how well one can detect fake stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of people who see nothing implausible about special effects in movies, for example, whereas I am never, ever, even slightly convinced by special effects (pre-CGI it was easier to be convincing, even though it was less polished, because things had to have some semblance to physical reality since they were actually physical).
I can concede that alien visitors will most certainly have advanced abilities when it comes to harnessing physics, and that what feels like natural movement for a human-designed craft is not the same as what you'd expect from an advanced alien craft, so this instinct may easily be thrown off by genuine alien craft... but that's stretching things a bit.
I use a Nexus One on AT&T with a $15 data plan. It only gives you 200 mb a month, but I'm in the same boat and mainly use wi-fi and I got the phone for the other functionality (though I don't argue with getting email and so on when out and about). Also... it's a T-Mobile Nexus One, so the AT&T 3G frequency doesn't work. So I get 2G speeds. So no way I'm going to pay for the "full" data plan, because the 2G speed is quite slow (email is fine, google maps and navigation is fine, and I use it occasionally to look stuff up so it's usable in a pinch but not for anything extensive).
Also, people on slashdot have reported success with calling AT&T and telling them to disable data. They do indeed detect if you're using a smartphone and "helpfully" automatically add data to your plan (to be fair they do notify you of this via SMS), but apparently if you insist they will disable that.
Finally, you can disable data altogether right on the device, and presumably AT&T then wouldn't detect that it's a smartphone (according to some more reports from slashdot users in earlier stories). Depending on your phone and whether or not you've rooted it etc. this may be easy or quite difficult. There's a service menu reachable by typing in a code on Android phones that offers this, and presumably it's possible on other smartphones via a similar method. I don't think you even need to be rooted to get to those options.
I have an unlocked & rooted Nexus One, which I use on AT&T. I regularly send and receive sms messages to and from Thailand, in Thai script, and in mixed Thai and English.
If you mix Thai and English you get about half the normal number of characters per message, but if it's just Thai you get the full 160 characters. Not sure, is that what you're referring to? Because other than that (which I can understand could be a complication with encoding the text - don't know any technical details) I'm not sure what the complaint is as it seems to work for me, so I'm curious.
That said, AT&T does charge me 50 cents per outgoing text to Thailand. You can get international text packages as part of your plan, but I don't normally send enough per month for it to be worth it (the pricing structure is ridiculous as one might expect from AT&T).
The cost to send them to a US phone from Thailand? The same as it costs to send to another Thai phone, which on a prepaid account is 1 baht, which is about 3 cents. I even get MMS messages (with photos) regularly from there, without a second thought given to the cost - I haven't looked but I assume AT&T's price for an international MMS is outrageous, so I haven't tried it.
Can't believe you missed the obvious joke there. Since "a field" is not a valid Clue location, there's no reason to not further break continuity with the game by offering "chair" as the murder weapon:)
This is one of the reasons I stopped playing FPS games on the computer... as much as a gamepad sucks as an FPS input device (though you get used to it), at least I know when I play Bad Company 2 on the PS3 that I'm on a level playing field, and if someone reacts faster whipping out the knife (also just one button on the PS3) it's not because they just have a better mouse.
It's not cheating or anything, but especially when it comes to any advantages you have aiming vehicle weapons it sounds a bit unfair. It isn't really unfair, either, because anyone who thinks it is could just get a better mouse... but I guess I just prefer a simple, level playing field:)
I think to play a game like the one he's describing - a mod, especially, which these days aren't as popular as in the old days - you'd need a bunch of people you know reasonably well. Perhaps they all hang out at the same forum, or whatever. I used to play some games with that type of group from a forum (in the days of the original Rainbow Six game, and the first few sequels), and it was fantastic - most people knew each other and everyone was playing the game as intended, forming small squads and so on, with no forced mechanism like in Bad Company 2 (which is my favorite game at the moment, to be clear).
Also, when the original Day of Defeat and Counterstrike were popular (pre-Steam), there were lots of dedicated servers with groups of dedicated people who all knew each other, like we did in the Rainbow Six days. I had a list of four or five public Day of Defeat servers I cycled between, and there would always be a fair number of people I recognized playing, and everyone took the game seriously and worked as a team. The Rainbow Six group moved to Counterstrike after the Rainbow Six games kind of lost their way, so there was one Counterstrike server I always played on and it was great (I tried Counterstrike Source and besides me being terrible at it now, all the servers sucked).
I stopped playing games on computers a few years ago, partly because that community aspect started falling apart - it's hard (if not impossible) to find public servers running games as good as then now. I do try once in a while.
I play Bad Company 2 on the PS3; it's easy to just pick up random games because of the way matchmaking works there, and generally it's fine, and the squad mechanism means at least some of the time you've got teamwork (very loosely most of the time, but it's something). Hardly a replacement for the old days, but it's fun to play for an hour or two once a week or so (which is about all the gaming I do in total nowadays...)
Also, the photos are pretty poorly done - someone did these with an inexpensive camera, and without much photographic experience.
I know NASA has good photographers that work for them, as I've seen their photos - these are awful in comparison, and they don't do the occasion justice, in my opinion. I mean, really - most of them are crooked, even.
One hopes that the good NASA photographers are actually documenting all this stuff, and that these photos were just taken by someone who was there and happened to have a camera. Although the apparent lack of a professional photographer at this occasion suggests otherwise... or perhaps they don't consider this as poignant a moment as it's being portrayed as?
Ikea has a similar chair with arm rests. I had one for a couple years and liked it a lot. Very sturdy (I broke my previous chair, an Office Max special - fell apart under me) and comfortable. I had to abandon it because of a fairly sudden cross-country move - it will be replaced soon, but I don't have a home office area set up at the moment.
Is it standard for people you know to have outstanding warrants against them? Having your car's paper work in order, yes that's a good idea if you're going through a checkpoint. Including warrants in there seems strange, though.
For Your Eyes Only is my favorite Bond film, and it's Roger Moore. His other ones I can agree were often pretty silly (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, and A View to a Kill especially) but For Your Eyes Only is basically the ultimate Bond film, and Roger Moore is great in it.
I have to agree with Pierce Brosnan being great, though... except that most of his films were pretty awful too! Goldeneye was excellent, but it went way downhill for Brosnan after that, despite him being excellent in each one.
FWIW my ranking is Moore -> Connery -> Brosnan -> Dalton/Lazenby/Craig (tie - I thought they were all fine, just didn't bring anything special like the others did) but I can't deny that Connery's Bond films are among the best (though they can be quite silly sometimes too - I always think of the flamethrower vehicle thing in Dr. No as an example).
So how do you explain all the people who grew up in the late 80's and 90's, such as myself, and got just as much into Star Wars (perhaps even more so) than those who were young when it was originally released?
I knew even as a kid that the special effects were slightly dated (though I still think they're quite good even today - nothing CGI can match physical stuff in my opinion), but it didn't matter - besides the fact that we watched them on relatively small TVs on pan-and-scanned VHS tapes, the effects were second to the great characters and the interesting story.
Again, even as a kid, I could tell when other movies were copying techniques from Star Wars, whether visual effects or aspects of the storytelling and characters (now that I'm older I recognize that it's more complex since Star Wars took huge influence from so many earlier sources, but it's safe to say much of the 80's and 90's copycats were copying from Star Wars and not the original material). They didn't do it as well, and the movies weren't as good.
It's not just because it was the "first" to offer great special effects and an exciting method of storytelling with great characters. It truly was excellently done and stands up well to those films that followed it. Which isn't to say that there aren't similar films made later that are as good or better - there are - but most aren't. I think kids today watching the original Star Wars films will be just as entranced as previous generations, despite the improved special effects today and everything. The original films "got it" just right, and almost nothing in the mean time has to the same extent (the original Indiana Jones films did, and you could perhaps argue the LOTR trilogy).
Personally, my kids (when I have any in the future) are going to watch the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. I'll let them watch newer stuff too, of course, but I'm going to do my best to hide most of the drivel available these days from them, especially the Star Wars prequels and Indiana Jones 4. I have no reason to doubt that they will like the original movies as much as I did, even though by then they'll be ancient history as far as my kids will be concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
As the AC comment noted, different custom ROMs offer astonishing differences in battery life, to the point where it boggles the mind that the ROMs shipped with the phones haven't been tweaked (or even tested) to get at least somewhat better battery life. I mean, it's not like these ROMs offer less functionality - usually it's far more functionality (unless you consider Motoblur and other crap like that essential functionality I guess).
I have a Nexus One which originally provided about 15 hours of battery life given moderate use. I've used three or four custom ROMs since then; one was abysmal with battery life (lasting less than 8 hours - e.g. almost useless if you aren't able to constantly plug in), but the one I'm using now gives me 40+ hours with the same moderate use as I did with the original stock ROM when it gave me ~15 hours. And this with a battery that's been wearing down over the past year or so.
Newegg has good, quick service, but it's more complicated and costs you more to do returns or exchanges, such that many times it isn't worth it. Newegg charges you the shipping fees for returns and exchanges, Amazon doesn't.
Newegg does ship quickly (depending on where you live) and the selection and prices are generally good, but all the people who give them rave reviews must not have ever tried to return anything!
California and New York (the two places I've lived) both have sales tax of at least 8.25% in urban and suburban areas. It's been at least 8.5% in the particular cities I've lived in.
Also, both states have some of the highest state income and other taxes around. And both states have budget issues, quite severe ones actually.
Now, I do like the idea of no income tax but a higher sales tax, but I'm not sure it would work out to be feasible. And many of the rich would end up with an effective tax cut - if you're a miser and don't spend any money, then you wouldn't pay any tax. You'd need the sales tax percentage to vary by each person's income, which is entirely infeasible.
You missed the point - you ask for people to go out and experience the world rather than learning from snopes. This makes no sense because you can't learn e.g. where the width of rail tracks came from by experiencing it, unless learning from experience includes experiencing a book, and snopes has already done that research so why bother?
I suppose there are things on snopes that you could learn from experience - to pick an obvious example, you could experience what happens when you eat pop rocks and soda. Most of the interesting stuff, though, and the things that get referenced elsewhere on the internet - such as where did rail track widths come from - are not in that category. You may know everything and not be interested in trivia like this, but many (most, I would wager) are.
Realizing that someone's statement is passed-on information of dubious quality is an important skill, yes, but that's not what you were talking about and that's not what FrkyD was asking for with his comment.
The point of the OED is that it includes information about how English is actually used, meaning it includes slang and such things. So if you're just learning English, you can consult it while reading someone's poorly written English on the internet and understand fairly well.
Not that you can't easily find definitions for slang and acronyms elsewhere, but the OED is a respected (if not authoritative) source, and when you're learning another language (or just improving your knowledge of your native language) you want to have an authoritative source. Many authoritative sources, second-language courses, etc. don't contain slang, and it's a major hindrance to actually learning practical use of the language, so I applaud their efforts.
Whether or not "l33t" or just "leet" qualifies as important or widespread slang is the real debate, not whether or not slang and widely used acronyms belong in the dictionary in the first place.
Two things - first, look at urbandictionary.com. Yes, you can find essentially any slang term there if you already heard it - but you'll get hundreds of alternate definitions, and then there are thousands of terms people have added that are not actually widely used slang. If you were unfamiliar with English slang and tried to use that source, you'd have major problems. That's not to say that a better implementation isn't possible (and there are printed slang dictionaries already that are carefully edited), it just illustrates many of the problems in undertaking such a task.
Second, the OED apparently wishes to be a source of information about how the language is actually used - it updates things as meanings change over time. So you can read something written in not-necessarily-the-Queen's-English, probably online, and look up new words and slang and understand them. Other dictionaries don't do this as aggressively. The OED contains *many* slang terms, but only adds them once they've gained demonstrable widespread cultural impact. Whether or not "leet" or "l33t" qualifies is a separate debate, but you have to understand what the OED is trying to do in order to say whether or not such slang should be included at all, and they've already decided that it should be.
I don't generally use much slang, nor do I often consult a dictionary, but I agree that widespread slang belongs in a dictionary of actual English usage and in other respects the OED is certainly a fine dictionary as far as I can tell.
I fell into that trap too, was reading for years before registering. Then I saw a comment from a user with an id past 1,000,000 and thought crap, I need to register! Now we're near 2,000,000 so those of us with low 1,000,000's won't have to feel as inadequate anymore :)
Joystick steering exists, designed for people with disabilities making turning a steering wheel difficult (as I recall). I'm not sure if they ever went into actual use, but I saw a video of one driving in traffic years and years ago on one of those silly Discovery/Science Channel shows about new technologies (possibly "Beyond Tomorrow").
I guess it may be specific to computer science, which is not my field, and perhaps I'm just reading into it differently than intended, but I think you might have missed part of the point of the comic. The academic in the comic will take the result and turn it into papers and grad student theses - for other people, with the professor's name attached. The guy who wrote the original code may be credited but is incidental to the other people who will be involved. Too much work, not enough pay, is exactly right!
The point though is that in academia, you can turn almost anything into a source of further research (which means further funding). Every grad student (and the programmer in the comic is implied to be a grad student) feels that their work is special, but they lack the perspective to realize it probably isn't - but, even the smallest things can be turned into more research and more funding if you're good at writing grants, which is what the professor is excited about, not the code itself.
I mean, actually the comic is primarily a dig at the business perspective on research problems (and it is truly a problem in many industries that businesses don't share their basic research), but the way academia is portrayed is derisive as well, just not as transparently.
I don't doubt this is particularly true in biology, since there are so many students pursuing that, but just wanted to say it's also true in geology which is my field.
My thesis research resulted in a negative result. It's not absolute - it wouldn't be outright lying to say more study could reveal something I missed - but it's certain enough that it makes doing anything with it (e.g. publishing) practically impossible. It was incredibly disheartening, and I got no encouragement from anyone regarding what to do about it.
I'm not willing to lie or embellish, and as a result, I'm stuck with no future in academia, and an impossible job market where this failed research prevents me from getting a job.
Yep, it's definitely not true in the rest of the world. I'm from the US and went to grad school in the US, but spent a lot of time at a university in Thailand while doing research there, and got some insight into how their upper education system works. It was very much like your description of Malaysia (no surprise).
I envied the Thai grad students, and I'm seriously considering going there for a PhD. It seemed like a much more sane place than US universities, the main reason being that it isn't a cutthroat atmosphere.
You don't see as much epic, ground-breaking research out of countries like that as you do out of the US. However, very, very few people in the US are doing that research either - most are doing second or third tier research, the same as in Malaysia or Thailand (not to knock any research done there). And the second or third tier people in SE Asia have no problem finding relatively fulfilling work. If you're second or third tier in the US, you're probably not going to end up with a job related to what you studied. I can't find a job doing *anything* - even working retail - with a master's degree from a second or third tier state school!
On the other hand, it's a fairly privileged few who are able to go into these fields in places like SE Asia. The researchers there are great and very smart, but there's not cutthroat competition because fewer people have the opportunity to give it a go in the first place. The US has such competition because more people have the opportunities to try, which IMO is ultimately a good thing - but funding has to scale with it and it's lagging behind.
I agree with your point entirely, but I also have to say that most of your examples are of positive role models. I've certainly had thoughts like "what would Sherlock Holmes or The Doctor do in this situation" when confronted with real-world problems, and I'm sure many people take positive cues from Star Trek characters ("what's the logical solution?"), and even superheroes.
The problem comes when people have fictional role models that aren't "good", with the stereotypical example being any Grand Theft Auto character. I don't know if anyone uses zombies as a role model; vampires certainly (Twilight etc.)... but that seems pretty benign compared to murderous GTA gangsters :)
I don't think anyone who has looked at Android phones can deny that the iPhone's locked down, Apple-specified (rather than carrier) nature has been a huge advantage. Most Android phones are loaded with garbage.
Even at the most benign level of carrier/manufacturer customization - skins and visualization stuff - they fuck it up. Different skins and whatever is fine, and there are some nice community-made options, but it's clear that the carriers and manufacturers make things different just to be different, not to improve anything - because the base Android version is almost always superior.
I love my unlocked, rooted Nexus One. I use a custom ROM, but the base ROM that Google pushes out is perfectly fine and very nice to use. I read about what other Android phones are like, and I'm sometimes shocked - it would not be a phone experience that I would enjoy. It's often radically different from the base Android experience, and not for the better (not that there couldn't be improvements with base Android, as there certainly could be - same with iOS, though).
So I am glad that Google has recognized the problem and is doing something about it. It's not like Android phones are anywhere near great examples of open-source philosophy, since most of it isn't even open, so it's hard to object on those grounds. If they attempted to restrict the ability to customize things, that'd be one thing, but that's not what they're doing. They're dictating to the carriers and manufacturers that they don't want Android phones messed up with their shitty customizations, because to the general public that gives all of Android a bad name, not just the specific phone.
I think it's pretty clever, since it's pointless and quite buggy... kind of like the rest of Slashdot's recent UI changes. So it's quite the meta-joke :)
I'll concede that it's well done, but regardless, it isn't at all convincing to me. It felt entirely artificial, the same way most of a movie like District 9 feels artificial no matter how outstanding the effects are. Even the interviews at the beginning of that movie - no special effects, just talking heads - felt artificial. I didn't see Cloverfield, but I saw the previews and felt the same way (I don't think they show the monster at all in the previews, even).
Besides the unnatural "shakiness" of the videos (which apparently was done in post-processing, which makes sense), the behavior of the object itself feels quite off, and then the movement at the end looks totally fake. Also, the audio from the people supposedly watching felt staged.
We have an instinctual understanding of what's physically possible and/or realistic, which is how we can tell things are fake in the movies or in things like this. How strongly the "fake" response comes depends on how well done it is of course, and I suspect it varies from person to person how well one can detect fake stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of people who see nothing implausible about special effects in movies, for example, whereas I am never, ever, even slightly convinced by special effects (pre-CGI it was easier to be convincing, even though it was less polished, because things had to have some semblance to physical reality since they were actually physical).
I can concede that alien visitors will most certainly have advanced abilities when it comes to harnessing physics, and that what feels like natural movement for a human-designed craft is not the same as what you'd expect from an advanced alien craft, so this instinct may easily be thrown off by genuine alien craft... but that's stretching things a bit.
I use a Nexus One on AT&T with a $15 data plan. It only gives you 200 mb a month, but I'm in the same boat and mainly use wi-fi and I got the phone for the other functionality (though I don't argue with getting email and so on when out and about). Also... it's a T-Mobile Nexus One, so the AT&T 3G frequency doesn't work. So I get 2G speeds. So no way I'm going to pay for the "full" data plan, because the 2G speed is quite slow (email is fine, google maps and navigation is fine, and I use it occasionally to look stuff up so it's usable in a pinch but not for anything extensive).
Also, people on slashdot have reported success with calling AT&T and telling them to disable data. They do indeed detect if you're using a smartphone and "helpfully" automatically add data to your plan (to be fair they do notify you of this via SMS), but apparently if you insist they will disable that.
Finally, you can disable data altogether right on the device, and presumably AT&T then wouldn't detect that it's a smartphone (according to some more reports from slashdot users in earlier stories). Depending on your phone and whether or not you've rooted it etc. this may be easy or quite difficult. There's a service menu reachable by typing in a code on Android phones that offers this, and presumably it's possible on other smartphones via a similar method. I don't think you even need to be rooted to get to those options.
I have an unlocked & rooted Nexus One, which I use on AT&T. I regularly send and receive sms messages to and from Thailand, in Thai script, and in mixed Thai and English.
If you mix Thai and English you get about half the normal number of characters per message, but if it's just Thai you get the full 160 characters. Not sure, is that what you're referring to? Because other than that (which I can understand could be a complication with encoding the text - don't know any technical details) I'm not sure what the complaint is as it seems to work for me, so I'm curious.
That said, AT&T does charge me 50 cents per outgoing text to Thailand. You can get international text packages as part of your plan, but I don't normally send enough per month for it to be worth it (the pricing structure is ridiculous as one might expect from AT&T).
The cost to send them to a US phone from Thailand? The same as it costs to send to another Thai phone, which on a prepaid account is 1 baht, which is about 3 cents. I even get MMS messages (with photos) regularly from there, without a second thought given to the cost - I haven't looked but I assume AT&T's price for an international MMS is outrageous, so I haven't tried it.
Can't believe you missed the obvious joke there. Since "a field" is not a valid Clue location, there's no reason to not further break continuity with the game by offering "chair" as the murder weapon :)
This is one of the reasons I stopped playing FPS games on the computer... as much as a gamepad sucks as an FPS input device (though you get used to it), at least I know when I play Bad Company 2 on the PS3 that I'm on a level playing field, and if someone reacts faster whipping out the knife (also just one button on the PS3) it's not because they just have a better mouse.
It's not cheating or anything, but especially when it comes to any advantages you have aiming vehicle weapons it sounds a bit unfair. It isn't really unfair, either, because anyone who thinks it is could just get a better mouse... but I guess I just prefer a simple, level playing field :)
I think to play a game like the one he's describing - a mod, especially, which these days aren't as popular as in the old days - you'd need a bunch of people you know reasonably well. Perhaps they all hang out at the same forum, or whatever. I used to play some games with that type of group from a forum (in the days of the original Rainbow Six game, and the first few sequels), and it was fantastic - most people knew each other and everyone was playing the game as intended, forming small squads and so on, with no forced mechanism like in Bad Company 2 (which is my favorite game at the moment, to be clear).
Also, when the original Day of Defeat and Counterstrike were popular (pre-Steam), there were lots of dedicated servers with groups of dedicated people who all knew each other, like we did in the Rainbow Six days. I had a list of four or five public Day of Defeat servers I cycled between, and there would always be a fair number of people I recognized playing, and everyone took the game seriously and worked as a team. The Rainbow Six group moved to Counterstrike after the Rainbow Six games kind of lost their way, so there was one Counterstrike server I always played on and it was great (I tried Counterstrike Source and besides me being terrible at it now, all the servers sucked).
I stopped playing games on computers a few years ago, partly because that community aspect started falling apart - it's hard (if not impossible) to find public servers running games as good as then now. I do try once in a while.
I play Bad Company 2 on the PS3; it's easy to just pick up random games because of the way matchmaking works there, and generally it's fine, and the squad mechanism means at least some of the time you've got teamwork (very loosely most of the time, but it's something). Hardly a replacement for the old days, but it's fun to play for an hour or two once a week or so (which is about all the gaming I do in total nowadays...)
Also, the photos are pretty poorly done - someone did these with an inexpensive camera, and without much photographic experience.
I know NASA has good photographers that work for them, as I've seen their photos - these are awful in comparison, and they don't do the occasion justice, in my opinion. I mean, really - most of them are crooked, even.
One hopes that the good NASA photographers are actually documenting all this stuff, and that these photos were just taken by someone who was there and happened to have a camera. Although the apparent lack of a professional photographer at this occasion suggests otherwise... or perhaps they don't consider this as poignant a moment as it's being portrayed as?
Ikea has a similar chair with arm rests. I had one for a couple years and liked it a lot. Very sturdy (I broke my previous chair, an Office Max special - fell apart under me) and comfortable. I had to abandon it because of a fairly sudden cross-country move - it will be replaced soon, but I don't have a home office area set up at the moment.
Is it standard for people you know to have outstanding warrants against them? Having your car's paper work in order, yes that's a good idea if you're going through a checkpoint. Including warrants in there seems strange, though.
For Your Eyes Only is my favorite Bond film, and it's Roger Moore. His other ones I can agree were often pretty silly (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, and A View to a Kill especially) but For Your Eyes Only is basically the ultimate Bond film, and Roger Moore is great in it.
I have to agree with Pierce Brosnan being great, though... except that most of his films were pretty awful too! Goldeneye was excellent, but it went way downhill for Brosnan after that, despite him being excellent in each one.
FWIW my ranking is Moore -> Connery -> Brosnan -> Dalton/Lazenby/Craig (tie - I thought they were all fine, just didn't bring anything special like the others did) but I can't deny that Connery's Bond films are among the best (though they can be quite silly sometimes too - I always think of the flamethrower vehicle thing in Dr. No as an example).
So how do you explain all the people who grew up in the late 80's and 90's, such as myself, and got just as much into Star Wars (perhaps even more so) than those who were young when it was originally released?
I knew even as a kid that the special effects were slightly dated (though I still think they're quite good even today - nothing CGI can match physical stuff in my opinion), but it didn't matter - besides the fact that we watched them on relatively small TVs on pan-and-scanned VHS tapes, the effects were second to the great characters and the interesting story.
Again, even as a kid, I could tell when other movies were copying techniques from Star Wars, whether visual effects or aspects of the storytelling and characters (now that I'm older I recognize that it's more complex since Star Wars took huge influence from so many earlier sources, but it's safe to say much of the 80's and 90's copycats were copying from Star Wars and not the original material). They didn't do it as well, and the movies weren't as good.
It's not just because it was the "first" to offer great special effects and an exciting method of storytelling with great characters. It truly was excellently done and stands up well to those films that followed it. Which isn't to say that there aren't similar films made later that are as good or better - there are - but most aren't. I think kids today watching the original Star Wars films will be just as entranced as previous generations, despite the improved special effects today and everything. The original films "got it" just right, and almost nothing in the mean time has to the same extent (the original Indiana Jones films did, and you could perhaps argue the LOTR trilogy).
Personally, my kids (when I have any in the future) are going to watch the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. I'll let them watch newer stuff too, of course, but I'm going to do my best to hide most of the drivel available these days from them, especially the Star Wars prequels and Indiana Jones 4. I have no reason to doubt that they will like the original movies as much as I did, even though by then they'll be ancient history as far as my kids will be concerned.