Yup. Started off as somebody's little project and grew into one of the most popular scripting languages on the planet. Why? Because it's easy to get to grips with. Same as BASIC. There's lots of things wrong with it (inconsistent syntax for starters), but you can sit a non-geek down and get them to the stage of being productive in half an hour. It's all about the learning curve.
So what happens when the system goes down? You've suddenly got nobody there who is capable of taking the orders. If it's anything like the coffee shop I had the misfortune of working for the staff aren't allowed to take on each other's roles if there's a problem. I was once threatened with disciplinary action because whilst working alone I was taking orders and serving at the same time (standard practice in the bar trade).
The upshot? I was told to take all of the orders before I started making coffees, so I did. As a result I was still taking orders an hour later and several people were going ballistic at the boss who was trying to explain that the company's systems would ensure they were served quicker (which was untrue to the point of hilarity). I asked her, in front of the customers, if I could demonstrate how one person could both take orders and serve at the same time. The response? "Our other staff can't do that, if customers get that service from you they'll expect it in our other outlets."
Coffee shops (collectively) need to get their heads out of their backsides and train their staff to do two jobs at once, not try to eliminate jobs with flakey tech based ordering systems.
Titan (also Baxter) is even more depressing. It starts with Columbia crashing (written pre-actual-crash), then follows the US through the mothballing of 95% of NASA and a big swing to the anti-science-pro-religion factions. This does not bode well for the crewed mission to Titan in what remains of the shuttle fleet.
I read it differently - the end to me was rather uplifting, the aliens realised that they were going to be destroyed, so they implanted enough information in Ender's head for him to ressurect the species if he so chose. And he did, and as he was "the saviour of humanity" they had to accept his choice to also be the saviour of aliens. Rather a nice line on the futility of war I thought.
My vote goes to just about anything by Alistair Reynolds. Every single character is brutally self-serving, the closest any of them ever come to a redeeming feature is "being really good at being brutally self-serving". Great books, don't get me wrong, but by no means "fluffy space bunnies". If he wrote a Tribbles episode the Tribbles would win, and not in a good way.
But if your religion actually means anything to you, it helps to shape your morality and values.
It can, however, be shown that it's perfectly possible to form a strong and moral code without any religious instruction. Good people are good people, regardless of their creation theory. Religion may well shape this "natural" moral code, but whether that's a good thing is debatable, there's extreme examples on both sides.
See: "Automate the 'Nope, this isn't copyright' process too" and "The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100", coincidentally also present in my post above. Which you quoted.
Congratulations on a well used meme in context for once, and in a first post too, makes a nice change! Sadly, this could equally well be the work of a bored student or just about anyone else. I doubt there was that much thought behind it.
"Let's kill all the lawyers, let's kill 'em tonight."
~The Eagles, 'Get Over It'
The problem is that YouTube is very big and they have a lot of copyright infringements. They have to respond "in a timely manner" to copyright claims, so there are two ways to do it: automate everything to a great degree, knowing that non-justified takedowns will sometimes occur, or hire an army of people to do it with Eyeball 1.0. Option 1 is cheaper, so guess what?
Solution: Automate the "Nope, this isn't copyright" process too. If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person. The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100 to the person who dealt with it. Problem solved.
That's a double edged sword - do we allow virtually anyone to stand for election, or do we bar the religious on the grounds of a mental instability?
And what happens in places like the deep south of the USA where the electorate won't vote for you unless you're a brimstone preaching Christian?
Agreed, we should remove any automatic political benefit for religious leaders, but barring the religious from political office....well...that sounds like the kind of discrimination that some religions present as $Deity's-Will.
Subtle difference - religious leaders (Church of England) are appointed to the House of Lords (roughly equivalent to the Senate), the "government" is purely the majority party/parties in the House of Commons (~House of Reps).
The general meaning stands though, we do have religious leaders automatically placed in the House of Lords, in my opinion it's an outdated and discriminatory practice and I'm glad to see reform being introduced. That said, how many members of the US Senate/HofR are openly non-Christian?
I'm not sure what the nutrient mix is, but regardless, rabbit starvation is a result of eating only one food, and that being deficient in one particular nutrient (in the case of rabbits, some fat-soluble acids). If you're still eating a little fruit and veg etc with your insects you should be fine.
I've only read Ender's Game, so I'm not working from a big sample size, but as far as that one goes I thought it was superb, intelligent, insightful and subtle. He compares favourably with Asimov and Baxter as far as I'm concerned (although a bit soft to draw comparisons with Clarke).
Without copyright producing content would be back down the the profitability of sweeping crumbs off tables.
It already is. A top 5 album in the UK will typically net you £5k-£10k, less than minimum wage if you only produce one a year. If you're lucky to have two hit albums in a year then it's better than working as a waiter, but not by a lot.
I've had chilli flavoured oven baked mealworms, very tasty, similar to savoury popcorn. Locusts aren't bad either, although a little overly-crunchy in parts. Termites, ants, various mosquito/midge types and even arachnids are popular in various parets of the world. Far more efficient to produce than cow too.
Edinburgh's is now on its second cycle of "this has become too commercial, I'm doing something free!". Firstly, the Fringe cropped up as a reaction to the commercialisation and expense of the International Arts Festival, but over the years that became nearly as expensive (for both audiences and participants, the average Fringe show loses a couple of grand, my flatmates made £200 for the month a few years back and considered that a success).
So now the Free Fringe and Free Festival have cropped up, both offering free shows with donations taken at the end.
10: PRINT "As soon as something becomes popular enough somebody will try to monetize it, which stops it being as popular, so they try harder to monetize it even more, driving people away. Eventually somebody has a great idea, do the same thing but for free!"
20: GOTO 10
Except for BT customers who have turned off the open access on their home routers, they're not allowed to use hotspots. Who wants to be held legally responsible for traffic through their home router when it's being accessed by the stranger in the car outside your house?
The modern olympics date to 1894, they're hardly ancient. Personally I'd prefer a return to the original, all athletes compete naked, top prize is a laurel leaf crown, and there's a poetry competition.
The City Of London 2012 MacDonalds BT Coca Cola Official Olympic Games (TM) have turned out to be a huge exercise in making money for the sponsors while screwing over the athletes (who aren't allowed to display the logos of the sponsors who have supported them for years) and the local businesses who have been paralysed by traffic restrictions and lost a huge amount because nobody is bothering to go into the city other than for the games.
All the money raised will go towards marketing campaigns to raise funds for the next games, which will in turn go towards marketing campaigns...
Given the stories of "fake users", bots and the like currently doing the rounds, you'd think it would make sense for them to at least make an attempt at linking accounts to their owners. There's little point advertising the latest cosmetics to the 56 year old male boss of an 18 year old female...
You can't authorize somebody to access Facebook's servers unless you work for Facebook. Access is granted in the T&C for users when they sign up, but it explicitly forbids giving others your login details.
Simple solution: Facebook should set up a "panic password" which you can hand over, the first time this is used it locks the account down, records the IP etc and flashes up a big page informing the "hacker" that they have broken laws X,Y and Z, that the authorities and the original user have been informed, and that Facebook will assist the user in pressing for prosecution and compensation.
I use it all the time, feeds from/. and various other news sites on my iGoogle home page (which is being phased out, pity, I find it very useful)
The other thing it's exceptionally useful for is embedding content. For example, I run a website for a bar next to a theatre, rather than posting info on all the shows each day I just parse an RSS feed from the theatre, style it to match the website and shazzam, ready made, auto-updating content. Very handy.
As a user, yes, you are something of an expert on a user interface. The "real experts" do know a lot of things that are applicable to mass-market users and can say things like "90% of users will find X more useful than Y", but that doesn't make the 10% wrong in any way. My impression of the last few years of OS development (eg Unity, iOS, Android, Metro) is that two things are on the go here: firstly, a rush to very simple, basic interfaces for people who "don't get computers", this is a good thing for many users. The second is a rush to make their OS suitable for tablets and smaller form devices as that's where the majority of installs are going to be in the future.
Sadly, this leaves out people who either want a more "advanced" interface (basically XP, Gnome2, what we used to understand as a normal desktop interface), and those who like or need to work on a device with a large screen and proper keyboard/mouse setup. There are two solutions, "screw the 10%" or "make it easy to customise".
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Yup. Started off as somebody's little project and grew into one of the most popular scripting languages on the planet. Why? Because it's easy to get to grips with. Same as BASIC. There's lots of things wrong with it (inconsistent syntax for starters), but you can sit a non-geek down and get them to the stage of being productive in half an hour. It's all about the learning curve.
So what happens when the system goes down? You've suddenly got nobody there who is capable of taking the orders. If it's anything like the coffee shop I had the misfortune of working for the staff aren't allowed to take on each other's roles if there's a problem. I was once threatened with disciplinary action because whilst working alone I was taking orders and serving at the same time (standard practice in the bar trade).
The upshot? I was told to take all of the orders before I started making coffees, so I did. As a result I was still taking orders an hour later and several people were going ballistic at the boss who was trying to explain that the company's systems would ensure they were served quicker (which was untrue to the point of hilarity). I asked her, in front of the customers, if I could demonstrate how one person could both take orders and serve at the same time. The response? "Our other staff can't do that, if customers get that service from you they'll expect it in our other outlets."
Coffee shops (collectively) need to get their heads out of their backsides and train their staff to do two jobs at once, not try to eliminate jobs with flakey tech based ordering systems.
Titan (also Baxter) is even more depressing. It starts with Columbia crashing (written pre-actual-crash), then follows the US through the mothballing of 95% of NASA and a big swing to the anti-science-pro-religion factions. This does not bode well for the crewed mission to Titan in what remains of the shuttle fleet.
I read it differently - the end to me was rather uplifting, the aliens realised that they were going to be destroyed, so they implanted enough information in Ender's head for him to ressurect the species if he so chose. And he did, and as he was "the saviour of humanity" they had to accept his choice to also be the saviour of aliens. Rather a nice line on the futility of war I thought.
My vote goes to just about anything by Alistair Reynolds. Every single character is brutally self-serving, the closest any of them ever come to a redeeming feature is "being really good at being brutally self-serving". Great books, don't get me wrong, but by no means "fluffy space bunnies". If he wrote a Tribbles episode the Tribbles would win, and not in a good way.
It can, however, be shown that it's perfectly possible to form a strong and moral code without any religious instruction. Good people are good people, regardless of their creation theory. Religion may well shape this "natural" moral code, but whether that's a good thing is debatable, there's extreme examples on both sides.
I like it. So now we need an xkcd cartoon about it, and YouTube will probably implement it. Brilliant. I love the interweb.
See: "Automate the 'Nope, this isn't copyright' process too" and "The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100", coincidentally also present in my post above. Which you quoted.
Congratulations on a well used meme in context for once, and in a first post too, makes a nice change! Sadly, this could equally well be the work of a bored student or just about anyone else. I doubt there was that much thought behind it.
"Let's kill all the lawyers, let's kill 'em tonight." ~The Eagles, 'Get Over It'
The problem is that YouTube is very big and they have a lot of copyright infringements. They have to respond "in a timely manner" to copyright claims, so there are two ways to do it: automate everything to a great degree, knowing that non-justified takedowns will sometimes occur, or hire an army of people to do it with Eyeball 1.0. Option 1 is cheaper, so guess what?
Solution: Automate the "Nope, this isn't copyright" process too. If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person. The company/person who was in the wrong then has to pay $100 to the person who dealt with it. Problem solved.
That's a double edged sword - do we allow virtually anyone to stand for election, or do we bar the religious on the grounds of a mental instability?
And what happens in places like the deep south of the USA where the electorate won't vote for you unless you're a brimstone preaching Christian?
Agreed, we should remove any automatic political benefit for religious leaders, but barring the religious from political office....well...that sounds like the kind of discrimination that some religions present as $Deity's-Will.
Subtle difference - religious leaders (Church of England) are appointed to the House of Lords (roughly equivalent to the Senate), the "government" is purely the majority party/parties in the House of Commons (~House of Reps).
The general meaning stands though, we do have religious leaders automatically placed in the House of Lords, in my opinion it's an outdated and discriminatory practice and I'm glad to see reform being introduced. That said, how many members of the US Senate/HofR are openly non-Christian?
I'm not sure what the nutrient mix is, but regardless, rabbit starvation is a result of eating only one food, and that being deficient in one particular nutrient (in the case of rabbits, some fat-soluble acids). If you're still eating a little fruit and veg etc with your insects you should be fine.
I've only read Ender's Game, so I'm not working from a big sample size, but as far as that one goes I thought it was superb, intelligent, insightful and subtle. He compares favourably with Asimov and Baxter as far as I'm concerned (although a bit soft to draw comparisons with Clarke).
There are those who believe this has already happened.
It already is. A top 5 album in the UK will typically net you £5k-£10k, less than minimum wage if you only produce one a year. If you're lucky to have two hit albums in a year then it's better than working as a waiter, but not by a lot.
I've had chilli flavoured oven baked mealworms, very tasty, similar to savoury popcorn. Locusts aren't bad either, although a little overly-crunchy in parts. Termites, ants, various mosquito/midge types and even arachnids are popular in various parets of the world. Far more efficient to produce than cow too.
Making things illegal usually increases the profit margins.
Edinburgh's is now on its second cycle of "this has become too commercial, I'm doing something free!". Firstly, the Fringe cropped up as a reaction to the commercialisation and expense of the International Arts Festival, but over the years that became nearly as expensive (for both audiences and participants, the average Fringe show loses a couple of grand, my flatmates made £200 for the month a few years back and considered that a success).
So now the Free Fringe and Free Festival have cropped up, both offering free shows with donations taken at the end.
10: PRINT "As soon as something becomes popular enough somebody will try to monetize it, which stops it being as popular, so they try harder to monetize it even more, driving people away. Eventually somebody has a great idea, do the same thing but for free!"
20: GOTO 10
Sound familiar? *cough*socialnetworks*cough*
Except for BT customers who have turned off the open access on their home routers, they're not allowed to use hotspots. Who wants to be held legally responsible for traffic through their home router when it's being accessed by the stranger in the car outside your house?
The modern olympics date to 1894, they're hardly ancient. Personally I'd prefer a return to the original, all athletes compete naked, top prize is a laurel leaf crown, and there's a poetry competition.
The City Of London 2012 MacDonalds BT Coca Cola Official Olympic Games (TM) have turned out to be a huge exercise in making money for the sponsors while screwing over the athletes (who aren't allowed to display the logos of the sponsors who have supported them for years) and the local businesses who have been paralysed by traffic restrictions and lost a huge amount because nobody is bothering to go into the city other than for the games.
All the money raised will go towards marketing campaigns to raise funds for the next games, which will in turn go towards marketing campaigns...
Because you use it to attack your fellow countrymen for having differing views to yours.
Given the stories of "fake users", bots and the like currently doing the rounds, you'd think it would make sense for them to at least make an attempt at linking accounts to their owners. There's little point advertising the latest cosmetics to the 56 year old male boss of an 18 year old female...
You can't authorize somebody to access Facebook's servers unless you work for Facebook. Access is granted in the T&C for users when they sign up, but it explicitly forbids giving others your login details.
Simple solution: Facebook should set up a "panic password" which you can hand over, the first time this is used it locks the account down, records the IP etc and flashes up a big page informing the "hacker" that they have broken laws X,Y and Z, that the authorities and the original user have been informed, and that Facebook will assist the user in pressing for prosecution and compensation.
I use it all the time, feeds from /. and various other news sites on my iGoogle home page (which is being phased out, pity, I find it very useful)
The other thing it's exceptionally useful for is embedding content. For example, I run a website for a bar next to a theatre, rather than posting info on all the shows each day I just parse an RSS feed from the theatre, style it to match the website and shazzam, ready made, auto-updating content. Very handy.
As a user, yes, you are something of an expert on a user interface. The "real experts" do know a lot of things that are applicable to mass-market users and can say things like "90% of users will find X more useful than Y", but that doesn't make the 10% wrong in any way. My impression of the last few years of OS development (eg Unity, iOS, Android, Metro) is that two things are on the go here: firstly, a rush to very simple, basic interfaces for people who "don't get computers", this is a good thing for many users. The second is a rush to make their OS suitable for tablets and smaller form devices as that's where the majority of installs are going to be in the future.
Sadly, this leaves out people who either want a more "advanced" interface (basically XP, Gnome2, what we used to understand as a normal desktop interface), and those who like or need to work on a device with a large screen and proper keyboard/mouse setup. There are two solutions, "screw the 10%" or "make it easy to customise".