Working in a phone shop, it grates at my nerves the number of times I hear "I just want a phone" - not because I think everyone needs every feature under the sun, but because we HAVE one, the Samsung E1081T, and people still can't bloody use THAT. It's as if as soon as a device has more than five buttons (three functions) people have some complete logical breakdown. I base this number o a TV remote, having power, volume up and down, and channel up and down. Some people don't ever touch the numbers on their remote because they're afraid of "blowing it up". My idiot customers can't seem to grasp that even though it's mobile, it's still a phone, and if you want to dial a number then just start pressing buttons.
The other customers that piss me off are the ones who have about the sam level of technological ability (i.e, that of a retarded chimpanzee with both hands cut off), and are adamant they must have an iPhone. I try to talk them out of an iPhone, point them at something more their ability level, or at least at something GOOD if they want a smartphone, but they seem insistant on wasting their money, who am I to stop them? I just serve seven hundred people a day and know exactly what everyone needs (even though it's a menial customer service job exposing me to the scum of humanity, I pride myself on never having had so much as a bad comment leveled against me). The thing is, these customers BARELY know how to get to the dialer, and I see them later carrying a fucking NOTEBOOK, an old-school address book and dialing manually, as if the contact list is some kind of black magic!
Back to topic, if you're tech savvy and want "just a phone", then get a chap Samsung. Or a Nokia smartphone, Symbian is so dated that you might as well only have a dialer and a contact list. If you're not tech savvy, or buying for a grandparent, you are beyond help. Even the phone from TFA is too complex for you. Technology is not that fucking hard to use. My mother has Multiple Sclerosis, so she's half blind and not very dextrous or strong in her hands, you know what I gave her? My old Samsung Galaxy i7500, and she has NO problems with it.
Except telecommunications networks collude on their d-baggery. It almost amounts to price fixing, at least in Australia. All the major telcos have data limits on their wireless and fixed services, and they all seem to have similar amounts at similar price points (except Telstra who provide little value and grow fat off their formerly government sponsored monopoly).
If a service cannot keep up with demand, then it is a failing of the company, not the fault of the users. They've oversold their network. More than trying to control what people can do, they should be regionally limiting subscriptions. Contracts help telcos plan for someone being otheir network for two years, and they should be able to plan their network growth and management accordingly.
I personally consider religion (theistic religion, at least) to be institutionally supported schizophrenia, what with the whole talking to yourself, and the paranoia that you're always being watched, with the results determining your eterrnal fate. Willing submission to such a fear-based control mechanism is a symptom of a clearly diseased psyche, as is the "lalala I'm not listening" aproach Christians take to things they don't like in their religion. And then there's the people who can't even be internally consistent with whether the bible is being figurative or literal. Basically, if a Christian says that evolution doesn't exist because they believe in the literal word of the Bible, then remind them the literal word of the Bible says the Earth is flat, circular, has four literal corners, the sun, moon and stars revolve around us, there is a vast, infinite ocean beneath us, and infinite ocean above us held back by a literal firmament, and when it rains, God is opening the windows in said firmament. If they can straight-facedly tell me they believe all of that, then they're clearly undereducated, but I still respect their belief. Metaphoricalists piss me off just a tiny bit more, though. Every time the literal word of the Bible is proven wrong on any topic, they move the goalposts by saying it's all metaphorical - i.e. Had there really been a firmament that God walked around on, Sputnik would have slammed into it rather than making it into space, so God isn't LITERALLY in the sky, it's obviously just a metaphor, contrary to Christian doctrine of the preceeding couple of thousand years. I'm sure others have made this point, but I'm pretty sure there's a greater danger of confusing an old storeybook with reality than there is of confusing an MMO. My proof? Continued existence of Christianity, Islam, Judaeism, Hinduism, and about a million others I'm forgetting.
Corporations would look for financial return first, rather than possible scientific implications. If helping America back into space gives China some cool new missile tech, they'd be pretty likely to help, cost of the venture be damned.
If you don't feed your dog, don't be surprised when he looks elsewhere for food. This is what happens when the government fucks over the space program a million times. Maybe partnering with corporate ventures would be better for national security, but those are inherently driven by money. A government truly comitted to the idea of manned spaceflight though is more likely to be results oriented.
I'm pro-classification, anti-censorship. An adult customer should have the right to buy whatever they want, no matteer who's moral sensibilities it may offend (currently, in Australia, I don't have that right). Realistically, there are some games we don't want kids playing. Any parent who, for example, bought GTA4 for their eight year old desserves to have Child Services pay a visit, and GTA4 wasn't even really that bad. Australian ratings are federally enforced, unlike the "voluntary" ESRB ratings. G, for General Exhibition. PG, Parental Guidance. M15+, recommended for audiences 15 years and over (recommended, so a shop assistant still can't refuse to sell this to a ten year old), MA15+, restricted to audiences 15 and over, meaning shop assistants are legally required to (but often don't) request ID, in much the same way they do for alcohol and cigarettes. Unfortunately, that's where Australian ratings for games stop, meaning anything that does not fit within the bounds of an MA15+ rating is outright banned. More often than not, however, if a game is going to be banned, one of two things happens. Either the developer will make some token gesture and make a minor edit, and it gets shoehorned into the MA rating when it really should be rated R18+, or like in the case of Left 4 Dead 2, the developer refuses to cave, and says they just won't release it here, sometimes resulting in the OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Classification - do you see "Interactive Media" in their title? I think games may be beyond their legal bounds:P) caving and allowing the release anyway. So what we have here is either obscene censorship - I say so because no content, no matter how offensive, is as obscene as the act of censoring it, or things that probably shoundln't be in the hands of 15 year olds getting there.
I guess my overall point was that legal restriction of sales is certainly a good idea. The headline is a little inflamatory until you fully understand what the survey meant.
Rhymes with coined, meaning to create a new word. A cybernetic organism is a life form constructed, like a Terminator, while an augmented one, in my opinion, is naturally born, but has later had something like a robot arm attached.
If a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, that makes the likes of Terminators cyborgs. Daleks and Cybermen, and the Borg, are cybernetically augmented organisms, which I quoined "cybauorgs".
Of course Slashdot's moderation is full of similarly ignorant assholes. We peer-review our own work, though many of us resent the idea that we have "peers", we at least recognise in others the same smug arrogance:)
My personal opinion, which is almost certainly an extreme one, and not one I expect people to ever take seriously, is that all religions wishing to influence legislation should register as political parties or lobby groups, and lose their religious privilages in the eys of the law. No tax breaks, or selective exemption from libel laws just because you have an imaginary friend. I'm just tired of religion directing our laws. You know the Australian Parliament still recites The Lord's Prayer before every sitting? How the hell am I meant to feel like my views are fairly represented, free from unfair restrictions imposed by beliefs I don't share? Nobody is forcing Christians to undergo stem cell treatments, but they're deciding we can't, all because they've decided their God doesn't like it. Where exactly does it say in the Bible "thou shalt not perform experiments involving genetics or stem cells"?
Australia's problems are a lot more subtle, but no less troublesome for it. In the USA, you have loud mothed politicians espousing their views like this, and clear battle lines can be drawn. Here, politicians find it best to keep their religious motivations quiet (with a few exceptions), and they come up with a dozen "moral" arguments, rather than their religion. Some might think it better, because it looks like they're keeping their religion out of their job, but it doesn't work like that; they just keep their religion out of their speeches, giving the impression of a secret, shadow theocracy (so I exaggerate a little, but not much).
I always thought the 700MB file size of movies was more motivated by the abundance of CDs. Not that they said "Come hell or high water, I'll make this just squeeze onto a CD", but they probably just thought "one movie per CD sounds alright, let's get the quality up until we approach that".
I'm fairly certain the reason the multiform taunted the Doctor about it was because the Doctor, or at least the Timelords, are the root of the problem. I'm aware he's supposedly the last Timelord alive, but we've seen how thinking you're the last often turns out... Of course, they could pull the whole alternate reality thing again. The Doctor never was clear about how alternate realities come to be, just that they're meant to be sealed off. I'd say alternate realities are the convenient writers-block fixer: Out of enemies? Bring an ancient and long-since-defeated enemy back from another alternate reality! The damaged Cyberman in the preview says it's at least possible. What I'm most curious about is the English-flag-stamped Dalek; though it's probably just some military immitation, and not a true Dalek...
On a serious note, what differences would there need to be between mobile search and desktop search? I don't know about most people, but when I search for something, no matter what device I'm using, I expect the same results from the same terms. I don't always want my results vetted based on where I happen to be standing, or just the fact my phone identifies itself as a mobile device. If they're talking about finding things like pizza places, or cinemas, I think Google kind of already does that, doesn't it? I'm stuck in 1.5 land on my Android phone (I fucking hate Samsung, they don't care once a phone has been sold, minor software updates apparently mean entire new models, but I digress), but I'm pretty sure 1.6 lets you voice search things like "pizza" or "restaurants", and it will return results relevant to your location, though I could be wrong. The last thing I really need is "better mobile search", unless that means "more touch-friendly web design" and "websites that don't look like shit in a WAP browser".
A quick (ctrl + f in Firefox) search of this thread finds NO references to L Space! What the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days? Instead of parroting "That's no moon" every time someone sees a funny shaped rock in space, people should be pouncing on obvious things like this!
Agreed, I have a Samsung Galaxy (which has an AMOLED screen), and indoors it looks amazing, way better than my friends' iPhones' screens. Introduce direct sunlight though, and you're looking at a dull, dark-grey mess.
The first time I'd ever heard of DARPA was when I played Metal Gear Solid. Ever since then, I've always had the ideas of DARPA and Metal Gear irrevocably tied together in my mind. They'd better hurry up on that Metal Gear too, because Japan's military research have a Gundam project going on! Granted, right now it has a more ungainly shuffle than that damn deceptively marketed Robo Raptor (I bought one of those... I felt so cheated), but you never know; some genius may step in and accelerate the project... To compare the two though, Metal Gear Rex is a far more realistic prospect with today's technology than any model of Gundam is, so technically, DARPA would still have a head start.
For as long as I've been using Linux (admittedly not long compared to some, since 2004), theming has been possible under regular user privilages. Installing software without root access, to me, is a definite no-no though. It would be fine if you could install a program in an isolated sandbox though. I don't just mean cutting a program off from editing vital system stuff, but also cutting it off from interacting with other programs in any way; otherwise all the security in the OS won't help one bit if, for example, something infecting your media player could just lift your personal information straight out of Firefox.
I meant merely that people see little point modding an AC up because the points just go nowhere. I wanted the AC post modded up so people who have their mod thresholds set high would see the post, no need to fly off the handle about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Working in a phone shop, it grates at my nerves the number of times I hear "I just want a phone" - not because I think everyone needs every feature under the sun, but because we HAVE one, the Samsung E1081T, and people still can't bloody use THAT. It's as if as soon as a device has more than five buttons (three functions) people have some complete logical breakdown. I base this number o a TV remote, having power, volume up and down, and channel up and down. Some people don't ever touch the numbers on their remote because they're afraid of "blowing it up". My idiot customers can't seem to grasp that even though it's mobile, it's still a phone, and if you want to dial a number then just start pressing buttons.
The other customers that piss me off are the ones who have about the sam level of technological ability (i.e, that of a retarded chimpanzee with both hands cut off), and are adamant they must have an iPhone. I try to talk them out of an iPhone, point them at something more their ability level, or at least at something GOOD if they want a smartphone, but they seem insistant on wasting their money, who am I to stop them? I just serve seven hundred people a day and know exactly what everyone needs (even though it's a menial customer service job exposing me to the scum of humanity, I pride myself on never having had so much as a bad comment leveled against me). The thing is, these customers BARELY know how to get to the dialer, and I see them later carrying a fucking NOTEBOOK, an old-school address book and dialing manually, as if the contact list is some kind of black magic!
Back to topic, if you're tech savvy and want "just a phone", then get a chap Samsung. Or a Nokia smartphone, Symbian is so dated that you might as well only have a dialer and a contact list. If you're not tech savvy, or buying for a grandparent, you are beyond help. Even the phone from TFA is too complex for you. Technology is not that fucking hard to use. My mother has Multiple Sclerosis, so she's half blind and not very dextrous or strong in her hands, you know what I gave her? My old Samsung Galaxy i7500, and she has NO problems with it.
I wish I had an evercookie. A magical cookie that regrows every time you take a bite out of it sounds like an amazing idea.
Except telecommunications networks collude on their d-baggery. It almost amounts to price fixing, at least in Australia. All the major telcos have data limits on their wireless and fixed services, and they all seem to have similar amounts at similar price points (except Telstra who provide little value and grow fat off their formerly government sponsored monopoly).
If a service cannot keep up with demand, then it is a failing of the company, not the fault of the users. They've oversold their network. More than trying to control what people can do, they should be regionally limiting subscriptions. Contracts help telcos plan for someone being otheir network for two years, and they should be able to plan their network growth and management accordingly.
I personally consider religion (theistic religion, at least) to be institutionally supported schizophrenia, what with the whole talking to yourself, and the paranoia that you're always being watched, with the results determining your eterrnal fate. Willing submission to such a fear-based control mechanism is a symptom of a clearly diseased psyche, as is the "lalala I'm not listening" aproach Christians take to things they don't like in their religion. And then there's the people who can't even be internally consistent with whether the bible is being figurative or literal. Basically, if a Christian says that evolution doesn't exist because they believe in the literal word of the Bible, then remind them the literal word of the Bible says the Earth is flat, circular, has four literal corners, the sun, moon and stars revolve around us, there is a vast, infinite ocean beneath us, and infinite ocean above us held back by a literal firmament, and when it rains, God is opening the windows in said firmament. If they can straight-facedly tell me they believe all of that, then they're clearly undereducated, but I still respect their belief. Metaphoricalists piss me off just a tiny bit more, though. Every time the literal word of the Bible is proven wrong on any topic, they move the goalposts by saying it's all metaphorical - i.e. Had there really been a firmament that God walked around on, Sputnik would have slammed into it rather than making it into space, so God isn't LITERALLY in the sky, it's obviously just a metaphor, contrary to Christian doctrine of the preceeding couple of thousand years. I'm sure others have made this point, but I'm pretty sure there's a greater danger of confusing an old storeybook with reality than there is of confusing an MMO. My proof? Continued existence of Christianity, Islam, Judaeism, Hinduism, and about a million others I'm forgetting.
Perhaps the incessant /. news posts about NASA being underfunded or mismanaged.
Corporations would look for financial return first, rather than possible scientific implications. If helping America back into space gives China some cool new missile tech, they'd be pretty likely to help, cost of the venture be damned.
If you don't feed your dog, don't be surprised when he looks elsewhere for food. This is what happens when the government fucks over the space program a million times. Maybe partnering with corporate ventures would be better for national security, but those are inherently driven by money. A government truly comitted to the idea of manned spaceflight though is more likely to be results oriented.
Adobe bought Macromedia back in distant times, so if Microsoft buy Adobe, won't that make them Micromacrobe?
I use my iPad in landscape for websites, and portrair for ebooks and comics, though for ebooks I much prefer my Kobo, which is portrait only.
I'm pro-classification, anti-censorship. An adult customer should have the right to buy whatever they want, no matteer who's moral sensibilities it may offend (currently, in Australia, I don't have that right). Realistically, there are some games we don't want kids playing. Any parent who, for example, bought GTA4 for their eight year old desserves to have Child Services pay a visit, and GTA4 wasn't even really that bad. Australian ratings are federally enforced, unlike the "voluntary" ESRB ratings. G, for General Exhibition. PG, Parental Guidance. M15+, recommended for audiences 15 years and over (recommended, so a shop assistant still can't refuse to sell this to a ten year old), MA15+, restricted to audiences 15 and over, meaning shop assistants are legally required to (but often don't) request ID, in much the same way they do for alcohol and cigarettes. Unfortunately, that's where Australian ratings for games stop, meaning anything that does not fit within the bounds of an MA15+ rating is outright banned. More often than not, however, if a game is going to be banned, one of two things happens. Either the developer will make some token gesture and make a minor edit, and it gets shoehorned into the MA rating when it really should be rated R18+, or like in the case of Left 4 Dead 2, the developer refuses to cave, and says they just won't release it here, sometimes resulting in the OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Classification - do you see "Interactive Media" in their title? I think games may be beyond their legal bounds :P) caving and allowing the release anyway. So what we have here is either obscene censorship - I say so because no content, no matter how offensive, is as obscene as the act of censoring it, or things that probably shoundln't be in the hands of 15 year olds getting there.
I guess my overall point was that legal restriction of sales is certainly a good idea. The headline is a little inflamatory until you fully understand what the survey meant.
Simple, hold the exams in my house. No wireless signals can penetrate its paper-thin walls!
Couldnt remember if it wasa spelling mistake I read once, or if there was some British spelling shenanigan going on.
Rhymes with coined, meaning to create a new word. A cybernetic organism is a life form constructed, like a Terminator, while an augmented one, in my opinion, is naturally born, but has later had something like a robot arm attached.
If a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, that makes the likes of Terminators cyborgs. Daleks and Cybermen, and the Borg, are cybernetically augmented organisms, which I quoined "cybauorgs".
A quick show of hands, who's ever pissed on a lemon tree?
Of course Slashdot's moderation is full of similarly ignorant assholes. We peer-review our own work, though many of us resent the idea that we have "peers", we at least recognise in others the same smug arrogance :)
My personal opinion, which is almost certainly an extreme one, and not one I expect people to ever take seriously, is that all religions wishing to influence legislation should register as political parties or lobby groups, and lose their religious privilages in the eys of the law. No tax breaks, or selective exemption from libel laws just because you have an imaginary friend. I'm just tired of religion directing our laws. You know the Australian Parliament still recites The Lord's Prayer before every sitting? How the hell am I meant to feel like my views are fairly represented, free from unfair restrictions imposed by beliefs I don't share? Nobody is forcing Christians to undergo stem cell treatments, but they're deciding we can't, all because they've decided their God doesn't like it. Where exactly does it say in the Bible "thou shalt not perform experiments involving genetics or stem cells"?
Australia's problems are a lot more subtle, but no less troublesome for it. In the USA, you have loud mothed politicians espousing their views like this, and clear battle lines can be drawn. Here, politicians find it best to keep their religious motivations quiet (with a few exceptions), and they come up with a dozen "moral" arguments, rather than their religion. Some might think it better, because it looks like they're keeping their religion out of their job, but it doesn't work like that; they just keep their religion out of their speeches, giving the impression of a secret, shadow theocracy (so I exaggerate a little, but not much).
I always thought the 700MB file size of movies was more motivated by the abundance of CDs. Not that they said "Come hell or high water, I'll make this just squeeze onto a CD", but they probably just thought "one movie per CD sounds alright, let's get the quality up until we approach that".
I'm fairly certain the reason the multiform taunted the Doctor about it was because the Doctor, or at least the Timelords, are the root of the problem. I'm aware he's supposedly the last Timelord alive, but we've seen how thinking you're the last often turns out... Of course, they could pull the whole alternate reality thing again. The Doctor never was clear about how alternate realities come to be, just that they're meant to be sealed off. I'd say alternate realities are the convenient writers-block fixer: Out of enemies? Bring an ancient and long-since-defeated enemy back from another alternate reality! The damaged Cyberman in the preview says it's at least possible. What I'm most curious about is the English-flag-stamped Dalek; though it's probably just some military immitation, and not a true Dalek...
On a serious note, what differences would there need to be between mobile search and desktop search? I don't know about most people, but when I search for something, no matter what device I'm using, I expect the same results from the same terms. I don't always want my results vetted based on where I happen to be standing, or just the fact my phone identifies itself as a mobile device. If they're talking about finding things like pizza places, or cinemas, I think Google kind of already does that, doesn't it? I'm stuck in 1.5 land on my Android phone (I fucking hate Samsung, they don't care once a phone has been sold, minor software updates apparently mean entire new models, but I digress), but I'm pretty sure 1.6 lets you voice search things like "pizza" or "restaurants", and it will return results relevant to your location, though I could be wrong. The last thing I really need is "better mobile search", unless that means "more touch-friendly web design" and "websites that don't look like shit in a WAP browser".
A quick (ctrl + f in Firefox) search of this thread finds NO references to L Space! What the hell is wrong with Slashdot these days? Instead of parroting "That's no moon" every time someone sees a funny shaped rock in space, people should be pouncing on obvious things like this!
Agreed, I have a Samsung Galaxy (which has an AMOLED screen), and indoors it looks amazing, way better than my friends' iPhones' screens. Introduce direct sunlight though, and you're looking at a dull, dark-grey mess.
The first time I'd ever heard of DARPA was when I played Metal Gear Solid. Ever since then, I've always had the ideas of DARPA and Metal Gear irrevocably tied together in my mind. They'd better hurry up on that Metal Gear too, because Japan's military research have a Gundam project going on! Granted, right now it has a more ungainly shuffle than that damn deceptively marketed Robo Raptor (I bought one of those... I felt so cheated), but you never know; some genius may step in and accelerate the project... To compare the two though, Metal Gear Rex is a far more realistic prospect with today's technology than any model of Gundam is, so technically, DARPA would still have a head start.
For as long as I've been using Linux (admittedly not long compared to some, since 2004), theming has been possible under regular user privilages. Installing software without root access, to me, is a definite no-no though. It would be fine if you could install a program in an isolated sandbox though. I don't just mean cutting a program off from editing vital system stuff, but also cutting it off from interacting with other programs in any way; otherwise all the security in the OS won't help one bit if, for example, something infecting your media player could just lift your personal information straight out of Firefox.
I meant merely that people see little point modding an AC up because the points just go nowhere. I wanted the AC post modded up so people who have their mod thresholds set high would see the post, no need to fly off the handle about it.