You have to draw the line somewhere, but the whole notion that online retailers insist upon saving your credit information is absurd.
Meh. You're talking about something that goes wrong about 0.001% of the time... and in cases of outright fraud, the consumer typically isn't even held responsible by their credit card issuer.
Here's a radical idea: how about if parents try applying some actual discipline? Before making online commerce less convenient for everyone else, can we try that and see if it works?
I'm willing to gamble that when I want to open a.PDF document 30 years from now, it's not going to be a problem on whatever platform I'm using at the time. But if my data was saved in some nonstandard but "optimized" format like DjVu, it will effectively be gone forever.
Replacing one file format with another is not the solution, because the file format itself is not the problem. Piss-poor engineering practices at Adobe are the problem.
No, what he's saying is that only expert computer programmers should be able to understand and control what's running on their machines.
This is not a new attitude -- it goes back to the 1960s at least. I guess somebody has to keep the old-school IBM priesthood alive, like Freemasons, Opus Dei cultists, and the guy who leaves the rose on Edgar Allan Poe's grave at midnight.
People massively underestimate just how much wealth is concentrated in the top few percent of earners.
Just as people massively underestimate just how much of the tax burden falls on that same few percent. Were you aware that about 40% of Americans currently pay no net Federal income tax at all?
Dividing the country into a nation of stakeholders and leeches is no way to improve things. We need to focus more on the health of the middle class, not the 'rich' or the 'poor.' Economics is not a zero-sum game, regardless of what the Ivy League programs are teaching kids these days.
The ipad is an iphone for people with smaller dicks... lets face it, most iphone purchasers are compensating for something
I don't know about that, but I'm absolutely sure that the psychology behind posts like yours could mint several new PhDs, if any ambitious grad students looking for research topics are surfing Slashdot these days.
"Let's face it," to use your own words, your whole post amounts to an exhibition of pathology. Either someone paid you to post that bizarre idea salad -- and as a Google stockholder I hope to God it isn't us -- or you're a member of a small but growing contingent of people on here who genuinely need professional help, but don't necessarily fit into any of the current DSM-IV criteria for diagnosis.
There is yet one question to be answered: "what shall we do with the debris?". Lock them down somewhere and hope for the best?
Keep it handy, because we're going to want it back someday.
Or we could just grind it into particulate form and spew it into the atmosphere, like coal-fired plants do every day without a single camera crew in sight.
Makes sense, but why is Microsoft paying people to astroturf a cancelled product? Is this some brilliant new Ballmer-crafted PR strategy that will be studied in business schools for generations, alongside the Ford Pinto, Three Mile Island, and DivX?
I can see them hiring trolls to talk up Windows 7 phones and other things that are actually purchasable, but the idea that anyone is still paying to keep Courier in front of peoples' eyeballs doesn't appear to make sense.
Even though everyone in the world already has an iPod, Apple somehow simultaneously gets people to believe that having one will make you cool and unique AND that not having one will make you an outsider.
News flash: Google, Microsoft, and RIM don't drive their developers in 18-hour shifts trying to copy "marketers."
It sounds like you're projecting your own deep-seated insecurities onto a diverse, unrelated population. There's an app for that.
The 'future robots' were a colossal fuckup on the part of the production designers, and a surprising one as well, considering who was helming the film. They didn't look anything like mecha. They looked completely organic, just like cliched "grey aliens" from countless cheesy SF movies.
Fooled me completely... I snorted in disgust (as did half the theater) and almost walked out.
But every generation thinks that modern music isn't as good as it used to be.
Sure. But the thing is, this used to be something that happened once you hit 40 or 50, when you were old enough to have teenagers of your own.
Now, almost as soon as you graduate from high school and get exposed to more diverse music in college, you look back at what you were buying and listening to, and wonder WTF you were thinking. Pop music has become so irredeemably shitty that the so-called generation gap is all but gone.
If police work is easy, it means you're living in a police state.
They're here to serve us, not the other way around. History shows that when you give the FBI increased investigative powers, those powers are used not to prevent the next 9/11 or OKC bombing, but to spy on dangerous subversives as Martin Luther King and John Lennon.
With power should come responsibility, or at least accountability. The FBI has shown neither.
The poilicy persisted for the most part unil our production peaked early 70's
Not directly comparable -- we're a lot better at finding and extracting oil than we were back then. Don't kid yourself -- we have one hell of a lot of crude oil at our disposal, and it's right where it needs to be.
Are you an American citizen? If so you are subject to more than 40,000 pages of local, state, and Federal law. You may rest assured you've broken more than one of those laws today, probably before you finished your breakfast. You just haven't been caught.
Sometimes the problem is the law. That's the case with the War on (Some) Drugs.
To quote Dogbert, your comment more or less says "Hey everyone, I don't understand what fungible means."
Oil isn't really fungible, if you're thinking long term. The oil under our own (US) territory may have the same nominal value, but it's a lot more valuable to us than the oil underneath Saudi territory.
What is often derided as America's "dependency" on foreign oil is actually a rare example of smart politics: in a world where supplies are declining, it's best to burn the bad guys' oil first.
Woz was talking about a different problem, something that affected the cruise control's control loop behavior at wide-open throttle. IMHO he was experiencing a corner case that had nothing to do with the sensationalized incidents.
The fact that so many of the drivers who experienced this particular "malfunction" were over age 60 tells you all you need to know.
Do you encourage children to engage in 'independent thinking' in math class, too? If they have enough faith that 2+2=5, should they get credit on the test for that, too? Something tells me that if I showed up at your church with a biology textbook and encouraged 'independent thinking', things would get awkward in a hurry.
Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church. Deal?
If you suggest we should blindly accept authority like that, then it's hard to compete with the religious members of the community who will point to their own authorities.
The place for this 'debate' is in graduate education, not K-12. In K-12, the goal is to impart well-known fundamental principles, not to encourage "indepedent thinking." That comes later after a proper foundation is laid.
I'll admit to typing 32 when I meant 64.:) At 64 kbps an AAC-class codec may still not qualify as 'lossless' to a discriminating ear, but it will sound as good as whatever Pandora is streaming now.
Are they actually streaming at 128, though? I thought they ran at 64 mono, at least on the old EDGE iPhone.
Networks are designed to handle the predicted traffic load all the time and the peak traffic load for some of the time, not everyone and their grandmother streaming music all day long.
True enough. Ever since someone first showed me an example of streaming Internet media, I've wondered how long it would take before people see just what a bad idea it is to make a packet-switched network act like a circuit-switched one. It's like painting with a screwdriver.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find ways to make it work... just that mobile operators currently have the wrong tool for the job, and it's not immediately clear how to fix it. Hence the need for throttling.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. You're talking about something that goes wrong about 0.001% of the time... and in cases of outright fraud, the consumer typically isn't even held responsible by their credit card issuer.
Here's a radical idea: how about if parents try applying some actual discipline? Before making online commerce less convenient for everyone else, can we try that and see if it works?
Because .PDF is the new ASCII, and DjVu isn't.
I'm willing to gamble that when I want to open a .PDF document 30 years from now, it's not going to be a problem on whatever platform I'm using at the time. But if my data was saved in some nonstandard but "optimized" format like DjVu, it will effectively be gone forever.
Replacing one file format with another is not the solution, because the file format itself is not the problem. Piss-poor engineering practices at Adobe are the problem.
No, what he's saying is that only expert computer programmers should be able to understand and control what's running on their machines.
This is not a new attitude -- it goes back to the 1960s at least. I guess somebody has to keep the old-school IBM priesthood alive, like Freemasons, Opus Dei cultists, and the guy who leaves the rose on Edgar Allan Poe's grave at midnight.
Just as people massively underestimate just how much of the tax burden falls on that same few percent. Were you aware that about 40% of Americans currently pay no net Federal income tax at all?
Dividing the country into a nation of stakeholders and leeches is no way to improve things. We need to focus more on the health of the middle class, not the 'rich' or the 'poor.' Economics is not a zero-sum game, regardless of what the Ivy League programs are teaching kids these days.
I don't know about that, but I'm absolutely sure that the psychology behind posts like yours could mint several new PhDs, if any ambitious grad students looking for research topics are surfing Slashdot these days.
"Let's face it," to use your own words, your whole post amounts to an exhibition of pathology. Either someone paid you to post that bizarre idea salad -- and as a Google stockholder I hope to God it isn't us -- or you're a member of a small but growing contingent of people on here who genuinely need professional help, but don't necessarily fit into any of the current DSM-IV criteria for diagnosis.
Keep it handy, because we're going to want it back someday.
Or we could just grind it into particulate form and spew it into the atmosphere, like coal-fired plants do every day without a single camera crew in sight.
Makes sense, but why is Microsoft paying people to astroturf a cancelled product? Is this some brilliant new Ballmer-crafted PR strategy that will be studied in business schools for generations, alongside the Ford Pinto, Three Mile Island, and DivX?
I can see them hiring trolls to talk up Windows 7 phones and other things that are actually purchasable, but the idea that anyone is still paying to keep Courier in front of peoples' eyeballs doesn't appear to make sense.
Crank it up to 1500 watts, like LightSquared is doing, and the FCC will give you a license and a favorable press release.
Thanks to cronyism at the FCC, we're about to start jamming GPS everywhere, on a perfectly legal basis.
This is what happens when you hire politicians to do engineering work.
News flash: Google, Microsoft, and RIM don't drive their developers in 18-hour shifts trying to copy "marketers."
It sounds like you're projecting your own deep-seated insecurities onto a diverse, unrelated population. There's an app for that.
The 'future robots' were a colossal fuckup on the part of the production designers, and a surprising one as well, considering who was helming the film. They didn't look anything like mecha. They looked completely organic, just like cliched "grey aliens" from countless cheesy SF movies.
Fooled me completely... I snorted in disgust (as did half the theater) and almost walked out.
Sure. But the thing is, this used to be something that happened once you hit 40 or 50, when you were old enough to have teenagers of your own.
Now, almost as soon as you graduate from high school and get exposed to more diverse music in college, you look back at what you were buying and listening to, and wonder WTF you were thinking. Pop music has become so irredeemably shitty that the so-called generation gap is all but gone.
And worst of all, the kid will grow up seeing this state of affairs as perfectly normal.
They're here to serve us, not the other way around. History shows that when you give the FBI increased investigative powers, those powers are used not to prevent the next 9/11 or OKC bombing, but to spy on dangerous subversives as Martin Luther King and John Lennon.
With power should come responsibility, or at least accountability. The FBI has shown neither.
Son, you don't make money by writing a lot of checks -- or a lot of Linux code, for that matter.
Yeah, but they're starting to think there may be some 'wireless' interaction between neurons via electric fields, too.
In other words: well, shit. The human-level AI goalposts just got moved back another light year or two.
Not directly comparable -- we're a lot better at finding and extracting oil than we were back then. Don't kid yourself -- we have one hell of a lot of crude oil at our disposal, and it's right where it needs to be.
Are you an American citizen? If so you are subject to more than 40,000 pages of local, state, and Federal law. You may rest assured you've broken more than one of those laws today, probably before you finished your breakfast. You just haven't been caught.
Sometimes the problem is the law. That's the case with the War on (Some) Drugs.
Oil isn't really fungible, if you're thinking long term. The oil under our own (US) territory may have the same nominal value, but it's a lot more valuable to us than the oil underneath Saudi territory.
What is often derided as America's "dependency" on foreign oil is actually a rare example of smart politics: in a world where supplies are declining, it's best to burn the bad guys' oil first.
Woz was talking about a different problem, something that affected the cruise control's control loop behavior at wide-open throttle. IMHO he was experiencing a corner case that had nothing to do with the sensationalized incidents.
The fact that so many of the drivers who experienced this particular "malfunction" were over age 60 tells you all you need to know.
Do you encourage children to engage in 'independent thinking' in math class, too? If they have enough faith that 2+2=5, should they get credit on the test for that, too? Something tells me that if I showed up at your church with a biology textbook and encouraged 'independent thinking', things would get awkward in a hurry.
Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church. Deal?
If you suggest we should blindly accept authority like that, then it's hard to compete with the religious members of the community who will point to their own authorities.
The place for this 'debate' is in graduate education, not K-12. In K-12, the goal is to impart well-known fundamental principles, not to encourage "indepedent thinking." That comes later after a proper foundation is laid.
I'll admit to typing 32 when I meant 64. :) At 64 kbps an AAC-class codec may still not qualify as 'lossless' to a discriminating ear, but it will sound as good as whatever Pandora is streaming now.
Are they actually streaming at 128, though? I thought they ran at 64 mono, at least on the old EDGE iPhone.
Really? What codecs have you written?
True enough. Ever since someone first showed me an example of streaming Internet media, I've wondered how long it would take before people see just what a bad idea it is to make a packet-switched network act like a circuit-switched one. It's like painting with a screwdriver.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find ways to make it work... just that mobile operators currently have the wrong tool for the job, and it's not immediately clear how to fix it. Hence the need for throttling.