1. Getting married for the right reasons, like genuinely liking the whole of other person
I don't like people in general, and dislike many specifically. I don't want their wealth or their children. Children are a special group that I dislike twice as much.
Both sides of the relationship focused more on "what can I do for my partner"
I'd rather focus on my own projects instead of working for someone else. If they want my help they should help me back (cash is an acceptable medium of exchange.)
Working at it, and believing the relationship is more important than other things
Relationship is an imaginary, immaterial feeling that is entirely virtual and transitory. I wouldn't spend even a millisecond nurturing a relationship. I have real work to do, and real people need results of that work. I don't deal in feelings, I work with logic, facts and physical objects. The only relationship that I accept is a business relationship, formalized in contracts and other documents. I'm not against cooperation.
Having a good income coming in
I have enough for myself and I have no intention to share it with wives or their children. If they want money they can go and earn it themselves.
Being willing to genuinely forgive the partner.
I do that when people make mistakes. But when someone intentionally wants to hurt me, that will not be forgotten, and measures will be taken. Usually, though, those who try to hurt me are hurting themselves far more. As a proverbial man at the river I only need to sit there and observe the stream.
Each partner having a social life beyond their spouse.
What is that "social life" thing you are talking about, and what is it good for?
Are you sure you've met any married people, or are they all the "married in Vegas after meeting on a drunk weekend" variety?
Among my school friends (who are more or less a random sample) all who married had at least one divorce. Why would anyone want to go through this mess? A divorce can also ruin you financially - either as a one-time hit, or as decade-long shackles of child support. The quote from "True Lies" is actually very wise.
By far the majority are happy in their marriage - or present a good appearance of being so
The latter. As one married person told me, "At first it's difficult but then you get used to it."
Buy your own set of police handcuffs without a key, and then get a key. With millions of pairs in use it shouldn't be too difficult. Then you have a perfect reason to own a key. If the judge asks why do you need handcuffs you can always claim curiosity about BDSM.
Slashdot is a news site only insofar as it links to sites that actually *do* report news.
Slashdot is famous for not RTFA. Why is that? Because most of the value of Slashdot is not in consuming the news piece and walking away but in listening to what other people say and perhaps adding your own opinion to the mix. Just like we do right now.
News on Slashdot are nothing but topics of discussion. Humans (not only those of female persuasion) thrive on taking a hypothesis and constructing an entire universe of possibilities out of it. This way one can be creative.
Besides, plenty of local news can be generated locally, within the community. Just this morning a large trailer was stuck on the road not far from my house, unable to pass a switchback. I could have reported on that; others took pictures with their cell phones, and Highway Patrol was there, and a crane to free the hapless trailer. Majority of witnesses of events are not reporters but regular citizens who go about their business and encounter something unusual. With proliferation of always-on mobile connectivity this is extremely simple. Even major newspapers are not ashamed to ask "Have you been a witness to this event? Tell us all about it..."
Next the geek has to ditch his day-job and start investigating local stories, to make the site compelling to the potential readership.
Stories will be happily delivered by the readership themselves, just as it was happening for thousands of years before.
That is not going to replace the local rag without a lot of hard work.
A local rag cannot afford a team of journalists. At best that would be one or two guys, and they can't be everywhere. In the end the stories will be delivered by eyewitnesses themselves. Previously journalists were needed to record the words and to put them on paper. Today a reporting party can post her own words and provide her own photos - from the very site of the story, if need be.
Nice try at trying to make me look like someone who looks down on small town people though.
I didn't mean to create such impression. I only wanted to say that people in small towns have free time - perhaps even more of it than people in large cities, just because the nearest theater is 100 miles away.
I was visiting people in a small town (population about 520) in CA a few months ago. They had wireless internet (Verizon) pretty much everywhere. They had access to Web and email inside the house and outside. In fact, Verizon is their Internet link through a MiFi dongle. Satellite is also an option but they did not need it.
If you really want to try and refute my point supply some successful examples of an individual running a website that is out performing the towns newspaper.
We are posting on one. It was custom built from the ground up by a couple of geeks. Today a similar project would take just a couple of hours, not a couple of months. A newspaper is simply not capable of offering an interactive service. Comparing them would be disastrous to the newspaper - that's why newspapers are dying.
No website is going to report on stuff that matters to them, because those 1k or 30k people towns don't generally matter to them.
You believe that in a crowd of 1K to 30K people there is not one geek who can set up a LAMP with Joomla? And that there are no willing contributors who can master the simple user interface of Joomla? Life in small towns is not all hard labor, it's also long periods of boredom.
A newspaper is a costly proposition. You have to print it somewhere (your 1K village has no printing press!) and deliver quickly, and distribute. There is no feedback.
An electronic newspaper is free to publish. It supports logins for subscription if you insist on it, but logins are primarily for comments. This makes it interactive. That Fred Smith from a ranch 30 miles down the road does not come to town every day, but he is certain to log in every morning and every evening, read it all and add comments to whatever he finds interesting.
I haven't touched a newspaper in a decade. Probably haven't intentionally seen one either. Why would anyone want one? It's not even ecologically sensible, to kill trees just to deliver a few minutes per day of amusement to a family when the same, or better, can be achieved electronically, at a millionth of cost.
tl;dr: if its not broke, don't re-invent it! 're-writing email systems' has got to the be the stupidest thing you could do, today!
The fashion industry reinvents itself every year by cyclically going through old designs and selling them as the new thing. The pendulum of "thick clients" vs. "thin clients" is well known in the computer industry. Reinventing things is necessary to create new markets and fill them with new products. A smartphone allowed telecom companies to sell $100/mo plans with extra charges where previously a $25/mo plan was seen as an overkill. A smartphone is nothing but a new Tamagotchi that you are expected to continually buy software for and pay for the connectivity, and listen to its every beep. But in the end it is not more valuable than the original Tamagotchi or a pet rock.
Indeed people are tired of the endless race, and when Microsoft reinvents Windows all they get is angry complaints. This is because the new Windows does not solve almost any new problem, but it creates lots of problems out of thin air. Progress is good, but humanity would be better off if MS would stop at Windows 7, continue to maintain it, and if they are that anxious to do something new they can create a new product, call it "Glass" or something, and promote that, completely separately and without messing with millions of users of Windows.
I retired my laptop recently and replaced it with a desktop PC. I was tired of laptop's limitations. It had a small (17") screen and the connection to an external monitor crashed the system. It had only 2 GB of RAM, and my use patterns require more. Its performance was mediocre. Fans were noisy and right in front of me. And so on...
The laptop was consuming 45 watts (as measured with a Kill-a-watt.) The desktop draws 50 watts. The difference is completely irrelevant. Now I have a decent 1920x1080 Acer H274HL LED monitor, so I can have many windows on the screen at the same time. The box is under the table and I do not hear the fans. Fans are easy to replace when they wear out. There is 8 GB of RAM and I can install more if I want to. Lots of HDD space. Excellent performance.
Cringely and others like him simply found a new wave to ride. Now they are endlessly writing that everyone will soon be computing on their cell phones. But I bet that Cringely typed his screed on at least a laptop - if not on a desktop. Professionals do not really need portable devices. What they need is computing power, lots of it. Why to sit idly and look at the computer that is locked up and thinking its own computery thoughts?
The laptop, of course, will be reimaged and restored; the hardware is reasonably OK and I have replacement fans for it. But it will no longer be my primary computer. It's not worth it. Laptops are always a step down from a desktop in terms of performance because they have to be small and flat. A large design can be "greener" than a small one because it can afford more efficient - and larger - components. The example of the desktop that draws as little as the laptop is an illustration of that.
If you buy a phone and pay at least some of your own money then "we control your phone" is a bad idea. You will be making personal calls, installing personal software, etc. If you quit it may be all but impossible to disconnect your phone from the corporate servers. (That happened to one of my friends - he had to throw the phone out, buy a new phone and transfer the number.)
If the employee pays some of his own money then you can be sure that EPEAT would be one of his lowest priorities in the selection of the device. Few people are willing to make big (on the personal scale) sacrifice for a tiny (drop in the ocean) benefit to the planet.
If the company pays 100% then "a stipend" is reduced down to the list of phones that the company is willing to support. Really the list doesn't have to be large - one iPhone, one simple candy bar phone, and a couple of decent Android phones. Then the phone belongs to the employer and there is no dual use. This is how many companies buy (or lease) notebooks. The employee is given a list, he picks what he likes, and he gets it. Without the list you will end up with useless hardware (if you are lucky) or with 1,000 models that you now have to support (if you are not lucky at all.)
If the public doesn't change their buying in response to Apple's move, then all the other vendors may decide that EPEAT certification isn't necessary for them to sell products.
Except that bottom (or inline) posters are much more likely to trim the quotes, because they have to look as part of the response
True. However we are mostly discussing business email here (where Outlook is the king.) Personal email is moved to Web-based MUAs long ago.
In a business setting you do not want to trim quotes. In fact, you do not want to mess with the message besides typing your two cents on top. Here is why.
It costs nothing today to store, transmit and deliver the entire conversation in each and every message. This is not on the radar of IT departments. Sending 10 MB attachments to 100 recipients - yes, that could be problematic. But replies do not have attachments.
It is valuable to look at any message and instantly have access to the entire conversation that led to it. Yes, earlier messages are probably also archived... or maybe not. When you receive tens of emails every day you cannot say that you remember what you did with any given message. Often I find the data that I need not in my own message that I sent but in someone's reply to it.
Quoting other people destroys their statements. Accusations of selective quoting are possible. Honest mistakes are also possible. Once you trim the quote you cannot go back. If you do not trim then everyone can see for themselves what was said and by who.
Top posting hides the history of the conversation unless you actually need it. Then you simply scroll down. There is no harm in having it all there.
On the other hand, there is plenty of wasted time in trimming the quotes and in arranging one's reply. Then you send and tens or hundreds of people have to read through the quoted part, scroll down and look for your two cents. This is a massive waste of time in a large country. This is good only for sellers of wheel mice.
Top poster's reply is right in front of you as soon as you open the message. In fact, many short messages are even shown to you in the notification pop-up, so that you see what's up without opening the message and without interrupting your work.
Top posting concatenates messages. You can have hundreds of replies down there and they all look exactly as they were sent, with their own formatting intact, with embedded tables, images, highlighting, and whatever else they contain. Rich text is essential for engineers. Bottom posting requires nested quotes; very quickly you run out of horizontal space and your quotes run off the edge of the screen and wrap and it becomes an unreadable mess. Nested quoting of rich text is difficult, if not impossible - you have to be aware of the layout. This is far more than a busy worker can afford to just say "Sure, order three more and we are good."
Both posting orders have its place. Bottom post is useful if you publish for a very wide audience. You want to minimize the traffic, so you trim the quotes. You quote your opponent and then reply so that the discussion looks natural. Bottom posting practically requires plain text format.
Top post is better for smaller groups that are aware of the conversation. Top post can be seen as two parts: the message that you just typed and the history. Most people only want your message, but the history is also there because it costs nothing to keep it and it may be bad if you remove it, and it would cost you time if you start editing and rearranging it.
Today email is a commodity. Days of UUCP and 120 baud modems are gone. There is no point in saving bytes. Personal time is now the resource that we want to save.
never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever)
I used Thunderbird for a while. Had to remove it after I got mad enough at it. The rich text editor in it was broken - it refused to use fonts that I wanted, reverting back at every opportunity. Also it loved to eat ends of lines - all of them in one big bite. Start typing your reply, press END, press DEL and now the first line of the quoted text is sitting at the cursor.
Eventually I got tired of that and reverted to the Dark Side. (Or is it Yellow Side now?) At least it works. This is not the year 2000 to endlessly mess with MUAs. I want my email to work, and the best MUA to do it gets the job.
Linux is much better than Windows for headless operation. Each instance of Windows assumes a live human sitting in front of the screen. Linux assumes nothing, and it has all the remote access and maintenance tools one might want. This is somewhat important if you build clusters.
Linux also has a far better multiuser operation. Windows supports multiple users, in theory, but outside of impossibly expensive Terminal Servers this remains just a theoretical possibility. A single logon will eat a gigabyte and one CPU core. Linux logins are lightweight (at cost of one getty and one bash) and once you are in you can run whatever you want. Furthermore, if your software needs X it runs on your terminal and not on the more expensive and heavily used shared server.
Windows' advantages are simple: bling and availability of COTS software. Since none of that is of interest to scientists, Windows has no advantage over Linux - except that scientists may run Windows on their laptops for sake of MS Office and Outlook.
But there is yet another reason. Many XP boxes are not certifiably capable or running Windows 7. A geek may try to upgrade his ancient Celeron box with a pirated Win7; he risks nothing if the box bluescreens or is too slow. But why would a business do that? An upgrade costs money in all aspects, but what will be gained? Since XP all the updates that MS produced are (in a business setting) either neutral or detrimental (Win8.) I have a few XP laptops, they will never be upgraded.
Similarly, if you package an update for Android (for each phone, perfectly good) and let phone owners know - how many, in your opinion, will accept the offer? I think 5% at most, even though the upgrade is free. Majority of phone|tablet users do not see their devices as computers; they see them as self-contained appliances - and we do not upgrade the firmware in microwave ovens.
and has made statements about being on a mission to stop "two wars" (i.e. the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan)
Why would that be illegal? Publishing US secrets was not a crime for Assange because he haven't signed on the dotted line. Manning did, and he is being punished for that.
So in fact, maybe merit really is a factor here, because if they're being turned down for these jobs, that shows they probably aren't as good as the people who do get to work there.
Or perhaps because CERN exists on limited funding and cannot hire every scientist in the world - even if CERN managers love the idea. If a particular place of research is unusually productive... expect long lines at the gates.
The experiments on LHC are scheduled years ahead. You cannot just come there, flip a switch and run your own experiment. It will cost millions in electric energy alone. CERN can sustain only a certain number of teams - or else they will be just sitting there and waiting for their time with the machine.
Perhaps the scientists are employed by universities and have teaching jobs assigned to them. Then they cannot easily move without abandoning their students. (That would be legal but not very nice.)
Theoretical physicists do not need to be near an experiment. Plenty of physics is done on paper (or in computers.) For those scientists Texas is just as good a place as any other.
Google's own numbers show ~90% Android users still aren't on 4.0+, and it's been almost nine months since ICS was released.
There are still millions of Windows XP boxes even though Windows 7 is out there for years. Does that indicate that the Windows upgrade process is broken?
Android devices are sold as something a notch below Apple products (at least because it's not Apple.) Android phones cost less, and as result they are sold to customers who just want a phone. There are very few geeks in that crowd. Among geeks there are very few people who want to risk all the data that they have on the phone for sake of upgrade to a new version of the OS that they haven't seen and don't know what it does better or worse. Most people don't even know what they have and what else is out there. I have a Galaxy Tab device; I don't even know what version of Android it runs! I don't even know what versions are out there! Why? Because I don't care. It's not a quest of my life to nurture and maintain the most recent version of Android on a device that does what it needs to do already. I see no point in upgrading it. It's a tool and it works well.
Sure. Mexico is also having no effective control over most of its territory. Comparing Mexican crime to US is unfair because the USA is #1 in everything (incl. crime.) With regard to 2050, I can also make forecasts that I will not live to see proven or overturned. Companies are operating in all countries of the world - in Africa, in Asia, in Europe. Do you think it is safe to run diamond mining in Africa, where every warlord wants the crystals to pay for his war toys? Malaria, wars, rogue Army of God, AIDS, poisonous wildlife, patently bankrupt governments, pirates - all that is Africa; and still Western companies are there. They'd be on the Moon if only they could. Doesn't say much about the country; it only says that the country has exploitable resources, and the price of using them is acceptable to company's directors who live in London and never have to smell the burnt powder.
I will be ready to accept that MX is the best country in the world as soon as its government eliminates all narco-cartels (including Zetas) and makes sure that mass executions in the style that is so common these days in Mexico are no more. Until that happens I will continue to see MX as a weak country that is de-facto governed by organized crime; a country that cannot even keep its own peasants employed, so that they have to cross the border and work on slave-like terms in the USA.
I can only say that such an idea was so counter to the intentions of the programmers, that they assumed the users wouldn't think it likely either.
Perhaps. I'm really surprised that Google, with all its size, did not consider calling for a psychological study. As you point out, customer-facing products can make us happy or angry. If only we were all robots this wouldn't be a problem. Logically, there is nothing wrong with dangerous designs - as long as you never make a mistake. But people don't work like that. We may look at one thing and perceive it as something completely different because it triggered some association and activated our fears.
Imagine a device that says "if you press this button you will have a 20% chance of dying before you reach 65 years of age." How many people will press that button? But the button does nothing (let's assume that the 20% figure is a naturally occurring probability of death in this range of age.) It's Pascal's Wager all over again.
This debacle is not an uncommon occurrence at Google, though. The company has issues. The list of their stupid decisions is long and it is growing fast. I think they just don't have capable management in place. They can have endless meetings that discuss placement of individual pixels, but - as the facts illustrate - they never bothered to ask if the users want those pixels in the first place. Numerous management and good management are not one and the same.
This is not unique to Google. Do I need to say more than Windows 8 and its Metro? Same issues, same non-solutions, same cramming of unwanted features down the throat of some customers. Is it some sort of a corporate senility? I'm amazed that so many businesses (hey, Cisco!) choose to shoot themselves in the foot without even a second thought. This is not rocket science by any means; a 5 y/o child would have told you that. Perhaps they need to hire a 5 y/o child as an advisor?
When you start typing a name in the To: field, and gmail offers to autocomplete it, are you offended that gmail thought you forgot the name of the person you are sending email to?
There are two parts in my rejection of this misfeature.
One part is that it makes it simpler to make mistakes. It is harmless to forget someone on an email. You can always copy this person separately - or one of recipients of your email can forward. There is no penalty.
On the other hand, including someone who should not be included is sometimes disastrous. My example of different customers is very indicative of that. You can also be in negotiations with different employers, different contractors, and so on. Google cannot understand why you include some people and not the other. From Google's point of view if you copied someone just once then you should copy him always. This is obviously not so. You can email your GF and her mom when you discuss "official" matters, but you probably should not include the mom when you discuss far more personal things.
Suggesting to copy makes such mistakes more likely. As you say, it doesn't take a superhuman effort to type a few characters of the name and get it autocompleted. You are looking at the field at this time so you can confirm that the autocompletion is correct. If you don't like it you can delete autocompletion entries (though in GMail you have to delete the whole contact, IIRC.) Clicking is much simpler and can lead to errors.
Another reason to be unhappy is that I don't want to take these advices from computers. I don't want to personify a machine, but such an advice is a pretty arrogant thing. Would you like a robot to advice you on lovemaking? Worst of all, you know that this advice is not based on any good reasons (such as the content of the email) - it is only based on groupings of recipients that were seen before. You, as a sentient being, understand that those groupings mean nothing. A persistent and stupid advice is annoying.
Not all advices from computers are like that. For example, spell checkers and grammar checkers are usually well received. First of all, they are smarter than most people in this narrow area of expertise. Second, they can be turned off entirely, or they can be told to ignore this specific instance, or they can be told to learn the new word. They are not confrontational, they are not trying to teach you how to live your life. And if you still have a problem with that, go ahead and turn them off - it is easy.
Google's advisor cannot be turned off. If it were, nobody would rail against this feature. They'd simply disable it and continue; this feature would be never seen again. But Google, in its infinite arrogance, decided that everyone must have this thing because Google knows best. You can be unhappy that a robot gives you Clippy-like stupid advices, but in the end you are far more unhappy about humans at Google that foisted this upon you. Slashdot audience used to advocate variety; it is strange that now "one size fits all" applications are lauded here by so many. Apple-like reduction of choice is now a new virtue. Wouldn't you be a tad upset that a company thinks that you are unable to use a computer with choices?
By the way, I just mentioned MS Office Assistant - the beloved Clippy. The analogy is very close. Clippy was universally hated because it was an idiot giving stupid advices to people. But at lease Clippy could be uninstalled. Microsoft was not *that* full of themselves to make Clippy a mandatory part of the Office experience. Google is, obviously.
There is yet another, third now, part that contributes to rejection of this feature. You never know if GMail is going to send the email to those guys or not. You know that it can. You also know that it says it won't unless you click there. But you cannot be sure; there is no way for you to see the JavaScript source, there is no way for you to make sure that a mistake will not happen. Google employs young coders who may not sha
Yes, you got it right. Still. many people are unhappy about those features regardless of your personal opinion about them. Those people wanted to have nothing to do with this feature - even if it could have been advantageous to them. Exercise is good for people, but would you want an Exercise Police waking you up at 6am and forcing you to run a mile or two whether you like it or not?
Or when an email thread drifts to a new topic and gmail reminds you of a coworker who also worked on that project with the rest of the people in the thread.
I do not lack awareness of who should be included into the thread or excluded from it. The subject often wanders in and out of different areas, requiring to include sometimes accounting, sometimes the boss, sometimes the customer. I do not need a suggestion to include customer A into a mail thread about product B that the customer A has no awareness of.
I'm sorry that you lack the self-discipline to do this.
Everyone makes mistakes, it's just a question of when. A wise man knows that and builds safeties into dangerous mechanisms; a fool removes them because he is always sure of himself.
You are one car crash, stroke, or cancer diagnosis away from racking up millions in costs.
You stumbled upon one interesting question that is related to the problem:
How much is your life worth?
For example, you fall ill and require daily infusions of blood. Thousands of people need to be found, tested, and brought to your bed for the procedure. You will never get better. You are not a genius whose mind is needed to save the Earth from an otherwise unavoidable doom. Should the humanity sacrifice that much just to keep you alive? Should the humanity sacrifice that much even if you will recover?
This is an important question. Few things in this Universe are free; healthcare is not an exception. It costs someone's labor - essentially, part of someone's life - to keep you healthy. It is not air that we get for free, not sunlight, not gravity. Someone has to actually work to treat you.
So if you get a stroke and your life can be only maintained by a continuous multi-million expense, is it worth it? You sould like you believe that any expense is OK to keep you alive. But that's not true. Humans are like bacteria on this Earth. There are 6 billion of us, and none are of any galactic significance. Your life is of value only to you, and to some extent to your relatives. If so, why do you insist that we all chip in and maintain your life forever? Oh, you aren't requesting the "forever" part? But then where is the line in the sand behind which you can be allowed to die?
Obamacare and British NHS decide that for you. But in the current USA this line is drawn entirely by you - by your abilities, by your finances, and by your love of your own life. If you have the money you can afford all the healthcare that you can buy. This is your reward for working hard (for simplicity I presume the connection between public good and your wealth. Trust fund babies are not part of the deal, of course.) However if you are an alcoholic bum from under the bridge, then perhaps you are not valuing your own life that high. Or circumstances conspired against you - that happens too. That NASA astronaut guy, Poindexter, died today in an accident, and no money could save him. If only he'd be more careful with his life he could live happily ever after. But he was a risk taker and he valued his life just right for himself. Steve Irwin is another example.
To cut the lecture short, if I get a stroke and I need a million dollars to get better I would gladly die. My life is not worth a million dollars. To put it differently, if I recover I will not be able to produce enough of public good to equal a million dollars. Humanity will be better off with me dead. I *do not want* you to pay for my healthcare. You may be shocked to learn that my (or yours) precious self is not infinitely valuable to Earthlings, but that's how things are. The value of your mind and of your body is pretty low, I would say (not "you" specifically, but "you" generically.) If you think you are an exception, prove it. Win a Nobel Prize, or become a founder of new Microsoft - you get the drift. Give me some proof that if *you* get in a car accident I should pay a million dollars for your treatment. If you do not, I will simply leave the problem to your capable hands. Pay for yourself and do not saddle me with costs that you incurred - and I will be happy to return the favor.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see how these rules apply to me:
1. Getting married for the right reasons, like genuinely liking the whole of other person
I don't like people in general, and dislike many specifically. I don't want their wealth or their children. Children are a special group that I dislike twice as much.
Both sides of the relationship focused more on "what can I do for my partner"
I'd rather focus on my own projects instead of working for someone else. If they want my help they should help me back (cash is an acceptable medium of exchange.)
Working at it, and believing the relationship is more important than other things
Relationship is an imaginary, immaterial feeling that is entirely virtual and transitory. I wouldn't spend even a millisecond nurturing a relationship. I have real work to do, and real people need results of that work. I don't deal in feelings, I work with logic, facts and physical objects. The only relationship that I accept is a business relationship, formalized in contracts and other documents. I'm not against cooperation.
Having a good income coming in
I have enough for myself and I have no intention to share it with wives or their children. If they want money they can go and earn it themselves.
Being willing to genuinely forgive the partner.
I do that when people make mistakes. But when someone intentionally wants to hurt me, that will not be forgotten, and measures will be taken. Usually, though, those who try to hurt me are hurting themselves far more. As a proverbial man at the river I only need to sit there and observe the stream.
Each partner having a social life beyond their spouse.
What is that "social life" thing you are talking about, and what is it good for?
Are you sure you've met any married people, or are they all the "married in Vegas after meeting on a drunk weekend" variety?
Among my school friends (who are more or less a random sample) all who married had at least one divorce. Why would anyone want to go through this mess? A divorce can also ruin you financially - either as a one-time hit, or as decade-long shackles of child support. The quote from "True Lies" is actually very wise.
By far the majority are happy in their marriage - or present a good appearance of being so
The latter. As one married person told me, "At first it's difficult but then you get used to it."
Buy your own set of police handcuffs without a key, and then get a key. With millions of pairs in use it shouldn't be too difficult. Then you have a perfect reason to own a key. If the judge asks why do you need handcuffs you can always claim curiosity about BDSM.
So you haven't really provided an example.
Someone else did.
Slashdot is a news site only insofar as it links to sites that actually *do* report news.
Slashdot is famous for not RTFA. Why is that? Because most of the value of Slashdot is not in consuming the news piece and walking away but in listening to what other people say and perhaps adding your own opinion to the mix. Just like we do right now.
News on Slashdot are nothing but topics of discussion. Humans (not only those of female persuasion) thrive on taking a hypothesis and constructing an entire universe of possibilities out of it. This way one can be creative.
Besides, plenty of local news can be generated locally, within the community. Just this morning a large trailer was stuck on the road not far from my house, unable to pass a switchback. I could have reported on that; others took pictures with their cell phones, and Highway Patrol was there, and a crane to free the hapless trailer. Majority of witnesses of events are not reporters but regular citizens who go about their business and encounter something unusual. With proliferation of always-on mobile connectivity this is extremely simple. Even major newspapers are not ashamed to ask "Have you been a witness to this event? Tell us all about it..."
Next the geek has to ditch his day-job and start investigating local stories, to make the site compelling to the potential readership.
Stories will be happily delivered by the readership themselves, just as it was happening for thousands of years before.
That is not going to replace the local rag without a lot of hard work.
A local rag cannot afford a team of journalists. At best that would be one or two guys, and they can't be everywhere. In the end the stories will be delivered by eyewitnesses themselves. Previously journalists were needed to record the words and to put them on paper. Today a reporting party can post her own words and provide her own photos - from the very site of the story, if need be.
Nice try at trying to make me look like someone who looks down on small town people though.
I didn't mean to create such impression. I only wanted to say that people in small towns have free time - perhaps even more of it than people in large cities, just because the nearest theater is 100 miles away.
I was visiting people in a small town (population about 520) in CA a few months ago. They had wireless internet (Verizon) pretty much everywhere. They had access to Web and email inside the house and outside. In fact, Verizon is their Internet link through a MiFi dongle. Satellite is also an option but they did not need it.
If you really want to try and refute my point supply some successful examples of an individual running a website that is out performing the towns newspaper.
We are posting on one. It was custom built from the ground up by a couple of geeks. Today a similar project would take just a couple of hours, not a couple of months. A newspaper is simply not capable of offering an interactive service. Comparing them would be disastrous to the newspaper - that's why newspapers are dying.
No website is going to report on stuff that matters to them, because those 1k or 30k people towns don't generally matter to them.
You believe that in a crowd of 1K to 30K people there is not one geek who can set up a LAMP with Joomla? And that there are no willing contributors who can master the simple user interface of Joomla? Life in small towns is not all hard labor, it's also long periods of boredom.
A newspaper is a costly proposition. You have to print it somewhere (your 1K village has no printing press!) and deliver quickly, and distribute. There is no feedback.
An electronic newspaper is free to publish. It supports logins for subscription if you insist on it, but logins are primarily for comments. This makes it interactive. That Fred Smith from a ranch 30 miles down the road does not come to town every day, but he is certain to log in every morning and every evening, read it all and add comments to whatever he finds interesting.
I haven't touched a newspaper in a decade. Probably haven't intentionally seen one either. Why would anyone want one? It's not even ecologically sensible, to kill trees just to deliver a few minutes per day of amusement to a family when the same, or better, can be achieved electronically, at a millionth of cost.
tl;dr: if its not broke, don't re-invent it! 're-writing email systems' has got to the be the stupidest thing you could do, today!
The fashion industry reinvents itself every year by cyclically going through old designs and selling them as the new thing. The pendulum of "thick clients" vs. "thin clients" is well known in the computer industry. Reinventing things is necessary to create new markets and fill them with new products. A smartphone allowed telecom companies to sell $100/mo plans with extra charges where previously a $25/mo plan was seen as an overkill. A smartphone is nothing but a new Tamagotchi that you are expected to continually buy software for and pay for the connectivity, and listen to its every beep. But in the end it is not more valuable than the original Tamagotchi or a pet rock.
Indeed people are tired of the endless race, and when Microsoft reinvents Windows all they get is angry complaints. This is because the new Windows does not solve almost any new problem, but it creates lots of problems out of thin air. Progress is good, but humanity would be better off if MS would stop at Windows 7, continue to maintain it, and if they are that anxious to do something new they can create a new product, call it "Glass" or something, and promote that, completely separately and without messing with millions of users of Windows.
GP probably meant pencil and paper. Or, in this case, a hard rock and a softer rock to scribble on.
I retired my laptop recently and replaced it with a desktop PC. I was tired of laptop's limitations. It had a small (17") screen and the connection to an external monitor crashed the system. It had only 2 GB of RAM, and my use patterns require more. Its performance was mediocre. Fans were noisy and right in front of me. And so on...
The laptop was consuming 45 watts (as measured with a Kill-a-watt.) The desktop draws 50 watts. The difference is completely irrelevant. Now I have a decent 1920x1080 Acer H274HL LED monitor, so I can have many windows on the screen at the same time. The box is under the table and I do not hear the fans. Fans are easy to replace when they wear out. There is 8 GB of RAM and I can install more if I want to. Lots of HDD space. Excellent performance.
Cringely and others like him simply found a new wave to ride. Now they are endlessly writing that everyone will soon be computing on their cell phones. But I bet that Cringely typed his screed on at least a laptop - if not on a desktop. Professionals do not really need portable devices. What they need is computing power, lots of it. Why to sit idly and look at the computer that is locked up and thinking its own computery thoughts?
The laptop, of course, will be reimaged and restored; the hardware is reasonably OK and I have replacement fans for it. But it will no longer be my primary computer. It's not worth it. Laptops are always a step down from a desktop in terms of performance because they have to be small and flat. A large design can be "greener" than a small one because it can afford more efficient - and larger - components. The example of the desktop that draws as little as the laptop is an illustration of that.
If you buy a phone and pay at least some of your own money then "we control your phone" is a bad idea. You will be making personal calls, installing personal software, etc. If you quit it may be all but impossible to disconnect your phone from the corporate servers. (That happened to one of my friends - he had to throw the phone out, buy a new phone and transfer the number.)
If the employee pays some of his own money then you can be sure that EPEAT would be one of his lowest priorities in the selection of the device. Few people are willing to make big (on the personal scale) sacrifice for a tiny (drop in the ocean) benefit to the planet.
If the company pays 100% then "a stipend" is reduced down to the list of phones that the company is willing to support. Really the list doesn't have to be large - one iPhone, one simple candy bar phone, and a couple of decent Android phones. Then the phone belongs to the employer and there is no dual use. This is how many companies buy (or lease) notebooks. The employee is given a list, he picks what he likes, and he gets it. Without the list you will end up with useless hardware (if you are lucky) or with 1,000 models that you now have to support (if you are not lucky at all.)
If the public doesn't change their buying in response to Apple's move, then all the other vendors may decide that EPEAT certification isn't necessary for them to sell products.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
(link)
Except that bottom (or inline) posters are much more likely to trim the quotes, because they have to look as part of the response
True. However we are mostly discussing business email here (where Outlook is the king.) Personal email is moved to Web-based MUAs long ago.
In a business setting you do not want to trim quotes. In fact, you do not want to mess with the message besides typing your two cents on top. Here is why.
Both posting orders have its place. Bottom post is useful if you publish for a very wide audience. You want to minimize the traffic, so you trim the quotes. You quote your opponent and then reply so that the discussion looks natural. Bottom posting practically requires plain text format.
Top post is better for smaller groups that are aware of the conversation. Top post can be seen as two parts: the message that you just typed and the history. Most people only want your message, but the history is also there because it costs nothing to keep it and it may be bad if you remove it, and it would cost you time if you start editing and rearranging it.
Today email is a commodity. Days of UUCP and 120 baud modems are gone. There is no point in saving bytes. Personal time is now the resource that we want to save.
never used thunderbird (but I don't know anyone else that does either so whatever)
I used Thunderbird for a while. Had to remove it after I got mad enough at it. The rich text editor in it was broken - it refused to use fonts that I wanted, reverting back at every opportunity. Also it loved to eat ends of lines - all of them in one big bite. Start typing your reply, press END, press DEL and now the first line of the quoted text is sitting at the cursor.
Eventually I got tired of that and reverted to the Dark Side. (Or is it Yellow Side now?) At least it works. This is not the year 2000 to endlessly mess with MUAs. I want my email to work, and the best MUA to do it gets the job.
A Higgs boson and a graviton are different things. At least because a graviton is expected to have no mass.
Linux is much better than Windows for headless operation. Each instance of Windows assumes a live human sitting in front of the screen. Linux assumes nothing, and it has all the remote access and maintenance tools one might want. This is somewhat important if you build clusters.
Linux also has a far better multiuser operation. Windows supports multiple users, in theory, but outside of impossibly expensive Terminal Servers this remains just a theoretical possibility. A single logon will eat a gigabyte and one CPU core. Linux logins are lightweight (at cost of one getty and one bash) and once you are in you can run whatever you want. Furthermore, if your software needs X it runs on your terminal and not on the more expensive and heavily used shared server.
Windows' advantages are simple: bling and availability of COTS software. Since none of that is of interest to scientists, Windows has no advantage over Linux - except that scientists may run Windows on their laptops for sake of MS Office and Outlook.
But there is yet another reason. Many XP boxes are not certifiably capable or running Windows 7. A geek may try to upgrade his ancient Celeron box with a pirated Win7; he risks nothing if the box bluescreens or is too slow. But why would a business do that? An upgrade costs money in all aspects, but what will be gained? Since XP all the updates that MS produced are (in a business setting) either neutral or detrimental (Win8.) I have a few XP laptops, they will never be upgraded.
Similarly, if you package an update for Android (for each phone, perfectly good) and let phone owners know - how many, in your opinion, will accept the offer? I think 5% at most, even though the upgrade is free. Majority of phone|tablet users do not see their devices as computers; they see them as self-contained appliances - and we do not upgrade the firmware in microwave ovens.
He takes the view that the US is a big bully
He and the other 5,650,000,000 people.
and has made statements about being on a mission to stop "two wars" (i.e. the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan)
Why would that be illegal? Publishing US secrets was not a crime for Assange because he haven't signed on the dotted line. Manning did, and he is being punished for that.
So in fact, maybe merit really is a factor here, because if they're being turned down for these jobs, that shows they probably aren't as good as the people who do get to work there.
Or perhaps because CERN exists on limited funding and cannot hire every scientist in the world - even if CERN managers love the idea. If a particular place of research is unusually productive ... expect long lines at the gates.
The experiments on LHC are scheduled years ahead. You cannot just come there, flip a switch and run your own experiment. It will cost millions in electric energy alone. CERN can sustain only a certain number of teams - or else they will be just sitting there and waiting for their time with the machine.
Perhaps the scientists are employed by universities and have teaching jobs assigned to them. Then they cannot easily move without abandoning their students. (That would be legal but not very nice.)
Theoretical physicists do not need to be near an experiment. Plenty of physics is done on paper (or in computers.) For those scientists Texas is just as good a place as any other.
Google's own numbers show ~90% Android users still aren't on 4.0+, and it's been almost nine months since ICS was released.
There are still millions of Windows XP boxes even though Windows 7 is out there for years. Does that indicate that the Windows upgrade process is broken?
Android devices are sold as something a notch below Apple products (at least because it's not Apple.) Android phones cost less, and as result they are sold to customers who just want a phone. There are very few geeks in that crowd. Among geeks there are very few people who want to risk all the data that they have on the phone for sake of upgrade to a new version of the OS that they haven't seen and don't know what it does better or worse. Most people don't even know what they have and what else is out there. I have a Galaxy Tab device; I don't even know what version of Android it runs! I don't even know what versions are out there! Why? Because I don't care. It's not a quest of my life to nurture and maintain the most recent version of Android on a device that does what it needs to do already. I see no point in upgrading it. It's a tool and it works well.
Sure. Mexico is also having no effective control over most of its territory. Comparing Mexican crime to US is unfair because the USA is #1 in everything (incl. crime.) With regard to 2050, I can also make forecasts that I will not live to see proven or overturned. Companies are operating in all countries of the world - in Africa, in Asia, in Europe. Do you think it is safe to run diamond mining in Africa, where every warlord wants the crystals to pay for his war toys? Malaria, wars, rogue Army of God, AIDS, poisonous wildlife, patently bankrupt governments, pirates - all that is Africa; and still Western companies are there. They'd be on the Moon if only they could. Doesn't say much about the country; it only says that the country has exploitable resources, and the price of using them is acceptable to company's directors who live in London and never have to smell the burnt powder.
I will be ready to accept that MX is the best country in the world as soon as its government eliminates all narco-cartels (including Zetas) and makes sure that mass executions in the style that is so common these days in Mexico are no more. Until that happens I will continue to see MX as a weak country that is de-facto governed by organized crime; a country that cannot even keep its own peasants employed, so that they have to cross the border and work on slave-like terms in the USA.
I can only say that such an idea was so counter to the intentions of the programmers, that they assumed the users wouldn't think it likely either.
Perhaps. I'm really surprised that Google, with all its size, did not consider calling for a psychological study. As you point out, customer-facing products can make us happy or angry. If only we were all robots this wouldn't be a problem. Logically, there is nothing wrong with dangerous designs - as long as you never make a mistake. But people don't work like that. We may look at one thing and perceive it as something completely different because it triggered some association and activated our fears.
Imagine a device that says "if you press this button you will have a 20% chance of dying before you reach 65 years of age." How many people will press that button? But the button does nothing (let's assume that the 20% figure is a naturally occurring probability of death in this range of age.) It's Pascal's Wager all over again.
This debacle is not an uncommon occurrence at Google, though. The company has issues. The list of their stupid decisions is long and it is growing fast. I think they just don't have capable management in place. They can have endless meetings that discuss placement of individual pixels, but - as the facts illustrate - they never bothered to ask if the users want those pixels in the first place. Numerous management and good management are not one and the same.
This is not unique to Google. Do I need to say more than Windows 8 and its Metro? Same issues, same non-solutions, same cramming of unwanted features down the throat of some customers. Is it some sort of a corporate senility? I'm amazed that so many businesses (hey, Cisco!) choose to shoot themselves in the foot without even a second thought. This is not rocket science by any means; a 5 y/o child would have told you that. Perhaps they need to hire a 5 y/o child as an advisor?
When you start typing a name in the To: field, and gmail offers to autocomplete it, are you offended that gmail thought you forgot the name of the person you are sending email to?
There are two parts in my rejection of this misfeature.
One part is that it makes it simpler to make mistakes. It is harmless to forget someone on an email. You can always copy this person separately - or one of recipients of your email can forward. There is no penalty.
On the other hand, including someone who should not be included is sometimes disastrous. My example of different customers is very indicative of that. You can also be in negotiations with different employers, different contractors, and so on. Google cannot understand why you include some people and not the other. From Google's point of view if you copied someone just once then you should copy him always. This is obviously not so. You can email your GF and her mom when you discuss "official" matters, but you probably should not include the mom when you discuss far more personal things.
Suggesting to copy makes such mistakes more likely. As you say, it doesn't take a superhuman effort to type a few characters of the name and get it autocompleted. You are looking at the field at this time so you can confirm that the autocompletion is correct. If you don't like it you can delete autocompletion entries (though in GMail you have to delete the whole contact, IIRC.) Clicking is much simpler and can lead to errors.
Another reason to be unhappy is that I don't want to take these advices from computers. I don't want to personify a machine, but such an advice is a pretty arrogant thing. Would you like a robot to advice you on lovemaking? Worst of all, you know that this advice is not based on any good reasons (such as the content of the email) - it is only based on groupings of recipients that were seen before. You, as a sentient being, understand that those groupings mean nothing. A persistent and stupid advice is annoying.
Not all advices from computers are like that. For example, spell checkers and grammar checkers are usually well received. First of all, they are smarter than most people in this narrow area of expertise. Second, they can be turned off entirely, or they can be told to ignore this specific instance, or they can be told to learn the new word. They are not confrontational, they are not trying to teach you how to live your life. And if you still have a problem with that, go ahead and turn them off - it is easy.
Google's advisor cannot be turned off. If it were, nobody would rail against this feature. They'd simply disable it and continue; this feature would be never seen again. But Google, in its infinite arrogance, decided that everyone must have this thing because Google knows best. You can be unhappy that a robot gives you Clippy-like stupid advices, but in the end you are far more unhappy about humans at Google that foisted this upon you. Slashdot audience used to advocate variety; it is strange that now "one size fits all" applications are lauded here by so many. Apple-like reduction of choice is now a new virtue. Wouldn't you be a tad upset that a company thinks that you are unable to use a computer with choices?
By the way, I just mentioned MS Office Assistant - the beloved Clippy. The analogy is very close. Clippy was universally hated because it was an idiot giving stupid advices to people. But at lease Clippy could be uninstalled. Microsoft was not *that* full of themselves to make Clippy a mandatory part of the Office experience. Google is, obviously.
There is yet another, third now, part that contributes to rejection of this feature. You never know if GMail is going to send the email to those guys or not. You know that it can. You also know that it says it won't unless you click there. But you cannot be sure; there is no way for you to see the JavaScript source, there is no way for you to make sure that a mistake will not happen. Google employs young coders who may not sha
Did I get this right?
Yes, you got it right. Still. many people are unhappy about those features regardless of your personal opinion about them. Those people wanted to have nothing to do with this feature - even if it could have been advantageous to them. Exercise is good for people, but would you want an Exercise Police waking you up at 6am and forcing you to run a mile or two whether you like it or not?
Or when an email thread drifts to a new topic and gmail reminds you of a coworker who also worked on that project with the rest of the people in the thread.
I do not lack awareness of who should be included into the thread or excluded from it. The subject often wanders in and out of different areas, requiring to include sometimes accounting, sometimes the boss, sometimes the customer. I do not need a suggestion to include customer A into a mail thread about product B that the customer A has no awareness of.
I'm sorry that you lack the self-discipline to do this.
Everyone makes mistakes, it's just a question of when. A wise man knows that and builds safeties into dangerous mechanisms; a fool removes them because he is always sure of himself.
You are one car crash, stroke, or cancer diagnosis away from racking up millions in costs.
You stumbled upon one interesting question that is related to the problem:
How much is your life worth?
For example, you fall ill and require daily infusions of blood. Thousands of people need to be found, tested, and brought to your bed for the procedure. You will never get better. You are not a genius whose mind is needed to save the Earth from an otherwise unavoidable doom. Should the humanity sacrifice that much just to keep you alive? Should the humanity sacrifice that much even if you will recover?
This is an important question. Few things in this Universe are free; healthcare is not an exception. It costs someone's labor - essentially, part of someone's life - to keep you healthy. It is not air that we get for free, not sunlight, not gravity. Someone has to actually work to treat you.
So if you get a stroke and your life can be only maintained by a continuous multi-million expense, is it worth it? You sould like you believe that any expense is OK to keep you alive. But that's not true. Humans are like bacteria on this Earth. There are 6 billion of us, and none are of any galactic significance. Your life is of value only to you, and to some extent to your relatives. If so, why do you insist that we all chip in and maintain your life forever? Oh, you aren't requesting the "forever" part? But then where is the line in the sand behind which you can be allowed to die?
Obamacare and British NHS decide that for you. But in the current USA this line is drawn entirely by you - by your abilities, by your finances, and by your love of your own life. If you have the money you can afford all the healthcare that you can buy. This is your reward for working hard (for simplicity I presume the connection between public good and your wealth. Trust fund babies are not part of the deal, of course.) However if you are an alcoholic bum from under the bridge, then perhaps you are not valuing your own life that high. Or circumstances conspired against you - that happens too. That NASA astronaut guy, Poindexter, died today in an accident, and no money could save him. If only he'd be more careful with his life he could live happily ever after. But he was a risk taker and he valued his life just right for himself. Steve Irwin is another example.
To cut the lecture short, if I get a stroke and I need a million dollars to get better I would gladly die. My life is not worth a million dollars. To put it differently, if I recover I will not be able to produce enough of public good to equal a million dollars. Humanity will be better off with me dead. I *do not want* you to pay for my healthcare. You may be shocked to learn that my (or yours) precious self is not infinitely valuable to Earthlings, but that's how things are. The value of your mind and of your body is pretty low, I would say (not "you" specifically, but "you" generically.) If you think you are an exception, prove it. Win a Nobel Prize, or become a founder of new Microsoft - you get the drift. Give me some proof that if *you* get in a car accident I should pay a million dollars for your treatment. If you do not, I will simply leave the problem to your capable hands. Pay for yourself and do not saddle me with costs that you incurred - and I will be happy to return the favor.