But saying the average American is not intelligent enough to ride a horse -- that's just elitism.
No. That's pragmatism.
The majority of Americans are no longer self sufficient and have lost "generational" knowledge that has been passed down. Did you grow up on a farm? How much information was imparted to you from your parents?
It goes for a lot more than horses.
Maybe I am a little too cynical, but unless it is something shallow and easy I just don't see the average American picking up that kind of a skill set quick enough to make a difference. There is going to be quite a learning curve. Not to mention how to cooperate with others on horses, regulations, care, etc.
Oh, I am American. Looking around at some people in the city I have serious doubts about their survival capabilities without all the technology that they have cocooned themselves with.
P.S - You cannot compare an American 200 years ago with an American 100 years ago, and most certainly not today. Take this as my cynicism, but most Americans today are that in name only. We have fallen quite a bit, and it seems like there is no end to how much farther we are going to fall.
Learning to ride a horse is thoroughly enjoyable. You should try it.
I'm sure it is. I just know that riding a horse is one thing, truly understanding it is another, and long term care another still. If people took care of horses in the same way they do their cars the horse would be dead in a month.
Also -- they're not actually all that efficient when you consider the massive quantities of food and space they need to live in.
You're assuming the average American is smart enough to ride a horse. I doubt it.
For the record, I have no fucking clue how to ride a horse or to even begin to deal with them. Have some relatives that do, but I suspect that people that can ride a horse is going to be a pretty small percentage.
Well technically he is correct. Later on he does say you have to make a decision based on evidence and not intent or benefit (motive).
People that want to claim the Moon landing was faked only have a few reasons. Most of that is related to a "search for the truth" and uncovering government conspiracies, etc.
The US government however had a very good reason to lie that is far more believable. The Cold War. It was all about propaganda and penis measurements. At that time there was a huge competition in countries around the world to get democracy or communism accepted. I believe that is a valid reason and motive to take the Moon landings.
Then you need to take evidence into account. While most people cannot actually see the landing site, and all other evidence *could* be faked, what about the Moon rocks?
They have a very unique composition compared to other rocks on Earth. Considering the amount of rocks were so high, and that collection of lunar meteorites would have been such an intensive process, in order for the Moon landings to have been faked they would have needed to either create (ruled out) or find (improbable) the rocks on Earth.
Everything else could have been faked. It *is* possible. They did not have to go all the way to the Moon. A massive conspiracy? Sure. Motivated by the Cold War though, there have been fairly large military and intelligence projects that were kept secret for years all for the benefit of the American Way of Life. I can believe all of that because government is made up of people, and if those people are really determined to do something with the resources they have... well they usually can do it. Government ineptitude is popular to banter around, but there have been some rather impressive large projects accomplished around the world with governments.
The issue to me comes down to the rocks. Pulling that off in the late 60's and allowing other scientists to access to it raises the order of difficulty to nigh impossibility. If they did not come from the Moon, where else on Earth did they come from and how come nobody else has found more? Not talking about meteorites, but actual rock formations matching the unique composition of the Moon rocks.
Would it be possible to simply connect the Earth and Moon with a cable that vehicles could traverse? Yes some technologic problems to overcome but in principle?
Only possible if it is in the same reality where the Moon is made of cheese. In that case just hire Wallace and Grommit. Remember to bring the crackers.
Technological problems is an understatement. Assuming you could even get that much mass into space, the cable would be a feat of engineering worthy of the Greek Gods. You're talking about the Earth to the Moon.
It would only be useful for one day out of the month, assuming you did not mean it was actually connecting the Earth and the Moon. If so.... that is not going to work out real well. You see the Moon orbits the Earth, which kind of precludes the possibility of connecting them with a cable.
Unlesss........ you create a *huge* channel in the ecliptic plane of the Earth to allow the cable to slide through it, which would also require one on the Moon. That would be some really impressive engineering to pull that off. I don't want to be anywhere near the channel if the cable snaps or the channel fails.
Quite frankly, if you could do all that, you would be at a level of technology that would probably allow you to make it there and back with the equivalent of a space Winnebago.
they're going to run into some fundamental engineering constraints
Nooo.... they're going to run into some military constraints. Last time I checked nobody "owned" space. There is no sovereignty claiming it as their possession.
The US government, among others, is already targeting the Internet and shutting down websites over copyright. If they can do that with Internet services running on physical equipment that is actually on the ground in a country then I think they definitely won't give a crap about taking down a "free and globally accessible satellite communications network". Except that won't be done as cleanly as taking down a website. Probably involve some missiles.
If I was part of this group I would be thinking about ways of subverting existing networks to run Darknets. It's far less likely they will try a scorched earth tactic with those networks and a more productive use of their time.
It's just that I had heard that some religious beliefs were created out of practical concerns at the time and it was easier to enforce on the populations through some sort of divine authority. It's foolish to believe that every part of a religious text was direct from a deity. They have been modified and interpreted differently to accomplish various agendas over time, and not all of them are malicious. Some of them were to protect people from themselves, or so I heard.
Pork was never the healthiest animal to eat. To this day there are still diseases associated with pork we just understand them better and use science (and plenty of regulations) to mitigate the risks.
Compared to the nasty pink slime and industrial shit we eat right now?
Untested? Plenty of unhealthy lard asses that have lived off processed nasty foods (like Twinkies, Ho-Hos, etc.) for over 40 years have provided us with information about health already.
I would not touch the stuff personally, but if you make it and slap some processed cheese on it you will get all the volunteers you want to study the impact.
Environmental impact of current farming of animals is becoming more problematic as the population increases, and standards of living increase. You just cannot provide that much meat to a developed country without causing significant harm.
At some point economics is going to be the deciding factor on whether or not you can afford real meat, or meat grown in a lab. I would expect real meat to be at a rather high premium considering the amount of land, water, and food you typically need to raise a single animal.
Add some sort of carbon tax system to offsite all those gas emissions and pollution from the waste, and it could very well be true.
A diet high in fiber, vegetables, and non meat based proteins may be the most economical in the future.
Scientist: I have sent for you Dogers because we are facing a crisis. The world supply supply of Baconium Tastius, the Bacon atom, is alarmingly low. Duck Rogers: And you want me to help? Scientist: Can you do it? Duck Rogers: Ohh Indubaboobabitable sir.
That is not so much of a requirement then. Additionally, in development you would not want anything personal about the employee to be associated with the company or project.
The company itself is not requiring the developer to create a social networking account. All the company says is that you are working on developing an application for Facebook. It would actually make sense in that context to require that the developer not use his personal account, but to create another one instead for development only. Seems to be self evident to me for development.
I am looking at reasons why the company requires an employee to create an account. Both customer service and development related tasks don't require employees to create accounts. That is something that the IT department should be creating and there should be policies on exactly how the accounts are used in accordance with any code of conduct policies that a company might have.
Still does not make sense in the context of a requirement.
Customer service is a department all of its own in most medium companies. If they are integrating with Facebook or Google they will be using accounts specific to that goal. Requiring an employee to create an account makes no sense. In a customer service setting you would not want to mix any personal aspects of that employee with the company. More likely the company creates the accounts and instructs the employee how to log in and use it to perform customer service related tasks.
Social networking is not collaboration specifically. In fact, collaboration is not really the primary goal at all of Social Networking platforms. Social networking is comprised of Social Networks. That is specifically about relationships and the exchange of ideas, interests, activities, etc.
Collaboration tools like MS Sharepoint are not something I would consider to be an internal Social Networking platform, and I don't believe they are marketed as such.
More to the point, why isn't there an enterprise version of G+/FB that a company can keep isolated on their own network?
Why does a company need social networking in the first place for employees?
I can understand trying to follow the crowd and have a "Web 2.0" presence with all the bells and whistles like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, whatever. That's marketing and their never ending quest for the Douche Master Throne. I dislike advertising obviously.
What benefits are there to having the employees participate in a social network? What work activities are appropriate to be public? Is this just another new SEO trick? Are there organizational benefits?
I just don't get it. If you need communication tools, that is not social networking specific. Social networking can have them, but then again, so do many other platforms. Skype can be used to communicate. I have that for business since it makes it easier to communicate with people and is far more flexible then txt messaging (which I refuse to use). You can go for the most expensive communication and collaboration platforms out there like MS Sharepoint that comes to mind. I'm sure IBM probably has something as ridiculously expensive and proprietary too. Google can be used for the same thing.
The question posed does not make sense, either by you or the article submitter, because I fail to see any business value in social networking beyond marketing.
I can see there being some kind of lock-in, albeit not the one you are talking about.
Random password generation is useless on its own. I can't even remember 20 random alphanumeric characters and I have a good memory.
What is required when you do that is a password vault of some kind. Plenty of software available to do this for you. Chrome will already remember your passwords, but I can see them syncing that with your Google profile. They might already, I don't use Google for anything religiously.
That could be the lock-in. All of your passwords are stored in the "Cloud" with Google. However, I am sure they would provide a secure export adhering to some standards (theirs) that other vendors could read (after circumnavigating some documentation more fucking complicated than the plans for the Death Star). Sorry, I do API programming for some Google products and I find their documentation a little lacking in some places and not well organized.
My biggest issue is with Open ID. I will never, ever, participate in a system where you authenticate with a company where you are not the user, but the product. That's not security. Regardless of whether it is Google, having all that authentication in one spot is a bad idea. One password to rule them all, One password to bind them all, and in the darkness where you fucking lose it you get bent over by some sociopath in Russia who will own your ass and use it to pay for Vodka and teenage Russian hookers.
Unless, I am explicitly told by a client, after they ignore all my recommendations, will I integrate a centralized authentication scheme. Just poor security, but others will disagree I am sure....
Ohhhh, I almost forgot:)
YouTube API was offline for over 3 hours yesterday. Got a ton of emails about it and I looked at the response code coming back and it was ServiceUnavailable. No problems with our system, from what I could tell from the logs. Calls just started working again a few hours later with no code changes.
So if I do integrate Open ID, what guarantees do I have that the service will reasonably be available? How do I tell a user that the reason they can't authenticate is because one of the largest companies in the world has products in perpetual beta for free and I can't complain because it is free?
Do you think any user that complained yesterday believed Google was at fault or our system? Seriously, why even bother sending out a service impact notification that people might not even believe. With just a few hours I let them think it was just a spike in our load and it took longer than normal to upload.
That's the best explanation yet. VLC crashes quite often for me (10-20% of the time. 100% on some files.). Not surprising since I ask it to play so many different formats and who the hell knows how well it was encoded.
When it does start to do it, only letting it complete will get rid of the message. After that, it can get stuck in that pattern and do it every single time. Most likely because the process never completed correctly.
I do long periods in between it though.
What I find the *most* annoying is the complete lack of information regarding it. I assume a cache is made to speed up some process involving subtitles. There should be an option to turn off caching, or the process itself is only required when subtitles are actually activated.
VLC is an odd program. When it works, it works wonderfully. Otherwise it sucks very badly. I often go back and forth between MPC and VLC.
I get frustrated by that "rebuild font cache" that just keeps happening on occasion no matter what you do. Subtitle rendering left some things to be desired.
It's just a tool like anything else. I never had the expectation that it was going to work in every single circumstance given the unbelievable variation in encoding formats and what they actually output these days.
Overall, I have never regretted installing it unlike some other programs.
Slashdot Mirror
But saying the average American is not intelligent enough to ride a horse -- that's just elitism.
No. That's pragmatism.
The majority of Americans are no longer self sufficient and have lost "generational" knowledge that has been passed down. Did you grow up on a farm? How much information was imparted to you from your parents?
It goes for a lot more than horses.
Maybe I am a little too cynical, but unless it is something shallow and easy I just don't see the average American picking up that kind of a skill set quick enough to make a difference. There is going to be quite a learning curve. Not to mention how to cooperate with others on horses, regulations, care, etc.
Oh, I am American. Looking around at some people in the city I have serious doubts about their survival capabilities without all the technology that they have cocooned themselves with.
P.S - You cannot compare an American 200 years ago with an American 100 years ago, and most certainly not today. Take this as my cynicism, but most Americans today are that in name only. We have fallen quite a bit, and it seems like there is no end to how much farther we are going to fall.
Learning to ride a horse is thoroughly enjoyable. You should try it.
I'm sure it is. I just know that riding a horse is one thing, truly understanding it is another, and long term care another still. If people took care of horses in the same way they do their cars the horse would be dead in a month.
Also -- they're not actually all that efficient when you consider the massive quantities of food and space they need to live in.
Are you talking about the horses or the humans? :)
You're assuming the average American is smart enough to ride a horse. I doubt it.
For the record, I have no fucking clue how to ride a horse or to even begin to deal with them. Have some relatives that do, but I suspect that people that can ride a horse is going to be a pretty small percentage.
Going to be one hell of a learning curve :)
Of course you did not find anything related to octopuses intelligence on Wikipedia. Search for the Necronomicon instead.
Well technically he is correct. Later on he does say you have to make a decision based on evidence and not intent or benefit (motive).
People that want to claim the Moon landing was faked only have a few reasons. Most of that is related to a "search for the truth" and uncovering government conspiracies, etc.
The US government however had a very good reason to lie that is far more believable. The Cold War. It was all about propaganda and penis measurements. At that time there was a huge competition in countries around the world to get democracy or communism accepted. I believe that is a valid reason and motive to take the Moon landings.
Then you need to take evidence into account. While most people cannot actually see the landing site, and all other evidence *could* be faked, what about the Moon rocks?
They have a very unique composition compared to other rocks on Earth. Considering the amount of rocks were so high, and that collection of lunar meteorites would have been such an intensive process, in order for the Moon landings to have been faked they would have needed to either create (ruled out) or find (improbable) the rocks on Earth.
Everything else could have been faked. It *is* possible. They did not have to go all the way to the Moon. A massive conspiracy? Sure. Motivated by the Cold War though, there have been fairly large military and intelligence projects that were kept secret for years all for the benefit of the American Way of Life. I can believe all of that because government is made up of people, and if those people are really determined to do something with the resources they have... well they usually can do it. Government ineptitude is popular to banter around, but there have been some rather impressive large projects accomplished around the world with governments.
The issue to me comes down to the rocks. Pulling that off in the late 60's and allowing other scientists to access to it raises the order of difficulty to nigh impossibility. If they did not come from the Moon, where else on Earth did they come from and how come nobody else has found more? Not talking about meteorites, but actual rock formations matching the unique composition of the Moon rocks.
Would it be possible to simply connect the Earth and Moon with a cable that vehicles could traverse? Yes some technologic problems to overcome but in principle?
Only possible if it is in the same reality where the Moon is made of cheese. In that case just hire Wallace and Grommit. Remember to bring the crackers.
Technological problems is an understatement. Assuming you could even get that much mass into space, the cable would be a feat of engineering worthy of the Greek Gods. You're talking about the Earth to the Moon.
It would only be useful for one day out of the month, assuming you did not mean it was actually connecting the Earth and the Moon. If so.... that is not going to work out real well. You see the Moon orbits the Earth, which kind of precludes the possibility of connecting them with a cable.
Unlesss........ you create a *huge* channel in the ecliptic plane of the Earth to allow the cable to slide through it, which would also require one on the Moon. That would be some really impressive engineering to pull that off. I don't want to be anywhere near the channel if the cable snaps or the channel fails.
Quite frankly, if you could do all that, you would be at a level of technology that would probably allow you to make it there and back with the equivalent of a space Winnebago.
they're going to run into some fundamental engineering constraints
Nooo.... they're going to run into some military constraints. Last time I checked nobody "owned" space. There is no sovereignty claiming it as their possession.
The US government, among others, is already targeting the Internet and shutting down websites over copyright. If they can do that with Internet services running on physical equipment that is actually on the ground in a country then I think they definitely won't give a crap about taking down a "free and globally accessible satellite communications network". Except that won't be done as cleanly as taking down a website. Probably involve some missiles.
If I was part of this group I would be thinking about ways of subverting existing networks to run Darknets. It's far less likely they will try a scorched earth tactic with those networks and a more productive use of their time.
How is a mammoth either handy or decorative?
It *might* be handy... but then you would be taking the Flintstones a little too seriously.
you could expect to eat a stegosaurus steak or a Jurassic plant pretty much as readily as a modern buffalo steak or root tuber.
I'm sure the farmer and meat processing plant would disagree.....
I don't have any particular beliefs like that.
It's just that I had heard that some religious beliefs were created out of practical concerns at the time and it was easier to enforce on the populations through some sort of divine authority. It's foolish to believe that every part of a religious text was direct from a deity. They have been modified and interpreted differently to accomplish various agendas over time, and not all of them are malicious. Some of them were to protect people from themselves, or so I heard.
Pork was never the healthiest animal to eat. To this day there are still diseases associated with pork we just understand them better and use science (and plenty of regulations) to mitigate the risks.
Compared to the nasty pink slime and industrial shit we eat right now?
Untested? Plenty of unhealthy lard asses that have lived off processed nasty foods (like Twinkies, Ho-Hos, etc.) for over 40 years have provided us with information about health already.
I would not touch the stuff personally, but if you make it and slap some processed cheese on it you will get all the volunteers you want to study the impact.
Environmental impact of current farming of animals is becoming more problematic as the population increases, and standards of living increase. You just cannot provide that much meat to a developed country without causing significant harm.
At some point economics is going to be the deciding factor on whether or not you can afford real meat, or meat grown in a lab. I would expect real meat to be at a rather high premium considering the amount of land, water, and food you typically need to raise a single animal.
Add some sort of carbon tax system to offsite all those gas emissions and pollution from the waste, and it could very well be true.
A diet high in fiber, vegetables, and non meat based proteins may be the most economical in the future.
baconic cells
ROFL.
That reminds me of a scene from Loony Tunes.
Scientist: I have sent for you Dogers because we are facing a crisis. The world supply supply of Baconium Tastius, the Bacon atom, is alarmingly low.
Duck Rogers: And you want me to help?
Scientist: Can you do it?
Duck Rogers: Ohh Indubaboobabitable sir.
Actually wasn't the logic behind not eating pork something about disease, but they disguised it as religion?
That is not so much of a requirement then. Additionally, in development you would not want anything personal about the employee to be associated with the company or project.
The company itself is not requiring the developer to create a social networking account. All the company says is that you are working on developing an application for Facebook. It would actually make sense in that context to require that the developer not use his personal account, but to create another one instead for development only. Seems to be self evident to me for development.
I am looking at reasons why the company requires an employee to create an account. Both customer service and development related tasks don't require employees to create accounts. That is something that the IT department should be creating and there should be policies on exactly how the accounts are used in accordance with any code of conduct policies that a company might have.
Still does not make sense in the context of a requirement.
Customer service is a department all of its own in most medium companies. If they are integrating with Facebook or Google they will be using accounts specific to that goal. Requiring an employee to create an account makes no sense. In a customer service setting you would not want to mix any personal aspects of that employee with the company. More likely the company creates the accounts and instructs the employee how to log in and use it to perform customer service related tasks.
Social networking is not collaboration specifically. In fact, collaboration is not really the primary goal at all of Social Networking platforms. Social networking is comprised of Social Networks. That is specifically about relationships and the exchange of ideas, interests, activities, etc.
Collaboration tools like MS Sharepoint are not something I would consider to be an internal Social Networking platform, and I don't believe they are marketed as such.
More to the point, why isn't there an enterprise version of G+/FB that a company can keep isolated on their own network?
Why does a company need social networking in the first place for employees?
I can understand trying to follow the crowd and have a "Web 2.0" presence with all the bells and whistles like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, whatever. That's marketing and their never ending quest for the Douche Master Throne. I dislike advertising obviously.
What benefits are there to having the employees participate in a social network? What work activities are appropriate to be public? Is this just another new SEO trick? Are there organizational benefits?
I just don't get it. If you need communication tools, that is not social networking specific. Social networking can have them, but then again, so do many other platforms. Skype can be used to communicate. I have that for business since it makes it easier to communicate with people and is far more flexible then txt messaging (which I refuse to use). You can go for the most expensive communication and collaboration platforms out there like MS Sharepoint that comes to mind. I'm sure IBM probably has something as ridiculously expensive and proprietary too. Google can be used for the same thing.
The question posed does not make sense, either by you or the article submitter, because I fail to see any business value in social networking beyond marketing.
have there been OVER 9000 of these things yet?
Anal probes by aliens? It's possible, but not everyone reports it. Good question.
People already lose 17" laptops. This will be no different.
If you make the minimum size something like a cell phone it will just be that much more powerful.
This is getting old. Could you do something productive like talking about Area 51, Anal Probes by Aliens, or whether or not Han shot first?
Anything else please...
I can see there being some kind of lock-in, albeit not the one you are talking about.
Random password generation is useless on its own. I can't even remember 20 random alphanumeric characters and I have a good memory.
What is required when you do that is a password vault of some kind. Plenty of software available to do this for you. Chrome will already remember your passwords, but I can see them syncing that with your Google profile. They might already, I don't use Google for anything religiously.
That could be the lock-in. All of your passwords are stored in the "Cloud" with Google. However, I am sure they would provide a secure export adhering to some standards (theirs) that other vendors could read (after circumnavigating some documentation more fucking complicated than the plans for the Death Star). Sorry, I do API programming for some Google products and I find their documentation a little lacking in some places and not well organized.
My biggest issue is with Open ID. I will never, ever, participate in a system where you authenticate with a company where you are not the user, but the product. That's not security. Regardless of whether it is Google, having all that authentication in one spot is a bad idea. One password to rule them all, One password to bind them all, and in the darkness where you fucking lose it you get bent over by some sociopath in Russia who will own your ass and use it to pay for Vodka and teenage Russian hookers.
Unless, I am explicitly told by a client, after they ignore all my recommendations, will I integrate a centralized authentication scheme. Just poor security, but others will disagree I am sure....
Ohhhh, I almost forgot :)
YouTube API was offline for over 3 hours yesterday. Got a ton of emails about it and I looked at the response code coming back and it was ServiceUnavailable. No problems with our system, from what I could tell from the logs. Calls just started working again a few hours later with no code changes.
So if I do integrate Open ID, what guarantees do I have that the service will reasonably be available? How do I tell a user that the reason they can't authenticate is because one of the largest companies in the world has products in perpetual beta for free and I can't complain because it is free?
Do you think any user that complained yesterday believed Google was at fault or our system? Seriously, why even bother sending out a service impact notification that people might not even believe. With just a few hours I let them think it was just a spike in our load and it took longer than normal to upload.
That's the best explanation yet. VLC crashes quite often for me (10-20% of the time. 100% on some files.). Not surprising since I ask it to play so many different formats and who the hell knows how well it was encoded.
It gets stuck in a pattern.
When it does start to do it, only letting it complete will get rid of the message. After that, it can get stuck in that pattern and do it every single time. Most likely because the process never completed correctly.
I do long periods in between it though.
What I find the *most* annoying is the complete lack of information regarding it. I assume a cache is made to speed up some process involving subtitles. There should be an option to turn off caching, or the process itself is only required when subtitles are actually activated.
That's a bit trollish.
VLC is an odd program. When it works, it works wonderfully. Otherwise it sucks very badly. I often go back and forth between MPC and VLC.
I get frustrated by that "rebuild font cache" that just keeps happening on occasion no matter what you do. Subtitle rendering left some things to be desired.
It's just a tool like anything else. I never had the expectation that it was going to work in every single circumstance given the unbelievable variation in encoding formats and what they actually output these days.
Overall, I have never regretted installing it unlike some other programs.
It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?
Uhhhh... it's rebuilding the font cache dude. It say it right there in the dialog box.
Better question is... why does it need to do it every fucking time? :)
I don't think you are using that term correctly. Looking it up, I found a quite informative primer on the neckbeard.
Not all Anime fans are neckbeards apparently, and not all neckbeards are virgins. A fact that was very surprising to say the least.