Not to dwell too much on the resource-hogging and ugly interface (much of which can be rectified with Classic Shell),
I find the Start menu a little too flashy and a less efficient than classic, but it's not a big deal. I can disable auto-pinning, and pin enough of my most important programs there to get by. The right column (Documents, Pictures, Music...) is pretty much a waste. But it's not as much of a disaster as Win8.
Windows 7 removed the ability to select a logon domain via drop-down box
They did? I didn't know. I use Win7, but not in AD environment.
The Network browser in Explorer is severely crippled for any network with more than a handful of hosts
It never worked well. It's not as bad as the same function in Ubuntu, though - that one doesn't work at all, and never worked for me.
Hardware compatibility
I know a person who had to dump a perfectly good color laser printer just because there are no Win7 drivers for it. Well built printers can last a decade.
Of course there is the matter of Extended Support for XP ending on 8 April 2013, but that's another story...
What is this "support" thing that everyone talks about? I know nobody who would ever need support with XP - and especially support from MS. The OS is a commodity for many years now. Need an OS? Install from a CD, and it will work. Afraid of Internet hackers? Use a hardware firewall. There is not much else to do to be safe.
No, the UI of XP and of 7 is similar enough, and I never heard any complaints about that transition. People stick with XP because of compatibility with older - and very expensive - software and hardware that they invested into a decade ago and cannot just rebuy on a lark. Those upgrades are not free in the industry - they often require huge yearly payments for "maintenance."
Again, this has nothing to do with user's personal choice. A great deal of industrial software does not work well under Win7. One might say that it shouldn't, because it breaks the new security model. Perhaps. But the fact remains.
A few items cannot even be bought today, because the company either closed the doors, or moved on, abandoning an older product. Sometimes you have your technological chain dependent on very specific data path (.txt -.dxf -.dwg - custom reader - custom processor...) An upgrade, even if you can afford it, may wreck your business just because it is not compatible with a million other pieces of software that you must use. Xilinx's transition from XST to PlanAhead to Vivado is a great illustration of that disaster. Those tools don't even produce compatible files to exchange the pin data with CAD tools!
The only question to me is whether capitalism will die a peaceful death like the old USSR with communism, or go down in a bloody war to the death as fascism did in the 1940s
That is one question. However the far more important question to ask is what to do with billions of unwanted people? (I started talking about it in the message just above.) What will happen if you leave people alone, housed and fed by robots or by super-efficient geniuses?
If anything is known about humans by now, they will start forming their own societies - clans, gangs, whatever you call them. The purpose of that would be to seek distinction and recognition - something that the gray uniformity of universal Communism cannot provide.
In the end you get the same society that we have today; except that toiling for a piece of bread is no longer required. Well, it is not required even today - all developed countries have social safety nets, where someone else will work for your food. In the future that "someone else" will be a robot, and we can forget about it entirely.
But can you imagine a whole world on welfare? Those would be 6+ Billion healthy and well fed people with nothing to do for their entire life - and they would be acutely aware of that. Some would love to work, but there is nothing meaningful for them to do - not everyone is a creator. What will they choose to do then? My guess is that they won't be discovering new subatomic particles. A few will, but they are not statistically significant. Many will choose warfare, just because that's what humans always did, with reason and without. They'd be Barons and Counts and Kings, just as before, with one small difference: when they need food they just press a button and a robotic train delivers. Feudals never really competed for food - they competed for power, and robot cannot give you power. That's what will keep them occupied.
In essence, I question the theory that the human as we know him is even able to exist in a world of abundance. He would go insane. In this aspect you can see what Heinlein did here.
Thank you, Ned Ludd. I know some people were skeptical because your earlier predictions were a few centuries premature. Nevertheless this time I'm sure the singularity is at hand.
Well, of course there is an infinite job market, here and now, if you are an engineer of teleportation, or if you specialize in rebuilding of hyperspace drives, or if you are a top notch actor/singer/driver/*. However if you are just an average guy, your chances are pretty poor. You are not needed because manual labor is not needed anymore. You have to be at least a tech in robotics to even get a chance at a new robot factory. Humans cannot even do the work at < 20 nm levels, they are a dirty disaster, they are not wanted there!
Half of the population is below average in any metric of your choice, just by definition. The business (whatever of it remains) will absorb the top notch people - 1%, 10% or 50%. In either case it is a disaster because 50% unemployment is destructive, even if those people are fed and housed. Idle hands and all that. Full employment is possible only if efficiency of human labor is so low that you always send more humans to the factory, or to the field, and still not overproduce.
Founders of communism never really specified how the future society is supposed to work. We know now that without a new man it is doomed (because nobody wants to work and everyone wants to consume.) But there are things worse than that. We could fix the above problem with 100% of robots that remove any reason for anyone to actually work. But then human mind starts to rot. Some people seek work and find it - in art, in engineering, in research. Other people may seek pleasures and entertainment at your expense - and you will not like that. Power over other humans is a very addictive drug; actually, it is the most potent motivator known to man. In an otherwise bland society, where everyone can have every material thing for free, this power over others will become the only thing that you cannot have delivered. Such unique things quickly become highly desirable.
It requires a specific build and a specific serial number to install. With MS servers no longer listening, the XP install will be forever. But WGA can be also removed, or never installed in the first place.
but is no longer described as "easy" for Win 7
Win7 and 8 have been already cracked. Actually, they are not cracked - these are corporate builds with a cracked KMS.
I can understand that many would be unhappy to run a pirated OS. However if MS officially stops selling what they need, what option do they have? Can MS hold the world hostage to their business plans? Can MS tell the world to waste trillions of dollars on unneeded and unwanted upgrades?
And how long 'til MS pulls the plug on it? XPs EOL is already on the horizon
XP is not going to magically stop working on that dreadful date. If retail builds fail to reactivate over the Internet, there are many "helpful geeks" with "correct knowledge" to fix your system. Those setups will never require reactivation.
3: Watch data and its access. If a Windows admin suddenly is slurping down everything in the accounting directory, and it isn't a backup utility doing this, then someone should be notified.
What is there to stop the admin from restoring the backup onto a separate, local drive and then doing his thing with the databases? Admins are supposed to restore backups now and then, just to test if they work.
7: Spend your time and do background checks that work. Checking for felonies, yes. Demanding usernames/passwords to Facebook for ongoing monitoring 24/7, no.
Snowden had no felonies.
Finally, morale. A company that always threatens its developers with offshoring, and has low morale will have far more security issues than one that at least knows how to treat people with some modicum of respect.
Only if the employees return that respect. Not all of them will. One could be a spy, for example - either sent in ahead of time, or a long term worker who was offered an amazingly good deal for a pile of worthless bits that nobody would even know that they were copied. A company may be good to the employee, but not to the tune of paying off his mortgage or sending his kids to college. Most spies work for less, especially if they are convinced by a trained psychologist that they do the right thing and they are saving the world. (Sometimes this is even true.)
How many unique numbers can you represent with 400 bits?
That's hardly the right question to ask. Have a look at all kinds of errors in ADCs and DACs. Want to buy a 3 GHz, 24-bit ADC? I will sell you one. It will produce codes from 0x000000 to 0xFFFFFF. Unfortunately, those are the only codes it will ever produce... this is just one example.
A site that *gives* you Bitcoins would be far more popular than the site that *takes* them. Currently, to get BTC you need to buy them in Japan, and they are expensive. It's much easier to do nothing and ignore this tip jar and the entire BTC economy, since they are not influential.
BTC doesn't save you money on a gallon of milk; but it would be all the rage if that changes. But first the BTC network must solve some fundamental problems, such as how to get an instant confirmation of a transaction. Credit cards do it well under 5 seconds; you cannot tell people to linger at the store for 10-15 minutes, it's not even physically possible. There are also other problems, such as security of the terminals, and security of the network, and lack of arbitration if things go wrong (you paid, they haven't received - what now?) and, of course, transaction fees.
This is patently false to anyone who actually interacts with and respects women.
Why did you say "women," and not "men?" This is sexis. I am deeply offended:-) If A is different from B, then B is different from A. Why do you pick women as disrespected, poor victims of big, bad men? Why do you hate women so much?:-)
Note that I am very careful to not label any one group as deficient. A typical man is just as good with a baby as a typical woman is good with cold steel. But both are needed if they want to have a baby *and* have it protected from predators. Social roles exist even among animals; it's not something that is unique to humans. One could deny that, of course, just as one could deny that water is wet or that the Pope is Catholic.
I fully agree. Children of the MD and the CEO have the same genetic chance of being smart - or stupid - as their counterparts from Afghanistan. What makes huge difference here is the fact that the former will get their chance to realize the potential, whereas the latter will not. A math genius is not of much use in the field, working the hoe or herding goats.
Put those children of peasants in a good school, and lo! some of them make fine doctors. It has happened over and over again.
It takes at least a miracle for a 9th child of Akhmed and Gülnara to get to a university. Even a school might be a problem, especially if the kid is of female persuasion. They poison girls in schools there.
Being above average intelligence is a big boon if you want to make babies.
If you are above average intelligence, you will not want to make too many babies. There is simply no reason to, and they are super expensive in the first world, and they are a huge legal liability. But a peasant needs all the children he can get because they are his old age pension, and the children are dirt cheap there (a child dies from an accident - Allah's will.)
Try applying for one of those shit jobs and then you will see. I also worked at shit jobs 20 years ago and was able to get them. Now I can apply at every supermarket, restaurant, and retail store in a 10-15 mile raduis willing to do anything, in addition to using every online resource and get nothing and none of them have any interest. So it does look to me as if things have gotten worse at least around here.
Part of the blame belongs to politicians. Previously, in the ages of Kings and Dukes and Barons, an innkeeper would pay one coin per day to the maid, and that maid would produce enough work to attract customers who bring one or more additional coins to the innkeeper. Thus, hiring people was a smart move because everyone benefited.
Today the same innkeeper has to pay one coin to the maid, and one coin to the state. Maybe more than one coin to the state, with Obamacare and other mandatory employment taxes. At the same time the maid has to pay 1/3 of that coin to the state as well. We have two problems here. First, employment of the maid is effective only if her labor attracts customers who bring in at least three additional coins (for the same work as in the medieval example above.) Clearly, this is a harder goal to achieve. Secondly, the maid has less money after a day of work. Thirdly, we have social safety nets now, that can pay some people for them doing nothing. In the end, it makes more sense to NOT employ the maid - her work is not economically profitable anymore; not to the innkeeper, and not to the maid either. An innkeeper would do better if he replaces carpet floors with tile (easier to clean) - then two existing maids can do the work instead of three, or five. If that continues, we will end up with a robot hotel that requires no people to maintain. Every business would want your money, but none of them will hire you so that you can earn that money. This is a well known problem - the capitalist society will fail at that transition.
A faimily of a medical doctor as husband and a CEO as wife is probably having one or two kids. A family of two illiterate peasants in Afghanistan is likely to have ten kids. The laws of evolution are subverted by the little fact that humans are not entirely driven by instincts. Humans formed societies that make children not only unnecessary - they make them detrimental. Better organized societies are worse in this aspect than primitive societies.
Perhaps eugenics is not the only choice here. But the society needs to ensure that good genes propagate, even if that involves technological means. The evolution's opinion on what genes are good is different than ours. From evolution's point of view, a serial rapist with a body and brains of a WWF fighter is an excellent specimen. In the end we get more strong serial rapists. The population does increase... but the society dies. A high tech society cannot be sustained by idiots who have 99% of their thinking power in their lower brain.
I presume you are talking about races within human species. The difference between individuals is stronger across genders than across races. A white man, an Indian man, a Black man and an Asian man have far better chances of forming a stable team than a white man and a white woman. As such, if there are psychological differences between races, they are entirely caused by nurture. The differences between a male and a female are genetic, formed over a long period of time to optimize the chances of survival of the species. (Nature avoids unnecessary complexity; the differences wouldn't be there unless they serve a purpose.)
It's certainly valid to lump an entire demographic together. However I wouldn't place that group into a "negative" category. There are very few demographics, if any at all, that can be painted with such a wide brush. (Maybe some tribe of cannibals?) I don't think the OP intended to do that either. He used the word "insane," but it has meanings outside of clinical use. More commonly it is synonymous to "incomprehensible." All I read there is that the OP acknowledged his lack of ability to understand the opposite gender, and walked away. That's hardly wrong. Some men choose to correct the problem by use of force - and some women accept that. That would be far more wrong, on both sides of it.
Right there you're claiming that 50% of the human population is insane. Presumably, you don't count yourself among them.
It goes both ways. I'm sure the term "insane" here means "uncorrelated to all the psychological patterns known to me." It may be perfectly normal for that other 50%, though.
Clearly not, since you don't respect women.
What is respect, though? Isn't leaving them alone, after acknowledging that he cannot work with them, not a sign of respect? I may respect you, and you may respect me, but we may never travel together - maybe just because we are going in opposite directions; because our goals and our ideals are incompatible. But if I take a whip and start beating you, in attempt to teach you the proper behavior as I understand it, then it wouldn't be respectful at all. Leaving other people alone is the highest form of respect, since it acknowledges that they are right on their own, and they require no "help" to get better.
I don't care what you do or don't do with your wabbly bits so long as if anyone else is involved it is consensual, but as far as life and evolution are concerned, you're an irrelevant dead end.
Genetically - yes. But not intellectually. There aren't too many geniuses who had children who also became pretty good. (It happens more often in families of artists because it's more nurture than nature.) Do you care that Albert Einstein had family and children? (They didn't fare well.)
From evolution's point of view, you're not adaptable to the kind of change we are now experiencing. It's not that you should, it's that since you don't, you're removing yourself from the race.
You can also say that the race repels solitary, asexual individuals. The race is not concerned, there are plenty of men and women who are only interested in socialization and replication. Thus biological needs of survival are achieved.
This, however, may indicate that the race, without some touch of eugenics, is doomed to mediocrity because biologically it does not select for brains (not anymore, at least.) There is no mechanism that would allow a genius to have more children and spread their genes around. Futurists imagined such mechanisms, but the society of today does not have them. To make things worse, geniuses are sidelined and often oppressed because they are different. The society favors the average, not the best.
This isn't just about socializing. It's about working outside the home
Why would a modern information worker need to work outside his home? You aren't suggesting (I hope) that a modern industrial worker needs to shovel coal into furnaces. Technology changed these jobs. Today you can be a rich ISV writing your own code in peace and quiet of your home and selling it on the Internet, or through Apple. Socializing is an instrument, not the end goal. Traditionally one needed to socialize to buy and sell, to learn and to teach. None of that is true today, this comment being just one illustration of the principle.
being able to cook for yourself, doing your own laundry, doing your own shopping, etc.
It takes very little effort to cook pasta or rice, especially if you have specialized cookers. Laundry is done by a washing machine. Shopping is done either online (for expensive products) or at the nearby grocery store. Where else would one need to go if his office == his home?
And I wonder if your vehicle would need to be registered for commercial use.
It sounds likely, since you'd be using it for commercial purposes. Lyft, of course, has nicely isolated themselves from those problems - they only run a matchmaking service; the costs are borne by the driver. At $35/hr this is not that great, if you have to pay for gas and service out of that amount. In city you'd cover, on average, 30 miles within 1 hour, and that would be 1 gallon of fuel at $4. So you have now $30, and you are at the far end of the trip. Taxi drivers get connected trips over the radio (or a cell phone today.) Do the Lyft drivers get the next trip once they arrive at some faraway location? If they have to drive back at their own cost, the income from that occupation is nonexistent, and can be wiped out by a single accident that is caused either by the passenger asking to go to an accident-prone location, or simply by statistics.
Because i was refering to the start screen, which was designed based on the metrics collected from Vista/7 that showed that's how users were using it. So they designed 8 around that.
Yes, the start screen is a different story. However I doubt that the start screen, for a phone, was designed with intent that you would be typing anything into it:-) I think what happened is "a cross between a porcupine and a grass snake." Some features from one UI became leftovers in another UI.
With regard to metrics, I don't know who supplied those. As I said, I don't know any Windows user who would ever type anything into the start menu. Most people are poor typists, and moving the hand from the mouse to the keyboard is ergonomically inefficient, to the extent that a longer mouse operation (right-click, Cut) is preferred to the shorter keyboard shortcut Ctrl-X.
So presenting them in a small non-resizable popup organized into folders named after a variation of the application name, or the company that produced it is better? (Because if you can't even remember the application name, what are the odds you know who published it?)
As matter of fact, names of top level folders in the Start menu are quite reasonable. I have only a couple that are company names ("Atmel", "Digilent", "National Instruments.") The rest are valid names of applications, and they are very recognizable.
Also, as I said, the names are a poor substitute. For example, under "Xilinx" I have "Impact" (which is a JTAG programming tool.) However if you use search, "xilinx" will not find Impact. You have to search for impact directly. Xilinx produced too many utilities with weird names, and it's all but impossible to remember their names. But if you click on "Xilinx" folder, they are there. On some boxes you get a few, on some you get more, and on some you get all of them - depending on what you have installed, and what licenses you have. It would be pretty stupid to try to search for ISE or PlanAhead or Vivado if only lab tools are installed. How would you know that? Via the start menu.
If you don't know the name of the app you are looking for the start screen is better. You've got more space, more ways to sort and search, and better search.
You get a thousand rectangles, all alike, spread across twenty pages with no rhyme or reason. That's because the structure of the start screen is flat - or flattened. It's called "information overload." There is a reason why most of the items in the Start menu are hidden from view until you select the top folder - to protect you from looking at too much data and not seeing anything.
Tried 8 yet?
Tried on Win7. The Win8 laptop is downstairs. Will try one day, when I get there:-)
That's how people were using the old start menu too. That's how its supposed to be used.
The start menu, from Windows 95 and until Vista, had no integrated search. You cannot say "that's how its supposed to be used." It became an option in Vista and 7, but not too many people (per my personal observations) even know that the built-in search exists. Some users that I know do not touch the keyboard unless they must, like for typing an email - and even that they do with one finger, "hunt and peck" style. You can't expect them to remember names of applications. Hell, I don't remember most of the names of applications on this very box. I have better things to remember than that. For those applications that I do remember about, "quick" does not return Quicken, but "quicken" does - how would MS explain that? BTW, QuickTime is not returned either - except the "About QuickTime." This is garbage. Typing is only a tool for some power users, and it has limited value as you cannot know what applications are installed on a given PC that you just connected to. You use the hierarchical menu to find out.
However, I use my no-fee CC for most purchases and pay it off every month so using is like using cash but negates me having to carry/restock my wallet with much cash. I accept the privacy loss of using a CC for the additional theft protection and convenient.
By using C/C you also are creating plausible deniability for your other purchases that you may not want to become known. Your spending pattern will remain the same, of an innocent person. You go to the same grocery stores, you buy gas at the same stations... except that one case when you bought food at an odd store for cash, and bought gas at a faraway station for cash, since you were visiting a lover and did not want anyone to know.
An existing and unbroken pattern of everyday purchases can also create a false alibi - if it was not you but your brother who bought groceries on that very day when you were away. If your brother doesn't advertise the fact, anyone who pulls your c/c log will find that "you" were in this town on that day, and not somewhere else.
Reportedly, miners are already configuring their systems to drop transactions that do not bring revenue. Days of BTC mining just for fun, done by a few nerds and a computer, are gone. Today you need to have an ASIC miner to keep up - and as soon as the network becomes faster, the difficulty level goes up, and the number of still available bitcoins continues to drop. Why would a miner mine anything say, ten years from now, when he needs a quantum computer (at a mere $10M price tag) to even get started? The mined bitcoins, which will be coming at a rate of one per year, will not be a very good enticement. If a miner is in business, he wouldn't be donating his computer's time to freeloaders. I already have a small amount in BTC that I cannot transfer to another account because it requires a fee that is larger than the amount! Combine with the deflation of BTC, and your "small transaction fee" is quickly growing into a tax that is worse than these 3% of Visa.
Other poster already mentioned that BTC suffers from several problems. Here is one, for example. You come to the store and pay a small amount of BTC. You then stand there for ten minutes and wait for six confirmations. They are not coming. The store owner is getting nervous, if not aggressive. He suggests that you put the goods down and leave, or else he will call the cops. What are your options?
Those confirmations may be genuinely delayed, or you may have mistyped his account number, or it may be a ruse by the store owner. Why not - the software is not secure, and anyone can hack it in any way they want, to say whatever they want. If you have a block explorer on your smartphone and you know what it is, you can prove (? a web service proving that A paid B? Not even funny.) that the transaction went through. But for majority of people this is not just over their head, it's in another galaxy. That's why people use banks and cash - because there is an independent arbiter of all transactions. Cash can be checked for validity simply enough, and bank transactions are all logged and cross-referenced, so that none are lost.
MS Security Essentials monitor the HOSTS file. However if you have physical access to the console you can always configure an exception. (I did, because I always have custom HOSTS files, because I have no DNS server on the LAN. (I have a couple of BBBs now to make one of them into a proper DNS server, but I still need to find time for that:-))
Slashdot Mirror
Not to dwell too much on the resource-hogging and ugly interface (much of which can be rectified with Classic Shell),
I find the Start menu a little too flashy and a less efficient than classic, but it's not a big deal. I can disable auto-pinning, and pin enough of my most important programs there to get by. The right column (Documents, Pictures, Music...) is pretty much a waste. But it's not as much of a disaster as Win8.
Windows 7 removed the ability to select a logon domain via drop-down box
They did? I didn't know. I use Win7, but not in AD environment.
The Network browser in Explorer is severely crippled for any network with more than a handful of hosts
It never worked well. It's not as bad as the same function in Ubuntu, though - that one doesn't work at all, and never worked for me.
Hardware compatibility
I know a person who had to dump a perfectly good color laser printer just because there are no Win7 drivers for it. Well built printers can last a decade.
Of course there is the matter of Extended Support for XP ending on 8 April 2013, but that's another story...
What is this "support" thing that everyone talks about? I know nobody who would ever need support with XP - and especially support from MS. The OS is a commodity for many years now. Need an OS? Install from a CD, and it will work. Afraid of Internet hackers? Use a hardware firewall. There is not much else to do to be safe.
No, the UI of XP and of 7 is similar enough, and I never heard any complaints about that transition. People stick with XP because of compatibility with older - and very expensive - software and hardware that they invested into a decade ago and cannot just rebuy on a lark. Those upgrades are not free in the industry - they often require huge yearly payments for "maintenance."
Again, this has nothing to do with user's personal choice. A great deal of industrial software does not work well under Win7. One might say that it shouldn't, because it breaks the new security model. Perhaps. But the fact remains.
A few items cannot even be bought today, because the company either closed the doors, or moved on, abandoning an older product. Sometimes you have your technological chain dependent on very specific data path (.txt - .dxf - .dwg - custom reader - custom processor...) An upgrade, even if you can afford it, may wreck your business just because it is not compatible with a million other pieces of software that you must use. Xilinx's transition from XST to PlanAhead to Vivado is a great illustration of that disaster. Those tools don't even produce compatible files to exchange the pin data with CAD tools!
The only question to me is whether capitalism will die a peaceful death like the old USSR with communism, or go down in a bloody war to the death as fascism did in the 1940s
That is one question. However the far more important question to ask is what to do with billions of unwanted people? (I started talking about it in the message just above.) What will happen if you leave people alone, housed and fed by robots or by super-efficient geniuses?
If anything is known about humans by now, they will start forming their own societies - clans, gangs, whatever you call them. The purpose of that would be to seek distinction and recognition - something that the gray uniformity of universal Communism cannot provide.
In the end you get the same society that we have today; except that toiling for a piece of bread is no longer required. Well, it is not required even today - all developed countries have social safety nets, where someone else will work for your food. In the future that "someone else" will be a robot, and we can forget about it entirely.
But can you imagine a whole world on welfare? Those would be 6+ Billion healthy and well fed people with nothing to do for their entire life - and they would be acutely aware of that. Some would love to work, but there is nothing meaningful for them to do - not everyone is a creator. What will they choose to do then? My guess is that they won't be discovering new subatomic particles. A few will, but they are not statistically significant. Many will choose warfare, just because that's what humans always did, with reason and without. They'd be Barons and Counts and Kings, just as before, with one small difference: when they need food they just press a button and a robotic train delivers. Feudals never really competed for food - they competed for power, and robot cannot give you power. That's what will keep them occupied.
In essence, I question the theory that the human as we know him is even able to exist in a world of abundance. He would go insane. In this aspect you can see what Heinlein did here.
Thank you, Ned Ludd. I know some people were skeptical because your earlier predictions were a few centuries premature. Nevertheless this time I'm sure the singularity is at hand.
Well, of course there is an infinite job market, here and now, if you are an engineer of teleportation, or if you specialize in rebuilding of hyperspace drives, or if you are a top notch actor/singer/driver/*. However if you are just an average guy, your chances are pretty poor. You are not needed because manual labor is not needed anymore. You have to be at least a tech in robotics to even get a chance at a new robot factory. Humans cannot even do the work at < 20 nm levels, they are a dirty disaster, they are not wanted there!
Half of the population is below average in any metric of your choice, just by definition. The business (whatever of it remains) will absorb the top notch people - 1%, 10% or 50%. In either case it is a disaster because 50% unemployment is destructive, even if those people are fed and housed. Idle hands and all that. Full employment is possible only if efficiency of human labor is so low that you always send more humans to the factory, or to the field, and still not overproduce.
Founders of communism never really specified how the future society is supposed to work. We know now that without a new man it is doomed (because nobody wants to work and everyone wants to consume.) But there are things worse than that. We could fix the above problem with 100% of robots that remove any reason for anyone to actually work. But then human mind starts to rot. Some people seek work and find it - in art, in engineering, in research. Other people may seek pleasures and entertainment at your expense - and you will not like that. Power over other humans is a very addictive drug; actually, it is the most potent motivator known to man. In an otherwise bland society, where everyone can have every material thing for free, this power over others will become the only thing that you cannot have delivered. Such unique things quickly become highly desirable.
Now yes this software is easy to bypass in XP.
It requires a specific build and a specific serial number to install. With MS servers no longer listening, the XP install will be forever. But WGA can be also removed, or never installed in the first place.
but is no longer described as "easy" for Win 7
Win7 and 8 have been already cracked. Actually, they are not cracked - these are corporate builds with a cracked KMS.
I can understand that many would be unhappy to run a pirated OS. However if MS officially stops selling what they need, what option do they have? Can MS hold the world hostage to their business plans? Can MS tell the world to waste trillions of dollars on unneeded and unwanted upgrades?
And how long 'til MS pulls the plug on it? XPs EOL is already on the horizon
XP is not going to magically stop working on that dreadful date. If retail builds fail to reactivate over the Internet, there are many "helpful geeks" with "correct knowledge" to fix your system. Those setups will never require reactivation.
3: Watch data and its access. If a Windows admin suddenly is slurping down everything in the accounting directory, and it isn't a backup utility doing this, then someone should be notified.
What is there to stop the admin from restoring the backup onto a separate, local drive and then doing his thing with the databases? Admins are supposed to restore backups now and then, just to test if they work.
7: Spend your time and do background checks that work. Checking for felonies, yes. Demanding usernames/passwords to Facebook for ongoing monitoring 24/7, no.
Snowden had no felonies.
Finally, morale. A company that always threatens its developers with offshoring, and has low morale will have far more security issues than one that at least knows how to treat people with some modicum of respect.
Only if the employees return that respect. Not all of them will. One could be a spy, for example - either sent in ahead of time, or a long term worker who was offered an amazingly good deal for a pile of worthless bits that nobody would even know that they were copied. A company may be good to the employee, but not to the tune of paying off his mortgage or sending his kids to college. Most spies work for less, especially if they are convinced by a trained psychologist that they do the right thing and they are saving the world. (Sometimes this is even true.)
How many unique numbers can you represent with 400 bits?
That's hardly the right question to ask. Have a look at all kinds of errors in ADCs and DACs. Want to buy a 3 GHz, 24-bit ADC? I will sell you one. It will produce codes from 0x000000 to 0xFFFFFF. Unfortunately, those are the only codes it will ever produce... this is just one example.
There is a built-in dryer.
A site that *gives* you Bitcoins would be far more popular than the site that *takes* them. Currently, to get BTC you need to buy them in Japan, and they are expensive. It's much easier to do nothing and ignore this tip jar and the entire BTC economy, since they are not influential.
BTC doesn't save you money on a gallon of milk; but it would be all the rage if that changes. But first the BTC network must solve some fundamental problems, such as how to get an instant confirmation of a transaction. Credit cards do it well under 5 seconds; you cannot tell people to linger at the store for 10-15 minutes, it's not even physically possible. There are also other problems, such as security of the terminals, and security of the network, and lack of arbitration if things go wrong (you paid, they haven't received - what now?) and, of course, transaction fees.
This is patently false to anyone who actually interacts with and respects women.
Why did you say "women," and not "men?" This is sexis. I am deeply offended :-) If A is different from B, then B is different from A. Why do you pick women as disrespected, poor victims of big, bad men? Why do you hate women so much? :-)
Note that I am very careful to not label any one group as deficient. A typical man is just as good with a baby as a typical woman is good with cold steel. But both are needed if they want to have a baby *and* have it protected from predators. Social roles exist even among animals; it's not something that is unique to humans. One could deny that, of course, just as one could deny that water is wet or that the Pope is Catholic.
the DNA is but a minor issue.
I fully agree. Children of the MD and the CEO have the same genetic chance of being smart - or stupid - as their counterparts from Afghanistan. What makes huge difference here is the fact that the former will get their chance to realize the potential, whereas the latter will not. A math genius is not of much use in the field, working the hoe or herding goats.
Put those children of peasants in a good school, and lo! some of them make fine doctors. It has happened over and over again.
It takes at least a miracle for a 9th child of Akhmed and Gülnara to get to a university. Even a school might be a problem, especially if the kid is of female persuasion. They poison girls in schools there.
Being above average intelligence is a big boon if you want to make babies.
If you are above average intelligence, you will not want to make too many babies. There is simply no reason to, and they are super expensive in the first world, and they are a huge legal liability. But a peasant needs all the children he can get because they are his old age pension, and the children are dirt cheap there (a child dies from an accident - Allah's will.)
Try applying for one of those shit jobs and then you will see. I also worked at shit jobs 20 years ago and was able to get them. Now I can apply at every supermarket, restaurant, and retail store in a 10-15 mile raduis willing to do anything, in addition to using every online resource and get nothing and none of them have any interest. So it does look to me as if things have gotten worse at least around here.
Part of the blame belongs to politicians. Previously, in the ages of Kings and Dukes and Barons, an innkeeper would pay one coin per day to the maid, and that maid would produce enough work to attract customers who bring one or more additional coins to the innkeeper. Thus, hiring people was a smart move because everyone benefited.
Today the same innkeeper has to pay one coin to the maid, and one coin to the state. Maybe more than one coin to the state, with Obamacare and other mandatory employment taxes. At the same time the maid has to pay 1/3 of that coin to the state as well. We have two problems here. First, employment of the maid is effective only if her labor attracts customers who bring in at least three additional coins (for the same work as in the medieval example above.) Clearly, this is a harder goal to achieve. Secondly, the maid has less money after a day of work. Thirdly, we have social safety nets now, that can pay some people for them doing nothing. In the end, it makes more sense to NOT employ the maid - her work is not economically profitable anymore; not to the innkeeper, and not to the maid either. An innkeeper would do better if he replaces carpet floors with tile (easier to clean) - then two existing maids can do the work instead of three, or five. If that continues, we will end up with a robot hotel that requires no people to maintain. Every business would want your money, but none of them will hire you so that you can earn that money. This is a well known problem - the capitalist society will fail at that transition.
A faimily of a medical doctor as husband and a CEO as wife is probably having one or two kids. A family of two illiterate peasants in Afghanistan is likely to have ten kids. The laws of evolution are subverted by the little fact that humans are not entirely driven by instincts. Humans formed societies that make children not only unnecessary - they make them detrimental. Better organized societies are worse in this aspect than primitive societies.
Perhaps eugenics is not the only choice here. But the society needs to ensure that good genes propagate, even if that involves technological means. The evolution's opinion on what genes are good is different than ours. From evolution's point of view, a serial rapist with a body and brains of a WWF fighter is an excellent specimen. In the end we get more strong serial rapists. The population does increase... but the society dies. A high tech society cannot be sustained by idiots who have 99% of their thinking power in their lower brain.
That is a wonderful example for the whole discussion here! Thanks!
I presume you are talking about races within human species. The difference between individuals is stronger across genders than across races. A white man, an Indian man, a Black man and an Asian man have far better chances of forming a stable team than a white man and a white woman. As such, if there are psychological differences between races, they are entirely caused by nurture. The differences between a male and a female are genetic, formed over a long period of time to optimize the chances of survival of the species. (Nature avoids unnecessary complexity; the differences wouldn't be there unless they serve a purpose.)
It's certainly valid to lump an entire demographic together. However I wouldn't place that group into a "negative" category. There are very few demographics, if any at all, that can be painted with such a wide brush. (Maybe some tribe of cannibals?) I don't think the OP intended to do that either. He used the word "insane," but it has meanings outside of clinical use. More commonly it is synonymous to "incomprehensible." All I read there is that the OP acknowledged his lack of ability to understand the opposite gender, and walked away. That's hardly wrong. Some men choose to correct the problem by use of force - and some women accept that. That would be far more wrong, on both sides of it.
Right there you're claiming that 50% of the human population is insane. Presumably, you don't count yourself among them.
It goes both ways. I'm sure the term "insane" here means "uncorrelated to all the psychological patterns known to me." It may be perfectly normal for that other 50%, though.
Clearly not, since you don't respect women.
What is respect, though? Isn't leaving them alone, after acknowledging that he cannot work with them, not a sign of respect? I may respect you, and you may respect me, but we may never travel together - maybe just because we are going in opposite directions; because our goals and our ideals are incompatible. But if I take a whip and start beating you, in attempt to teach you the proper behavior as I understand it, then it wouldn't be respectful at all. Leaving other people alone is the highest form of respect, since it acknowledges that they are right on their own, and they require no "help" to get better.
I don't care what you do or don't do with your wabbly bits so long as if anyone else is involved it is consensual, but as far as life and evolution are concerned, you're an irrelevant dead end.
Genetically - yes. But not intellectually. There aren't too many geniuses who had children who also became pretty good. (It happens more often in families of artists because it's more nurture than nature.) Do you care that Albert Einstein had family and children? (They didn't fare well.)
From evolution's point of view, you're not adaptable to the kind of change we are now experiencing. It's not that you should, it's that since you don't, you're removing yourself from the race.
You can also say that the race repels solitary, asexual individuals. The race is not concerned, there are plenty of men and women who are only interested in socialization and replication. Thus biological needs of survival are achieved.
This, however, may indicate that the race, without some touch of eugenics, is doomed to mediocrity because biologically it does not select for brains (not anymore, at least.) There is no mechanism that would allow a genius to have more children and spread their genes around. Futurists imagined such mechanisms, but the society of today does not have them. To make things worse, geniuses are sidelined and often oppressed because they are different. The society favors the average, not the best.
This isn't just about socializing. It's about working outside the home
Why would a modern information worker need to work outside his home? You aren't suggesting (I hope) that a modern industrial worker needs to shovel coal into furnaces. Technology changed these jobs. Today you can be a rich ISV writing your own code in peace and quiet of your home and selling it on the Internet, or through Apple. Socializing is an instrument, not the end goal. Traditionally one needed to socialize to buy and sell, to learn and to teach. None of that is true today, this comment being just one illustration of the principle.
being able to cook for yourself, doing your own laundry, doing your own shopping, etc.
It takes very little effort to cook pasta or rice, especially if you have specialized cookers. Laundry is done by a washing machine. Shopping is done either online (for expensive products) or at the nearby grocery store. Where else would one need to go if his office == his home?
And I wonder if your vehicle would need to be registered for commercial use.
It sounds likely, since you'd be using it for commercial purposes. Lyft, of course, has nicely isolated themselves from those problems - they only run a matchmaking service; the costs are borne by the driver. At $35/hr this is not that great, if you have to pay for gas and service out of that amount. In city you'd cover, on average, 30 miles within 1 hour, and that would be 1 gallon of fuel at $4. So you have now $30, and you are at the far end of the trip. Taxi drivers get connected trips over the radio (or a cell phone today.) Do the Lyft drivers get the next trip once they arrive at some faraway location? If they have to drive back at their own cost, the income from that occupation is nonexistent, and can be wiped out by a single accident that is caused either by the passenger asking to go to an accident-prone location, or simply by statistics.
Because i was refering to the start screen, which was designed based on the metrics collected from Vista/7 that showed that's how users were using it. So they designed 8 around that.
Yes, the start screen is a different story. However I doubt that the start screen, for a phone, was designed with intent that you would be typing anything into it :-) I think what happened is "a cross between a porcupine and a grass snake." Some features from one UI became leftovers in another UI.
With regard to metrics, I don't know who supplied those. As I said, I don't know any Windows user who would ever type anything into the start menu. Most people are poor typists, and moving the hand from the mouse to the keyboard is ergonomically inefficient, to the extent that a longer mouse operation (right-click, Cut) is preferred to the shorter keyboard shortcut Ctrl-X.
So presenting them in a small non-resizable popup organized into folders named after a variation of the application name, or the company that produced it is better? (Because if you can't even remember the application name, what are the odds you know who published it?)
As matter of fact, names of top level folders in the Start menu are quite reasonable. I have only a couple that are company names ("Atmel", "Digilent", "National Instruments.") The rest are valid names of applications, and they are very recognizable.
Also, as I said, the names are a poor substitute. For example, under "Xilinx" I have "Impact" (which is a JTAG programming tool.) However if you use search, "xilinx" will not find Impact. You have to search for impact directly. Xilinx produced too many utilities with weird names, and it's all but impossible to remember their names. But if you click on "Xilinx" folder, they are there. On some boxes you get a few, on some you get more, and on some you get all of them - depending on what you have installed, and what licenses you have. It would be pretty stupid to try to search for ISE or PlanAhead or Vivado if only lab tools are installed. How would you know that? Via the start menu.
If you don't know the name of the app you are looking for the start screen is better. You've got more space, more ways to sort and search, and better search.
You get a thousand rectangles, all alike, spread across twenty pages with no rhyme or reason. That's because the structure of the start screen is flat - or flattened. It's called "information overload." There is a reason why most of the items in the Start menu are hidden from view until you select the top folder - to protect you from looking at too much data and not seeing anything.
Tried 8 yet?
Tried on Win7. The Win8 laptop is downstairs. Will try one day, when I get there :-)
That's how people were using the old start menu too. That's how its supposed to be used.
The start menu, from Windows 95 and until Vista, had no integrated search. You cannot say "that's how its supposed to be used." It became an option in Vista and 7, but not too many people (per my personal observations) even know that the built-in search exists. Some users that I know do not touch the keyboard unless they must, like for typing an email - and even that they do with one finger, "hunt and peck" style. You can't expect them to remember names of applications. Hell, I don't remember most of the names of applications on this very box. I have better things to remember than that. For those applications that I do remember about, "quick" does not return Quicken, but "quicken" does - how would MS explain that? BTW, QuickTime is not returned either - except the "About QuickTime." This is garbage. Typing is only a tool for some power users, and it has limited value as you cannot know what applications are installed on a given PC that you just connected to. You use the hierarchical menu to find out.
However, I use my no-fee CC for most purchases and pay it off every month so using is like using cash but negates me having to carry/restock my wallet with much cash. I accept the privacy loss of using a CC for the additional theft protection and convenient.
By using C/C you also are creating plausible deniability for your other purchases that you may not want to become known. Your spending pattern will remain the same, of an innocent person. You go to the same grocery stores, you buy gas at the same stations ... except that one case when you bought food at an odd store for cash, and bought gas at a faraway station for cash, since you were visiting a lover and did not want anyone to know.
An existing and unbroken pattern of everyday purchases can also create a false alibi - if it was not you but your brother who bought groceries on that very day when you were away. If your brother doesn't advertise the fact, anyone who pulls your c/c log will find that "you" were in this town on that day, and not somewhere else.
Reportedly, miners are already configuring their systems to drop transactions that do not bring revenue. Days of BTC mining just for fun, done by a few nerds and a computer, are gone. Today you need to have an ASIC miner to keep up - and as soon as the network becomes faster, the difficulty level goes up, and the number of still available bitcoins continues to drop. Why would a miner mine anything say, ten years from now, when he needs a quantum computer (at a mere $10M price tag) to even get started? The mined bitcoins, which will be coming at a rate of one per year, will not be a very good enticement. If a miner is in business, he wouldn't be donating his computer's time to freeloaders. I already have a small amount in BTC that I cannot transfer to another account because it requires a fee that is larger than the amount! Combine with the deflation of BTC, and your "small transaction fee" is quickly growing into a tax that is worse than these 3% of Visa.
Other poster already mentioned that BTC suffers from several problems. Here is one, for example. You come to the store and pay a small amount of BTC. You then stand there for ten minutes and wait for six confirmations. They are not coming. The store owner is getting nervous, if not aggressive. He suggests that you put the goods down and leave, or else he will call the cops. What are your options?
Those confirmations may be genuinely delayed, or you may have mistyped his account number, or it may be a ruse by the store owner. Why not - the software is not secure, and anyone can hack it in any way they want, to say whatever they want. If you have a block explorer on your smartphone and you know what it is, you can prove (? a web service proving that A paid B? Not even funny.) that the transaction went through. But for majority of people this is not just over their head, it's in another galaxy. That's why people use banks and cash - because there is an independent arbiter of all transactions. Cash can be checked for validity simply enough, and bank transactions are all logged and cross-referenced, so that none are lost.
MS Security Essentials monitor the HOSTS file. However if you have physical access to the console you can always configure an exception. (I did, because I always have custom HOSTS files, because I have no DNS server on the LAN. (I have a couple of BBBs now to make one of them into a proper DNS server, but I still need to find time for that :-))