You will often start by bathing the seed in mutagens or hard radiation to effect changes in the blocks. How is this different from GMO, except for the blindfolding?
I had never heard that before. That must be quite recent right? I don't imagine Mendel was soaking his peas in mutagens. Do you really consider that part and parcel of hybridization as it has been performed for thousands of years?
Ah, the naturalistic fallacy.
Well if it is a fallacy, then explain why it is a fallacy.
It could have happened naturally, meaning, that the two species were compatible to cross breed. I believe it would be inherently less dangerous because you are not (with an educated guess) taking genes from an entirely difference species and using GM methods to inject it into another species. That would not have happened naturally, or at least the chances of it happening spontaneously are quite small.
Once again, if it is a fallacy, please tell me why.
As opposed to selective breeding, where you can? Or is selective breeding also biological warfare?
I already said selective breeding is dangerous, albeit to a less extent than GM. Killer bees? Plenty of invasive species have damaged ecosystems, but hybridization between two species that would not normally interact can produce unexpected results that radically shift the balance of an ecosystem so fast that other species cannot adapt fast enough.
Perhaps you could consider that natural, in that natural forces are at work, but human intervention is greatly speeding up the time tables.
GMO is like biological warfare in that the consequences of letting your strains interact with the ecosystem can have very damaging long term effects, and like Pandora's box, once out in the open, it cannot be put back in the box.
As another poster pointed out, antibiotics have created a "cold war" with pathogens. There are a couple of super bugs popping up that are quite scary simply because we have nothing that can treat them. At the moment, they have the upper hand biologically speaking and we are playing catch up. Considering the populations on this planet, and how fast a bug from Asia can travel to the US, our ability to play catch up may mean the difference of tens of thousands of lives, or in a pandemic situation millions.
GMO food has created the same situation. Round up Ready is a particularly concerning offender since it creates an environment in which seed diversity is compromised and the overall health of the system is reduced. An environment is created, that can be likened to nothing other than a test laboratory for pathogens and insects that can rapidly test out new "prototypes" that can survive better.
Isn't the whole point of GMO to raise crop yields and mitigate events that would destabilize production quotas over the short term? As well as allow crops to grow in more environments that were previously hostile?
I would think it would be a bad idea to have blind faith that science can always bridge the gap fast enough to solve all problems and put us in a situation where all of the sudden crop yields plummet because our new "shiny" has a "bug" in it that causes us to go into emergency "tech support mode".
The mistake is thinking I am a dirty hippie or a naturalist. I'm not. I just don't have as much faith in science strongly driven by profits, and not.. science. It is hubris to think we have come so far, so fast, with the field of genetics when collecting meaningful data could take human generations.
I call for patience and prudence, nothing more.
Now if you think my assumptions, presumptions, and data is somehow faulty, I am listening. Please point me to some sources that I can read and study.
Why exactly do you feel you need touch for Windows 8? The whole thing can be used just fine with Keyboard and Mouse. There are tons of keyboard and mouse shortcuts and in many ways its even faster and easier to use with keyboard and mouse.
Keyboard shortcuts can be quite complicated and you need to remember a pattern, or profile, for a specific setup. Program navigation and shortcuts to standard operations would be quite useful. Similar to those huge tablets with overlays for common Autocad operations.
Visual will always be a lot faster and easier to customize across different platforms.
Everything in the taskbar, start menu, and system tray is very conducive to touch. The effort to grab the mouse, move it to the location, and click or hover is actually greater than extending out your arm and just touching the area.
If you really want you can do this with windows 8. You can dock the start screen on a close up touch monitor, launch apps from that and send them to any monitor you want.
That's kind of like a duct tape solution. Yes, it's a start. I also believe you can specify with most multi-monitor set ups a default screen to start apps on. I'm positive I have seen 3rd party software to assist you with this.
The real issue is the size and placement of the close up touch monitor. Too tall and it can conflict with seeing the monitors in front of you. Embedded in the desk surface and it is not that easy to see. A specialized screen that is at a 30-45 degree angle right behind the keyboard and mouse area that is only 8-10 inches tall would be ideal.
It's Mendel. I added the 'n', but forgot to take of the rest while editing.
I'm not a Luddite either. I said let's do the science, but take better precautions since we only have one Earth. If this was 500 fucking years from now and the Weyland corporation wanted to do a fuck ton of risky genetic research on an Earth-like planet go for it.
If am a Luddite afraid of the future, then you and the pro-GMO people are Nazi scientists willing to cause great immediate harm just to further your own scientific agendas, which, are not even scientific agendas since they were mostly political and ideological.
What I said, and you cannot, or are unwilling to even attempt to refute, IS THAT YOU CANNOT STATE WITH CONFIDENCE BACKED BY SCIENCE WHAT THE TRUE RAMIFICATIONS WILL BE OF GMO MODIFICATIONS COEXISTING WITH CURRENT STRAINS IN THE EXACTLY ONE ENVIRONMENT WE HAVE AVAILABLE..
Look up the definition for the word Luddite. It does not describe my position. I'm perfectly fine with supporting the science. Happy to do it, and curious about what the results will be.
Not willing to even remotely accept the possibility of damaging our one freakin planet to do it, just so we can have immediate short term happy happy, look-at-our-brand-new-shiny results.
Your hyperbole aside, it makes no sense at all for you to claim that people have been genetically modifying anything for ten thousand years. That's hybridization, which is not remotely the same as GMO.
GMO can be fine. Just keep the shit separate and labeled until the science has progressed to the point where it can be said with real confidence that current ecosystems will be protected for generations. Don't tell me that you know what will happen in the wild, because even the best scientists cannot state with any reasonable certainty that they know either. They hope. Gutcheck says yes. No hard data to back that up, and that will take time. Not 5 years, not 10 years, but more than likely 50,100, or more years.
Everything does not have to be so fast. Take your time. Not such a bad idea either, because contrary to popular belief, the Earth is not that big of a place. We have ONE Earth right now. That's it. Fuck it up and we are a toast. We are doing a good enough job of that already with the ecosystems that we have. Hmmmm.... Let's add some GMO to it as well.
While he has some points about damage already being done, and preventative measures being put into place to prevent cross contamination, it is disingenuous at worst, and at best ignorance to claim the GMO is the same thing Mendelson was doing playing with peas.
What Mendelson did, and what others have done for thousands of years is hybridization. Not just plants, but animals too.
To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.
At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger. There is still danger. Non indigenous species have already damaged and changed ecosystems countless times since Man started carrying so much crap with him from one place to another.
GMO, involves methods much more dangerous. Death codes anyone? It is beyond hubris to think that we know enough to mess with the fundamental codes of life itself, and downright insane to proceed like you know with certainty the complete consequences of your actions over any meaningful period of time.
Now I am not arguing that the very field itself should be banned and not pursued. Just use some fucking prudence and make absolutely sure to protect the current ecosystems that we have right now.
Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.
Just have some god damned patience. Science is not done over night, and the field of genetics does not have to progress so dangerously fast out in the open.
Most of our food production problems ARE POLITICAL, and not about resources. There is enough food thrown away every day in the US to feed Africa (or at least really damn close), and Ethiopia, the poster child of starvation is starving mostly due to political and economic reasons (agricultural policies).
It's funny that people against GMO get accused of having their heads in the sand, being anti-science, etc. when most people who are for GMO, purportedly based on science and reason, want to completely ignore even the mere possibility that things can go wrong.
Then it comes down to a disagreement over what a term means. Advertising, in practice, is in discordance with your definition. My definition, OTOH, fits perfectly.
That's fine, let's not make it about right or wrong definitions. I understand the concept you are trying to present and agree that it is vastly preferable to the current offering.
However, targeted advertisements will not take advantage of the fact I am looking for a cellphone and offer me reviews and technical data. It will be more vapid, manipulative, and deceitful media not designed to inform, but to get me to react and agree to their call to action.
It's really quite funny. I mean, I understand what you are saying, but it is not in reality.
Your preferred version of reality: Hey, dog. I have something over here that is nutritious, weighs x amount, tastes like a reasonable facsimile of bacon. It may, or may not contain, toxic substances from our dubiously sourced suppliers in China, where as you know, they eat you.
Reality: Look whats over here! I got Bacon! It's BACON! Come get it mother fucker! Come get it!
Even for someone like you, they could send offers of greatly priced earplugs and blindfolds for when you have to go out.
Cute. I am paying far too much attention to the women around me to notice bill boards, have music for earplugs (advanced solution), and can walk away from most areas that get too fucking annoying. For instance, I wholly stopped shopping at Walgreens the first time a motion activated advertisement started screaming at me about the product on the shelf right next to it. Fuck that noise. I don't need blindfolds and earplugs for that. Just don't walk into a Walgreens.
As for your rationale that you're winning, I can't really follow. You seem to think that, somehow, the advertising industry is keeping a score or something.
OMG. LMFAO.
They are keeping score. It's called Metrics and ROI. How else do you think those big firms justify their existence in the first place? There is actual data that shows the effectiveness of advertising.
I'm winning, quite simply, because my goal is to remove advertising from my life and their goal is to forcibly inject advertisement into my life. As well as collect data on me that violates the level of privacy I find desirable.
There you go. I'm winning and will continue to do so.
Your lofty idea that advertising can change, despite the privacy implications of targeted advertising is supremely cute. Cute, like believing in Santa Claus kind of cute.
Places on the west coast of the US. It has been gaining a lot of traction in the last couple of years. Right above the pump they put a steel enclosure with two small flat screens and built in speakers. Pump the volume way up and go to town on you.
Worst part is there are not all in sync. It's a cacophony of "advertising sounds", which are the most annoying because they are specifically designed to manipulate you and gain your attention. Seriously... who talks like that in real life?
When I went to Las Vegas for a convention they had them all over the place. I think it was called Terribles.
No, actually it isn't. What I'm talking about is the opportunity to turn "an affront to an advanced and intellectual society" into something actually informative. For me, the ideal advertisement is just like a tech site. Like Slashdot, for example. I learned about the Raspberry Pi here, and that's a product I'm interested in. Ideally, you'd only see advertising that you actually wanted to. And there are many that you do want to see, unless you make no monetary transactions whatsoever. I'd be interested in learning about places that offer organic vegetables nearby. I like to know which tech gizmos are being launched. Why should I shun out ads completely? Their current form is the problem. They are intrusive because they are competing with every other ad in existence, and stupid because they have little time to do so and people are plain uninterested in them (mainly because they are instrusive and stupid). I'll say it again: they can be made into something actually helpful. The fact that a lot of people can't see it says a lot about the low they have reached.
You're not talking about advertising. You specifically came to Slashdot. Slashdot offered a review of the Raspberry Pi. It contained detailed technical specifications, examples of how it could be used, price comparisons with Arduino, Interesting, Insightful, and Informative comments from other users.
If you want to know about places that offer organic vegetables near you, you can go to a website similar to Slashdot that will offer reviews and directions.
Advertising is about manipulation and deception, and anytime accurate or relevant information has been imparted, it is only a consequence of law, and the minimum amount possible.
Advertising is also most objectionable when it actively interferes and interrupts with an activity. I don't give a flying fuck if I *LOVE* organic vegetables, don't fucking put an overlay up on my TV programming to tell me. Wait till I actively search out for food, and even then, don't manipulate me. Just give me the cold hard facts, because I asked for them.
Again: we shouldn't be declaring war on advertising. Not even in a metaphor. It's nonsensical and infeasible
Wrong on all counts.
1) We should be declaring war against anything that is an affront to common decency and intelligence. Advertising is about active manipulation and deceit for profit. Nothing about that is useful or beneficial to society in any way, shape, or form.
2) Nonsensical. How? It has an intelligent meaning. To avoid information that is purposefully deceitful and manipulative. It is also neither ridiculous or unreasonable to want to distance yourself from such unworthy material as it only cheapens your existence and is a waste of your mental faculties. A person actively avoiding such a nuisance would seem to be exhibiting good judgement.
3) Infeasible. Incorrect. I have removed the majority of advertisements from my life, and it has saved me money and time. I no longer spend over $100 per month on a content distribution system that cares nothing for my desires as a customer and only presents me as a product to the true customers. I am not bereft of digital content either. A plethora of books, music, and movies is at my fingertips on my terms, and 99.9% of the time it is legal!.
you'll be fighting a useless fight.
Far from useless. I'm winning. How many advertisements have I seen in the last 10 years? Practically none. How many have they tried to show me? Probably tens of thousands. In all honesty, it is most likely Advertisers 452, Me 1,124,198 over the last 10 years.
That isn't fighting, by the way, in any way, shape or form. It's just shunning out things that annoy you.
As opposed to allowing things that annoy me to continue to annoy me and stay close to me?
That's a lot smarter than my first thought which was that it could be used as an early warning system for a Death Star coming into orbit and getting ready to fire.
Alderaan could have really used one of those. Although they were the first so it would be kinda hard to put the danger into the proper context.
After the first use, I would imagine the rest of the galaxy kept close tabs on where that fucker was. Probably messed with local economies the same way cops do on the roads. Death Star gets within a parsec of a star system and you see you vacation requests and sick days just skyrocket.
I was thinking that the TV would start talking a nice calm voice when it detects that you are sad and tells you that the Snickers bar will always be your friend and never judge you....
Well, as long as you're going to be shown ads, you might as well
That's a defeatist attitude. Settling for less is the reason why we have a progressively less free, and less private society, and why people with power (influence & money, which is really money and money) continue to abuse people without consequence.
I refuse.
Advertisements are an abomination and only serve as an affront to an advanced and intellectual society. There is no amount of money, or shiny, that will get me to participate in such offensive and vapid wastes of time.
So I can't watch sports anymore because it is a screen full of advertisements. Big deal. If I really liked the sport so damned much... I could get off my ass and go do it. The only difference between me and NASCAR are the police who object to me driving like that.
So I can't purchase new consoles that want to destroy me freedom (specifically peaceful enjoyment of property) and take away my privacy so they can make even more money. Big freakin deal. There will be plenty of open source alternatives (Humble Bundle aint bad) and given enough time, technology like Kinect will be developed by competitors, hacked, and applied to open source alternatives that don't exploit you.
So I can't watch TV anymore. Yeah.... *huge* loss there. I have been set free since I stopped watching TV nearly 10 years ago. There are a couple of shows that I am interested in and I just pirate the web releases that have no commercials and no overlays during the programming itself. Pay for Netflix and purchase DVD box sets when I really like a show.
So I can't stand outside my car when I fill up with gas because those asshats want to put in 30 display screens playing advertisements WITH sound blaring. Fine, fuck-em. I get back in my car and turn on the music a little louder and relax till the indicator says it has stopped filling up.
So I can't get a magazine anymore. Big Whoop. The quality of journalism has plummeted into the depths of the sewer system since I grew up anyways. Far better off just purchasing a book that will have far more detailed information and analysis about a topic than a vapid, attention-getting-whore of a journalistic attempt in some paper.
So I can't listen to the radio anymore. Well that's a dying format anyways. A couple of dollars a month and I get commercial free music and programming at my fingertips, with premium options giving me more on demand control.
So I don't have a usable mailbox anymore because junk mail advertisers fill it up in 2 days with useless and environmentally unsustainable advertising. Solved that more than 10 years ago with a single private mailbox store that filters all presort class mail into the recycle bin for me.
So I can't surf the web anymore like I did when it was first created. Yeah.. that one did not affect me all that much since I was doing my best effort from the start to defeat tracking and prevent advertisements from hitting my screen at all. It is very rare that I encounter one now.
So I can't just allow anybody to email me anymore. I run my own mail server. A couple thousand aliases and counting. Anytime a single piece of SPAM makes it to the inbox (which made it past the filters and RBL's) I just destroy the alias and deliver a new one to the source if I deem it appropriate. My business cards have a random prefix plus my name that I print out. Makes it easier to manage.
In about another 10 years or so I will seriously consider a Kickstarter like project to create augmented reality glasses that can remove all advertisements from my field of view. Granted, that is quite problematic and has serious philosophical and societal implications, but let's face it, by then it will be all out techno-war for your attention and any hope at a peaceful quite life of intellectual pursuits will hinge upon your ability to tune out the massive amount of noise corporations want to throw at you.
Never give up. Never surrender. Plenty of options.. including the best move... not to play.
NASA was not the only group of people looking with very sensitive instruments. I'm sure plenty of groups spent that day collecting data and if NASA came up with anything that deviated too strongly from everyone else it would be suspicious.
OTOH, it's going to be very hard to arrange another Venus transit
That does put a damper on reproducibility doesn't it?:)
The pictures of the transit are meaningless to me. Well, to be more specific, whether or not they are fake makes no difference to me. All I can appreciate is the beauty of the pictures. They were quite beautiful too.
What cannot be faked is the science behind it. I'm sure there was valuable scientific data collected that is being pored over right now, and papers authored, and so on and so forth.
If they faked the pictures, it would stand to reason they are also faking the data. I would imagine some people much more skilled in astrophysics could pick up on that.
As far as I am concerned, the pictures visually depicted the transit to me and were stunning. Computer generated or not, they served their purpose.
Because other than feeling like my desktop monitor ought to have a slider keyboard like a giant cell phone
I don't want my monitors to have any touch capability. Why? It's freaking useless. I have a bunch of large monitors on swing arms and stands in front of me, but they are not within arms reach. Much less set up to ergonomically use a touchscreen.
What would be really cool and useful is a wide (15"-30") touchscreen interface that either replaced my keyboard and mouse, or was at an angle right behind them.
You could use that with an operating system for so many useful things. Why have a start menu, or even a task bar on the main screens at all? That stuff just begs for a touch interface, but not when I can't reach it on a desktop.
This whole upset over Win8 and the massive search field is because MS is trying to shoe horn smartphone interfaces into a platform wholly unsuited for it just due to ergonomic reasons alone. For a company that does so much research into ergonomics, that is rather pathetic.
What do you need touch for, and provide it for that . That's what MS needs to figure out.
The younger crowd finds no value in it, or much worse, finds value in not having it.
It's youthful idealism and naivety that leads them to these conclusions. One simply needs some exposure to history to see the risks, and exposure to fields of study like game theory to understand why even a little loss in privacy can have dramatic detrimental affects for society as a whole.
The loss of privacy at this scale is quite unprecedented though. It is not all that surprising that the average person has a hard time figuring out just how dangerous it could be in the long term.
Unfortunately, it will take some pretty harsh experience to educate them and hopefully pass the wisdom down to the next generations.
That is of course assuming that we don't irreversibly damage the environment to the point that mere survival is all our future generations can think about.
The only difference between us and them is the dress code, our ability to solve complex problems.
Ability to solve complex problems is a little condescending. Accurate, but condescending.
Dress code? By that I assume you mean they can't wear those witty t-shirts like, "Select Top 25 from Employees WHERE (Sex = 'F') Order by Hotness"?
Unless you've got a programmer that has some kind of severe debilitating autism, there's absolutely no reason not to take him on your sales calls
That's not the only reason and you know it. You forgot about AssBurgers, and a host of other anti-social disorders that preclude us from putting up with unwashed masses that don't know what a compiler does.
Besides, they lock us in windowless rooms most of the time.
The lack of windows is to increase company morale, and any programming geek worth his salt can bypass the lock.
I haven't met a programmer yet, who wouldn't be grateful for the sunlight
You mean that super bright and hot orb of death outside?! No, no thank you. It burns us, it does.
I never thought it was about censorship. It might be looked at censorship for political reasons, but I thought it was far more ominous. I have no idea about how TV and the "mental wasteland" Mr. Bradbury thought TV was got into the picture.
To me, and this influenced me quite a bit as a child, was that a totalitarian government destroyed books to remove information from the people. It wasn't that the information was objectionable, it was the benefit to the person receiving the information that was objectionable. I found that particularly disturbing since my exposure to literature was so damn liberating and exciting. All those worlds, ideas, concepts denied to me because it might cause me to think for myself and question the world around me.
To say it was censorship is deeply simplistic. Hopefully, I did get Mr. Bradbury's point, if that is what it was.
Yes, you can type google in the address bar, wait for DNS to timeout, be presented with a google search for google, and then click google.
No you can't.
Browsers changed their behavior quite some time ago. Typing just "google" into IE, Chrome, or Firefox results in a search for "google" on Google and Bing.
When they want to make those tlds work they will just change the default behavior to attempt to load.google instead. Which will be quite interesting since that will directly conflict with the paradigm of the address bar being used as a search bar. Considering how much Google benefits from that, as well as Microsoft I am not sure they really want to change that behavior since it would just result in DNS hijacking (excuse me, advertising) which would benefit ISPs and OpenDNS instead.
Considering that it is just a blatant attempt to print money, they should just phase out specific tlds anyways and just allow anybody and everybody to purchase a.whatever tld.
But why do that when for every tld you can rake in a couple hundred thousand dollars up front and then millions upon million upon millions reselling the same subdomains over and over and over again to businesses and paranoid people who want to control their brand?
It's not like they are sticking to the rules about.org and.net, so I don't think they would mandate you need a.tickets to sell tickets.
Mandating that you would have to purchase one would only make sense if you needed help to sell out the space. With asshat squatters and speculators I sincerely doubt they will have problems selling it.
It was not so much about features, as it was stability.
Vista sucks ass for stability and performance. Now, I know, that plenty of people will come out defending it. However, I have *never* came across a Vista set up that performed well.
Networking for one, is a complete disaster. From the weird crap it does/did with DHCP discovery because they were oh-so-much-smarter than everyone else, to taking 5-10 minutes to identify a network.
I could go on, but it never really came down to features for me. Plenty of stuff that is in Vista is in my Windows 7 Pro right now, but the Windows 7 Pro is working well for me.
So maybe Vista was just a testing ground and they refined a lot of stuff they were trying to do and put it in Windows 7.
Slashdot Mirror
You will often start by bathing the seed in mutagens or hard radiation to effect changes in the blocks. How is this different from GMO, except for the blindfolding?
I had never heard that before. That must be quite recent right? I don't imagine Mendel was soaking his peas in mutagens. Do you really consider that part and parcel of hybridization as it has been performed for thousands of years?
Ah, the naturalistic fallacy.
Well if it is a fallacy, then explain why it is a fallacy.
It could have happened naturally, meaning, that the two species were compatible to cross breed. I believe it would be inherently less dangerous because you are not (with an educated guess) taking genes from an entirely difference species and using GM methods to inject it into another species. That would not have happened naturally, or at least the chances of it happening spontaneously are quite small.
Once again, if it is a fallacy, please tell me why.
As opposed to selective breeding, where you can? Or is selective breeding also biological warfare?
I already said selective breeding is dangerous, albeit to a less extent than GM. Killer bees? Plenty of invasive species have damaged ecosystems, but hybridization between two species that would not normally interact can produce unexpected results that radically shift the balance of an ecosystem so fast that other species cannot adapt fast enough.
Perhaps you could consider that natural, in that natural forces are at work, but human intervention is greatly speeding up the time tables.
GMO is like biological warfare in that the consequences of letting your strains interact with the ecosystem can have very damaging long term effects, and like Pandora's box, once out in the open, it cannot be put back in the box.
As another poster pointed out, antibiotics have created a "cold war" with pathogens. There are a couple of super bugs popping up that are quite scary simply because we have nothing that can treat them. At the moment, they have the upper hand biologically speaking and we are playing catch up. Considering the populations on this planet, and how fast a bug from Asia can travel to the US, our ability to play catch up may mean the difference of tens of thousands of lives, or in a pandemic situation millions.
GMO food has created the same situation. Round up Ready is a particularly concerning offender since it creates an environment in which seed diversity is compromised and the overall health of the system is reduced. An environment is created, that can be likened to nothing other than a test laboratory for pathogens and insects that can rapidly test out new "prototypes" that can survive better.
Isn't the whole point of GMO to raise crop yields and mitigate events that would destabilize production quotas over the short term? As well as allow crops to grow in more environments that were previously hostile?
I would think it would be a bad idea to have blind faith that science can always bridge the gap fast enough to solve all problems and put us in a situation where all of the sudden crop yields plummet because our new "shiny" has a "bug" in it that causes us to go into emergency "tech support mode".
The mistake is thinking I am a dirty hippie or a naturalist. I'm not. I just don't have as much faith in science strongly driven by profits, and not.. science. It is hubris to think we have come so far, so fast, with the field of genetics when collecting meaningful data could take human generations.
I call for patience and prudence, nothing more.
Now if you think my assumptions, presumptions, and data is somehow faulty, I am listening. Please point me to some sources that I can read and study.
Why exactly do you feel you need touch for Windows 8? The whole thing can be used just fine with Keyboard and Mouse. There are tons of keyboard and mouse shortcuts and in many ways its even faster and easier to use with keyboard and mouse.
Keyboard shortcuts can be quite complicated and you need to remember a pattern, or profile, for a specific setup. Program navigation and shortcuts to standard operations would be quite useful. Similar to those huge tablets with overlays for common Autocad operations.
Visual will always be a lot faster and easier to customize across different platforms.
Everything in the taskbar, start menu, and system tray is very conducive to touch. The effort to grab the mouse, move it to the location, and click or hover is actually greater than extending out your arm and just touching the area.
If you really want you can do this with windows 8. You can dock the start screen on a close up touch monitor, launch apps from that and send them to any monitor you want.
That's kind of like a duct tape solution. Yes, it's a start. I also believe you can specify with most multi-monitor set ups a default screen to start apps on. I'm positive I have seen 3rd party software to assist you with this.
The real issue is the size and placement of the close up touch monitor. Too tall and it can conflict with seeing the monitors in front of you. Embedded in the desk surface and it is not that easy to see. A specialized screen that is at a 30-45 degree angle right behind the keyboard and mouse area that is only 8-10 inches tall would be ideal.
Uninformed my ass.
It's Mendel. I added the 'n', but forgot to take of the rest while editing.
I'm not a Luddite either. I said let's do the science, but take better precautions since we only have one Earth. If this was 500 fucking years from now and the Weyland corporation wanted to do a fuck ton of risky genetic research on an Earth-like planet go for it.
If am a Luddite afraid of the future, then you and the pro-GMO people are Nazi scientists willing to cause great immediate harm just to further your own scientific agendas, which, are not even scientific agendas since they were mostly political and ideological.
What I said, and you cannot, or are unwilling to even attempt to refute, IS THAT YOU CANNOT STATE WITH CONFIDENCE BACKED BY SCIENCE WHAT THE TRUE RAMIFICATIONS WILL BE OF GMO MODIFICATIONS COEXISTING WITH CURRENT STRAINS IN THE EXACTLY ONE ENVIRONMENT WE HAVE AVAILABLE..
Look up the definition for the word Luddite. It does not describe my position. I'm perfectly fine with supporting the science. Happy to do it, and curious about what the results will be.
Not willing to even remotely accept the possibility of damaging our one freakin planet to do it, just so we can have immediate short term happy happy, look-at-our-brand-new-shiny results.
has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible
:D
Yes. Many of us here are quite aware that evolution is thought to not be possible in the Midwest.
He did not say ban, he said isolate.
Why is that so unreasonable?
Your hyperbole aside, it makes no sense at all for you to claim that people have been genetically modifying anything for ten thousand years. That's hybridization, which is not remotely the same as GMO.
GMO can be fine. Just keep the shit separate and labeled until the science has progressed to the point where it can be said with real confidence that current ecosystems will be protected for generations. Don't tell me that you know what will happen in the wild, because even the best scientists cannot state with any reasonable certainty that they know either. They hope. Gutcheck says yes. No hard data to back that up, and that will take time. Not 5 years, not 10 years, but more than likely 50,100, or more years.
Everything does not have to be so fast. Take your time. Not such a bad idea either, because contrary to popular belief, the Earth is not that big of a place. We have ONE Earth right now. That's it. Fuck it up and we are a toast. We are doing a good enough job of that already with the ecosystems that we have. Hmmmm.... Let's add some GMO to it as well.
The argument is neither obvious, nor correct.
While he has some points about damage already being done, and preventative measures being put into place to prevent cross contamination, it is disingenuous at worst, and at best ignorance to claim the GMO is the same thing Mendelson was doing playing with peas.
What Mendelson did, and what others have done for thousands of years is hybridization. Not just plants, but animals too.
To understand the difference, think of like Tetris. Hybridization is arranging the blocks to form patterns. Some patterns can be advantageous and desirable, while others are not. GMO, is altering the blocks themselves to form the patterns.
At least with hybridization you are taking two species and breeding them together. This could have happened naturally, and is much less prone to danger. There is still danger. Non indigenous species have already damaged and changed ecosystems countless times since Man started carrying so much crap with him from one place to another.
GMO, involves methods much more dangerous. Death codes anyone? It is beyond hubris to think that we know enough to mess with the fundamental codes of life itself, and downright insane to proceed like you know with certainty the complete consequences of your actions over any meaningful period of time.
Now I am not arguing that the very field itself should be banned and not pursued. Just use some fucking prudence and make absolutely sure to protect the current ecosystems that we have right now.
Biological warfare is conducted in protected laboratories for this reason, and GMO is biological warfare in that you cannot possibly state with credulity and assurance that the consequences of your actions will not bring great harm to our current ecosystems.
Just have some god damned patience. Science is not done over night, and the field of genetics does not have to progress so dangerously fast out in the open.
Most of our food production problems ARE POLITICAL, and not about resources. There is enough food thrown away every day in the US to feed Africa (or at least really damn close), and Ethiopia, the poster child of starvation is starving mostly due to political and economic reasons (agricultural policies).
It's funny that people against GMO get accused of having their heads in the sand, being anti-science, etc. when most people who are for GMO, purportedly based on science and reason, want to completely ignore even the mere possibility that things can go wrong.
Hubris.
Then it comes down to a disagreement over what a term means. Advertising, in practice, is in discordance with your definition. My definition, OTOH, fits perfectly.
That's fine, let's not make it about right or wrong definitions. I understand the concept you are trying to present and agree that it is vastly preferable to the current offering.
However, targeted advertisements will not take advantage of the fact I am looking for a cellphone and offer me reviews and technical data. It will be more vapid, manipulative, and deceitful media not designed to inform, but to get me to react and agree to their call to action.
It's really quite funny. I mean, I understand what you are saying, but it is not in reality.
Your preferred version of reality: Hey, dog. I have something over here that is nutritious, weighs x amount, tastes like a reasonable facsimile of bacon. It may, or may not contain, toxic substances from our dubiously sourced suppliers in China, where as you know, they eat you.
Reality: Look whats over here! I got Bacon! It's BACON! Come get it mother fucker! Come get it!
Even for someone like you, they could send offers of greatly priced earplugs and blindfolds for when you have to go out.
Cute. I am paying far too much attention to the women around me to notice bill boards, have music for earplugs (advanced solution), and can walk away from most areas that get too fucking annoying. For instance, I wholly stopped shopping at Walgreens the first time a motion activated advertisement started screaming at me about the product on the shelf right next to it. Fuck that noise. I don't need blindfolds and earplugs for that. Just don't walk into a Walgreens.
As for your rationale that you're winning, I can't really follow. You seem to think that, somehow, the advertising industry is keeping a score or something.
OMG. LMFAO.
They are keeping score. It's called Metrics and ROI. How else do you think those big firms justify their existence in the first place? There is actual data that shows the effectiveness of advertising.
I'm winning, quite simply, because my goal is to remove advertising from my life and their goal is to forcibly inject advertisement into my life. As well as collect data on me that violates the level of privacy I find desirable.
There you go. I'm winning and will continue to do so.
Your lofty idea that advertising can change, despite the privacy implications of targeted advertising is supremely cute. Cute, like believing in Santa Claus kind of cute.
Places on the west coast of the US. It has been gaining a lot of traction in the last couple of years. Right above the pump they put a steel enclosure with two small flat screens and built in speakers. Pump the volume way up and go to town on you.
Worst part is there are not all in sync. It's a cacophony of "advertising sounds", which are the most annoying because they are specifically designed to manipulate you and gain your attention. Seriously... who talks like that in real life?
When I went to Las Vegas for a convention they had them all over the place. I think it was called Terribles.
No, actually it isn't. What I'm talking about is the opportunity to turn "an affront to an advanced and intellectual society" into something actually informative. For me, the ideal advertisement is just like a tech site. Like Slashdot, for example. I learned about the Raspberry Pi here, and that's a product I'm interested in. Ideally, you'd only see advertising that you actually wanted to. And there are many that you do want to see, unless you make no monetary transactions whatsoever. I'd be interested in learning about places that offer organic vegetables nearby. I like to know which tech gizmos are being launched. Why should I shun out ads completely? Their current form is the problem. They are intrusive because they are competing with every other ad in existence, and stupid because they have little time to do so and people are plain uninterested in them (mainly because they are instrusive and stupid). I'll say it again: they can be made into something actually helpful. The fact that a lot of people can't see it says a lot about the low they have reached.
You're not talking about advertising.
You specifically came to Slashdot. Slashdot offered a review of the Raspberry Pi. It contained detailed technical specifications, examples of how it could be used, price comparisons with Arduino, Interesting, Insightful, and Informative comments from other users.
If you want to know about places that offer organic vegetables near you, you can go to a website similar to Slashdot that will offer reviews and directions.
Advertising is about manipulation and deception, and anytime accurate or relevant information has been imparted, it is only a consequence of law, and the minimum amount possible.
Advertising is also most objectionable when it actively interferes and interrupts with an activity. I don't give a flying fuck if I *LOVE* organic vegetables, don't fucking put an overlay up on my TV programming to tell me. Wait till I actively search out for food, and even then, don't manipulate me. Just give me the cold hard facts, because I asked for them.
Again: we shouldn't be declaring war on advertising. Not even in a metaphor. It's nonsensical and infeasible
Wrong on all counts.
1) We should be declaring war against anything that is an affront to common decency and intelligence. Advertising is about active manipulation and deceit for profit. Nothing about that is useful or beneficial to society in any way, shape, or form.
2) Nonsensical. How? It has an intelligent meaning. To avoid information that is purposefully deceitful and manipulative. It is also neither ridiculous or unreasonable to want to distance yourself from such unworthy material as it only cheapens your existence and is a waste of your mental faculties. A person actively avoiding such a nuisance would seem to be exhibiting good judgement.
3) Infeasible. Incorrect. I have removed the majority of advertisements from my life, and it has saved me money and time. I no longer spend over $100 per month on a content distribution system that cares nothing for my desires as a customer and only presents me as a product to the true customers. I am not bereft of digital content either. A plethora of books, music, and movies is at my fingertips on my terms, and 99.9% of the time it is legal! .
you'll be fighting a useless fight.
Far from useless. I'm winning. How many advertisements have I seen in the last 10 years? Practically none. How many have they tried to show me? Probably tens of thousands. In all honesty, it is most likely Advertisers 452, Me 1,124,198 over the last 10 years.
That isn't fighting, by the way, in any way, shape or form. It's just shunning out things that annoy you.
As opposed to allowing things that annoy me to continue to annoy me and stay close to me?
It's
That's a lot smarter than my first thought which was that it could be used as an early warning system for a Death Star coming into orbit and getting ready to fire.
Alderaan could have really used one of those. Although they were the first so it would be kinda hard to put the danger into the proper context.
After the first use, I would imagine the rest of the galaxy kept close tabs on where that fucker was. Probably messed with local economies the same way cops do on the roads. Death Star gets within a parsec of a star system and you see you vacation requests and sick days just skyrocket.
I was thinking that the TV would start talking a nice calm voice when it detects that you are sad and tells you that the Snickers bar will always be your friend and never judge you....
Well, as long as you're going to be shown ads, you might as well
That's a defeatist attitude. Settling for less is the reason why we have a progressively less free, and less private society, and why people with power (influence & money, which is really money and money) continue to abuse people without consequence.
I refuse.
Advertisements are an abomination and only serve as an affront to an advanced and intellectual society. There is no amount of money, or shiny, that will get me to participate in such offensive and vapid wastes of time.
So I can't watch sports anymore because it is a screen full of advertisements. Big deal. If I really liked the sport so damned much... I could get off my ass and go do it. The only difference between me and NASCAR are the police who object to me driving like that.
So I can't purchase new consoles that want to destroy me freedom (specifically peaceful enjoyment of property) and take away my privacy so they can make even more money. Big freakin deal. There will be plenty of open source alternatives (Humble Bundle aint bad) and given enough time, technology like Kinect will be developed by competitors, hacked, and applied to open source alternatives that don't exploit you.
So I can't watch TV anymore. Yeah.... *huge* loss there. I have been set free since I stopped watching TV nearly 10 years ago. There are a couple of shows that I am interested in and I just pirate the web releases that have no commercials and no overlays during the programming itself. Pay for Netflix and purchase DVD box sets when I really like a show.
So I can't stand outside my car when I fill up with gas because those asshats want to put in 30 display screens playing advertisements WITH sound blaring. Fine, fuck-em. I get back in my car and turn on the music a little louder and relax till the indicator says it has stopped filling up.
So I can't get a magazine anymore. Big Whoop. The quality of journalism has plummeted into the depths of the sewer system since I grew up anyways. Far better off just purchasing a book that will have far more detailed information and analysis about a topic than a vapid, attention-getting-whore of a journalistic attempt in some paper.
So I can't listen to the radio anymore. Well that's a dying format anyways. A couple of dollars a month and I get commercial free music and programming at my fingertips, with premium options giving me more on demand control.
So I don't have a usable mailbox anymore because junk mail advertisers fill it up in 2 days with useless and environmentally unsustainable advertising. Solved that more than 10 years ago with a single private mailbox store that filters all presort class mail into the recycle bin for me.
So I can't surf the web anymore like I did when it was first created. Yeah.. that one did not affect me all that much since I was doing my best effort from the start to defeat tracking and prevent advertisements from hitting my screen at all. It is very rare that I encounter one now.
So I can't just allow anybody to email me anymore. I run my own mail server. A couple thousand aliases and counting. Anytime a single piece of SPAM makes it to the inbox (which made it past the filters and RBL's) I just destroy the alias and deliver a new one to the source if I deem it appropriate. My business cards have a random prefix plus my name that I print out. Makes it easier to manage.
In about another 10 years or so I will seriously consider a Kickstarter like project to create augmented reality glasses that can remove all advertisements from my field of view. Granted, that is quite problematic and has serious philosophical and societal implications, but let's face it, by then it will be all out techno-war for your attention and any hope at a peaceful quite life of intellectual pursuits will hinge upon your ability to tune out the massive amount of noise corporations want to throw at you.
Never give up. Never surrender. Plenty of options.. including the best move... not to play.
considerably elevated chance of getting caught
You're right and that is what I meant.
NASA was not the only group of people looking with very sensitive instruments. I'm sure plenty of groups spent that day collecting data and if NASA came up with anything that deviated too strongly from everyone else it would be suspicious.
OTOH, it's going to be very hard to arrange another Venus transit
That does put a damper on reproducibility doesn't it? :)
The pictures of the transit are meaningless to me. Well, to be more specific, whether or not they are fake makes no difference to me. All I can appreciate is the beauty of the pictures. They were quite beautiful too.
What cannot be faked is the science behind it. I'm sure there was valuable scientific data collected that is being pored over right now, and papers authored, and so on and so forth.
If they faked the pictures, it would stand to reason they are also faking the data. I would imagine some people much more skilled in astrophysics could pick up on that.
As far as I am concerned, the pictures visually depicted the transit to me and were stunning. Computer generated or not, they served their purpose.
Because other than feeling like my desktop monitor ought to have a slider keyboard like a giant cell phone
I don't want my monitors to have any touch capability. Why? It's freaking useless. I have a bunch of large monitors on swing arms and stands in front of me, but they are not within arms reach. Much less set up to ergonomically use a touchscreen.
What would be really cool and useful is a wide (15"-30") touchscreen interface that either replaced my keyboard and mouse, or was at an angle right behind them.
You could use that with an operating system for so many useful things. Why have a start menu, or even a task bar on the main screens at all? That stuff just begs for a touch interface, but not when I can't reach it on a desktop.
This whole upset over Win8 and the massive search field is because MS is trying to shoe horn smartphone interfaces into a platform wholly unsuited for it just due to ergonomic reasons alone. For a company that does so much research into ergonomics, that is rather pathetic.
What do you need touch for , and provide it for that . That's what MS needs to figure out.
cant we just shoot them instead?
No, no, no.
You cannot use lethal measures to get them off your lawn. Not to mention it usually results in a body on your lawn, which defeats the purpose.
Long hair, those trippy t-shirts, flowers, and kind of flowers on your person, hemp based clothing, colored glasses.
If you use the words, "Like", "Yeah", or "Man" in a single sentence.
Ohh, and if you have Lesbian Seagull playing that is instant probable cause.
Expectation of privacy has nothing to do with it.
The younger crowd finds no value in it, or much worse, finds value in not having it.
It's youthful idealism and naivety that leads them to these conclusions. One simply needs some exposure to history to see the risks, and exposure to fields of study like game theory to understand why even a little loss in privacy can have dramatic detrimental affects for society as a whole.
The loss of privacy at this scale is quite unprecedented though. It is not all that surprising that the average person has a hard time figuring out just how dangerous it could be in the long term.
Unfortunately, it will take some pretty harsh experience to educate them and hopefully pass the wisdom down to the next generations.
That is of course assuming that we don't irreversibly damage the environment to the point that mere survival is all our future generations can think about.
The only difference between us and them is the dress code, our ability to solve complex problems.
Ability to solve complex problems is a little condescending. Accurate, but condescending.
Dress code? By that I assume you mean they can't wear those witty t-shirts like, "Select Top 25 from Employees WHERE (Sex = 'F') Order by Hotness"?
Unless you've got a programmer that has some kind of severe debilitating autism, there's absolutely no reason not to take him on your sales calls
That's not the only reason and you know it. You forgot about AssBurgers, and a host of other anti-social disorders that preclude us from putting up with unwashed masses that don't know what a compiler does.
Besides, they lock us in windowless rooms most of the time.
The lack of windows is to increase company morale, and any programming geek worth his salt can bypass the lock.
I haven't met a programmer yet, who wouldn't be grateful for the sunlight
You mean that super bright and hot orb of death outside?! No, no thank you. It burns us, it does.
I never thought it was about censorship. It might be looked at censorship for political reasons, but I thought it was far more ominous. I have no idea about how TV and the "mental wasteland" Mr. Bradbury thought TV was got into the picture.
To me, and this influenced me quite a bit as a child, was that a totalitarian government destroyed books to remove information from the people. It wasn't that the information was objectionable, it was the benefit to the person receiving the information that was objectionable. I found that particularly disturbing since my exposure to literature was so damn liberating and exciting. All those worlds, ideas, concepts denied to me because it might cause me to think for myself and question the world around me.
To say it was censorship is deeply simplistic. Hopefully, I did get Mr. Bradbury's point, if that is what it was.
Holy crap that was funny. If there is any sense of comedy in the universe Mr. Bradbury saw that before he passed away :)
Yes, you can type google in the address bar, wait for DNS to timeout, be presented with a google search for google, and then click google.
No you can't.
Browsers changed their behavior quite some time ago. Typing just "google" into IE, Chrome, or Firefox results in a search for "google" on Google and Bing.
When they want to make those tlds work they will just change the default behavior to attempt to load .google instead. Which will be quite interesting since that will directly conflict with the paradigm of the address bar being used as a search bar. Considering how much Google benefits from that, as well as Microsoft I am not sure they really want to change that behavior since it would just result in DNS hijacking (excuse me, advertising) which would benefit ISPs and OpenDNS instead.
Exactly. It's a vanity purchase.
Considering that it is just a blatant attempt to print money, they should just phase out specific tlds anyways and just allow anybody and everybody to purchase a .whatever tld.
But why do that when for every tld you can rake in a couple hundred thousand dollars up front and then millions upon million upon millions reselling the same subdomains over and over and over again to businesses and paranoid people who want to control their brand?
It's not like they are sticking to the rules about .org and .net, so I don't think they would mandate you need a .tickets to sell tickets.
Mandating that you would have to purchase one would only make sense if you needed help to sell out the space. With asshat squatters and speculators I sincerely doubt they will have problems selling it.
It was not so much about features, as it was stability.
Vista sucks ass for stability and performance. Now, I know, that plenty of people will come out defending it. However, I have *never* came across a Vista set up that performed well.
Networking for one, is a complete disaster. From the weird crap it does/did with DHCP discovery because they were oh-so-much-smarter than everyone else, to taking 5-10 minutes to identify a network.
I could go on, but it never really came down to features for me. Plenty of stuff that is in Vista is in my Windows 7 Pro right now, but the Windows 7 Pro is working well for me.
So maybe Vista was just a testing ground and they refined a lot of stuff they were trying to do and put it in Windows 7.
#1 reason I switched from XP to Windows 7?
SSD Trim support.
#2? Stability over Vista.