1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value.
This says something very different from cost of production + cost of distribution, and the fact that it includes "intangible factors" and "perception" belies the notion that it can be precisely calculated.
3. Economics: No intrinsic value exists for any good or service except its price (see use value) which is reflection of its demand and supply position and not of any inherent quality.
This one is explicitly refuting the idea that value and price have a disconnect at all. This is basically a "subjective theory of value" being defined here -- "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it". The same cite has the investopedia definition as definition 7.
Here's the problem: there are multiple "intrinsic theories of value", and there is also the subjective theory of value. You are promoting the "Cost-of-production theory of value" as if it was the universally-accepted "economic definition" of intrinsic value:
Note the other theories of intrinsic value linked in wikipedia. Even restricting yourself to intrinsic value theory, I don't think "cost-of-production" is considered the slam-dunk winner of all things. More like an aspect of valuation.
This bug looks like the sort of bugs that can come from merging between different code branches in very large codebases. A duplicated line, or a missing line, is a common merge-conflict resolution, *especially* where essentially the same code was added in both branches and then merged together. As an example, if this was a refactor of an existing function that was made similarly in two branches, but a little extra trailing whitespace was clipped in only one branch, then you could get a duplicate line out of an automerge operation.
Your argument isn't working. In the wild, iOS and OSX have been exploited because somebody failed to notice this error. This is a thing that actually happened. Doesn't really matter whose fault it is and if they are all morons, what matters is whether we can we make it less likely.
I would propose that a Python-like static analyser might be able to catch this sort of thing, provided you don't get too fancy with macros. The fact is, virtually everybody has standardized on indentation for if statements as a readability boon, even in the vast majority of languages which use explicit symbols rather than indentation to make code blocks. So I kind of think that the indentation should have the meaning we are already ascribing to it. It's one of the things Python does right.
This of course brings back the tabs vs. spaces religious wars. To which I say, pick one model for your project and enforce it statically, and I recommend that model be some number of spaces. There's just too little benefit in adding complication like extra varieties of whitespace, or indentation that is usually meaningful but sometimes misleading, etc. (especially when a text editor could just treat every eg. 4 leading spaces on a line as a "pseudo-tab" for display purposes anyway if your panties really get in a twist about configurable column-spacing).
I can understand that this code that I just made up now* never actually prints "Fridays are the best", but surely you can see that it appears to, right? And I'd say that as much as possible, we should enforce that code runs the way it looks like it should run:
void StupidExampleFunction(){
for(day=0;day<7;day++){
if(day==1) printf("Mondays are the worst:(");}
if(day==5) printf("Fridays are the best!");{
} }
Obviously this is poorly written code, but I think you can see how mistakes can creep in because we've essentially assigned meaning to things that aren't actually syntax, which is misleading when it doesn't align with the actual syntax.
*I didn't actually compile it so there may very well be a syntax error or something, but I think you see what I'm getting at. Also, on languages that do have curly braces I like them each on their own line to make it trivially easy to pair them up so that mistakes like this are nearly impossible.
Well actually it's a very different thing with a different set of challenges, one of which being that you can't walk back the bad decision....
These people are eager to say they were among the first, to see things as nobody else has ever seen them, to have their names known, and to go down in history books. They just can't be the first to the arctic anymore.
I'm generally on your side on this one (as an atheist) -- the fallacy of hasty generalization is the evil-twin opposite to the No True Scotsman fallacy and they often appear hand-in-hand. Blaming all Islam for some Islam fuckheads with suicide bombs is as stupid as blaming atheism for Stalin.
That said, you're guilty of it here and I think your argument is getting off track. Banning vows of chastity aren't part of my beliefs. It is not even slightly related. Therefore, a democratically elected president who banned vows of chastity has done nothing whatsoever to further my beliefs (even if it damages somebody else's beliefs).
Similarly, I actually think it's fair to point out that atheism isn't the cause of attacking the dictator's opponents, power is the cause -- it's just that it's irrelevant, because here it's not *really* Islam as a whole that's the cause, it's this guy's particular reading of Islam that is the problem, and that reading appears to be a minority reading. And it's not really anything about atheism that caused some dictators to go on pogroms, but it's a threat to power or maybe that guy really did just hate religion as a concept or whatever.
A lot of slashdotters and people in gneeral commit the fallacy of thinking that everybody in religion X 100% believes the literal meaning of whatever English translation passage they read out-of-context on the Internet, even as they look around in eg. the US and see that most people call themselves Christian and yet blatantly violate explicit instructions in the KJV bible because they are clearly stupid. Like "thou shalt not kill" while holding a flyswatter. Even people who consider themselves 100% literalist go back and say "well, in the original Hebrew, the word was 'murder'; and besides they didn't really consider insects alive anyway" or some similar apologia. And we let them get away with that because even the most 100% literalist KJV-only fundamentalists are *expected* to interpret "thou shalt not kill" with a filter of reasonableness.
(plus, though I didn't search for long, I didn't find anything on the web about Plutarco Calles banning vows of chastity anyway).
It may be the closest thing we have -- I'd even agree with that -- however it's not actually close, so that's irrelevant, because you were saying the statement "religions aren't hiveminds" was bullshit, but it's not. Religions are not hive-minds, and they are not even close to hive-minds.
You seem to confused about how "No True Scotsman" works. "No True Scotsman" is about the in-group (A) declaring that people in the controversial group (C) are not part of A, because their ideals don't match their own. Instead they say they are in the out-group (O). In reality, the group C is within A.
This case is the reverse of that. Where people in group O start treating everybody in A as if they were all in C, which is *also* not the case, and it's the exact fallacy that leads to defensive "No True Scotsman" posturing.
This sentence right here is what did it:
"you can't go to mars and advance science exploration and the boundaries of human knowledge that would be suicide(without a exploding vest in a crowd of innocent civilians)"
The people saying you can't go to Mars are (kind of obviously) not the people who are advocating exploding vests. Both groups are Muslim, but they are nevertheless disjoint.
Christians who devote their lives to various good works and Christians who bomb abortion clinics are a disjoint set (the latter may believe they are the former, but they are not). Even though both groups are Christian.
Atheists who devote their lives to charity and are uncomfortable with even the idea of murder and atheists who are Stalin are a disjoint set. Even though both groups are atheist.
Agnostics who live their lives for the benefit of all and agnostics who start a fake self-contradictory religion in order to extract money from the masses while secure in the knowledge that there's no good reason to think that, even if there is a god, that god isn't actually pleased by the deception rather than displeased -- these are a disjoint set. Even though both groups are agnostics.
Men who shave their head because they are balding and think it looks better shaved right off, but are generally good people; and men who shave their head because they want to show support for neo-nazism -- these are again a disjoint set. Even though both groups have shaved heads.
The probability of dying after going to mars is more like the probability of dying after shooting yourself in the forehead with a shotgun than it is like the probability of joining the army.
The difference is transparently obvious.
And here's an extremely-lengthy example of a fatwa against suicide bombing and ramming planes into buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Strangely, people who call themselves Islamic are not actually a hive-mind! Some are rank jack-ass suicide bombers. Others think that's completely against their religion. Unprecedented, right?
Note it's been a while since I've used OSX more than some trivial playing with the newer touchpad in a Macbook Air, so I've refrained from commenting on more recent things.
This said, the post a couple above yours was specifically about *older* versions of Mac OS and I think that's still relevant.
Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen
The problem with the Fitt's Law argument is it only makes sense if your computing experience ends with clicking that menu item.
For instance, if you now have to move the mouse to the window, it's now maximally far away from your cursor and not near a screen edge, and Fitts Law says you just made things a kazillion times worse.
And if you want to interact with two windows (eg. copy from one, paste in another, using menus), you've added another step to switch which menu is available. Admittedly, virtually the whole world has figured out the keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste, since those are some of the most universally useful commands.
This all means that hot corners and hot edges for the mouse should be reserved for the sort of interactions that are fairly universal between apps, and which logically terminate a sequence of actions. For instance, closing an app (debatable because of accidental clicking, but common), switching to another app that's behind the current app, that sort of thing.
Mac OS has supported multiple mouse buttons for at least 16 years.
It was supported but not really seriously encouraged until more recently than 16 years. But yes, it's an out of date argument now. Just...not 16 years out of date.
Left Window Controls
I don't believe either your argument or the GP's. I'm very skeptical that it's "easier" to move up and to the left with your right hand rather than up and right, which is directly away from you rather than going across your body. But frankly, a mouse is not hard enough to use to justify left vs. right in any way. Window control positions are basically arbitrary (so long as they are in a consistent place within the OS, eg. corner of the window as we've all settled on).
General iOS crap
Integration with touchpads is great. Removing always-visible scrollbars removes needless clutter.
Touchpads are not iOS. I can see how they might seem related, but it is a fundamentally different interaction model when you're operating on a device distinct from the screen. Minimizing input delay is not as important, pinching takes on a different aspect, different opportunities exist simply because your hands aren't covering the viewport, etc.. Don't get me wrong -- I think improved touchpad support is great. I just don't think it has all that much to do with "General iOS crap". I guess maybe the fact that people were trained on iOS to perform certain gestures?
The start menu in Windows 7 wasn't good, but the screen is worse:
1. It's effectively a modal dialog. Modal dialogs are evil (most of the time): http://stackoverflow.com/quest... 2. By taking over the screen, it switches your context. 3. By taking over the screen, it makes it difficult to follow instructions like "press start, type 'blahblahblah', then hit enter" since it can't be onscreen at the same time. 4. The type to launch bizarrely offers fewer settings-related results than Win7 did, making it harder to launch those. Typing to launch is mainly helpful when I'm not sure exactly how to get there already.
Much as apparently some people hated the cascading menus of XP, I think that was the best start menu *except* that it didn't have type to launch. Type to launch was important enough that I dealt with the crappy start menu (you were able to go back to the cascading menu in at least Vista and probably Win7, but that disabled search, so it was a step back). There's no real equivalent advance in 8. They did add filtered searches, but the distinction between Settings and Programs is so vague that each of those categories is less useful than a combined category. And yes, just about any sensible person admits the start screen is better for a tablet, but on a mixed-input interface (whether or not touch is available) there is good reason to prefer the old small modeless menu.
Re-running the program is equivalent to having more than one mathematician review the proof. In both cases, you're trying to drive the probability of error in verification down to zero.
Beach front property, downtown workspace, and premium ski lodge property become irrelevant if you have ubiquitous, cheap transporters. It's even less relevant with holodeck technology. Their main scarcity seems to be spaceship jobs.
A very high proportion of MBAs have engineering undergraduate degrees, and for them, they did in fact go to school to be engineers (longer than they did to be a manager).
The people in our society who are good at talking but not at doing anything productive [...]
I hate to tell you this, but talking is productive. Or at least, it can be. In the same way that programming can be productive (but isn't necessarily).
Good engineers can't get into that because they're not good at BSing
Frankly, I don't think that's true. In fact I think your entire post is just you BSing. Which ironically means you in particular probably aren't very good at BSing, but that doesn't mean all engineer-kind is bad at BSing.
Why would skill in engineering be inversely correlated with skill at BSing?
Don't get me wrong, there are shitty shitty managers out there, and I won't venture to guess the proportion of shit-vs-non-shit.
You searched for the manuals, but not the pages inside of them, so your counterargument is irrelevant.
To be fair, I am not able to confirm or deny this about these manuals, but I've had similar problems with other technical documentation. If I were just looking for the main site I'd be fine, but the main site has 100 MB of data and bizarrely, every site in the world seems to be significantly worse with its inline search than either Google or Bing, even if they are theoretically powered by Google or Bing (not clear on why). The sybase one seems to roll its own internal search, which has awful presentation at least, and I didn't see an inline search on IBM either.
Non-citizens absolutely have civil rights, especially (but not exclusively) ones who were legally there. She was not just denied entry into the US arbitrarily, she was actually abused while inside the US, and apparently basically deported. You can't just deport people legally in the US with the same impunity you can deny them entry, in part because of, again, civil rights.
The third option is it was intentional and defensible. This court case has found that it was indefensible, so we dismiss that, leaving intentional malice vs. unintentional consequences.
I am. The scientific knowledge problem is much worse. The "literacy/language" problem is trivial and unimportant.
Come on. People get screwed up easily, and astrology is not an every-day word nor an important word, unless you actually look up an astrological prediction frequently. Just listen to a parent describing the characters on a show their kids like but they can't sit through, and you'll find some amusing word or syllable substitutions in major character names. I'm highly confident that with a little time, we kind find some word I've used more than Astrology in the past year, which is not some specific jargon, and which appears in major dictionaries, yet you have never heard of in your life. It just doesn't come up that often.
I would expect people who are really into astrology to be the most sensitive to the distinction (barring maybe people who are actually astronomers), and people who don't care about being a Leo or a Virgo or whatever to be the most hazy on it.
Plus, real linguists know that astrology really was the term for what we now call astronomy. After all, the word itself even has the form of a science-name: latin for stars, logy for study. Study of the stars.
Unlike credit card transactions, bank transactions are visible immediately.
Many credit cards are either instantly visible, or as close to instantly as makes no difference.
Why not reverse the transaction as soon as you notice it?
Because it's not an option. You have to ask the bank to do it, then they have to agree to do it and process it. I'm not familiar with any debit card that offers 24/7 online instant auto-approved charge reversal, though such a thing may exist (probably only below some threshold).
My understanding is that it's usually more like a week to get your money back.
Sure, his helicopter didn't crash, but either this was 1 accident, or it was worse than an accident, it was deliberate assault, which doesn't help the case.
Four more people hospitalized and blinded. This one is extra-crazy since it's military "friendlies".
Note also that non-laser light sources have been a problem in the past.
These were two of the first three results for "laser dazzle accidents" (no quotes) -- the other was an allegation that the car accident that lead to Princess Di's death may have been caused by intentional laser dazzle which I don't have the time of patience to follow up on right now.
The worst case you get caught for filing a false police report, which is a significant crime that can lead to long jail-time.
You could as easily falsely accuse your neighbour of threatening your life, or abusing you physically, or hatching a bomb plot, or dumping a dead body off a nearby river-bridge, or raping you, or whatever. In practice, most intentionally-false reports appear to be extremely rare.
I expect drones would have way less of a problem with lasers. Not least because we don't need to use the human visible spectrum in a drone's cameras.
I strongly suspect that drones are significantly less susceptible to this problem than human pilots, especially if we go out of our way to develop countermeasures. Eg. we could position cameras in deep "sockets" that narrow the field of view, but also narrow the potential attack radius. Then you can identifiy your attacker's position by the cameras that are *not* operational due to laser interference.
Slashdot Mirror
Has litecoin really achieved enough to break away from "other"?
Here's one economic definition of intrinsic value:
http://www.investopedia.com/te...
1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value.
This says something very different from cost of production + cost of distribution, and the fact that it includes "intangible factors" and "perception" belies the notion that it can be precisely calculated.
http://www.businessdictionary....
3. Economics: No intrinsic value exists for any good or service except its price (see use value) which is reflection of its demand and supply position and not of any inherent quality.
This one is explicitly refuting the idea that value and price have a disconnect at all. This is basically a "subjective theory of value" being defined here -- "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it". The same cite has the investopedia definition as definition 7.
Here's the problem: there are multiple "intrinsic theories of value", and there is also the subjective theory of value. You are promoting the "Cost-of-production theory of value" as if it was the universally-accepted "economic definition" of intrinsic value:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Note the other theories of intrinsic value linked in wikipedia. Even restricting yourself to intrinsic value theory, I don't think "cost-of-production" is considered the slam-dunk winner of all things. More like an aspect of valuation.
This bug looks like the sort of bugs that can come from merging between different code branches in very large codebases. A duplicated line, or a missing line, is a common merge-conflict resolution, *especially* where essentially the same code was added in both branches and then merged together. As an example, if this was a refactor of an existing function that was made similarly in two branches, but a little extra trailing whitespace was clipped in only one branch, then you could get a duplicate line out of an automerge operation.
Your argument isn't working. In the wild, iOS and OSX have been exploited because somebody failed to notice this error. This is a thing that actually happened. Doesn't really matter whose fault it is and if they are all morons, what matters is whether we can we make it less likely.
I would propose that a Python-like static analyser might be able to catch this sort of thing, provided you don't get too fancy with macros. The fact is, virtually everybody has standardized on indentation for if statements as a readability boon, even in the vast majority of languages which use explicit symbols rather than indentation to make code blocks. So I kind of think that the indentation should have the meaning we are already ascribing to it. It's one of the things Python does right.
This of course brings back the tabs vs. spaces religious wars. To which I say, pick one model for your project and enforce it statically, and I recommend that model be some number of spaces. There's just too little benefit in adding complication like extra varieties of whitespace, or indentation that is usually meaningful but sometimes misleading, etc. (especially when a text editor could just treat every eg. 4 leading spaces on a line as a "pseudo-tab" for display purposes anyway if your panties really get in a twist about configurable column-spacing).
I can understand that this code that I just made up now* never actually prints "Fridays are the best", but surely you can see that it appears to, right? And I'd say that as much as possible, we should enforce that code runs the way it looks like it should run:
void StupidExampleFunction(){ :(");}
for(day=0;day<7;day++){
if(day==1) printf("Mondays are the worst
if(day==5) printf("Fridays are the best!");{
}
}
Obviously this is poorly written code, but I think you can see how mistakes can creep in because we've essentially assigned meaning to things that aren't actually syntax, which is misleading when it doesn't align with the actual syntax.
*I didn't actually compile it so there may very well be a syntax error or something, but I think you see what I'm getting at. Also, on languages that do have curly braces I like them each on their own line to make it trivially easy to pair them up so that mistakes like this are nearly impossible.
Well actually it's a very different thing with a different set of challenges, one of which being that you can't walk back the bad decision....
These people are eager to say they were among the first, to see things as nobody else has ever seen them, to have their names known, and to go down in history books. They just can't be the first to the arctic anymore.
I'm generally on your side on this one (as an atheist) -- the fallacy of hasty generalization is the evil-twin opposite to the No True Scotsman fallacy and they often appear hand-in-hand. Blaming all Islam for some Islam fuckheads with suicide bombs is as stupid as blaming atheism for Stalin.
That said, you're guilty of it here and I think your argument is getting off track. Banning vows of chastity aren't part of my beliefs. It is not even slightly related. Therefore, a democratically elected president who banned vows of chastity has done nothing whatsoever to further my beliefs (even if it damages somebody else's beliefs).
Similarly, I actually think it's fair to point out that atheism isn't the cause of attacking the dictator's opponents, power is the cause -- it's just that it's irrelevant, because here it's not *really* Islam as a whole that's the cause, it's this guy's particular reading of Islam that is the problem, and that reading appears to be a minority reading. And it's not really anything about atheism that caused some dictators to go on pogroms, but it's a threat to power or maybe that guy really did just hate religion as a concept or whatever.
A lot of slashdotters and people in gneeral commit the fallacy of thinking that everybody in religion X 100% believes the literal meaning of whatever English translation passage they read out-of-context on the Internet, even as they look around in eg. the US and see that most people call themselves Christian and yet blatantly violate explicit instructions in the KJV bible because they are clearly stupid. Like "thou shalt not kill" while holding a flyswatter. Even people who consider themselves 100% literalist go back and say "well, in the original Hebrew, the word was 'murder'; and besides they didn't really consider insects alive anyway" or some similar apologia. And we let them get away with that because even the most 100% literalist KJV-only fundamentalists are *expected* to interpret "thou shalt not kill" with a filter of reasonableness.
(plus, though I didn't search for long, I didn't find anything on the web about Plutarco Calles banning vows of chastity anyway).
It may be the closest thing we have -- I'd even agree with that -- however it's not actually close, so that's irrelevant, because you were saying the statement "religions aren't hiveminds" was bullshit, but it's not. Religions are not hive-minds, and they are not even close to hive-minds.
You seem to confused about how "No True Scotsman" works. "No True Scotsman" is about the in-group (A) declaring that people in the controversial group (C) are not part of A, because their ideals don't match their own. Instead they say they are in the out-group (O). In reality, the group C is within A.
This case is the reverse of that. Where people in group O start treating everybody in A as if they were all in C, which is *also* not the case, and it's the exact fallacy that leads to defensive "No True Scotsman" posturing.
This sentence right here is what did it:
"you can't go to mars and advance science exploration and the boundaries of human knowledge that would be suicide(without a exploding vest in a crowd of innocent civilians)"
The people saying you can't go to Mars are (kind of obviously) not the people who are advocating exploding vests. Both groups are Muslim, but they are nevertheless disjoint.
Christians who devote their lives to various good works and Christians who bomb abortion clinics are a disjoint set (the latter may believe they are the former, but they are not). Even though both groups are Christian.
Atheists who devote their lives to charity and are uncomfortable with even the idea of murder and atheists who are Stalin are a disjoint set. Even though both groups are atheist.
Agnostics who live their lives for the benefit of all and agnostics who start a fake self-contradictory religion in order to extract money from the masses while secure in the knowledge that there's no good reason to think that, even if there is a god, that god isn't actually pleased by the deception rather than displeased -- these are a disjoint set. Even though both groups are agnostics.
Men who shave their head because they are balding and think it looks better shaved right off, but are generally good people; and men who shave their head because they want to show support for neo-nazism -- these are again a disjoint set. Even though both groups have shaved heads.
See where I'm going with this?
The probability of dying after going to mars is more like the probability of dying after shooting yourself in the forehead with a shotgun than it is like the probability of joining the army.
The difference is transparently obvious.
And here's an extremely-lengthy example of a fatwa against suicide bombing and ramming planes into buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Strangely, people who call themselves Islamic are not actually a hive-mind! Some are rank jack-ass suicide bombers. Others think that's completely against their religion. Unprecedented, right?
What about people randomly clipping power lines?
What about people with bombs?
What about people fucking with the traffic signals?
What about attaching the subway, bus, especially the ferry systems near islands.
This isn't the first scale attack possible. It's not even the first scale attack against transit.
Note it's been a while since I've used OSX more than some trivial playing with the newer touchpad in a Macbook Air, so I've refrained from commenting on more recent things.
This said, the post a couple above yours was specifically about *older* versions of Mac OS and I think that's still relevant.
Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen
The problem with the Fitt's Law argument is it only makes sense if your computing experience ends with clicking that menu item.
For instance, if you now have to move the mouse to the window, it's now maximally far away from your cursor and not near a screen edge, and Fitts Law says you just made things a kazillion times worse.
And if you want to interact with two windows (eg. copy from one, paste in another, using menus), you've added another step to switch which menu is available. Admittedly, virtually the whole world has figured out the keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste, since those are some of the most universally useful commands.
This all means that hot corners and hot edges for the mouse should be reserved for the sort of interactions that are fairly universal between apps, and which logically terminate a sequence of actions. For instance, closing an app (debatable because of accidental clicking, but common), switching to another app that's behind the current app, that sort of thing.
Mac OS has supported multiple mouse buttons for at least 16 years.
It was supported but not really seriously encouraged until more recently than 16 years. But yes, it's an out of date argument now. Just...not 16 years out of date.
Left Window Controls
I don't believe either your argument or the GP's. I'm very skeptical that it's "easier" to move up and to the left with your right hand rather than up and right, which is directly away from you rather than going across your body. But frankly, a mouse is not hard enough to use to justify left vs. right in any way. Window control positions are basically arbitrary (so long as they are in a consistent place within the OS, eg. corner of the window as we've all settled on).
General iOS crap
Integration with touchpads is great. Removing always-visible scrollbars removes needless clutter.
Touchpads are not iOS. I can see how they might seem related, but it is a fundamentally different interaction model when you're operating on a device distinct from the screen. Minimizing input delay is not as important, pinching takes on a different aspect, different opportunities exist simply because your hands aren't covering the viewport, etc.. Don't get me wrong -- I think improved touchpad support is great. I just don't think it has all that much to do with "General iOS crap". I guess maybe the fact that people were trained on iOS to perform certain gestures?
The start menu in Windows 7 wasn't good, but the screen is worse:
1. It's effectively a modal dialog. Modal dialogs are evil (most of the time): http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
2. By taking over the screen, it switches your context.
3. By taking over the screen, it makes it difficult to follow instructions like "press start, type 'blahblahblah', then hit enter" since it can't be onscreen at the same time.
4. The type to launch bizarrely offers fewer settings-related results than Win7 did, making it harder to launch those. Typing to launch is mainly helpful when I'm not sure exactly how to get there already.
Much as apparently some people hated the cascading menus of XP, I think that was the best start menu *except* that it didn't have type to launch. Type to launch was important enough that I dealt with the crappy start menu (you were able to go back to the cascading menu in at least Vista and probably Win7, but that disabled search, so it was a step back). There's no real equivalent advance in 8. They did add filtered searches, but the distinction between Settings and Programs is so vague that each of those categories is less useful than a combined category. And yes, just about any sensible person admits the start screen is better for a tablet, but on a mixed-input interface (whether or not touch is available) there is good reason to prefer the old small modeless menu.
Re-running the program is equivalent to having more than one mathematician review the proof. In both cases, you're trying to drive the probability of error in verification down to zero.
Beach front property, downtown workspace, and premium ski lodge property become irrelevant if you have ubiquitous, cheap transporters. It's even less relevant with holodeck technology. Their main scarcity seems to be spaceship jobs.
They go to school to be managers, not engineers
A very high proportion of MBAs have engineering undergraduate degrees, and for them, they did in fact go to school to be engineers (longer than they did to be a manager).
The people in our society who are good at talking but not at doing anything productive [...]
I hate to tell you this, but talking is productive. Or at least, it can be. In the same way that programming can be productive (but isn't necessarily).
Good engineers can't get into that because they're not good at BSing
Frankly, I don't think that's true. In fact I think your entire post is just you BSing. Which ironically means you in particular probably aren't very good at BSing, but that doesn't mean all engineer-kind is bad at BSing.
Why would skill in engineering be inversely correlated with skill at BSing?
Don't get me wrong, there are shitty shitty managers out there, and I won't venture to guess the proportion of shit-vs-non-shit.
You searched for the manuals, but not the pages inside of them, so your counterargument is irrelevant.
To be fair, I am not able to confirm or deny this about these manuals, but I've had similar problems with other technical documentation. If I were just looking for the main site I'd be fine, but the main site has 100 MB of data and bizarrely, every site in the world seems to be significantly worse with its inline search than either Google or Bing, even if they are theoretically powered by Google or Bing (not clear on why). The sybase one seems to roll its own internal search, which has awful presentation at least, and I didn't see an inline search on IBM either.
likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors
I'll need a source to believe that's "likely" rather than "conceivably".
Non-citizens absolutely have civil rights, especially (but not exclusively) ones who were legally there. She was not just denied entry into the US arbitrarily, she was actually abused while inside the US, and apparently basically deported. You can't just deport people legally in the US with the same impunity you can deny them entry, in part because of, again, civil rights.
The third option is it was intentional and defensible. This court case has found that it was indefensible, so we dismiss that, leaving intentional malice vs. unintentional consequences.
I am not aware of a fourth option.
I am. The scientific knowledge problem is much worse. The "literacy/language" problem is trivial and unimportant.
Come on. People get screwed up easily, and astrology is not an every-day word nor an important word, unless you actually look up an astrological prediction frequently. Just listen to a parent describing the characters on a show their kids like but they can't sit through, and you'll find some amusing word or syllable substitutions in major character names. I'm highly confident that with a little time, we kind find some word I've used more than Astrology in the past year, which is not some specific jargon, and which appears in major dictionaries, yet you have never heard of in your life. It just doesn't come up that often.
I would expect people who are really into astrology to be the most sensitive to the distinction (barring maybe people who are actually astronomers), and people who don't care about being a Leo or a Virgo or whatever to be the most hazy on it.
Plus, real linguists know that astrology really was the term for what we now call astronomy. After all, the word itself even has the form of a science-name: latin for stars, logy for study. Study of the stars.
We have much worse literacy problems than mixing up astrology and astronomy. Like this: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com....
Unlike credit card transactions, bank transactions are visible immediately.
Many credit cards are either instantly visible, or as close to instantly as makes no difference.
Why not reverse the transaction as soon as you notice it?
Because it's not an option. You have to ask the bank to do it, then they have to agree to do it and process it. I'm not familiar with any debit card that offers 24/7 online instant auto-approved charge reversal, though such a thing may exist (probably only below some threshold).
My understanding is that it's usually more like a week to get your money back.
Wrong. Here's one:
http://www.wfaa.com/news/local...
Sure, his helicopter didn't crash, but either this was 1 accident, or it was worse than an accident, it was deliberate assault, which doesn't help the case.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroo...
Four more people hospitalized and blinded. This one is extra-crazy since it's military "friendlies".
Note also that non-laser light sources have been a problem in the past.
These were two of the first three results for "laser dazzle accidents" (no quotes) -- the other was an allegation that the car accident that lead to Princess Di's death may have been caused by intentional laser dazzle which I don't have the time of patience to follow up on right now.
The thing is, we do tell people to stop shooting at the police and you definitely can get rewards for ratting out somebody who shoots at the police.
The worst case you get caught for filing a false police report, which is a significant crime that can lead to long jail-time.
You could as easily falsely accuse your neighbour of threatening your life, or abusing you physically, or hatching a bomb plot, or dumping a dead body off a nearby river-bridge, or raping you, or whatever. In practice, most intentionally-false reports appear to be extremely rare.
I expect drones would have way less of a problem with lasers. Not least because we don't need to use the human visible spectrum in a drone's cameras.
I strongly suspect that drones are significantly less susceptible to this problem than human pilots, especially if we go out of our way to develop countermeasures. Eg. we could position cameras in deep "sockets" that narrow the field of view, but also narrow the potential attack radius. Then you can identifiy your attacker's position by the cameras that are *not* operational due to laser interference.