It's entirely possible that reading Shakespeare on leather-bound Kindle type of device may be similar enough (or possibly superiour to) reading the real thing.
It is worth considering that the real thing as we think of it is not at all the real thing which we would have had in Shakespeare's day - his manuscripts were probably hand-written with an ink quill on parchment, and only meant to be performed anyway rather than read.
I think this raises an interesting question - how much of our attachment to printed ink on paper is mere intertia and sentiment, and how much of it is really based on the utility of the medium? As mediums go, ink on the cheap paper and held together by the horrendous glued 'perfect binding' we use nowadays is one of the worst for longevity, quality, and beauty, and yet we've all become quite attached to it. Books, as we currently make them, can be beat quite easily.
It is not so hard to forsee a time where we forego completely printing information on sheets of pulp, and sending it physically around the world, for fetching it electronically for display on a screen. That time is not so very far away. If you total up the time spent reading on an LCD screen compared to reading paper in everyday life, for many denizens of this site you'd already be reading more online than you ever do printed materials.
Personally, I already do most of my reading on an LCD (with all the disadvantages of current tech), and as tech improves can't see that declining at all - on the contrary, once ebooks pass through the inevitable 50 types of incompatible DRM stage (see music, software, movies) and come out the other side, I think they'll be a good candidate for our data storage and retrieval needs - they can't do worse than our current stock of books, 90% of which will disintegrate in their bindings over the next few hundred years.
As for newspapers, the writing was on the wall for them a long time ago, but I think the same could be said for books, there is just no clear contender to replace them. I imagine most of the big companies will reinvent themselves as information gatherers, but there is a big shake-up due in the industry, and moving to electronic tablets will not prevent that - the internet has completely changed the way we consume information, and simply changing the medium used to present their newspapers on is not going to save a lot of these companies.
The UK has a large stock of anti-virals, and has ordered more - they're now up to 50 million doses of Tamiflu ordered, which is quite good coverage given the population is around 60m. The masks are of debatable utility, but may help healthcare workers if coupled with goggles and other precautions like washing hands frequently.
I watch Apple cleaning up resources (languages), releasing single architecture OS (Snow Leopard) and there are some reports of massively shrink Mail.app etc. in OS betas. As they (and you) sure know there is ZERO performance enhancement of cleaning languages, removing architectures whatever windows switchers may think:)... I mean, Apple seems to do a huge spring cleaning lately.
Well, perhaps there are no direct performance improvements, but there are huge gains in support time, testing time, developer time, and disk space in trimming down the APIs and architectures supported. It makes a lot of sense and the only reason not to do it is that third party software houses hate it, because it means more work for them. For Apple it has a lot of upsides and only one downside (a bit of time spent deciding what to cut).
At the core level though, Developers may see something like "really stripped down OS X but still OS X", something they can use exact same core and just have to write different GUI.
Presumably you haven't looked in depth at the iPhone SDK, as this is exactly what is currently offered. Though the API does also show some signs of a general cleanup and a move to a newer base, which imply that this is the basis of OS X going forward, not the OS X we see on the desktop, most of the core functionality is exactly the same, and only some functionality is omitted. Given the way that Apple have proceed with Mobile OS X as more of an evolution of OS X rather than a branch, a more likely scenario is (as the grandparent noted), that the APIs in Mobile OS X will replace traditional OS X over time. This will become more and more likely if the installed base of the mobile OS grows to dwarf that of the desktop, and becomes a bigger revenue stream for Apple.
Thanks for that - but note I said 'produce', which is correct IMHO. Nobody is their right mind would buy & drive & Hummer, of course, so the mileage calcs are ingenuous[sic].
So your stats are meaningless. Thanks for clearing that up for us.
A car is for driving around in, so energy economy is really quite important over the lifetime of one you buy intending to use, as opposed to hardly ever drive. After a while the efficiency (or not) of the manufacture pales into insignificance in comparison to how much it costs to drive, and the cost to the climate of lots of people doing the same.
Sure, a Prius depends on electricity generation which is clean, so at this point in time it isn't much better for the environment than a normal car (unless you have off-grid power), but to compare it to a Hummer is disingenuous if not downright misleading.
Exactly - all they need to make this problem go away is to adopt the rather more sane update mechanism used by other apps - check for updates on a given schedule when the app is launched - if it's out of date, inform the user, and give them a choice of what to do.
I don't care if it's open or closed source, made by Google or any other company - I don't want background processes running unless they are absolutely necessary, and this one is not.
Secondly, by saying "...there where times were similar things were common even in europe like 500-600 years ago", you are making weasel excuses. It does not excuse the behaviour, nor make it right. It does show an attempt to deflect accusations of wrong-doing.
No, he's saying that the person who made that post and the people who modded it insightful are ignorant fools if they think that exactly the same examples of genocide and forced marriages of children can not be found in the Torah or the Bible. Really, slagging off Islam for these sort of stories in the holy book from a Christian or Jewish perspective is hipocritical.
If you are astonished at this marriage to a young girl, you would clearly be astonished by any of the cultures of the time. The parent wasn't saying it was right, they were saying it was prevalent.
Pedophilia (even when practiced by that Islamic prophet Mohammed) is wrong.
I think what you meant was that paedophelia (what a cheap shot by the way, think of the children), is considered wrong nowadays, but that it was not always so, as evidenced by the child brides in the Talmud (I believe the age in question is 3) and Christian Bible. To point this out is not a 'weasel excuse' it's to not wallow in the ignorance of expecting every age to conform to the mores of our own.
Re:Who gives a shit about twitter?
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Twitter On Scala
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since I assume it's about 3 lines of code (Or should be), and mimics most highschool coding class students' first projects.
That'll work for 100 users, let us know how it works out for 10,000, or 8 million.
I can't comment on the technical wonders (or otherwise) of the twitter code-base, but your comment really just illustrates your ignorance on the topic of programming languages and messaging. The problem of dealing with that many users sharing messages is not trivial, and has very little to do with the choice of programming language.
Unfortunately, on London craigslist at least, you are more likely to get responses from Africa trying to scam you than real responses to your ad. From a recent ad I got three responses from Abuja, Nigeria (according to IP), and none from genuine buyers, in spite of an instruction saying 'local buyers only' and requiring pickup.
This sort of site requires a critical mass of genuine people to be using it, and in certain places a lot of the traffic is probably caused more by scams than real items for sale. As you say, it's the internet it its purest, most open, form, and like email and web discussions, it's been taken over by scammers, spammers and blow-hards.
RE Video Chat...Nobody wants to show other people that they're in the toilet
I don't generally call people from the toilet, so it's not an issue. Perhaps it would be for you. In my opinion video chat has not caught on because it is expensive and charged at extortionate rates. I expect that to change. Look at desktop computers and you'll see video chat being used all over the world.
RE: email: Get caught checking your email while driving,
And? What does the obvious danger of emailing/phoning while driaving have to do with smartphones and the use of email on them? Texting while riding a bike is also inadvisable, but it doesn't seem to have put people off texting.
Since you're not doing it while driving, you're probably somewhere with a computer nearby.
However, many people are finding the smartphone to be a dumb idea. They're bulky, the screens crack just from sitting in your pocket, and for the most part, they're just cheap not-as-good-as-a-crackberry for people who don't want to pay for a blackberry.
As for the iPhone, it's just too damn bulky to be interesting
You're assuming that your experience and feelings are universal. Given the growth in smartphone sales, I disagree (based on the figures, not on a personal love for smartphones). For example, 17 million iPhones have been sold, mostly with expensive all you can eat data plans. I'd suggest that's not because lots of people have been duped, but because they find it useful to have access to email/the web on a phone when travelling, and are willing to pay a bit extra for it.
As to your contention that the iPhone in particular is a cheap Blackberry imitation, I disagree. When I used a Blackberry a few years ago the browser was some pitiful imitation of a real browser, and the email interface was the only thing which had received attention and was useful. They have progressed much with their UI, in part I think because of the competition.
As an example: my phone's UI doesn't suck. Good things about it are that it can copy and paste, and if I want to run applications from a unofficial site, or use it as a modem ("tethering"), it doesn't need to be hacked (it Just Works). All good interfaces have objective reasons why they are good - I would be curious for some examples?
So when talking about interfaces, you run off several features as evidence of why it doesn't suck?
The parent wasn't talking about tethering, or running unofficial apps, he was talking about the interface (copy and paste is the only thing you mentioned which *is* a UI issue, and agreed it's crazy they didn't have it in from day 1 on the iPhone).
Compared to Nokia, Motorola and Samsung phones, the UI on Android or the iPhone is far far ahead. Things like picture manipulation, app launching, tabs (on Android), reading email, texting etc are vastly simplified, compared with the menu based hell and inconsistent UI of Motorola/Nokia phones, which is often based around a series of OK/Cancel or Menu/Options choices, which require you to push one of a confusing array of hardware buttons below the screen.
People want phones first and foremost to make phone calls. A smart phone, for many of us, is a dumb decision - it's too bulky, while at the same time it doesn't have enough screen to replace even a netbook... and for people who tend to lose their phones on an annual basis, it gets expensive fast. Phones, for most people, are semi-disposable commodities. If someone loses it, or it gets stolen, or they drop it one time too many, it's not THAT big a deal. And for the majority, that's the way it should stay, because, like hard drive failures, it's not a question of if, but when - when you lose it, drop it, it dies, or it gets swiped.
Today, people want phones first and foremost to make phonecalls. Tomorrow, they may want them first and foremost for email and video chat, with audio being a function not often used.
Most people don't want to lug a laptop around just to check email/the web, they're happy to do their surfing on a tiny device they can carry around with them anyway (a smartphone). Most people will never have a 'netbook' or even know what one is, but they do know that you can now get phones which will display your email too and have access to the internet.
As to the argument about fragility etc, I imagine similar arguments about those newfangled portable computers called laptops back in the day.
Now perhaps you disagree with this future, but it is not improbable, and your blithe dismissal of smart-phones doesn't mean they will suddenly stop being the fastest-growing segment of phone handsets.
Well, first of all, I can't, because I don't live in the United States. However I have the same problem with similar services in the UK like the BBC iPlayer, which carries yet more content restricted to just one country, and has even more ridiculous restrictions on content (7 day rule).
Even if I did live in the states, I wouldn't be able to watch it when I want, because I don't sit chained to my desk waiting for TV to stream over an internet connection - this was a reference to it not being available on my phone for example for watching when travelling, or a laptop. As opposed to downloadable content, which is.
would you really be willing to pay for every tv show you might want to watch? i certainly wouldn't pay to keep up with half the stuff i have subscribed on hulu.
Evidently you don't value your time very highly.
I would be (and am) willing to pay for content because it establishes a direct link between good content and the money paid for it. Funding content entirely with advertising breaks that link, with predictable results.
you can run hulu full screen on any computer with a web browser and flash. doesn't seem very limiting to me.
It does seem very limiting to me (and others). I explained why in my post. You can't watch it on :
* Phones * iPods * Living room media centres (unless you want to watch it in a browser) * Laptops when travelling * Any other device the media companies take a dislike to
Simply put, I don't like the media companies having this much control over how I consume content. It's bad for the consumer, and bad for the product.
ad-supported viewing is still viable, though it's not going to fail because of individuals like you.
That's for the future to decide, however I wonder how a generation weaned on the internet will take to yet another delivery method they can't control delivery or consumption of?
At present this service succeeds because people think 'oh, it's just like TV', there may come a time when it fails because people think 'oh, it's just like TV, it has those annoying ads you can't skip every 5 minutes'.
I suspect when they have hooked a bunch of people they'll boost the ad/content ratio so that they can make more money, and the proposition will seem far less enticing.
I don't, I'd rather the internet superseded TV; these webTV websites like Hulu leave the same old content syndicates in charge of when you watch, what you watch, and what you watch with it (no Boxee or mobile devices for you! No content if you're not from country X). Note Hulu is owned and directed by media conglomerates, it's not some plucky independent.
Worse, it gives them leverage over device manufacturers to later on demand things like no ad-skipping, no recording, etc etc. in return for licensing access to their webTV channel. The only advance of this system over TV is it isn't scheduled. If this is the future of internet TV, count me out, I'll go back to youtube and reading.
I'd rather a simple purchase/rent model myself (as in Amazon or iTunes), and the minimum of middlemen between the content producer and the purchaser. After the purchase I do whatever I want with the item I have purchased, and don't have to be connected constantly to watch it, or ask permission to transfer it to a device (in this respect iTunes fails, they should lose the DRM).
The concepts of ad-supported viewing, control over viewing, no recording/skipping, and even channels themselves really deserve to die along with broadcast TV.
Because puts { "I like beans" } is 9000% better than just typing I like beans.
What a terrible example
1. It's not functioning Ruby (try puts "I like beans", like most languages in fact)
2. It has nothing to do with the strengths or failings of Ruby as a language.
Do you know anything about Ruby? Do your empty platitudes about 'layers upon layers of complexity' actually have any basis in reality? From your comment, I suspect not.
There are some not so nice corners of Ruby, but an attempt to oversimplify is not one of them.
Then that's where you went wrong. I'm sure that you realize that the police (indeed, all organs of Government) work for you and shouldn't have the right to dole out permission to exercise your inalienable rights, correct?
So carrying a lethal weapon is now an 'inalienable right'? I'd rather most of my fellow citizens did not have that right thanks very much, and it looks like the stats on violent death in the UK and US per capita agree with me.
Government is the voluntary surrender of certain rights in return for security. Thus we give the police the power to lock us up, confiscate weapons, etc etc, governed by certain laws. So giving up certain rights is not some kind of watershed moment, it is fundamental to the social contract. Other rights, such as the right to a free trial. I'd be far more worried about detention without trial, and secret trials than the right to bear arms. Those are real attacks on your freedom, happening right now, in the US and the UK.
Evidently we disagree about whether wide gun ownership is a fundamental right, and further about whether it is even desirable. To go from there to saying that states with tighter gun control laws than the US are somehow automatic dictatorships where citizens have abrogated all rights is laughable. Contrary to your beliefs, it is still legal to own weapons in the UK, but the controls are stricter than the US.
Would it make you happier if I just said that you set the stage for it when you willingly surrendered a right sometime in the 20th century that you had previously held for hundreds of years? I honestly didn't set out here to debate the merits of gun control, just to point out that the UK populace set a precedent for surrendering their rights long before the surveillance society came onto the scene.
Ask yourself when you would ever use your gun against your government, and you realise pretty quickly that if you don't want to end up like those at Waco, you wouldn't. Further, if you feel gun ownership is a fundamental guarantor of other rights, why has the US seen the biggest erosion of civil rights in its history in the last decade? What have the gun owners done to stop that? Nothing.
But claiming it's dues ex machina makes you look like an ignorant fool to anyone who knows what the term actually means.
heh. Really? Perhaps if you think wikipedia is actually a reliable source of definitions. The original usage from Horace says nothing about 'sudden', indeed, it refers to the use of a previously known god to wrap up a story by solving everything by fiat. Which is exactly what this series did. If you 'establish' it before the end by giving vague hints that Gods may intervene, it's still a cop-out.
It's intellectually lazy and disappointing. If you prefer not to use the term deus ex machina, fine, but really you're playing with semantics, the original point stands about the ending.
Oh right, so a deus ex machina is ok if you mention it earlier on in the plot. Gotcha.
The plot was confused from quite early on, the scripting was good initially and then deteriorated gradually as things lost coherence. The characterisation and dram was better, and at times gripping, but the cod-religion, silly plot-twists and lack of coherence really put me off the show around the end of season 2, so I'm glad to hear that the ending was just as messy as I imagined, basically '$Diety did it'.
I'm amazed to be honest that they managed to stretch it out for so long, and that people are still defending it.
Serious question: what the hell for? What do you gain from subtlety?
The world around us is subtle, shades of grey, not black and white. Lack of subtlety implies lack of understanding or, worse, wilful ignorance. Never good when you're trying to suspend disbelief as a viewer.
It's popular lately for all messages in media to be subtle, but that's just a cop-out so it can be mass-sold to everyone
Please, I'd like an example so that we know what you're talking about, because this sounds like bullshit demagogy otherwise - 'a cop-out so it can be mass-sold', WTF? Since when has subtlety made things more mainstream? How is it more prevalent than the manichaeism so popular over the last decade in 'the civilised world' as our politicians like to call it?
Art and entertainment are not solely there to 'add value' (whatever that means), they are a mode of communication, and a method of provoking emotions and thoughts in the viewer. Adding subtlety makes characters and situations portrayed more convincing, engaging and involving.
Battlestar Galactica had some promising starting assumptions and some poetic and moving moments, but having watched the first few series, it rarely rose above the level of soap opera (set in space), precisely because the script-writers felt it necessary to telegraph lots of the plot again and again, to introduce meaningless sub-plots (note needless complication is not subtlety) that were never tied up, and generally to beat the viewer around the head with what was happening, rather than leaving some things mysterious, and allowing ideas and characters room to breathe.
It was best when really pushing conflicts inherent in our society like freedom vs rights, the religious vs the secular in public life and military force vs political force. Sometimes that was let down by poor scripting, and sometimes by slightly hammy plot-lines. The best thing about it in my opinion was the oh-so-camp Gaius Baltar, who knew what the score was and played up to the hammy scripts he was handed. At times it did deal with genuinely interesting ideas in a genuinely challenging manner (terrorism for one), and yet that was betrayed by the insistence on cheap emotional shots (But you're a beautiful woman! But you're a cylon! But you're my father!), torture and sex, just to spice it up a little.
It had the feel of being written by huge teams of writers (i.e. more than two), and that was a shame, as some material was really promising, and I love thoughtful sci-fi.
Flash should not be used for online video, and I'm glad the iPhone is contributing to killing it in that space. We have lots of good video codecs to choose from, and Flash is not among them. It has its place as an animation plugin for certain content (though frankly the appeal is becoming more and more limited with CSS animations and faster Javascript).
As for arguing that DRM and control over viewers is a benefit of Flash - go ahead and cheer for Flash as a video format, if that's the internet you want to live on.
Observation doesn't necessarily require being directly over enemy territory. Such airships would be excellent for covering borders and providing 25/7 situational awareness over areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They would be most useful over American cities, used only for spying on criminals, of course.
I would prefer my media outlet to be viewed as neutral, & unbiased...not as negative nancies, nay-sayers, or devils advocates. It's OK to agree with gov't, it's OK to say 'good job Mr. President/Congressman/SCJ/etc'. But to be known as the opposition no matter who is in power strikes me as a group of people who just like to cause strife cause it sells - which is wrong.
The BBC is viewed as neutral by most non-extreme viewers. They do not always oppose the government, and yet they are sometimes critical of the government in power, as they should be.
What the parent meant was that the inevitably corrupt, hypocritical politicians from *both* main parties are typically unhappy with the BBC and claim they are biased etc. Generally when the likes of Mandelson (Rove), Blair (Bush with finesse), and John Major claim you're heavy handed and biased against the government, it means you're doing a good job.
The BBC strives to be relatively impartial, and is seen as such by the vast majority of the population (save politicians).
Hulu has a choice: They can provide a good assortment of content playing by the content provider's rules, or they can provide very little content any way they damn well please. So far, evidence shows that Hulu has made the right choices.
Hulu is backed by majors like NBC Universal and News Corp, they're not some scrappy startup trying to outplay the system.
The owners very much control which countries content is available in, and they've decided they don't care about the world outside the US.
As far as I'm concerned, it's dead in the water anyway - who wants the internet to turn into another version of TV? Displaying content only from certain 'channels', available only as a streamed service, served up with adverts, and restricted only to certain markets.
No thanks.
Maybe that works for you, but as far as I'm concerned they've made all the wrong choices. I'll stick with ripping DVDs and content I can download and put on my own devices to watch when I want.
It's not a commercial worm, but this sort of worm is possible on OS X, just more difficult. You talk as if this sort of exploit is impossible somehow on OS X, it is not.
Quite apart from that, you were wrong to say it has not been owned remotely - it has on multiple occasions had remote exploits via the browser. These require the user to visit a page with malicious javascript, that is all. Then a remote exploit commences. They do not require local access to the computer. Some have been patched, some are still open. Other browsers have similar exploits.
To quote your initial incorrect statement:
It's a lot more important to be secure from the 35 million people out on the internet than from the 2 that have an account on your computer.
The exploits I listed are not ones which require a local log in by the hacker, and this competition will specifically be testing browsers too.
Now you can play semantics, and try to twist remote to mean 'remote with no user action' but that's not what you said initially, it would not be a real world test, and that's not what the later stages of this contest test - last year I think they progressed from default locked down config, to services on, to visiting a web page. Last year the macbook was hacked via visiting a web page. A fair test given that most users don't leave their machine with no services on and never visiting web pages.
Vulnerabilities in web browsers certainly should not be dismissed as 'local' exploits - they only require minimal user intervention (clicking a link), and if that can lead to the system being compromised, it should be considered insecure. Indeed, after one initial infection, a worm could easily spread this way by emailing/iming contacts with a URL.
PS I run OS X, and don't run a virus scanner due to the lack of worms/viruses, but I don't view it as invulnerable, and neither should you. Your munition/shoe analogy doesn't make any sense, and implies that you really think that using OS X makes you somehow invulnerable to any exploits - it really doesn't.
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It's entirely possible that reading Shakespeare on leather-bound Kindle type of device may be similar enough (or possibly superiour to) reading the real thing.
It is worth considering that the real thing as we think of it is not at all the real thing which we would have had in Shakespeare's day - his manuscripts were probably hand-written with an ink quill on parchment, and only meant to be performed anyway rather than read.
I think this raises an interesting question - how much of our attachment to printed ink on paper is mere intertia and sentiment, and how much of it is really based on the utility of the medium? As mediums go, ink on the cheap paper and held together by the horrendous glued 'perfect binding' we use nowadays is one of the worst for longevity, quality, and beauty, and yet we've all become quite attached to it. Books, as we currently make them, can be beat quite easily.
It is not so hard to forsee a time where we forego completely printing information on sheets of pulp, and sending it physically around the world, for fetching it electronically for display on a screen. That time is not so very far away. If you total up the time spent reading on an LCD screen compared to reading paper in everyday life, for many denizens of this site you'd already be reading more online than you ever do printed materials.
Personally, I already do most of my reading on an LCD (with all the disadvantages of current tech), and as tech improves can't see that declining at all - on the contrary, once ebooks pass through the inevitable 50 types of incompatible DRM stage (see music, software, movies) and come out the other side, I think they'll be a good candidate for our data storage and retrieval needs - they can't do worse than our current stock of books, 90% of which will disintegrate in their bindings over the next few hundred years.
As for newspapers, the writing was on the wall for them a long time ago, but I think the same could be said for books, there is just no clear contender to replace them. I imagine most of the big companies will reinvent themselves as information gatherers, but there is a big shake-up due in the industry, and moving to electronic tablets will not prevent that - the internet has completely changed the way we consume information, and simply changing the medium used to present their newspapers on is not going to save a lot of these companies.
They did not order much in the way of antivirals, which were known to be effective.
I don't know where you got your information from, but you are misinformed.
http://www.healthcarerepublic.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=HCR.News.GP.LatestNews.Article&nNewsID=901865&sHashCode=#AddComment
The UK has a large stock of anti-virals, and has ordered more - they're now up to 50 million doses of Tamiflu ordered, which is quite good coverage given the population is around 60m. The masks are of debatable utility, but may help healthcare workers if coupled with goggles and other precautions like washing hands frequently.
I watch Apple cleaning up resources (languages), releasing single architecture OS (Snow Leopard) and there are some reports of massively shrink Mail.app etc. in OS betas. As they (and you) sure know there is ZERO performance enhancement of cleaning languages, removing architectures whatever windows switchers may think :)... I mean, Apple seems to do a huge spring cleaning lately.
Well, perhaps there are no direct performance improvements, but there are huge gains in support time, testing time, developer time, and disk space in trimming down the APIs and architectures supported. It makes a lot of sense and the only reason not to do it is that third party software houses hate it, because it means more work for them. For Apple it has a lot of upsides and only one downside (a bit of time spent deciding what to cut).
At the core level though, Developers may see something like "really stripped down OS X but still OS X", something they can use exact same core and just have to write different GUI.
Presumably you haven't looked in depth at the iPhone SDK, as this is exactly what is currently offered. Though the API does also show some signs of a general cleanup and a move to a newer base, which imply that this is the basis of OS X going forward, not the OS X we see on the desktop, most of the core functionality is exactly the same, and only some functionality is omitted. Given the way that Apple have proceed with Mobile OS X as more of an evolution of OS X rather than a branch, a more likely scenario is (as the grandparent noted), that the APIs in Mobile OS X will replace traditional OS X over time. This will become more and more likely if the installed base of the mobile OS grows to dwarf that of the desktop, and becomes a bigger revenue stream for Apple.
Thanks for that - but note I said 'produce', which is correct IMHO. Nobody is their right mind would buy & drive & Hummer, of course, so the mileage calcs are ingenuous[sic].
So your stats are meaningless. Thanks for clearing that up for us.
A car is for driving around in, so energy economy is really quite important over the lifetime of one you buy intending to use, as opposed to hardly ever drive. After a while the efficiency (or not) of the manufacture pales into insignificance in comparison to how much it costs to drive, and the cost to the climate of lots of people doing the same.
Sure, a Prius depends on electricity generation which is clean, so at this point in time it isn't much better for the environment than a normal car (unless you have off-grid power), but to compare it to a Hummer is disingenuous if not downright misleading.
Exactly - all they need to make this problem go away is to adopt the rather more sane update mechanism used by other apps - check for updates on a given schedule when the app is launched - if it's out of date, inform the user, and give them a choice of what to do.
I don't care if it's open or closed source, made by Google or any other company - I don't want background processes running unless they are absolutely necessary, and this one is not.
Secondly, by saying "...there where times were similar things were common even in europe like 500-600 years ago", you are making weasel excuses. It does not excuse the behaviour, nor make it right. It does show an attempt to deflect accusations of wrong-doing.
No, he's saying that the person who made that post and the people who modded it insightful are ignorant fools if they think that exactly the same examples of genocide and forced marriages of children can not be found in the Torah or the Bible. Really, slagging off Islam for these sort of stories in the holy book from a Christian or Jewish perspective is hipocritical.
If you are astonished at this marriage to a young girl, you would clearly be astonished by any of the cultures of the time. The parent wasn't saying it was right, they were saying it was prevalent.
Pedophilia (even when practiced by that Islamic prophet Mohammed) is wrong.
I think what you meant was that paedophelia (what a cheap shot by the way, think of the children), is considered wrong nowadays, but that it was not always so, as evidenced by the child brides in the Talmud (I believe the age in question is 3) and Christian Bible. To point this out is not a 'weasel excuse' it's to not wallow in the ignorance of expecting every age to conform to the mores of our own.
since I assume it's about 3 lines of code (Or should be), and mimics most highschool coding class students' first projects.
That'll work for 100 users, let us know how it works out for 10,000, or 8 million.
I can't comment on the technical wonders (or otherwise) of the twitter code-base, but your comment really just illustrates your ignorance on the topic of programming languages and messaging. The problem of dealing with that many users sharing messages is not trivial, and has very little to do with the choice of programming language.
Unfortunately, on London craigslist at least, you are more likely to get responses from Africa trying to scam you than real responses to your ad. From a recent ad I got three responses from Abuja, Nigeria (according to IP), and none from genuine buyers, in spite of an instruction saying 'local buyers only' and requiring pickup.
This sort of site requires a critical mass of genuine people to be using it, and in certain places a lot of the traffic is probably caused more by scams than real items for sale. As you say, it's the internet it its purest, most open, form, and like email and web discussions, it's been taken over by scammers, spammers and blow-hards.
RE Video Chat...Nobody wants to show other people that they're in the toilet
I don't generally call people from the toilet, so it's not an issue. Perhaps it would be for you. In my opinion video chat has not caught on because it is expensive and charged at extortionate rates. I expect that to change. Look at desktop computers and you'll see video chat being used all over the world.
RE: email: Get caught checking your email while driving,
And? What does the obvious danger of emailing/phoning while driaving have to do with smartphones and the use of email on them? Texting while riding a bike is also inadvisable, but it doesn't seem to have put people off texting.
Since you're not doing it while driving, you're probably somewhere with a computer nearby.
However, many people are finding the smartphone to be a dumb idea. They're bulky, the screens crack just from sitting in your pocket, and for the most part, they're just cheap not-as-good-as-a-crackberry for people who don't want to pay for a blackberry.
As for the iPhone, it's just too damn bulky to be interesting
You're assuming that your experience and feelings are universal. Given the growth in smartphone sales, I disagree (based on the figures, not on a personal love for smartphones). For example, 17 million iPhones have been sold, mostly with expensive all you can eat data plans. I'd suggest that's not because lots of people have been duped, but because they find it useful to have access to email/the web on a phone when travelling, and are willing to pay a bit extra for it.
As to your contention that the iPhone in particular is a cheap Blackberry imitation, I disagree. When I used a Blackberry a few years ago the browser was some pitiful imitation of a real browser, and the email interface was the only thing which had received attention and was useful. They have progressed much with their UI, in part I think because of the competition.
As an example: my phone's UI doesn't suck. Good things about it are that it can copy and paste, and if I want to run applications from a unofficial site, or use it as a modem ("tethering"), it doesn't need to be hacked (it Just Works). All good interfaces have objective reasons why they are good - I would be curious for some examples?
So when talking about interfaces, you run off several features as evidence of why it doesn't suck?
The parent wasn't talking about tethering, or running unofficial apps, he was talking about the interface (copy and paste is the only thing you mentioned which *is* a UI issue, and agreed it's crazy they didn't have it in from day 1 on the iPhone).
Compared to Nokia, Motorola and Samsung phones, the UI on Android or the iPhone is far far ahead. Things like picture manipulation, app launching, tabs (on Android), reading email, texting etc are vastly simplified, compared with the menu based hell and inconsistent UI of Motorola/Nokia phones, which is often based around a series of OK/Cancel or Menu/Options choices, which require you to push one of a confusing array of hardware buttons below the screen.
People want phones first and foremost to make phone calls. A smart phone, for many of us, is a dumb decision - it's too bulky, while at the same time it doesn't have enough screen to replace even a netbook ... and for people who tend to lose their phones on an annual basis, it gets expensive fast. Phones, for most people, are semi-disposable commodities. If someone loses it, or it gets stolen, or they drop it one time too many, it's not THAT big a deal. And for the majority, that's the way it should stay, because, like hard drive failures, it's not a question of if, but when - when you lose it, drop it, it dies, or it gets swiped.
Today, people want phones first and foremost to make phonecalls. Tomorrow, they may want them first and foremost for email and video chat, with audio being a function not often used.
Most people don't want to lug a laptop around just to check email/the web, they're happy to do their surfing on a tiny device they can carry around with them anyway (a smartphone). Most people will never have a 'netbook' or even know what one is, but they do know that you can now get phones which will display your email too and have access to the internet.
As to the argument about fragility etc, I imagine similar arguments about those newfangled portable computers called laptops back in the day.
Now perhaps you disagree with this future, but it is not improbable, and your blithe dismissal of smart-phones doesn't mean they will suddenly stop being the fastest-growing segment of phone handsets.
YYYY-MM-DD is the ISO standard, and won't cause confusion, so best to use that.
you can watch any content on hulu at any time.
Well, first of all, I can't, because I don't live in the United States. However I have the same problem with similar services in the UK like the BBC iPlayer, which carries yet more content restricted to just one country, and has even more ridiculous restrictions on content (7 day rule).
Even if I did live in the states, I wouldn't be able to watch it when I want, because I don't sit chained to my desk waiting for TV to stream over an internet connection - this was a reference to it not being available on my phone for example for watching when travelling, or a laptop. As opposed to downloadable content, which is.
would you really be willing to pay for every tv show you might want to watch? i certainly wouldn't pay to keep up with half the stuff i have subscribed on hulu.
Evidently you don't value your time very highly.
I would be (and am) willing to pay for content because it establishes a direct link between good content and the money paid for it. Funding content entirely with advertising breaks that link, with predictable results.
you can run hulu full screen on any computer with a web browser and flash. doesn't seem very limiting to me.
It does seem very limiting to me (and others). I explained why in my post. You can't watch it on :
* Phones
* iPods
* Living room media centres (unless you want to watch it in a browser)
* Laptops when travelling
* Any other device the media companies take a dislike to
Simply put, I don't like the media companies having this much control over how I consume content. It's bad for the consumer, and bad for the product.
ad-supported viewing is still viable, though it's not going to fail because of individuals like you.
That's for the future to decide, however I wonder how a generation weaned on the internet will take to yet another delivery method they can't control delivery or consumption of?
At present this service succeeds because people think 'oh, it's just like TV', there may come a time when it fails because people think 'oh, it's just like TV, it has those annoying ads you can't skip every 5 minutes'.
I suspect when they have hooked a bunch of people they'll boost the ad/content ratio so that they can make more money, and the proposition will seem far less enticing.
I WANT internet tv to succeed.
I don't, I'd rather the internet superseded TV; these webTV websites like Hulu leave the same old content syndicates in charge of when you watch, what you watch, and what you watch with it (no Boxee or mobile devices for you! No content if you're not from country X). Note Hulu is owned and directed by media conglomerates, it's not some plucky independent.
Worse, it gives them leverage over device manufacturers to later on demand things like no ad-skipping, no recording, etc etc. in return for licensing access to their webTV channel. The only advance of this system over TV is it isn't scheduled. If this is the future of internet TV, count me out, I'll go back to youtube and reading.
I'd rather a simple purchase/rent model myself (as in Amazon or iTunes), and the minimum of middlemen between the content producer and the purchaser. After the purchase I do whatever I want with the item I have purchased, and don't have to be connected constantly to watch it, or ask permission to transfer it to a device (in this respect iTunes fails, they should lose the DRM).
The concepts of ad-supported viewing, control over viewing, no recording/skipping, and even channels themselves really deserve to die along with broadcast TV.
Because puts { "I like beans" } is 9000% better than just typing I like beans.
What a terrible example
1. It's not functioning Ruby (try puts "I like beans", like most languages in fact)
2. It has nothing to do with the strengths or failings of Ruby as a language.
Do you know anything about Ruby? Do your empty platitudes about 'layers upon layers of complexity' actually have any basis in reality? From your comment, I suspect not.
There are some not so nice corners of Ruby, but an attempt to oversimplify is not one of them.
Then that's where you went wrong. I'm sure that you realize that the police (indeed, all organs of Government) work for you and shouldn't have the right to dole out permission to exercise your inalienable rights, correct?
So carrying a lethal weapon is now an 'inalienable right'? I'd rather most of my fellow citizens did not have that right thanks very much, and it looks like the stats on violent death in the UK and US per capita agree with me.
Government is the voluntary surrender of certain rights in return for security. Thus we give the police the power to lock us up, confiscate weapons, etc etc, governed by certain laws. So giving up certain rights is not some kind of watershed moment, it is fundamental to the social contract. Other rights, such as the right to a free trial. I'd be far more worried about detention without trial, and secret trials than the right to bear arms. Those are real attacks on your freedom, happening right now, in the US and the UK.
Evidently we disagree about whether wide gun ownership is a fundamental right, and further about whether it is even desirable. To go from there to saying that states with tighter gun control laws than the US are somehow automatic dictatorships where citizens have abrogated all rights is laughable. Contrary to your beliefs, it is still legal to own weapons in the UK, but the controls are stricter than the US.
Would it make you happier if I just said that you set the stage for it when you willingly surrendered a right sometime in the 20th century that you had previously held for hundreds of years? I honestly didn't set out here to debate the merits of gun control, just to point out that the UK populace set a precedent for surrendering their rights long before the surveillance society came onto the scene.
Ask yourself when you would ever use your gun against your government, and you realise pretty quickly that if you don't want to end up like those at Waco, you wouldn't. Further, if you feel gun ownership is a fundamental guarantor of other rights, why has the US seen the biggest erosion of civil rights in its history in the last decade? What have the gun owners done to stop that? Nothing.
But claiming it's dues ex machina makes you look like an ignorant fool to anyone who knows what the term actually means.
heh. Really? Perhaps if you think wikipedia is actually a reliable source of definitions. The original usage from Horace says nothing about 'sudden', indeed, it refers to the use of a previously known god to wrap up a story by solving everything by fiat. Which is exactly what this series did. If you 'establish' it before the end by giving vague hints that Gods may intervene, it's still a cop-out.
It's intellectually lazy and disappointing. If you prefer not to use the term deus ex machina, fine, but really you're playing with semantics, the original point stands about the ending.
Oh right, so a deus ex machina is ok if you mention it earlier on in the plot. Gotcha.
The plot was confused from quite early on, the scripting was good initially and then deteriorated gradually as things lost coherence. The characterisation and dram was better, and at times gripping, but the cod-religion, silly plot-twists and lack of coherence really put me off the show around the end of season 2, so I'm glad to hear that the ending was just as messy as I imagined, basically '$Diety did it'.
I'm amazed to be honest that they managed to stretch it out for so long, and that people are still defending it.
Serious question: what the hell for? What do you gain from subtlety?
The world around us is subtle, shades of grey, not black and white. Lack of subtlety implies lack of understanding or, worse, wilful ignorance. Never good when you're trying to suspend disbelief as a viewer.
It's popular lately for all messages in media to be subtle, but that's just a cop-out so it can be mass-sold to everyone
Please, I'd like an example so that we know what you're talking about, because this sounds like bullshit demagogy otherwise - 'a cop-out so it can be mass-sold', WTF? Since when has subtlety made things more mainstream? How is it more prevalent than the manichaeism so popular over the last decade in 'the civilised world' as our politicians like to call it?
Art and entertainment are not solely there to 'add value' (whatever that means), they are a mode of communication, and a method of provoking emotions and thoughts in the viewer. Adding subtlety makes characters and situations portrayed more convincing, engaging and involving.
Battlestar Galactica had some promising starting assumptions and some poetic and moving moments, but having watched the first few series, it rarely rose above the level of soap opera (set in space), precisely because the script-writers felt it necessary to telegraph lots of the plot again and again, to introduce meaningless sub-plots (note needless complication is not subtlety) that were never tied up, and generally to beat the viewer around the head with what was happening, rather than leaving some things mysterious, and allowing ideas and characters room to breathe.
It was best when really pushing conflicts inherent in our society like freedom vs rights, the religious vs the secular in public life and military force vs political force. Sometimes that was let down by poor scripting, and sometimes by slightly hammy plot-lines. The best thing about it in my opinion was the oh-so-camp Gaius Baltar, who knew what the score was and played up to the hammy scripts he was handed. At times it did deal with genuinely interesting ideas in a genuinely challenging manner (terrorism for one), and yet that was betrayed by the insistence on cheap emotional shots (But you're a beautiful woman! But you're a cylon! But you're my father!), torture and sex, just to spice it up a little.
It had the feel of being written by huge teams of writers (i.e. more than two), and that was a shame, as some material was really promising, and I love thoughtful sci-fi.
Flash should not be used for online video, and I'm glad the iPhone is contributing to killing it in that space. We have lots of good video codecs to choose from, and Flash is not among them. It has its place as an animation plugin for certain content (though frankly the appeal is becoming more and more limited with CSS animations and faster Javascript).
As for arguing that DRM and control over viewers is a benefit of Flash - go ahead and cheer for Flash as a video format, if that's the internet you want to live on.
Good thing it's not their money then. $2.4bn a year must go a long way.
Observation doesn't necessarily require being directly over enemy territory. Such airships would be excellent for covering borders and providing 25/7 situational awareness over areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They would be most useful over American cities, used only for spying on criminals, of course.
I would prefer my media outlet to be viewed as neutral, & unbiased...not as negative nancies, nay-sayers, or devils advocates. It's OK to agree with gov't, it's OK to say 'good job Mr. President/Congressman/SCJ/etc'. But to be known as the opposition no matter who is in power strikes me as a group of people who just like to cause strife cause it sells - which is wrong.
The BBC is viewed as neutral by most non-extreme viewers. They do not always oppose the government, and yet they are sometimes critical of the government in power, as they should be.
What the parent meant was that the inevitably corrupt, hypocritical politicians from *both* main parties are typically unhappy with the BBC and claim they are biased etc. Generally when the likes of Mandelson (Rove), Blair (Bush with finesse), and John Major claim you're heavy handed and biased against the government, it means you're doing a good job.
The BBC strives to be relatively impartial, and is seen as such by the vast majority of the population (save politicians).
Hulu has a choice: They can provide a good assortment of content playing by the content provider's rules, or they can provide very little content any way they damn well please. So far, evidence shows that Hulu has made the right choices.
Hulu is backed by majors like NBC Universal and News Corp, they're not some scrappy startup trying to outplay the system.
The owners very much control which countries content is available in, and they've decided they don't care about the world outside the US.
As far as I'm concerned, it's dead in the water anyway - who wants the internet to turn into another version of TV? Displaying content only from certain 'channels', available only as a streamed service, served up with adverts, and restricted only to certain markets.
No thanks.
Maybe that works for you, but as far as I'm concerned they've made all the wrong choices. I'll stick with ripping DVDs and content I can download and put on my own devices to watch when I want.
Please provide one example of a worm that spreads automatically on OS X.
OK. Because of people like you, anti-virus vendors have created a worm for OS X (I believe there are other examples):
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2006-021715-3051-99
It's not a commercial worm, but this sort of worm is possible on OS X, just more difficult. You talk as if this sort of exploit is impossible somehow on OS X, it is not.
Quite apart from that, you were wrong to say it has not been owned remotely - it has on multiple occasions had remote exploits via the browser. These require the user to visit a page with malicious javascript, that is all. Then a remote exploit commences. They do not require local access to the computer. Some have been patched, some are still open. Other browsers have similar exploits.
To quote your initial incorrect statement :
It's a lot more important to be secure from the 35 million people out on the internet than from the 2 that have an account on your computer.
The exploits I listed are not ones which require a local log in by the hacker, and this competition will specifically be testing browsers too.
Now you can play semantics, and try to twist remote to mean 'remote with no user action' but that's not what you said initially, it would not be a real world test, and that's not what the later stages of this contest test - last year I think they progressed from default locked down config, to services on, to visiting a web page. Last year the macbook was hacked via visiting a web page. A fair test given that most users don't leave their machine with no services on and never visiting web pages.
Vulnerabilities in web browsers certainly should not be dismissed as 'local' exploits - they only require minimal user intervention (clicking a link), and if that can lead to the system being compromised, it should be considered insecure. Indeed, after one initial infection, a worm could easily spread this way by emailing/iming contacts with a URL.
PS I run OS X, and don't run a virus scanner due to the lack of worms/viruses, but I don't view it as invulnerable, and neither should you. Your munition/shoe analogy doesn't make any sense, and implies that you really think that using OS X makes you somehow invulnerable to any exploits - it really doesn't.