What are some things a human can do that it is fundamentally impossible for any computer, no matter how powerful, to do?
A computer, as far as we know it, cannot understand speech on a level that would be comparable to a human. At this time we can throw hardware at this problem but still we cannot build a computer for the starship Enterprise.
Today's speech recognition is still unbelievably crude, and it depends upon physical recognition of sounds (phonemes) and matching them, fuzzily, to a set of known words. Context is lost, and incompatible (wrong) words can be strung together. A human does not recognize speech on a word by word basis - that process is continuous and predictive.
I fully agree about different purposes. Hitting a human figure at 500 meters requires a bipod and a telescopic sight. Iron sights will not do - human eyesight is just not that good, especially when you are talking about grunts and not about elite snipers.
As a point of reference, I was trained to use AKM. We never shot full-auto. The weapon did not have an automatic cutoff, so we had to be easy on the trigger. Longer distance shots were performed in semi-auto mode. We shot at targets 200 meters away (a standing figure) and I was able to hit my target with ease -- after about 10 minutes of explanations and about 1 minute of shooting.
The doctrine back then was that you do not want soldiers to shoot at distant targets. Weapons that would be adequate for that would not be good for a short range battle; and they would be expensive. Faraway targets would be assigned to people who can work them - snipers, mortar teams, artillery, missiles. It was not the task of a common infantryman to shoot at a movement 500 meters away. He can't even tell what it is from such a distance, let alone to hit it.
Now, you're a child born to that Mother. Your brain doesn't work as well, and you have lots of health problems. If that isn't the deck stacked against you I don't know what is.
I suggest you ask Stephen Hawking about that.
But in general, if you are disabled and a group of doctors confirms, you can be given social assistance. It's a safe thing to do because there are very few genuinely disabled people among all those that receive social assistance today. Your example of a disabled child is statistically insignificant. But personally - yes, a deaf child cannot become a musician; a blind child cannot become a race car driver; a child with low IQ is unlikely to become a famous mathematician. The society cannot help here - unless you suggest that we give honorable titles and jobs just so the disabled people feel good about that? We can do that, but it will dilute the value of those titles and jobs as rewards for people who earned themselves on their own. Now the deck is stacked against healthy and productive members of the society. (It was one of reasons why USSR fell.)
I know at least one able-bodied person on social security. One day he complains that he is not getting as much money as he'd wanted. I immediately gave him a business idea that was entirely within his domain. He thought about that and said: "If I open a business I will lose social security. What if I fail at that business? I'm not willing to risk that." US taxpayers are still paying him for his refusal to contribute to the society.
Breathing is not dependent on gravity. You can walk on your feet, lay on your back, stand on your head, or float inside the ISS - and be still breathing.
the deck is stacked against a lot of the population who don't see the opportunity to do so, and thus have less hope.
The deck is stacked against those who are lazy, violent, or on drugs. That's for a good reason. Everyone else has his own road to success. But the road is not easy, and many weaker minds prefer to not walk it at all. It's much easier to cry "Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"
No. That's why Vista is rare in business environment. Most companies migrated from XP directly to Win7.
Win7 offered some business reasons to move. Some were in dropping support and sales of XP; other were in fact that Win7 is a better OS than XP as long as your hardware is fast enough. If you want RAM then XP is not even a player; XP64 was always a second rate product due to lack of drivers. XP may not even install on a modern computer.
Will MS still sell Windows 7 to non-corporate customers after Win8 is released?
I don't know any non-corporate customer (outside of a few self-professed Win8 lovers on Slashdot) who would even recognize Win8 as Windows. I tried my best, but I can't use it (I have Win8 RC in a VM.) Why would a common man buy a computer that he cannot operate? If Aunt Betty can't have a Windows computer, Apple is there to assure her that Mac is exactly what she wants. Since salesmen work on commission, plenty of them will be denigrating Win8 just to sell more expensive Appleware. The management will also give them a hint: returned computers are not good for business. And if a customer can't figure out how to log in... back to the store the box goes.
If MS decides to drop sales of their best OS to date to prop up sales of a defective product then they will richly deserve all that comes their way. DVDs with p1rated copies of Win7 will proliferate and MS will not be able to do much because they are no longer profiting from that software anyway. Ballmer will be fired, and probably someone sane will take his place to make apologies and mend MS ways.
It feels like Windows 7 merged with a cheap Phone OS, and the blending makes it very confusing to navigate around.
Metro is the Star Trek TNG UI coded by people without even an ounce of artistic talent. I, for one, hate those ugly, large, boxy shapes and those atrocious colors. Have anyone here downloaded the Visual Studio 2012 RC? It has two color themes (light and dark) and both are murderous on the user. Humans don't even see these colors around them much - and most certainly we aren't surrounded by large boxy shapes. We work with nicely made tools and objects of soft, pleasant color. Windows was progressing to render those naturally, and by Win7 they were pretty well done. Win8 discards all that - the bathwater, the baby, the church, and the whole planet too, for good measure.
A good unified "panel" design of ST:TNG is there because the computers that the crew is operating are fixed purpose devices to run the ship. That's why similar designs are OK on tablets - which are largely single purpose devices to run one application out of some selection of applications. Desktops are neither needed nor wanted to run one application full screen (or tiled down to half of the screen.) Desktops run tens of applications, their windows customized to fit the monitor and to show that needs to be shown. Metro denies users all that "information under their fingertips," as BG's ghost writers put it. You can now only see what one application shows you, even if your screen is 27" or you have multiple monitors. Win8 is very inconvenient to use; its salvation may be only in hacks that remove Metro and put the customizable Start menu back.
At work if my computer died I would be forced to accept an OEM built computer running whatever is the current operating system, which is about to be Windows 8.
Either you are working for a zero-bit one-man business that is clueless about computers, or you will get Win7. No business will even consider thinking about possibly deploying Win8 anywhere in their infrastructure - not for many years, and perhaps not ever. There is zero business reason to involve Win8, and lots of downsides (such as loss of productivity and new training expenses and never-ending whining from The Old Guard that this newfangled thingy is so unfamiliar.)
PS. Since when Trayvon Martin is considered "a man who is an expert in all things physical"?
Since GZ almost got killed by TM, an unarmed man. Perhaps TM was not an expert on Olympic scale, but he was expert enough for GZ - and that's all that matters. After all, TM was a trained athlete (a football player,) and GZ would be unable to defend himself against a mouse, short of shooting it:-) The great equalizer was invented exactly for those reasons.
I didn't comment on your assertion that a trained fighter will be unable to disarm or disable an opponent armed with a makeshift weapon. That assertion is not very easy to prove. I am not an expert in martial arts, but I read some training materials out of curiosity. These materials clearly describe those scenarios - and in many cases there are actions that you, as a trained fighter, can take to do what you need. One of them is running away, of course; that is strongly recommended if you are unarmed against an opponent with an edged weapon or a gun. What we see in movies is not reality. But there are many other situations and recommendations for them. Do you think that if you in an open confrontation pick up a random stick and take a swing at Bruce Lee you will take him down? Just a week or two ago there was a news article about a martial arts expert who killed another man who pulled a gun on him. His skills certainly didn't fail him when it mattered.
even then it should be ran through ground based conduit.
Your objections are valid. But there are situations when underground conduits are impractical. A large, busy city street is one such example. Castle Wolfenstein would be another. Buildings on two shores of a river would be yet another example - trivial to cross in the air and next to impossible (not within an IT budget) by boring under the water. Fiber will be fine; there is armored cable that is designed for such duty - even though it is not under strain. I use CAT5 on my property; the cable is UV-resistant and intended for direct burial.
Of course when we get that far we can think of microwave links or laser/infrared. With enough power they will be fine in any weather. But I wasn't aiming for a practical example. Though that example was taken from real life because I had to hang a wire once between buildings. It was done this way for a good reason - it was an antenna.
"We have one full spool of cable, one empty spool, and a spool with an unknown length of the cable. How much cable do we have on the partially used spool?"
"We need to drag this cable from here to there. You cannot follow the path of the cable everywhere. We have no plans of this building, but here is your measuring tape. We have as many feet of cable on this spool as you calculated above. Will it be enough?"
"We need to hang a cable between two buildings, from height $h1 on building A to height $h2 on building B. The cable will be tied to a steel wire that can have tension up to $F newtons. Masses of the wire and the cable (per meter) are known, as well as the distance between the buildings. What is the required length of the cable and the wire, considering that the wire forms a catenary? When done, calculate the wind load for the wind speed of $speed m/s and tell me if the steel wire is strong enough."
You probably are not a professional bat wielder. You probably never touched that bat since the day you bought it. You are an engineer who routinely lifts things as heavy as a pencil.
Now, you are against two or three young and strong men (think Trayvon Martin) who are experts in all things physical. They may carry bats, or knives, or bike chains, or guns. You are overwhelmed. Swinging a bat at them is suicidal because you will not even disable one of them, and the two other will make sure you won't ever repeat your mistake.
But if you have a handgun that is ready to fire then even one shot into center of mass of each attacker will definitely reduce their interest in doing anything except collecting a few loose coils of their intestines and limping out to the nearest hospital. The magazine of your handgun will be still 50% to 70% full, just in case one of the attackers is not yet convinced and reaches for his gun. (Note that many guns used in crimes are not functional since criminals are not known for caring for their tools of trade.)
A bat has other deficiencies as well. For example, you cannot swing it in narrow corridors, door openings, and in rooms with low ceilings. A handgun is free from that problem.
Finally, if you manage to chase robbers away with a bat they are likely to be unhappy with you, and they will be back with guns to get even. Your bat will be less effective then.
Not having a gun in the house kind of makes it hard for a kid to shoot himself in the face with your non-existent gun.
Not having a gun in the house also prevents you from teaching your kid about guns. This means that if your child (who is old enough to shoot or be close) is not familar with a firearm to the point that it is no longer a "forbidden fruit" to him then the kid is 100% likely to play with someone else's gun as soon as he can get hold of it. Perhaps that would be the gun that your neighborhood dealer had to drop as he was chased by the police.
The first and the best line of defense against any threat is in detailed knowledge of the threat. Kids are curious. Remove their curiosity by teaching them to shoot. They will be bored in 15 minutes, guaranteed. The loud noise, even with hearing protection, is not a pleasant thing. The recoil will be hard on small hands. Let them experience this, under control, and they will not want to do it on their own. Show them what a 9mm bullet does to a wet phone book and they will not be casual about firearms. If they want to shoot some more, take them to the range. You cannot defeat the curiosity of a child, but you can join it - and by doing so you can direct and control it. If such a child sees a firearm in school or in the street he will not be attracted to it; the first thing that will come to his head would be the image of wounds that his fist can go through. He will instinctively do the right thing: "STOP! Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult." An untrained child will never do that because it is so counter-intuitive. An untrained child's priorities will be opposite: "What is it? May I touch it? May I take it home? May I play with it with my friends?"
Slashdot is full of children who do not yet understand cause and effect. Another issue is that only in the USA firearm ownership is more or less accepted; in Canada too, to a much lesser extent. In nearly all other countries of the world you have to jump through many hoops to get a permit for a shotgun that is only dangerous to ducks. Lack of shooting culture creates lack of understanding. People who never shot guns in their life are likely to not even comprehend why would anyone want to do that. And as such, they will vote to deny this privilege. If they don't have it, then nobody shall have it. It's called "tolerance" now.
Presence of starry-eyed teenagers is also evident in frequent references to bicycles. It is normal for a young person to take a bicycle to his college. However I seldom see a family man carrying a few 40-lb bags of salt on his bike. This is because family and home ownership come with literally heavy responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is protection of your family. If you choose to depend on the police to protect you, it's your right. But don't complain that the police comes just in time to outline the bodies and write a report. I'm listening to police radio quite often, and after the assignment is given the officer replies with his response time. Usually it is about 15 minutes. Cities are large, and there are only so many units on duty. You will be cold by the time the police shows up. The problem is exaggerated by the large number of criminal illegals from Central America. Those guys escape their own countries, where they are wanted for something already, and become invisibles in the US society. They don't exist; they can't be looked for; they can't be identified; if stopped, they give a dozen names, all false. They are free to do whatever they want - and, surprise - they do.
NO, it's not possible to abandon violence. We can transmute it in something else - sporting, playing, perhaps sex.
This has been tried for hundreds of years, and attempts always failed. Take your common British football fan. He is happy and agitated when watching the match. But as soon as the match ends the same fan on his way home feels the need to continue to be violent - and he, with his friends, smashes windows, flips cars and does other things that we know so well. A violent person remains violent. Even the most peaceful peacemaker on Earth would grab a knife and shove it into your liver if you seriously threaten her children.
The idea of channeling violence into other activity is impossible because it depends on the human mind to do the channeling. Even today a gangbanger from a ghetto can discard his knives and his guns and instead become an artist - a painter, a composer, a writer. There are many ways for a human to put his energy to better use. Majority of people do just that. However what stops the gangbanger from painting another Mona Lisa? His mind stops him. Until you give him a new mind he will continue to be a feral animal. Gangbanger's brain is on par with a rat's brain, just as complicated and driven by similar primitive desires. Is it physical or mental? I don't know. But looking at it as a black box, the similarity is obvious.
Losing violence is equal to losing means to protect ourselves from forces of nature or from other forms of life, or from deranged people. I'd say one has to completely abandon the physical form and become immortal, immune to all dangers, before the violence can be abandoned. But when you become god-like then perhaps you can afford to become a pacifist.
Studies on the bonobos suggest that sex is a very effective escape valve to violence. This ape is one of the less violent on the primate species, albeit being on the most sexualized.
Humans are already doing sex for most of their free time. There is no margin to do more of it. Besides, humans are more complex animals than small monkeys. Sex is not the ultimate reward for humans. Power over other humans is. And you do not want to offer that reward to anyone...
Your 2000 page long volume probably would be better served by LaTeX or InDesign depending on your taste.
Technically - yes. However it's better to forget LaTeX as a bad dream; I haven't met anyone who knows what LaTeX is, let alone how to use it, in at least a decade. Engineers who write hundreds of pages of manuals do not know anything except Word, and they feel no reason to learn anything else (they have other software to learn that is far more important to them.) Word works, and that's good enough.
I don't know what InDesign is because I never encountered it in a business setting. Perhaps there is a copy floating somewhere in marketing, but you certainly don't find it among the ranks.
Anything that is not WYSIWYG is programming of documents. Only programmers can do that. Majority of users do not understand that a certain statement will insert a picture at a later time. If the picture is not in front of their eyes they freak out. Word caters to those. LaTeX remains in the domain of scientists - and even there, as I heard, its positions are quickly diluted by rich text and HTML email. Admit it, it's a big difference between receiving a line of TeX code to compile in your head and between seeing a finished formula on the screen. Scientists are also humans, they don't care about how the formula gets there. The "how" is not something they can get a Nobel prize for. They only want the result, in the easiest way possible. Everything else just wastes their time.
"Business people sends out documents that require office because business people send out documents that require office" is circular reasoning. And, I think, wrong.
You can also say that American people speak English because other American people speak English. It is a circular reasoning, but it does not make it wrong in itself. An established system has some means to stabilize itself, otherwise it wouldn't be established in the first place. Such a system is resistant to external events, to some extent. Windows monopoly got a serious kick in the side for Vista; let's see what happens with Win8. By the way, if the threshold of resistance is exceeded (like of a gyroscope) the failure is violent and chaotic.
So you purposely turn away business because of your fanatical attachment to a single file format/application, when you could perfectly easily export to a PDF
I'm doing business for many years now. You asked DogDude, but my own answer to that would be "YES." My experience shows that picky customers are not customers at all. If someone walks into your hat store, asks if you have yellow hats, then tries all that you have... chances are good that this person will not buy anything. Even if he does buy something, you will spend too much time on that one customer. You typically do not want such a customer and such a sale.
You can see this as a simple test. The customer wants to probe your business before he entrusts you with an order. However you also want to probe the customer's business to be sure that he will pay. If a guy can't afford just one copy of MS Office then he most certainly can't afford my product, and any further communication with him is pointless.
Some customers are "high maintenance customers." Pickiness of this kind belongs to that group. You then need to look at the potential gain that you can get out of this sale. If the gain is low enough you will be better off saying "No bid" because your precious time will be better spent on other customers, or just on playing with your dogs at home (or your children, if for some reason you object to dogs;-)
I am sure your manager would love to hear about your antics.
People who make statements about who is a good customer and who is a bad customer are often their own bosses. They don't report to anyone. That's the whole reason why they need to have those opinions - there is nobody else who would do this for them. If you are not in charge you do not care. But even in large businesses, with a long chain of commands, directors of business development often listen to their subordinates - they very much want to know their opinions. A large company does not want to start manufacturing a large order of custom equipment if a tiny, unknown, fly-by-night company shows up with an order. If such an order is accepted it will be 100% prepaid, and the sale contract will be longer than the user's manual.
I mean, what are business people sending out that requires Office?
What kind of a document would the customer send to you when he wants to order a $100M set of ore mining machines?
What kind of a document you send back to that customer to tell him that you have what it takes and you can prove it?
What kind of a document the customer modifies and returns back to you (with the cycle repeating several times) until you have the technical requirements worked out?
What kind of a document your lawyers kick back and forth until you sign it?
What kind of a document you ship along with several thousand tons of machinery so that the customer may know how to operate it?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, in 2012 if you're using Office for anything more complex than a letter to mom or a school book report - you're probably doing it wrong.
The whole industry of the entire world is then doing it wrong.
And even then, you should save your $$ and use something free(Wordpad, Open Office, Google Docs)...
I'd love to see a 2,000 page long Volume 15 of the System Level User Manual as a Google Docs document. Its size would be measured in hundreds of megabytes, with all these illustrations and drawings... Even if you ship it to the customer as a PDF (as you should,) it still doesn't make it possible to edit such a massive document. You also need it correctly reflowed and rendered in real time. You could use the Master Document approach, but Google Docs doesn't support that (MS Office does.)
I tried to use OpenOffice, and each time it failed me in a bad way. With its current fragmentation it's even hard to tell what version does what. I'm not going to waste my time on fiddling with a wordprocessor; I have *new* stuff to work on.
If your $50/hr worker spends three or four extra hours during his entire employment at your office on troubles with OpenOffice then you incurred loss already, and that loss will be only increasing. The employee costs to the company about twice his salary, due to taxes and the infrastructure. Human labor is the most expensive resource in a company; you do not want to waste it on irrelevant things. Otherwise next you will be saying that instead of a $800 Dell desktop the employee should be given a R-Pi board and an old monitor.
Tap the Windows key and the first few letters of the application name.
You walk up to a computer. What do you type if you don't know what is installed on it? This is a common situation in a business environment.
Or you sit in front of your own computer, need to take a screenshot... what do you type? You know that you used to have some scissors icon in the start menu, but it's gone now. You type "scissors" and nothing comes up. What do you do now? (The tool is called "Snipping tool", good luck associating that with a screenshot or with scissors that are in its icon.)
Less than 2% of the world X86 market is being sold with touch.
One of my friends bought a Sony all-in-one with a touch screen, accidentally. (He wanted just a large screen.) Within a couple of weeks he asked me to disable the touch entirely because whenever he touches the screen for any purpose (to clean dust or to point something on the screen to others) the screen reacts, totally unexpectedly. He told me that he has no use for touch whatsoever. He is the only person that I know that owns a touch-capable desktop.
If you drive a car, at some point you're going to get pulled over. You're going to get a ticket of some sort with high probability.
If you don't break the law you are not likely to be ever pulled over.
In fact, I would say that a bike rider has more chances to interact with the police than a car driver. Roads are built for cars, whether you like it or not. A bicycle is not an equal on the road. Good, well trained riders are seldom a problem. But plenty don't bother to stop for the red light, for example, as long as in their opinion they can proceed. Bikes have to travel on the side of the road, where cars are parked, so you have more obstacles to steer around; at the same time car drivers, driving at 40 mph, are not that happy to see you appearing before them, pedaling at breakneck speed of 10 mph. A job of a bicycle rider is very dangerous, IMO, just because you are sufficiently different from the majority of traffic. If you want to become invisible you blend in. But you do the opposite.
There's no real way to be stopped and searched on a bicycle.
This is patently untrue. My local Sheriff's department regularly does stops of bicycles. Many criminals use bicycles too, they are quiet, portable and untraceable. If the police stops you and has a lawful cause to search you then you *will* be searched, and your blood taken, and whatever else your masters want from you.
With cycling, there's no tax to pay. No fuel to pay for.
You pay with your health, and with more food that you have to buy. Bicycles offer less protection to you from elements, other drivers, and from obstacles. Not everyone even benefits from heavy physical work (I do not, for example, for a good reason.)
Often, it is faster than a car journey anyway.
That could be true or false depending on where you live. Most cyclists would get a heart attack climbing up the hill where I live, even just once and without cargo. It would certainly take them far longer to get here than in a car. Same applies to freeways. But if you operate in a densely populated city then a bicycle is faster.
Cycling is probably one of the only remaining modes of transport that is truly free in both senses of the word.
I don't think so. There are no modes of transport that fit the definition of "free." Except perhaps drifing across the Atlantic on a reed raft. That would be free, I admit that much:-) But once you reach land you become a subject of the local government, and it usually has power to kill you with impunity - let alone to monitor your movements. Your choice of a vehicle does not matter.
These days if you tried to revolt with the pea shooters you're still allowed to buy, the military could just kill you with a hellfire missile launched from a drone 20 miles away.
Is this the reason why US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered zero losses?
If every US citizen shoots one US soldier and gets killed in return, the US Army will be wiped out completely, down to the last man, while the population suffers loss of only 0.3%. The US Army exists only because the population allows it to exist.
There were enough urban conflicts in recent time. The one in Syria is ongoing. You can be sure that the well-armed military does not have an upper hand over a ragtag band of freedom fighters. Armies exist to fight other armies. The drone can attack a specific location... but drone operators need to know which location to hit. Cities provide unlimited cover to all kinds of fighters. The military can level a city and destroy the resistance this way; however it is rarely done, and if a US military destroys a US city it will sign its own death warrant.
Experience of recent operations tells us that the army cannot even hold territory. All it can, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to build small, fortified bases and stay there. We can call them "prisons" for convenience, since the word is fitting well. The US Army has no control over the adjacent land, or over the villages and cities - or over people's minds. It can venture out, suffer a few losses to IEDs, perhaps capture a militant or two, and retreat. In essence, troops there are just targets.
Also consider that currently the US Army enjoys unlimited supplies of war materiel, since factories in the USA are working and producing everything that the Pentagon asks for. This will not be the case if widespread social unrest stops production. The US military does not have an unlimited supply of high-tech weapons - they are too expensive to stockpile. The US Army also does not have millions of boots to be put on the ground; for each grunt with a gun you have nine support personnel who aren't trained fighters (a.k.a. sitting ducks.) If there is ever a conflict between the US Army and The People (which IMO is not very likely) then the Army will fare not any better than Assad's troops in Damascus. They will not be able to use methods of total war on the US territory; and the fallback methods give advantage to militiamen. But the most important factor here will be disobedience, desertion and switching sides. A US soldier is required by law to reject illegal orders. A commander who orders his subordinates to fly a mission and firebomb a US city will find himself arrested, if he is lucky - or fragged if his luck wore thin.
Anybody who doesn't have the sense to know if their kid is still in the "wants to taste everything" stage will just as easily give them live ammo.
You don't even need to go for exotic scenarios. Gasoline from a car and some matches can be far more dangerous than a few grams of minimally contained propellant.
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What are some things a human can do that it is fundamentally impossible for any computer, no matter how powerful, to do?
A computer, as far as we know it, cannot understand speech on a level that would be comparable to a human. At this time we can throw hardware at this problem but still we cannot build a computer for the starship Enterprise.
Today's speech recognition is still unbelievably crude, and it depends upon physical recognition of sounds (phonemes) and matching them, fuzzily, to a set of known words. Context is lost, and incompatible (wrong) words can be strung together. A human does not recognize speech on a word by word basis - that process is continuous and predictive.
I fully agree about different purposes. Hitting a human figure at 500 meters requires a bipod and a telescopic sight. Iron sights will not do - human eyesight is just not that good, especially when you are talking about grunts and not about elite snipers.
As a point of reference, I was trained to use AKM. We never shot full-auto. The weapon did not have an automatic cutoff, so we had to be easy on the trigger. Longer distance shots were performed in semi-auto mode. We shot at targets 200 meters away (a standing figure) and I was able to hit my target with ease -- after about 10 minutes of explanations and about 1 minute of shooting.
The doctrine back then was that you do not want soldiers to shoot at distant targets. Weapons that would be adequate for that would not be good for a short range battle; and they would be expensive. Faraway targets would be assigned to people who can work them - snipers, mortar teams, artillery, missiles. It was not the task of a common infantryman to shoot at a movement 500 meters away. He can't even tell what it is from such a distance, let alone to hit it.
Now, you're a child born to that Mother. Your brain doesn't work as well, and you have lots of health problems. If that isn't the deck stacked against you I don't know what is.
I suggest you ask Stephen Hawking about that.
But in general, if you are disabled and a group of doctors confirms, you can be given social assistance. It's a safe thing to do because there are very few genuinely disabled people among all those that receive social assistance today. Your example of a disabled child is statistically insignificant. But personally - yes, a deaf child cannot become a musician; a blind child cannot become a race car driver; a child with low IQ is unlikely to become a famous mathematician. The society cannot help here - unless you suggest that we give honorable titles and jobs just so the disabled people feel good about that? We can do that, but it will dilute the value of those titles and jobs as rewards for people who earned themselves on their own. Now the deck is stacked against healthy and productive members of the society. (It was one of reasons why USSR fell.)
I know at least one able-bodied person on social security. One day he complains that he is not getting as much money as he'd wanted. I immediately gave him a business idea that was entirely within his domain. He thought about that and said: "If I open a business I will lose social security. What if I fail at that business? I'm not willing to risk that." US taxpayers are still paying him for his refusal to contribute to the society.
Breathing is not dependent on gravity. You can walk on your feet, lay on your back, stand on your head, or float inside the ISS - and be still breathing.
the deck is stacked against a lot of the population who don't see the opportunity to do so, and thus have less hope.
The deck is stacked against those who are lazy, violent, or on drugs. That's for a good reason. Everyone else has his own road to success. But the road is not easy, and many weaker minds prefer to not walk it at all. It's much easier to cry "Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"
Was there a business reason to involve Vista?
No. That's why Vista is rare in business environment. Most companies migrated from XP directly to Win7.
Win7 offered some business reasons to move. Some were in dropping support and sales of XP; other were in fact that Win7 is a better OS than XP as long as your hardware is fast enough. If you want RAM then XP is not even a player; XP64 was always a second rate product due to lack of drivers. XP may not even install on a modern computer.
Will MS still sell Windows 7 to non-corporate customers after Win8 is released?
I don't know any non-corporate customer (outside of a few self-professed Win8 lovers on Slashdot) who would even recognize Win8 as Windows. I tried my best, but I can't use it (I have Win8 RC in a VM.) Why would a common man buy a computer that he cannot operate? If Aunt Betty can't have a Windows computer, Apple is there to assure her that Mac is exactly what she wants. Since salesmen work on commission, plenty of them will be denigrating Win8 just to sell more expensive Appleware. The management will also give them a hint: returned computers are not good for business. And if a customer can't figure out how to log in... back to the store the box goes.
If MS decides to drop sales of their best OS to date to prop up sales of a defective product then they will richly deserve all that comes their way. DVDs with p1rated copies of Win7 will proliferate and MS will not be able to do much because they are no longer profiting from that software anyway. Ballmer will be fired, and probably someone sane will take his place to make apologies and mend MS ways.
It feels like Windows 7 merged with a cheap Phone OS, and the blending makes it very confusing to navigate around.
Metro is the Star Trek TNG UI coded by people without even an ounce of artistic talent. I, for one, hate those ugly, large, boxy shapes and those atrocious colors. Have anyone here downloaded the Visual Studio 2012 RC? It has two color themes (light and dark) and both are murderous on the user. Humans don't even see these colors around them much - and most certainly we aren't surrounded by large boxy shapes. We work with nicely made tools and objects of soft, pleasant color. Windows was progressing to render those naturally, and by Win7 they were pretty well done. Win8 discards all that - the bathwater, the baby, the church, and the whole planet too, for good measure.
A good unified "panel" design of ST:TNG is there because the computers that the crew is operating are fixed purpose devices to run the ship. That's why similar designs are OK on tablets - which are largely single purpose devices to run one application out of some selection of applications. Desktops are neither needed nor wanted to run one application full screen (or tiled down to half of the screen.) Desktops run tens of applications, their windows customized to fit the monitor and to show that needs to be shown. Metro denies users all that "information under their fingertips," as BG's ghost writers put it. You can now only see what one application shows you, even if your screen is 27" or you have multiple monitors. Win8 is very inconvenient to use; its salvation may be only in hacks that remove Metro and put the customizable Start menu back.
At work if my computer died I would be forced to accept an OEM built computer running whatever is the current operating system, which is about to be Windows 8.
Either you are working for a zero-bit one-man business that is clueless about computers, or you will get Win7. No business will even consider thinking about possibly deploying Win8 anywhere in their infrastructure - not for many years, and perhaps not ever. There is zero business reason to involve Win8, and lots of downsides (such as loss of productivity and new training expenses and never-ending whining from The Old Guard that this newfangled thingy is so unfamiliar.)
PS. Since when Trayvon Martin is considered "a man who is an expert in all things physical"?
Since GZ almost got killed by TM, an unarmed man. Perhaps TM was not an expert on Olympic scale, but he was expert enough for GZ - and that's all that matters. After all, TM was a trained athlete (a football player,) and GZ would be unable to defend himself against a mouse, short of shooting it :-) The great equalizer was invented exactly for those reasons.
I didn't comment on your assertion that a trained fighter will be unable to disarm or disable an opponent armed with a makeshift weapon. That assertion is not very easy to prove. I am not an expert in martial arts, but I read some training materials out of curiosity. These materials clearly describe those scenarios - and in many cases there are actions that you, as a trained fighter, can take to do what you need. One of them is running away, of course; that is strongly recommended if you are unarmed against an opponent with an edged weapon or a gun. What we see in movies is not reality. But there are many other situations and recommendations for them. Do you think that if you in an open confrontation pick up a random stick and take a swing at Bruce Lee you will take him down? Just a week or two ago there was a news article about a martial arts expert who killed another man who pulled a gun on him. His skills certainly didn't fail him when it mattered.
even then it should be ran through ground based conduit.
Your objections are valid. But there are situations when underground conduits are impractical. A large, busy city street is one such example. Castle Wolfenstein would be another. Buildings on two shores of a river would be yet another example - trivial to cross in the air and next to impossible (not within an IT budget) by boring under the water. Fiber will be fine; there is armored cable that is designed for such duty - even though it is not under strain. I use CAT5 on my property; the cable is UV-resistant and intended for direct burial.
Of course when we get that far we can think of microwave links or laser/infrared. With enough power they will be fine in any weather. But I wasn't aiming for a practical example. Though that example was taken from real life because I had to hang a wire once between buildings. It was done this way for a good reason - it was an antenna.
"We have one full spool of cable, one empty spool, and a spool with an unknown length of the cable. How much cable do we have on the partially used spool?"
"We need to drag this cable from here to there. You cannot follow the path of the cable everywhere. We have no plans of this building, but here is your measuring tape. We have as many feet of cable on this spool as you calculated above. Will it be enough?"
"We need to hang a cable between two buildings, from height $h1 on building A to height $h2 on building B. The cable will be tied to a steel wire that can have tension up to $F newtons. Masses of the wire and the cable (per meter) are known, as well as the distance between the buildings. What is the required length of the cable and the wire, considering that the wire forms a catenary? When done, calculate the wind load for the wind speed of $speed m/s and tell me if the steel wire is strong enough."
You probably are not a professional bat wielder. You probably never touched that bat since the day you bought it. You are an engineer who routinely lifts things as heavy as a pencil.
Now, you are against two or three young and strong men (think Trayvon Martin) who are experts in all things physical. They may carry bats, or knives, or bike chains, or guns. You are overwhelmed. Swinging a bat at them is suicidal because you will not even disable one of them, and the two other will make sure you won't ever repeat your mistake.
But if you have a handgun that is ready to fire then even one shot into center of mass of each attacker will definitely reduce their interest in doing anything except collecting a few loose coils of their intestines and limping out to the nearest hospital. The magazine of your handgun will be still 50% to 70% full, just in case one of the attackers is not yet convinced and reaches for his gun. (Note that many guns used in crimes are not functional since criminals are not known for caring for their tools of trade.)
A bat has other deficiencies as well. For example, you cannot swing it in narrow corridors, door openings, and in rooms with low ceilings. A handgun is free from that problem.
Finally, if you manage to chase robbers away with a bat they are likely to be unhappy with you, and they will be back with guns to get even. Your bat will be less effective then.
Not having a gun in the house kind of makes it hard for a kid to shoot himself in the face with your non-existent gun.
Not having a gun in the house also prevents you from teaching your kid about guns. This means that if your child (who is old enough to shoot or be close) is not familar with a firearm to the point that it is no longer a "forbidden fruit" to him then the kid is 100% likely to play with someone else's gun as soon as he can get hold of it. Perhaps that would be the gun that your neighborhood dealer had to drop as he was chased by the police.
The first and the best line of defense against any threat is in detailed knowledge of the threat. Kids are curious. Remove their curiosity by teaching them to shoot. They will be bored in 15 minutes, guaranteed. The loud noise, even with hearing protection, is not a pleasant thing. The recoil will be hard on small hands. Let them experience this, under control, and they will not want to do it on their own. Show them what a 9mm bullet does to a wet phone book and they will not be casual about firearms. If they want to shoot some more, take them to the range. You cannot defeat the curiosity of a child, but you can join it - and by doing so you can direct and control it. If such a child sees a firearm in school or in the street he will not be attracted to it; the first thing that will come to his head would be the image of wounds that his fist can go through. He will instinctively do the right thing: "STOP! Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult." An untrained child will never do that because it is so counter-intuitive. An untrained child's priorities will be opposite: "What is it? May I touch it? May I take it home? May I play with it with my friends?"
Slashdot is full of children who do not yet understand cause and effect. Another issue is that only in the USA firearm ownership is more or less accepted; in Canada too, to a much lesser extent. In nearly all other countries of the world you have to jump through many hoops to get a permit for a shotgun that is only dangerous to ducks. Lack of shooting culture creates lack of understanding. People who never shot guns in their life are likely to not even comprehend why would anyone want to do that. And as such, they will vote to deny this privilege. If they don't have it, then nobody shall have it. It's called "tolerance" now.
Presence of starry-eyed teenagers is also evident in frequent references to bicycles. It is normal for a young person to take a bicycle to his college. However I seldom see a family man carrying a few 40-lb bags of salt on his bike. This is because family and home ownership come with literally heavy responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is protection of your family. If you choose to depend on the police to protect you, it's your right. But don't complain that the police comes just in time to outline the bodies and write a report. I'm listening to police radio quite often, and after the assignment is given the officer replies with his response time. Usually it is about 15 minutes. Cities are large, and there are only so many units on duty. You will be cold by the time the police shows up. The problem is exaggerated by the large number of criminal illegals from Central America. Those guys escape their own countries, where they are wanted for something already, and become invisibles in the US society. They don't exist; they can't be looked for; they can't be identified; if stopped, they give a dozen names, all false. They are free to do whatever they want - and, surprise - they do.
NO, it's not possible to abandon violence. We can transmute it in something else - sporting, playing, perhaps sex.
This has been tried for hundreds of years, and attempts always failed. Take your common British football fan. He is happy and agitated when watching the match. But as soon as the match ends the same fan on his way home feels the need to continue to be violent - and he, with his friends, smashes windows, flips cars and does other things that we know so well. A violent person remains violent. Even the most peaceful peacemaker on Earth would grab a knife and shove it into your liver if you seriously threaten her children.
The idea of channeling violence into other activity is impossible because it depends on the human mind to do the channeling. Even today a gangbanger from a ghetto can discard his knives and his guns and instead become an artist - a painter, a composer, a writer. There are many ways for a human to put his energy to better use. Majority of people do just that. However what stops the gangbanger from painting another Mona Lisa? His mind stops him. Until you give him a new mind he will continue to be a feral animal. Gangbanger's brain is on par with a rat's brain, just as complicated and driven by similar primitive desires. Is it physical or mental? I don't know. But looking at it as a black box, the similarity is obvious.
Losing violence is equal to losing means to protect ourselves from forces of nature or from other forms of life, or from deranged people. I'd say one has to completely abandon the physical form and become immortal, immune to all dangers, before the violence can be abandoned. But when you become god-like then perhaps you can afford to become a pacifist.
Studies on the bonobos suggest that sex is a very effective escape valve to violence. This ape is one of the less violent on the primate species, albeit being on the most sexualized.
Humans are already doing sex for most of their free time. There is no margin to do more of it. Besides, humans are more complex animals than small monkeys. Sex is not the ultimate reward for humans. Power over other humans is. And you do not want to offer that reward to anyone...
Your 2000 page long volume probably would be better served by LaTeX or InDesign depending on your taste.
Technically - yes. However it's better to forget LaTeX as a bad dream; I haven't met anyone who knows what LaTeX is, let alone how to use it, in at least a decade. Engineers who write hundreds of pages of manuals do not know anything except Word, and they feel no reason to learn anything else (they have other software to learn that is far more important to them.) Word works, and that's good enough.
I don't know what InDesign is because I never encountered it in a business setting. Perhaps there is a copy floating somewhere in marketing, but you certainly don't find it among the ranks.
Anything that is not WYSIWYG is programming of documents. Only programmers can do that. Majority of users do not understand that a certain statement will insert a picture at a later time. If the picture is not in front of their eyes they freak out. Word caters to those. LaTeX remains in the domain of scientists - and even there, as I heard, its positions are quickly diluted by rich text and HTML email. Admit it, it's a big difference between receiving a line of TeX code to compile in your head and between seeing a finished formula on the screen. Scientists are also humans, they don't care about how the formula gets there. The "how" is not something they can get a Nobel prize for. They only want the result, in the easiest way possible. Everything else just wastes their time.
"Business people sends out documents that require office because business people send out documents that require office" is circular reasoning. And, I think, wrong.
You can also say that American people speak English because other American people speak English. It is a circular reasoning, but it does not make it wrong in itself. An established system has some means to stabilize itself, otherwise it wouldn't be established in the first place. Such a system is resistant to external events, to some extent. Windows monopoly got a serious kick in the side for Vista; let's see what happens with Win8. By the way, if the threshold of resistance is exceeded (like of a gyroscope) the failure is violent and chaotic.
So you purposely turn away business because of your fanatical attachment to a single file format/application, when you could perfectly easily export to a PDF
I'm doing business for many years now. You asked DogDude, but my own answer to that would be "YES." My experience shows that picky customers are not customers at all. If someone walks into your hat store, asks if you have yellow hats, then tries all that you have... chances are good that this person will not buy anything. Even if he does buy something, you will spend too much time on that one customer. You typically do not want such a customer and such a sale.
You can see this as a simple test. The customer wants to probe your business before he entrusts you with an order. However you also want to probe the customer's business to be sure that he will pay. If a guy can't afford just one copy of MS Office then he most certainly can't afford my product, and any further communication with him is pointless.
Some customers are "high maintenance customers." Pickiness of this kind belongs to that group. You then need to look at the potential gain that you can get out of this sale. If the gain is low enough you will be better off saying "No bid" because your precious time will be better spent on other customers, or just on playing with your dogs at home (or your children, if for some reason you object to dogs ;-)
I am sure your manager would love to hear about your antics.
People who make statements about who is a good customer and who is a bad customer are often their own bosses. They don't report to anyone. That's the whole reason why they need to have those opinions - there is nobody else who would do this for them. If you are not in charge you do not care. But even in large businesses, with a long chain of commands, directors of business development often listen to their subordinates - they very much want to know their opinions. A large company does not want to start manufacturing a large order of custom equipment if a tiny, unknown, fly-by-night company shows up with an order. If such an order is accepted it will be 100% prepaid, and the sale contract will be longer than the user's manual.
I mean, what are business people sending out that requires Office?
What kind of a document would the customer send to you when he wants to order a $100M set of ore mining machines?
What kind of a document you send back to that customer to tell him that you have what it takes and you can prove it?
What kind of a document the customer modifies and returns back to you (with the cycle repeating several times) until you have the technical requirements worked out?
What kind of a document your lawyers kick back and forth until you sign it?
What kind of a document you ship along with several thousand tons of machinery so that the customer may know how to operate it?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, in 2012 if you're using Office for anything more complex than a letter to mom or a school book report - you're probably doing it wrong.
The whole industry of the entire world is then doing it wrong.
And even then, you should save your $$ and use something free(Wordpad, Open Office, Google Docs)...
I'd love to see a 2,000 page long Volume 15 of the System Level User Manual as a Google Docs document. Its size would be measured in hundreds of megabytes, with all these illustrations and drawings... Even if you ship it to the customer as a PDF (as you should,) it still doesn't make it possible to edit such a massive document. You also need it correctly reflowed and rendered in real time. You could use the Master Document approach, but Google Docs doesn't support that (MS Office does.)
I tried to use OpenOffice, and each time it failed me in a bad way. With its current fragmentation it's even hard to tell what version does what. I'm not going to waste my time on fiddling with a wordprocessor; I have *new* stuff to work on.
If your $50/hr worker spends three or four extra hours during his entire employment at your office on troubles with OpenOffice then you incurred loss already, and that loss will be only increasing. The employee costs to the company about twice his salary, due to taxes and the infrastructure. Human labor is the most expensive resource in a company; you do not want to waste it on irrelevant things. Otherwise next you will be saying that instead of a $800 Dell desktop the employee should be given a R-Pi board and an old monitor.
Tap the Windows key and the first few letters of the application name.
You walk up to a computer. What do you type if you don't know what is installed on it? This is a common situation in a business environment.
Or you sit in front of your own computer, need to take a screenshot... what do you type? You know that you used to have some scissors icon in the start menu, but it's gone now. You type "scissors" and nothing comes up. What do you do now? (The tool is called "Snipping tool", good luck associating that with a screenshot or with scissors that are in its icon.)
Less than 2% of the world X86 market is being sold with touch.
One of my friends bought a Sony all-in-one with a touch screen, accidentally. (He wanted just a large screen.) Within a couple of weeks he asked me to disable the touch entirely because whenever he touches the screen for any purpose (to clean dust or to point something on the screen to others) the screen reacts, totally unexpectedly. He told me that he has no use for touch whatsoever. He is the only person that I know that owns a touch-capable desktop.
If you drive a car, at some point you're going to get pulled over. You're going to get a ticket of some sort with high probability.
If you don't break the law you are not likely to be ever pulled over.
In fact, I would say that a bike rider has more chances to interact with the police than a car driver. Roads are built for cars, whether you like it or not. A bicycle is not an equal on the road. Good, well trained riders are seldom a problem. But plenty don't bother to stop for the red light, for example, as long as in their opinion they can proceed. Bikes have to travel on the side of the road, where cars are parked, so you have more obstacles to steer around; at the same time car drivers, driving at 40 mph, are not that happy to see you appearing before them, pedaling at breakneck speed of 10 mph. A job of a bicycle rider is very dangerous, IMO, just because you are sufficiently different from the majority of traffic. If you want to become invisible you blend in. But you do the opposite.
There's no real way to be stopped and searched on a bicycle.
This is patently untrue. My local Sheriff's department regularly does stops of bicycles. Many criminals use bicycles too, they are quiet, portable and untraceable. If the police stops you and has a lawful cause to search you then you *will* be searched, and your blood taken, and whatever else your masters want from you.
With cycling, there's no tax to pay. No fuel to pay for.
You pay with your health, and with more food that you have to buy. Bicycles offer less protection to you from elements, other drivers, and from obstacles. Not everyone even benefits from heavy physical work (I do not, for example, for a good reason.)
Often, it is faster than a car journey anyway.
That could be true or false depending on where you live. Most cyclists would get a heart attack climbing up the hill where I live, even just once and without cargo. It would certainly take them far longer to get here than in a car. Same applies to freeways. But if you operate in a densely populated city then a bicycle is faster.
Cycling is probably one of the only remaining modes of transport that is truly free in both senses of the word.
I don't think so. There are no modes of transport that fit the definition of "free." Except perhaps drifing across the Atlantic on a reed raft. That would be free, I admit that much :-) But once you reach land you become a subject of the local government, and it usually has power to kill you with impunity - let alone to monitor your movements. Your choice of a vehicle does not matter.
How do you syntesize that hydrogen dioxide you want banned?
Would you settle on dihydrogen dioxide instead?
These days if you tried to revolt with the pea shooters you're still allowed to buy, the military could just kill you with a hellfire missile launched from a drone 20 miles away.
Is this the reason why US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered zero losses?
If every US citizen shoots one US soldier and gets killed in return, the US Army will be wiped out completely, down to the last man, while the population suffers loss of only 0.3%. The US Army exists only because the population allows it to exist.
There were enough urban conflicts in recent time. The one in Syria is ongoing. You can be sure that the well-armed military does not have an upper hand over a ragtag band of freedom fighters. Armies exist to fight other armies. The drone can attack a specific location... but drone operators need to know which location to hit. Cities provide unlimited cover to all kinds of fighters. The military can level a city and destroy the resistance this way; however it is rarely done, and if a US military destroys a US city it will sign its own death warrant.
Experience of recent operations tells us that the army cannot even hold territory. All it can, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to build small, fortified bases and stay there. We can call them "prisons" for convenience, since the word is fitting well. The US Army has no control over the adjacent land, or over the villages and cities - or over people's minds. It can venture out, suffer a few losses to IEDs, perhaps capture a militant or two, and retreat. In essence, troops there are just targets.
Also consider that currently the US Army enjoys unlimited supplies of war materiel, since factories in the USA are working and producing everything that the Pentagon asks for. This will not be the case if widespread social unrest stops production. The US military does not have an unlimited supply of high-tech weapons - they are too expensive to stockpile. The US Army also does not have millions of boots to be put on the ground; for each grunt with a gun you have nine support personnel who aren't trained fighters (a.k.a. sitting ducks.) If there is ever a conflict between the US Army and The People (which IMO is not very likely) then the Army will fare not any better than Assad's troops in Damascus. They will not be able to use methods of total war on the US territory; and the fallback methods give advantage to militiamen. But the most important factor here will be disobedience, desertion and switching sides. A US soldier is required by law to reject illegal orders. A commander who orders his subordinates to fly a mission and firebomb a US city will find himself arrested, if he is lucky - or fragged if his luck wore thin.
Anybody who doesn't have the sense to know if their kid is still in the "wants to taste everything" stage will just as easily give them live ammo.
You don't even need to go for exotic scenarios. Gasoline from a car and some matches can be far more dangerous than a few grams of minimally contained propellant.