Exactly... writing a simple application for X was arcane when I did it almost 10 years ago...
Ahhh that's just how they separated the men from the boys. Once you read the first 4 or 5 volumes of the X books using xlib wasn't that hard. Of course if you were all fancy like or lazy there was Motif.
The point is that if 99% of the people on a slippery road are going X MPH then you should either go X MPH or get off the road. Are you technically right? Maybe but pragmatically you are very wrong and I think it isn't hard to make a reasonable argument that if you know your behaviour is at odds with the behaviour of the vast majority AND is likely to result in an accident that wouldn't occur if you weren't there, then you are in fact in the wrong.
But the most important thing is just knowing your car. Slow down, take it really easy, don't be in a hurry, watch for other drivers, leave lots of room, and if someone is in a huge hurry or overtrusting their 4WD behemoth work your darndest to let them go have their accident with another driver if possible.
Actually slowing down can be the very worst thing you can do - many of the accidents I saw in the rural area I lived in were caused by one car coming up on another car that was going very slowly - the rear car had to either ditch or hit the car in front. It was actually kind of interesting that most people chose to ditch rather than hit the other car. More than once I was more or less forced to drive in 10-20 miles of continuous whiteout the would often make the front of your own car invisible, and the unspoken rule amongst most people was that you didn't go out unless you were willing to keep your speed up because nobody had a chance in hell of stopping if they came up on you and only saw you when they were 6 feet behind. My strategy was to try to get behind a loaded 18 wheeler - they were high enough up that they could see pretty well (the whiteout being cause by snow blown off farm fields that were above the level of the sunken road beds) and if there was an obstruction in front that they couldn't stop for they were going to clear the way for me.
and nothing works at all when your car rolls over
That may be true of American cars but it isn't true of all cars, and I'm not talking about armoured limos or other enormously expensive cars either.
Living in Canada I have a little experience with snow. One very snowy night I'm talking to a gas station owner in a smallish town that lay in a mountain valley with a major highway coming down the mountain. He told me most of the calls he got for tows came from guys in 4WD vehicles. The people in 2WD vehicles were smart enough not to try driving while the 4WD guys figured they could handle it. At the time I was driving a little sports car that handled spectacularly on dry pavement but was so light it would skate on even thin layers of snow - I listened to his advice. When I lived on a farm people were smart enough not to drive in bad weather unless they really had to and then they went equipped - chains or studded tires and in the trunk flares/shovels/sand plus candles and sleeping bags (just in case because it might be miles to another house/farm) etc. Now I live in a city where there is about 1-2 weeks of snow a year and I see an enormous number of shiny trucks and SUV's that never see a bit of bush or "work" but they do suck gas... it's just stupid.
It seems to me that Matt Groening was trying to tell us that the Simpsons and other Fox products are produced using slave labour and that we should therefore stop watching all such products since the existence of those products depend on other human beings suffering. I'm with ya Matt! No more 20th Century Fox products for me!!!
I thought the commentary was on the practices of 20th Century Fox seeing as how that was the name over the prison camp at the very end - for the most part it seemed like they were the ones being blamed, not the people they hired to do the dirty work.
The problem is in assuming a static value for one's time and a static value for "profit" from an activity. For any given individual, playing Farmville when you are supposed to doing some other activity might be considered "less profitable" but if your goal of the moment is to relax and blow off some steam before going on to other activities then playing Farmville might have a very high "profit" as the net result is to make you more efficient at a subsequent "high profit" activity.
You know what? Most human leisure activities look pretty stupid if you analyse them enough and from the right viewpoint. It doesn't make them undesirable or valueless.
I don't think it's really a matter of age. Even a young, but reasonably observant person, is capable of seeing that organic factors will have significant impact on intellectual capabilities. Nurture may have a tremendous impact on what you end up being able to do with what you were given to start with, but what you were given to start with is what is going to establish where the boundaries lay. My guess for second most important factor would be nutrition in the early years, followed by nurture in the early years.
Not necessarily... that is why there's the question of whether the universe would keep expanding despite gravitational forces - all particles continuing to recede forever - or would collapse in upon itself due to gravitational force. Think "escape velocity".
My dad retired from rockwell at 65 and I was worried for while because spent a couple of years cruising around the country with his girlfriend in their winnebago. Not very stimulating and a recipe for a second heart attack IMHO.
That seems a little biased. A lot of people would find cruising around the country seeing new sights and exploring, all with their SO, to be quite stimulating. I assume he and his girlfriend get out of the Winnebago and take a look around once in a while. Others might find doing something that keeps them inside a building all day, and the same old environment when they are outside, to be pretty boring.
Yup the local Safeways (maybe all Safeways - I don't know) run multiple breast cancer fund raising periods throughout the year. Recently they started having a once yearly prostate cancer fund raising period but the effort is nothing like that for breast cancer. No thanks. General cancer research funding drives? Sure. Alzheimers research funding drives? Sure. Sex specific research funding drives? No thanks.
I would have thought density would be significant, not just total mass, since you can take that mass and spread it out so thinly that it isn't going to do anything significant (form a star, a black hole or whatever).
Fourth, we might not be around for the next flights 20 years later, or if we survive that long we might not be around 40 years from now for the third round. By sending something now at least something of our species gets out of the solar system whether our species survives or not. Personally I think that's worthwhile..
You aren't dependent on "Arabs, Russians and Mexicans for the life blood of your economic viability and strategic safety"... you were right, it is a problem of attitude not supply. There wouldn't be a problem if "you" could simply stop driving all those Hummers and other fricken huge vehicles that are totally unnecessary for the average person, by which I mean people who don't have an actual practical need for an SUV or truck but drive one anyhow to help keep their egos pumped. And houses that are integer multiples of the size actually needed to be comfortable... I mean geez just how many bathrooms does a house need? It's not just an American thing either... I look at what I see on the road in my city and at least 75% of the people are driving vehicles all out of proportion to their needs. Having lived on a farm I can tell you it's not hard to tell when a 4wd vehicle has never been off paved roads... or a 2wd for that matter.
I can relate to that. During the summer it was consistently hot enough that I just turned the gas off to the furnace - not even a pilot light burning. There are no other gas powered devices in the house. My monthly bill was still about $18... consisting of various levies, taxes on the levies, environmental fees, and fixed fees from the utility for the physical plant. 0 consumption, $18 bill.
We also pay more per KwH once we exceed a monthly threshold. Meanwhile government and business buildings run their lights all night long without stepping to a higher rate. In fact the more individuals use the higher the rate they pay while the more big business uses the lower the rate they pay. And the street lights are so bright and so closely spaced that I could walk all the way around my block in the middle of the night and be able to read a book without any trouble at all - really I'm not exaggerating in the least.
Sometimes it is so blatant it's amazing. I remember one case where a cop had clocked a judge going well over the limit. Case goes to court, cops says he followed judge and clocked him going XX miles/hr over the limit. Defendant judge says "I don't think I was going that fast". Presiding judge finds defendant judge innocent - after all, a judge wouldn't lie, right????
I'm not sure that they were the "good old days"... I wasn't trying to portray them as such... it was just a lot clearer that you were getting screwed (that and, back then, every single gas station in the city having exactly the same price)... now it is harder to tell whether you are getting screwed or not, although I think that is a pretty safe assumption to start from in this particular case.
I think I was fairly clear that the Dynabook was never realized in hardware. Kay worked on the Dynabook at PARC. PARC developed what most would consider the first modern GUI... Apple certainly seemed to like it and your own reference essentially says the same thing. Engelbart developed a very specific system at SRI, then SRI people went to PARC and the Alto was developed, being [according to your reference] "the first computer to demonstrate the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface(GUI)". That's not to take away from anything Englebart did at SRI but the GUI was clearly developed at PARC as was the Dynabook concept even if it began before PARC - I'd have to dig out some old stuff to check what Kay may have done on the Dynabook before PARC - my recollection is that it was mainly a PARC project and that the Alto was considered a partial realization of the Dynabook, but it's been decades since I've thought about it so I could be misremembering.
Yup. One of the things they invented was the Dynabook, circa 1970... basically what you now get in an iPad, now that the hardware has caught up to the vision, 40 years later. And of course the mouse, the gui, OO programming with the introduction of Smalltalk etc. etc. etc. etc.
And the price of oil seems to have very little to do with the price of gasoline anyhow (In Canada at least). I have oil investments and I see them go up and down and nothing much happens to the price of gas. I've watched the price of a barrel of oil drop almost 20% with *zero* change in the price of gas. Years ago it used to be that when the price of oil went up the price of gas went up pretty much in lockstep and *instantly*. Then when the price of oil dropped the price of gas stayed the same for weeks - the gas companies claimed that they still had to use up all the oil in storage that had been bought at the old price. Curiously that logic never held when the price of oil went up.
Since people already replace their smartphone every couple of years maybe this isn't such a problem......
You do know you don't HAVE to always have the latest toy, my old record player still works fine...
I'll say - two years!?! I had my previous (dumb) phone for about 5 years and then broke down and bought a new one. That got me unlimited web access for $7.50/month which means I can run Google maps wherever I am, and I can also run Java apps on it. So far it has been 4 years and I haven't felt the need to replace it.
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Ahhh that's just how they separated the men from the boys. Once you read the first 4 or 5 volumes of the X books using xlib wasn't that hard. Of course if you were all fancy like or lazy there was Motif.
Yeah... who'd put any value on fact based reporting...
The point is that if 99% of the people on a slippery road are going X MPH then you should either go X MPH or get off the road. Are you technically right? Maybe but pragmatically you are very wrong and I think it isn't hard to make a reasonable argument that if you know your behaviour is at odds with the behaviour of the vast majority AND is likely to result in an accident that wouldn't occur if you weren't there, then you are in fact in the wrong.
Actually slowing down can be the very worst thing you can do - many of the accidents I saw in the rural area I lived in were caused by one car coming up on another car that was going very slowly - the rear car had to either ditch or hit the car in front. It was actually kind of interesting that most people chose to ditch rather than hit the other car. More than once I was more or less forced to drive in 10-20 miles of continuous whiteout the would often make the front of your own car invisible, and the unspoken rule amongst most people was that you didn't go out unless you were willing to keep your speed up because nobody had a chance in hell of stopping if they came up on you and only saw you when they were 6 feet behind. My strategy was to try to get behind a loaded 18 wheeler - they were high enough up that they could see pretty well (the whiteout being cause by snow blown off farm fields that were above the level of the sunken road beds) and if there was an obstruction in front that they couldn't stop for they were going to clear the way for me.
That may be true of American cars but it isn't true of all cars, and I'm not talking about armoured limos or other enormously expensive cars either.
Living in Canada I have a little experience with snow. One very snowy night I'm talking to a gas station owner in a smallish town that lay in a mountain valley with a major highway coming down the mountain. He told me most of the calls he got for tows came from guys in 4WD vehicles. The people in 2WD vehicles were smart enough not to try driving while the 4WD guys figured they could handle it. At the time I was driving a little sports car that handled spectacularly on dry pavement but was so light it would skate on even thin layers of snow - I listened to his advice. When I lived on a farm people were smart enough not to drive in bad weather unless they really had to and then they went equipped - chains or studded tires and in the trunk flares/shovels/sand plus candles and sleeping bags (just in case because it might be miles to another house/farm) etc. Now I live in a city where there is about 1-2 weeks of snow a year and I see an enormous number of shiny trucks and SUV's that never see a bit of bush or "work" but they do suck gas... it's just stupid.
It seems to me that Matt Groening was trying to tell us that the Simpsons and other Fox products are produced using slave labour and that we should therefore stop watching all such products since the existence of those products depend on other human beings suffering. I'm with ya Matt! No more 20th Century Fox products for me!!!
I thought the commentary was on the practices of 20th Century Fox seeing as how that was the name over the prison camp at the very end - for the most part it seemed like they were the ones being blamed, not the people they hired to do the dirty work.
The problem is in assuming a static value for one's time and a static value for "profit" from an activity. For any given individual, playing Farmville when you are supposed to doing some other activity might be considered "less profitable" but if your goal of the moment is to relax and blow off some steam before going on to other activities then playing Farmville might have a very high "profit" as the net result is to make you more efficient at a subsequent "high profit" activity.
You know what? Most human leisure activities look pretty stupid if you analyse them enough and from the right viewpoint. It doesn't make them undesirable or valueless.
How young are you?
I don't think it's really a matter of age. Even a young, but reasonably observant person, is capable of seeing that organic factors will have significant impact on intellectual capabilities. Nurture may have a tremendous impact on what you end up being able to do with what you were given to start with, but what you were given to start with is what is going to establish where the boundaries lay. My guess for second most important factor would be nutrition in the early years, followed by nurture in the early years.
Not necessarily... that is why there's the question of whether the universe would keep expanding despite gravitational forces - all particles continuing to recede forever - or would collapse in upon itself due to gravitational force. Think "escape velocity".
That seems a little biased. A lot of people would find cruising around the country seeing new sights and exploring, all with their SO, to be quite stimulating. I assume he and his girlfriend get out of the Winnebago and take a look around once in a while. Others might find doing something that keeps them inside a building all day, and the same old environment when they are outside, to be pretty boring.
Yup the local Safeways (maybe all Safeways - I don't know) run multiple breast cancer fund raising periods throughout the year. Recently they started having a once yearly prostate cancer fund raising period but the effort is nothing like that for breast cancer. No thanks. General cancer research funding drives? Sure. Alzheimers research funding drives? Sure. Sex specific research funding drives? No thanks.
I would have thought density would be significant, not just total mass, since you can take that mass and spread it out so thinly that it isn't going to do anything significant (form a star, a black hole or whatever).
Until we dropped the oxygen bomb and a lit match.
Yeah thanks from me too.
Fourth, we might not be around for the next flights 20 years later, or if we survive that long we might not be around 40 years from now for the third round. By sending something now at least something of our species gets out of the solar system whether our species survives or not. Personally I think that's worthwhile..
You aren't dependent on "Arabs, Russians and Mexicans for the life blood of your economic viability and strategic safety"... you were right, it is a problem of attitude not supply. There wouldn't be a problem if "you" could simply stop driving all those Hummers and other fricken huge vehicles that are totally unnecessary for the average person, by which I mean people who don't have an actual practical need for an SUV or truck but drive one anyhow to help keep their egos pumped. And houses that are integer multiples of the size actually needed to be comfortable... I mean geez just how many bathrooms does a house need? It's not just an American thing either... I look at what I see on the road in my city and at least 75% of the people are driving vehicles all out of proportion to their needs. Having lived on a farm I can tell you it's not hard to tell when a 4wd vehicle has never been off paved roads... or a 2wd for that matter.
I can relate to that. During the summer it was consistently hot enough that I just turned the gas off to the furnace - not even a pilot light burning. There are no other gas powered devices in the house. My monthly bill was still about $18... consisting of various levies, taxes on the levies, environmental fees, and fixed fees from the utility for the physical plant. 0 consumption, $18 bill.
We also pay more per KwH once we exceed a monthly threshold. Meanwhile government and business buildings run their lights all night long without stepping to a higher rate. In fact the more individuals use the higher the rate they pay while the more big business uses the lower the rate they pay. And the street lights are so bright and so closely spaced that I could walk all the way around my block in the middle of the night and be able to read a book without any trouble at all - really I'm not exaggerating in the least.
Sometimes it is so blatant it's amazing. I remember one case where a cop had clocked a judge going well over the limit. Case goes to court, cops says he followed judge and clocked him going XX miles/hr over the limit. Defendant judge says "I don't think I was going that fast". Presiding judge finds defendant judge innocent - after all, a judge wouldn't lie, right????
I'm not sure that they were the "good old days"... I wasn't trying to portray them as such... it was just a lot clearer that you were getting screwed (that and, back then, every single gas station in the city having exactly the same price)... now it is harder to tell whether you are getting screwed or not, although I think that is a pretty safe assumption to start from in this particular case.
I think I was fairly clear that the Dynabook was never realized in hardware. Kay worked on the Dynabook at PARC. PARC developed what most would consider the first modern GUI... Apple certainly seemed to like it and your own reference essentially says the same thing. Engelbart developed a very specific system at SRI, then SRI people went to PARC and the Alto was developed, being [according to your reference] "the first computer to demonstrate the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface(GUI)". That's not to take away from anything Englebart did at SRI but the GUI was clearly developed at PARC as was the Dynabook concept even if it began before PARC - I'd have to dig out some old stuff to check what Kay may have done on the Dynabook before PARC - my recollection is that it was mainly a PARC project and that the Alto was considered a partial realization of the Dynabook, but it's been decades since I've thought about it so I could be misremembering.
Yup. One of the things they invented was the Dynabook, circa 1970... basically what you now get in an iPad, now that the hardware has caught up to the vision, 40 years later. And of course the mouse, the gui, OO programming with the introduction of Smalltalk etc. etc. etc. etc.
And the price of oil seems to have very little to do with the price of gasoline anyhow (In Canada at least). I have oil investments and I see them go up and down and nothing much happens to the price of gas. I've watched the price of a barrel of oil drop almost 20% with *zero* change in the price of gas. Years ago it used to be that when the price of oil went up the price of gas went up pretty much in lockstep and *instantly*. Then when the price of oil dropped the price of gas stayed the same for weeks - the gas companies claimed that they still had to use up all the oil in storage that had been bought at the old price. Curiously that logic never held when the price of oil went up.
I'll say - two years!?! I had my previous (dumb) phone for about 5 years and then broke down and bought a new one. That got me unlimited web access for $7.50/month which means I can run Google maps wherever I am, and I can also run Java apps on it. So far it has been 4 years and I haven't felt the need to replace it.