From your post it sounds like you've been living somewhere that used to belong to the british empire, those people still tend to think of their weight in "stones" and various other oddball measurements but there are definitely countries where imperial units are barely used.
Here in Sweden the only people who use imperial units seem to be carpenters who call a 5x10 cm piece of wood a "tvåtumfyra" ("twoinchfour") but even they don't actually assume the actual size of it is 5.08x10.16 cm, it's just that "tvåtumfyra" is faster to say than "fem gånger tio centimeter".
As for degrees, most people tend to use degrees in everyday conversation (when it comes up) but degrees are not an "imperial" measurement, it predates most imperial units by centuries. And most people I've met who have taken "advanced" high school level math or college level math tend to use radians when actually doing any kind of math related to angles.
Also, you tell someone here in scandinavia that you're 5'10" tall and weigh 176 lbs and they're likely to either not understand you or they'll go "So, a foot is like, 30 cm, right? and how many inches are there in a foot? I know it's not ten but like, fifteen or something, right? And a pound's like, 0.5 kg? or was it less? maybe more? And aren't there two types of pound? Or was that pints?".
Basically, if you tell someone around here that something is "n <imperial unit>" they will have no clue no matter how "natural" you think it is because you happened to grow up with it.
Also, as for easy unit conversions, people do use them, just not in the uncommon ways you described, most people just aren't familiar with some of the less common prefixes but milli-, centi-, deci-, hecto- and kilo are all commonly used (and most people know that mega and giga are millions and billions, they just don't have much use for them, so rather than saying 1.5 megameters you say 1500 kilometers).
But the average doesn't tell the whole story, especially not when you factor in that survey-takers tend to remove the more extreme outliers ("900 sex partners? no fucking way!" or "Let's just remove the top 2% since their numbers are so far from the average").
I actually toyed with some numbers from a swedish community website poll a while back and plotted some graphs (can't find them now though), they showed that at least for that community the average woman actually had more sex partners than the average male but that the group of "extreme" males was a lot more extreme than the female "extreme" group (as in, guys who had a lot of sex partners had a lot of sex partners while women were a bit more moderate while still being far from the average). But when looking at just the "regular" people there most women had 2-3 more sex partners than men (with the likely conclusion being that the handful of "extreme" men accounted for the higher average amount "regular" women).
True, although I think the next paragraph sums up better how it tends to work...
The developer points out after reading the first design spec that maybe it would be better with a single faucet with adjustable temperature, seeing as how that's the "standard" that most users are used to. The developer is then bashed by the "idea people" for suggesting something which the user will clearly not understand. The developer then sighs and asks "Ok, so what is your definition of lukewarm?", after asking this question an additional dozen or so times he finally gets "Not hot and not cold" as an answer. The developer then tries to guess what "lukewarm" might mean to the "idea people", getting it wrong the first ten or so times he finally nails a temperature that they're happy with. But now they've decided they want the middle faucet 3 cm to the left, and the faucet for hot water shouldn't be red like they said in the original spec, because new market research has shown that purple might be a better color, and the developer is not allowed to just repaint it, it has to look brand new. Oh, and then there was that bit about the shower, the "idea people" are absolutely sure they put that in the spec. Oh, it wasn't in there? Oh well, that's no excuse, the project is past its deadline and over budget and it's clearly the developers' fault...
Yes, a bit exaggerated but there are plenty of us who have experienced projects and employers who behave like that. If you want "just a programmer" to build exactly what you tell him to then you should probably make sure you actually tell him (or her) what you want built.
The problem is that the "idea people" tend not to know where the "wall" is so they'll write specs that would equal "light bulb floating mid-air over there, and a cable five feet in front of the wall there yet hidden behind the wall". And when this cannot be created it is the fault of the developers who obviously "couldn't follow directions"...
I think that depends a lot on the education and the teacher (as well as the student).
I've seen a lot of students basically get brainwashed by professors who demand perfect conformance to their personal quirks, for some reason this seems especially common among those studying to become teachers, social workers and economists, but I've also seen plenty of examples of professors that would rather pass a student that did something wrong but used their own mind while failing those who just repeat what's in the course literature.
And there is of course, as I stated, the individual student's attitude to factor in as well. I've taken art and image production courses where most students tried to be a bit artistic, think of new ideas on their own and all that but some absolutely refused to instead choosing to turn their projects into poor examples of a mismash of basic artistic concepts. This despite the fact that they were encouraged to think for themselves, they just didn't want to, they wanted to do what they did for the social studies class, copy what was in the book with slightly different structure, slap their name on it and get a good grade.
You don't hang out with a lot of people who either dropped out of high school or who are downright proud of managing to force their way through high school, do you?
I'd say that if anything my experience has shown me that while there are outliers who go against the norm overall people with less education tend to be a lot more conformist, a lot more likely to listen to authorities (that's not to say they won't be loudly and irrationally opposed to authorities they dislike, just that from what I've seen they tend to be more likely to be directly influenced by someone or something).
That said, I think that as a larger percentage of the population gets university degrees and a university degree becomes more and more like a high school degree (cookie cutter, cram some knowledge, don't stop to reflect) the more there will be people who just went through the motions to get the degree without actually going to university to learn and think (personally I never got around to actually getting a degree because I was busy exploring interesting subjects, it just didn't feel like it was worth it to go back and do that last graduation project in order to get a degree). They just want the degree so they can be "successful", they don't care about the knowledge (that's why we get economists who know just what suit to wear at a business meeting but don't grasp eighth grade math and software developers who can speak fluent marketroid but think datatypes are "too complicated").
Well, the whole problem with the destruction of the original could probably be solved by slowly replacing the original organic brain with the electronic one. Instead of copying everything at once and then deleting the original you basically "graft" the electronic brain onto the original (obviously it would be a lot trickier than that in practice but so would "just copying" it be) and slowly let the electronic hardware do more and more while the organic does less. Eventually you'll have an all electronic brain.
Yeah, you'll only need to install a driver if you're running a version of windows older than XP.
Yet I've had to do it for both XP and Vista...
Can you name one? I've never seen a low-cost mp3 player that didn't function as a USB Drive. I think you're making this up.
Well, seeing as I was talking about no-name brand mp3 players I'll go with "The pink, blue and gray ones sold at a home electronics store downtown a few months ago for SEK 299 each".
Kind of funny how you ignored my corrections about iTunes and iPods in your reply.
Yes, most users have a very difficult time getting started with iTunes. Try this: Grab a few music CDs and see how long it takes to get iTunes installed, get registered with your apple ID , and the songs on those cd's on the player.
You've got to install iTunes, get an apple ID, etc. before you can even think about copying music onto an iPod
First, why would I have to get an "Apple ID"? I have two macs, with iTunes, as well as a work laptop with Windows and iTunes and I've never had to register for any "Apple ID" just to rip CDs or import mp3s. Maybe you just don't know what you're doing?
Also, the only part of the first quote that should take any time is ripping the CDs.
The majority of <$50 mp3 players, in contrast, work just like a USB Drive. No special software needed, no registration, nothing new to learn.
Now, compare the iPod way to the cheap-mp3 player way. Put a CD in the drive, copying the music on the cd (Media player will likely automatically start this for them) then right-click the my music folder and hit send-to.
The worst non-technical user may need help with the 'send-to' part, but only if they've never used a USB drive.
Yeah, it really is 'struggle with iTunes' or 'drag-and-drop BAM music'.
Really? Because a lot of the cheap "no-name" brand mp3 players I've dealt with have had a tendency to require all sorts of weirdness (a favorite is that they need you to install a USB driver that makes the entire USB subsystem unstable as well as some neat extensions for explorer. And for some reason if you want a version of the buggy USB driver that isn't two years old you have to go fetch ftp.randomcompany.co.tw/pub/product/driver/mp3/usb/productname/productnumber/23_2010_54_drv.exe and pray the 5 kB/s download doesn't end up failing because the damn ftpd goes offline).
Then there are the mp3 players that only work with specific versions of MS Windows.
Oh, and the ones where the drivers included on the CD don't actually match the hardware...
But yeah, surely it's a lot harder to install iTunes, plug in your iPod and sync it.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your comment but I'll give you a hint: You seem to have little knowledge of what you're talking about.
Well, the pirate party would probably have fared better in the last election if the media and all other parties hadn't gone completely silent on their issues the last couple of months before the election.
And then we have all the parties that had their representatives claim that they agreed with the pirate party only to completely ignore their "promises" once the election was over...
Well, since it's Tingsrätten (the lowest "local" court, mainly staffed by career politicians) I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a verdict that didn't make sense or even contradicted swedish law, it happens all the time. For cases that involve any legal complexity beyond "The defendant punched the victim in the face after drinking twelve beers and is thus guilty of assaulting the victim" tingsrätten's verdict isn't really considered all that important, it's not until the case makes it to Hovrätten that any verdict can be considered final.
As a swede I'm pretty certain I'm not alone in noticing how our politicians and our legal system did a full 180 turn on the TPB issue, at first they actually concluded that it wouldn't be possible to do anything about TPB, then there were a few meetings between members of our government and representatives of the US government as well as the regular lobbyists and all of a sudden TPB was raided...
Not to mention how they've been stretching and bending the law to even make it possible to prosecute the TPB founders, clearly something or someone convinced them that whether or not there was a law broken there had to be convictions.
It seems to me that the game market has changed, if we go back to 20 years ago a lot more (popular) games were platform games, single player RPGs and the like. And as fun as those games were at the time I just can't be bothered playing them much anymore, it just seems like repetition to me.
My favorites these days are RTS games, Civilization-style "god games" and WoW but even with these I often find myself not finishing them anymore.
With the two former categories I tend to get fed up with cheating AIs and annoying scripted events (in the RTS games), I'd like an AI that's scales in "cleverness" rather than speed when I turn up the difficulty. Most RTS AIs are pretty much retarded at any difficulty setting, the only difference is that if you turn up the difficulty they do things faster and faster and the cheating becomes more obvious.
As for WoW, there isn't really an attainable "end" to it (I suppose technically there is an "end boss" and levels of completeness like "getting all achievements"), it's a lot more fun to just quest with your friends, play a dungeon or two, maybe do some world PvP but you're not really working towards "beating" the game (yes, there are those that look at it that way but most people I interact with don't seem to play it that way and it's really annoying when you get one of those guys in a PUG dungeon group).
So at least for me it's a combination of the changing game market, stale games and the fact that I'm just not putting that much value into "beating" games anymore (it was more important in 4th grade when you could brag to your friends). I suspect this is true for a lot of people.
It sounds to me that you're implying that the bible quote is somehow an accurate prediction of the future. I'm having a bit of trouble believing in that. Even if it becomes extremely common (which I doubt).
Also, it's a quote from a collection of fairy tales several thousand years old, hardly an accurate prediction of technological progress or world events.
Personally I don't see the point of just having a dumb RFID chip in me, I'd rather have some smarter tech with some kind of user interface (preferably something a bit more "Ghost in the shell" and not just a keyboard implanted in one wrist and a monitor in the other).
As for religious objections, you're free not to get cyberized (to use a word from GitS) and although I may find your reason for it silly I would probably also refuse simply getting a "dumb" implant that does little more than act as a glorified ID card.
Sending mail should be possible - use your ISPs smart host.
Yes, I already run my own MTA at home, it just bugs me that I'm being sold an internet connection that is limited by my ISP.
I don't see any advantage for you in being able to directly connect to other mail servers from a residential IP, and can see lots of disadvantages where ISPs permit it en mass
From my point of view there are definitely advantages.
Have you ever run a mailserver for a business? It's not lazy to have tight spam controls - it's business sense. Spam costs money. For a couple of hundred accounts I see days with over 150,000 spam messages coming in. Users couldn't do their job if that were to be landing in their inbox. Filtering residential IPs will knock off 90% of that spam.
Yes I have. And of course spam filtering makes sense. But our spam filtering doesn't just rely on "ooh! this IP is in our 'residential' list! let's drop/bounce it!" but we have had issues with others blacklisting our primary external mail server's IP as a "residential" IP thereby making it impossible for us to send emails to them (and of course when we, one of their clients call them about it they immediately assume we're the ones who have somehow blacklisted ourselves by changing the blacklist they keep on their server).
There's nothing random about blocking port 25, and no one is doing it for shits and giggles. I'm all for ISPs allowing the port to be opened for a customer where they request it, but seriously, as long as they provide a reliable SMTP server that you can use as a relay, the cost to the end user is almost nil.
In my experience there are plenty of lazy ISPs out there who take the "how much shit can we block without overwhelming tech support" approach to port blocking. One that used to be the fastest available where I live (thankfully not anymore) blocked incoming traffic on a number of ports (including incoming on 25) and was extremely tight-lipped about which ports it was blocking, instead preferring to simply state that the blocked ports shouldn't affect "normal internet use".
Another problem with the outgoing SMTP relays is of course that through work I've seen a number of extremely underpowered such beasts serving lots of customers and the solution to the machine being underpowered hasn't been to spend a little money on something to replace the 15 year old SPARC. No, it's to supplement the spam filter (for outgoing mail) with a filter that strips all attachments that match certain criteria (like filename ends with pdf|js|exe|gz|bz2|and so on) to ease the load. Of course this creates issues for the users but the users can't do anything about it since they're locked in to the ISP's SMTP relay (and then there are the spam filters that edit the message thus breaking formatting or character encoding, that's another fun one).
You're assuming the server is reliable, in my (professional) experience it rarely is.
Great, you have a plethora of solutions (as do I), now please explain to someone who spends his/her days using Internet Explorer, Outlook, Excel and a handful of other "office drone tools" how to upload files to an FTP server. Oh btw, if it isn't done in exactly the same way as creating an attachment in Outlook they will never learn. These are the kind of people who call and mail software developers to complain when the "Print" and "Save" buttons have swapped places because they "can't find the print button" anymore...
Why would you want to send mail from a residential IP?
Because it should be possible.
The vast majority of big mail servers will simply block your messages.
I've found it's more like a minority, and I've even encountered a few that block large swaths of IPs that they have tagged as "residential/dynamic" but will let incoming emails through if there's a proper matching SPF record.
What's the point of email if you don't have reliable delivery?
It's only unreliable because some admins are lazy. And boy, it sure is fun when an IP that's been a static business IP for years suddenly gets blacklisted as "dynamic residential"...
If you want to access your own mail server running elsewhere, it should be trivial for it to allow inbound connections requiring smtp auth on a port other than 25.
It's still just a workaround that doesn't need to be done if the ISP handles its network properly instead of just randomly blocking ports for shits and giggles. And most only block outgoing port 25 so it's pretty easy to set up your MTA to send via their relay and run the MTA locally anyway, but this still retains the problem of the ISP filtering and messing with outgoing email (as well as the potential loss of outside access if their SMTP relay decides to go down, and I've seen enough ancient Solaris machines handling customer email to have a strong distrust of ISP SMTP relays, it shouldn't be "normal" for it to go down at least 1-2 times per week if you have tens of thousands of customers).
Unfortunately I've worked for several ISPs that had the bad habit of enforcing the following:
Blocked outgoing connections on port 25 for all hosts except their own SMTP relay.
Required valid logins on the SMTP relay in order to send emails.
Draconian size limits on emails passing through the SMTP relay.
Low upper limit on number of emails per day through the relay.
Antivirus software that ripped all sorts of benign data from emails for no reason.
Let's just say there were plenty of issues with users who couldn't figure out how to set things up on their own, not to mention users who found out the hard way that large attachments caused their emails to bounce (somewhere in the 10-15 MiB range IIRC).
Personally I'd love if there was at least an option for completely unfiltered access (perhaps even proper reverse lookup to deal with the idiots who think reverse lookup is a good way to deal with spam (hint: it's not, way too many legit companies have multiple hostnames on their mail servers or use a third party's mail relay for this to work well, it just gimps email)). Now. I'm not saying this should be for everyone, filter by default but give users an option to turn the filter off completely but display an overly clear "don't do this unless you're absolutely certain you know what you're doing" message that includes a warning about how the ISP will shut them down in a nanosecond if they get any legit spam reports. That way those who really want/need unfiltered access can have it while the rest of the users can enjoy the walled garden.
That number is heavily skewed towards older engineers, don't you think?
Well, as the parent post (and the linked article) stated, that's the average starting pay, out of college, not "older engineers" but fresh grads straight out of college.
The downside to lights only shining downwards is of course when it becomes too extreme so all you see when under the lights is what's under the lights, everything else seems dark. Of course, lights like these are popular with local politicians since there's no "wasted" light spreading out to the sides...
Of course, I live in a city that turns many of the lights off in the "summer" (read: "from spring to late october) to save money, and even in winter a lot of bike paths only have every other light turned on resulting in large dark areas along bike paths.
I'm all for more lighting, I suspect in the long-term they'd save just as much money by swapping out their old HPS lights for LEDs, and it might cut down on the number of lights that get stolen by pot-growing teens (seriously, it happens), but I guess that might make too much sense.
For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB.
I'm not so sure about that, with current state-of-the-art compression we're still looking at 720p movies weighing in at 2 GiB for decent quality. And for a lot of movies it makes a lot more sense to aim for 4 GiB rather than compromising quality just to save a little bandwidth.
If you're going with 1080p you can probably expect an average file size of 5 GiB per movie or so if you want reasonable quality. That's more like 25 TiB with 50 * 100 movies (although I find that number suspiciously high, I'm usually happy if I find more than three new movies per month that I think are good enough to bother watching, and after watching about a third of those turn out to be disappointments. So a more reasonable rate of new relevant movies per year would probably be 10-12, let's go with the higher number. We also have to factor in that as time passes some good movies become classics and retain their appeal while others fall out of favor, so we're unlikely to even want to download 12*50 movies at once, more likely we'll settle on something like half of that.
Now we're down to a library of 300 movies that can be subjectively considered the best of the last 50 years. If we disregard the technical issues and plain insanity of compressing all of these movies into one archive file and focus on the size that's only about 1.5 TiB. With my current connection I could easily download that in under 48 hours.
Considering that 300 movies should come to about 90*300 minutes of watching or about 450 hours I'd say that's plenty. You could watch one movie per night for a whole year with a 48 hour download. That's pretty good.
Now, the problem here is of course getting your hands on those movies, if you want the latest and greatest or one of the "universal" classics you can probably get it, but what if you want something else? That's becoming more and more of a problem, we have the bandwidth but to steal a phrase, the "long tail" of the content is still hard to get.
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From your post it sounds like you've been living somewhere that used to belong to the british empire, those people still tend to think of their weight in "stones" and various other oddball measurements but there are definitely countries where imperial units are barely used.
Here in Sweden the only people who use imperial units seem to be carpenters who call a 5x10 cm piece of wood a "tvåtumfyra" ("twoinchfour") but even they don't actually assume the actual size of it is 5.08x10.16 cm, it's just that "tvåtumfyra" is faster to say than "fem gånger tio centimeter".
As for degrees, most people tend to use degrees in everyday conversation (when it comes up) but degrees are not an "imperial" measurement, it predates most imperial units by centuries. And most people I've met who have taken "advanced" high school level math or college level math tend to use radians when actually doing any kind of math related to angles.
Also, you tell someone here in scandinavia that you're 5'10" tall and weigh 176 lbs and they're likely to either not understand you or they'll go "So, a foot is like, 30 cm, right? and how many inches are there in a foot? I know it's not ten but like, fifteen or something, right? And a pound's like, 0.5 kg? or was it less? maybe more? And aren't there two types of pound? Or was that pints?".
Basically, if you tell someone around here that something is "n <imperial unit>" they will have no clue no matter how "natural" you think it is because you happened to grow up with it.
Also, as for easy unit conversions, people do use them, just not in the uncommon ways you described, most people just aren't familiar with some of the less common prefixes but milli-, centi-, deci-, hecto- and kilo are all commonly used (and most people know that mega and giga are millions and billions, they just don't have much use for them, so rather than saying 1.5 megameters you say 1500 kilometers).
But the average doesn't tell the whole story, especially not when you factor in that survey-takers tend to remove the more extreme outliers ("900 sex partners? no fucking way!" or "Let's just remove the top 2% since their numbers are so far from the average").
I actually toyed with some numbers from a swedish community website poll a while back and plotted some graphs (can't find them now though), they showed that at least for that community the average woman actually had more sex partners than the average male but that the group of "extreme" males was a lot more extreme than the female "extreme" group (as in, guys who had a lot of sex partners had a lot of sex partners while women were a bit more moderate while still being far from the average). But when looking at just the "regular" people there most women had 2-3 more sex partners than men (with the likely conclusion being that the handful of "extreme" men accounted for the higher average amount "regular" women).
True, although I think the next paragraph sums up better how it tends to work...
The developer points out after reading the first design spec that maybe it would be better with a single faucet with adjustable temperature, seeing as how that's the "standard" that most users are used to. The developer is then bashed by the "idea people" for suggesting something which the user will clearly not understand. The developer then sighs and asks "Ok, so what is your definition of lukewarm?", after asking this question an additional dozen or so times he finally gets "Not hot and not cold" as an answer. The developer then tries to guess what "lukewarm" might mean to the "idea people", getting it wrong the first ten or so times he finally nails a temperature that they're happy with. But now they've decided they want the middle faucet 3 cm to the left, and the faucet for hot water shouldn't be red like they said in the original spec, because new market research has shown that purple might be a better color, and the developer is not allowed to just repaint it, it has to look brand new. Oh, and then there was that bit about the shower, the "idea people" are absolutely sure they put that in the spec. Oh, it wasn't in there? Oh well, that's no excuse, the project is past its deadline and over budget and it's clearly the developers' fault...
Yes, a bit exaggerated but there are plenty of us who have experienced projects and employers who behave like that. If you want "just a programmer" to build exactly what you tell him to then you should probably make sure you actually tell him (or her) what you want built.
The problem is that the "idea people" tend not to know where the "wall" is so they'll write specs that would equal "light bulb floating mid-air over there, and a cable five feet in front of the wall there yet hidden behind the wall". And when this cannot be created it is the fault of the developers who obviously "couldn't follow directions"...
Curiosity rarely survives formal education.
I think that depends a lot on the education and the teacher (as well as the student).
I've seen a lot of students basically get brainwashed by professors who demand perfect conformance to their personal quirks, for some reason this seems especially common among those studying to become teachers, social workers and economists, but I've also seen plenty of examples of professors that would rather pass a student that did something wrong but used their own mind while failing those who just repeat what's in the course literature.
And there is of course, as I stated, the individual student's attitude to factor in as well. I've taken art and image production courses where most students tried to be a bit artistic, think of new ideas on their own and all that but some absolutely refused to instead choosing to turn their projects into poor examples of a mismash of basic artistic concepts. This despite the fact that they were encouraged to think for themselves, they just didn't want to, they wanted to do what they did for the social studies class, copy what was in the book with slightly different structure, slap their name on it and get a good grade.
You don't hang out with a lot of people who either dropped out of high school or who are downright proud of managing to force their way through high school, do you?
I'd say that if anything my experience has shown me that while there are outliers who go against the norm overall people with less education tend to be a lot more conformist, a lot more likely to listen to authorities (that's not to say they won't be loudly and irrationally opposed to authorities they dislike, just that from what I've seen they tend to be more likely to be directly influenced by someone or something).
That said, I think that as a larger percentage of the population gets university degrees and a university degree becomes more and more like a high school degree (cookie cutter, cram some knowledge, don't stop to reflect) the more there will be people who just went through the motions to get the degree without actually going to university to learn and think (personally I never got around to actually getting a degree because I was busy exploring interesting subjects, it just didn't feel like it was worth it to go back and do that last graduation project in order to get a degree). They just want the degree so they can be "successful", they don't care about the knowledge (that's why we get economists who know just what suit to wear at a business meeting but don't grasp eighth grade math and software developers who can speak fluent marketroid but think datatypes are "too complicated").
Well, the whole problem with the destruction of the original could probably be solved by slowly replacing the original organic brain with the electronic one. Instead of copying everything at once and then deleting the original you basically "graft" the electronic brain onto the original (obviously it would be a lot trickier than that in practice but so would "just copying" it be) and slowly let the electronic hardware do more and more while the organic does less. Eventually you'll have an all electronic brain.
I have to say, this seems a lot more convoluted than "Give each node on the network its own public IPv6 address".
False dichotomy, thanks for playing, please try again.
Yeah, you'll only need to install a driver if you're running a version of windows older than XP.
Yet I've had to do it for both XP and Vista...
Can you name one? I've never seen a low-cost mp3 player that didn't function as a USB Drive. I think you're making this up.
Well, seeing as I was talking about no-name brand mp3 players I'll go with "The pink, blue and gray ones sold at a home electronics store downtown a few months ago for SEK 299 each".
Kind of funny how you ignored my corrections about iTunes and iPods in your reply.
Yes, most users have a very difficult time getting started with iTunes. Try this: Grab a few music CDs and see how long it takes to get iTunes installed, get registered with your apple ID , and the songs on those cd's on the player.
You've got to install iTunes, get an apple ID, etc. before you can even think about copying music onto an iPod
First, why would I have to get an "Apple ID"? I have two macs, with iTunes, as well as a work laptop with Windows and iTunes and I've never had to register for any "Apple ID" just to rip CDs or import mp3s. Maybe you just don't know what you're doing?
Also, the only part of the first quote that should take any time is ripping the CDs.
The majority of <$50 mp3 players, in contrast, work just like a USB Drive. No special software needed, no registration, nothing new to learn. Now, compare the iPod way to the cheap-mp3 player way. Put a CD in the drive, copying the music on the cd (Media player will likely automatically start this for them) then right-click the my music folder and hit send-to. The worst non-technical user may need help with the 'send-to' part, but only if they've never used a USB drive. Yeah, it really is 'struggle with iTunes' or 'drag-and-drop BAM music'.
Really? Because a lot of the cheap "no-name" brand mp3 players I've dealt with have had a tendency to require all sorts of weirdness (a favorite is that they need you to install a USB driver that makes the entire USB subsystem unstable as well as some neat extensions for explorer. And for some reason if you want a version of the buggy USB driver that isn't two years old you have to go fetch ftp.randomcompany.co.tw/pub/product/driver/mp3/usb/productname/productnumber/23_2010_54_drv.exe and pray the 5 kB/s download doesn't end up failing because the damn ftpd goes offline).
Then there are the mp3 players that only work with specific versions of MS Windows.
Oh, and the ones where the drivers included on the CD don't actually match the hardware...
But yeah, surely it's a lot harder to install iTunes, plug in your iPod and sync it.
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your comment but I'll give you a hint: You seem to have little knowledge of what you're talking about.
Well, the pirate party would probably have fared better in the last election if the media and all other parties hadn't gone completely silent on their issues the last couple of months before the election.
And then we have all the parties that had their representatives claim that they agreed with the pirate party only to completely ignore their "promises" once the election was over...
Well, since it's Tingsrätten (the lowest "local" court, mainly staffed by career politicians) I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a verdict that didn't make sense or even contradicted swedish law, it happens all the time. For cases that involve any legal complexity beyond "The defendant punched the victim in the face after drinking twelve beers and is thus guilty of assaulting the victim" tingsrätten's verdict isn't really considered all that important, it's not until the case makes it to Hovrätten that any verdict can be considered final.
As a swede I'm pretty certain I'm not alone in noticing how our politicians and our legal system did a full 180 turn on the TPB issue, at first they actually concluded that it wouldn't be possible to do anything about TPB, then there were a few meetings between members of our government and representatives of the US government as well as the regular lobbyists and all of a sudden TPB was raided...
Not to mention how they've been stretching and bending the law to even make it possible to prosecute the TPB founders, clearly something or someone convinced them that whether or not there was a law broken there had to be convictions.
It seems to me that the game market has changed, if we go back to 20 years ago a lot more (popular) games were platform games, single player RPGs and the like. And as fun as those games were at the time I just can't be bothered playing them much anymore, it just seems like repetition to me.
My favorites these days are RTS games, Civilization-style "god games" and WoW but even with these I often find myself not finishing them anymore.
With the two former categories I tend to get fed up with cheating AIs and annoying scripted events (in the RTS games), I'd like an AI that's scales in "cleverness" rather than speed when I turn up the difficulty. Most RTS AIs are pretty much retarded at any difficulty setting, the only difference is that if you turn up the difficulty they do things faster and faster and the cheating becomes more obvious.
As for WoW, there isn't really an attainable "end" to it (I suppose technically there is an "end boss" and levels of completeness like "getting all achievements"), it's a lot more fun to just quest with your friends, play a dungeon or two, maybe do some world PvP but you're not really working towards "beating" the game (yes, there are those that look at it that way but most people I interact with don't seem to play it that way and it's really annoying when you get one of those guys in a PUG dungeon group).
So at least for me it's a combination of the changing game market, stale games and the fact that I'm just not putting that much value into "beating" games anymore (it was more important in 4th grade when you could brag to your friends). I suspect this is true for a lot of people.
It sounds to me that you're implying that the bible quote is somehow an accurate prediction of the future. I'm having a bit of trouble believing in that. Even if it becomes extremely common (which I doubt).
Also, it's a quote from a collection of fairy tales several thousand years old, hardly an accurate prediction of technological progress or world events.
Personally I don't see the point of just having a dumb RFID chip in me, I'd rather have some smarter tech with some kind of user interface (preferably something a bit more "Ghost in the shell" and not just a keyboard implanted in one wrist and a monitor in the other).
As for religious objections, you're free not to get cyberized (to use a word from GitS) and although I may find your reason for it silly I would probably also refuse simply getting a "dumb" implant that does little more than act as a glorified ID card.
Sending mail should be possible - use your ISPs smart host.
Yes, I already run my own MTA at home, it just bugs me that I'm being sold an internet connection that is limited by my ISP.
I don't see any advantage for you in being able to directly connect to other mail servers from a residential IP, and can see lots of disadvantages where ISPs permit it en mass
From my point of view there are definitely advantages.
Have you ever run a mailserver for a business? It's not lazy to have tight spam controls - it's business sense. Spam costs money. For a couple of hundred accounts I see days with over 150,000 spam messages coming in. Users couldn't do their job if that were to be landing in their inbox. Filtering residential IPs will knock off 90% of that spam.
Yes I have. And of course spam filtering makes sense. But our spam filtering doesn't just rely on "ooh! this IP is in our 'residential' list! let's drop/bounce it!" but we have had issues with others blacklisting our primary external mail server's IP as a "residential" IP thereby making it impossible for us to send emails to them (and of course when we, one of their clients call them about it they immediately assume we're the ones who have somehow blacklisted ourselves by changing the blacklist they keep on their server).
There's nothing random about blocking port 25, and no one is doing it for shits and giggles. I'm all for ISPs allowing the port to be opened for a customer where they request it, but seriously, as long as they provide a reliable SMTP server that you can use as a relay, the cost to the end user is almost nil.
In my experience there are plenty of lazy ISPs out there who take the "how much shit can we block without overwhelming tech support" approach to port blocking. One that used to be the fastest available where I live (thankfully not anymore) blocked incoming traffic on a number of ports (including incoming on 25) and was extremely tight-lipped about which ports it was blocking, instead preferring to simply state that the blocked ports shouldn't affect "normal internet use".
Another problem with the outgoing SMTP relays is of course that through work I've seen a number of extremely underpowered such beasts serving lots of customers and the solution to the machine being underpowered hasn't been to spend a little money on something to replace the 15 year old SPARC. No, it's to supplement the spam filter (for outgoing mail) with a filter that strips all attachments that match certain criteria (like filename ends with pdf|js|exe|gz|bz2|and so on) to ease the load. Of course this creates issues for the users but the users can't do anything about it since they're locked in to the ISP's SMTP relay (and then there are the spam filters that edit the message thus breaking formatting or character encoding, that's another fun one).
You're assuming the server is reliable, in my (professional) experience it rarely is.
Great, you have a plethora of solutions (as do I), now please explain to someone who spends his/her days using Internet Explorer, Outlook, Excel and a handful of other "office drone tools" how to upload files to an FTP server. Oh btw, if it isn't done in exactly the same way as creating an attachment in Outlook they will never learn. These are the kind of people who call and mail software developers to complain when the "Print" and "Save" buttons have swapped places because they "can't find the print button" anymore...
Why would you want to send mail from a residential IP?
Because it should be possible.
The vast majority of big mail servers will simply block your messages.
I've found it's more like a minority, and I've even encountered a few that block large swaths of IPs that they have tagged as "residential/dynamic" but will let incoming emails through if there's a proper matching SPF record.
What's the point of email if you don't have reliable delivery?
It's only unreliable because some admins are lazy. And boy, it sure is fun when an IP that's been a static business IP for years suddenly gets blacklisted as "dynamic residential"...
If you want to access your own mail server running elsewhere, it should be trivial for it to allow inbound connections requiring smtp auth on a port other than 25.
It's still just a workaround that doesn't need to be done if the ISP handles its network properly instead of just randomly blocking ports for shits and giggles. And most only block outgoing port 25 so it's pretty easy to set up your MTA to send via their relay and run the MTA locally anyway, but this still retains the problem of the ISP filtering and messing with outgoing email (as well as the potential loss of outside access if their SMTP relay decides to go down, and I've seen enough ancient Solaris machines handling customer email to have a strong distrust of ISP SMTP relays, it shouldn't be "normal" for it to go down at least 1-2 times per week if you have tens of thousands of customers).
Unfortunately I've worked for several ISPs that had the bad habit of enforcing the following:
Let's just say there were plenty of issues with users who couldn't figure out how to set things up on their own, not to mention users who found out the hard way that large attachments caused their emails to bounce (somewhere in the 10-15 MiB range IIRC).
Personally I'd love if there was at least an option for completely unfiltered access (perhaps even proper reverse lookup to deal with the idiots who think reverse lookup is a good way to deal with spam (hint: it's not, way too many legit companies have multiple hostnames on their mail servers or use a third party's mail relay for this to work well, it just gimps email)). Now. I'm not saying this should be for everyone, filter by default but give users an option to turn the filter off completely but display an overly clear "don't do this unless you're absolutely certain you know what you're doing" message that includes a warning about how the ISP will shut them down in a nanosecond if they get any legit spam reports. That way those who really want/need unfiltered access can have it while the rest of the users can enjoy the walled garden.
That number is heavily skewed towards older engineers, don't you think?
Well, as the parent post (and the linked article) stated, that's the average starting pay, out of college, not "older engineers" but fresh grads straight out of college.
I'm pretty sure there are others that have the capability as well.
The downside to lights only shining downwards is of course when it becomes too extreme so all you see when under the lights is what's under the lights, everything else seems dark. Of course, lights like these are popular with local politicians since there's no "wasted" light spreading out to the sides...
Of course, I live in a city that turns many of the lights off in the "summer" (read: "from spring to late october) to save money, and even in winter a lot of bike paths only have every other light turned on resulting in large dark areas along bike paths.
I'm all for more lighting, I suspect in the long-term they'd save just as much money by swapping out their old HPS lights for LEDs, and it might cut down on the number of lights that get stolen by pot-growing teens (seriously, it happens), but I guess that might make too much sense.
For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB.
I'm not so sure about that, with current state-of-the-art compression we're still looking at 720p movies weighing in at 2 GiB for decent quality. And for a lot of movies it makes a lot more sense to aim for 4 GiB rather than compromising quality just to save a little bandwidth.
If you're going with 1080p you can probably expect an average file size of 5 GiB per movie or so if you want reasonable quality. That's more like 25 TiB with 50 * 100 movies (although I find that number suspiciously high, I'm usually happy if I find more than three new movies per month that I think are good enough to bother watching, and after watching about a third of those turn out to be disappointments. So a more reasonable rate of new relevant movies per year would probably be 10-12, let's go with the higher number. We also have to factor in that as time passes some good movies become classics and retain their appeal while others fall out of favor, so we're unlikely to even want to download 12*50 movies at once, more likely we'll settle on something like half of that.
Now we're down to a library of 300 movies that can be subjectively considered the best of the last 50 years. If we disregard the technical issues and plain insanity of compressing all of these movies into one archive file and focus on the size that's only about 1.5 TiB. With my current connection I could easily download that in under 48 hours.
Considering that 300 movies should come to about 90*300 minutes of watching or about 450 hours I'd say that's plenty. You could watch one movie per night for a whole year with a 48 hour download. That's pretty good.
Now, the problem here is of course getting your hands on those movies, if you want the latest and greatest or one of the "universal" classics you can probably get it, but what if you want something else? That's becoming more and more of a problem, we have the bandwidth but to steal a phrase, the "long tail" of the content is still hard to get.