Yes, but at least if you know you want to be in the NFL, you KNOW what you need to do - work hard to become damn good at Football, a game with well-defined rules.
They don't cancel your contract and kick you out of the league after 3 seasons because the commissioner arbitrarily decides that players named "Rick" or left-handed linebackers are no longer welcome.
Yes, any developer investing time and money to create a new iApplication is taking a risk that it may not be approved by the AppStore overlords. But, once their app is approved (v1.0) they should be able to reasonably expect that future versions (that don't drastically change the concept) would be able to get approval, even if it took a few tries. In this case, the entire business model went from valid/profitable to worthless without any warning and all of the time/money invested was a waste.
How do you think Apple would react if the FCC arbitrarily changed the specifications for wireless communications, turning every iPhone out there into a deaf mute? Actually, I'd kinda like to see that fight play out...
I wasn't arguing against personal sale, but rather pointing out the ineffectiveness of laws with easy workarounds. Maybe the DRM comparison was a stretch, but I still think there is a parallel there in that most of the time, the people that are penalized (even if we're just talking about having to wait a few days to get your new toy) are the law-abiding citizens. The intended targets of the law (heat-of-passion would-be criminals, felons, etc.) can simply take advantage of one of the many trivial workarounds like buying a second-hand gun from somebody listing one in the classifieds or buying from a private citizen at a gun show.
...assuming you overlook the glaring exception of the "Gun Show" loophole in many states. Like DRM, these type of regulations only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to purchase the things that they want. Sure, you'll catch the occasional idiot criminal, but for the most part the work-arounds are so trivial that anybody with even the slightest motivation can get a gun (or DRM-free media) with ease.
Re:Not impressed, but here's my take
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
Actually, now that I think about it, I definitely remember seeing the intact jet engine on the beach (not spinning)... Didn't somebody get sucked into it shortly after the crash and cause it to explode? If the engine is still intact, then nobody ever got sucked into it, probably because nobody survived.
Again, if there was a tent and footsteps, then this might not hold up, but I'm not at home to confirm at the moment.
Re:Not impressed, but here's my take
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
If there was a tent, I missed it. I'll have to go back to the DVR tonight. In that case though, I'd agree with your second point.
Re:Not impressed, but here's my take
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
It's not a big-picture higher-logic adaptation where the brain realizes that it's going to die, but more of a "crap, this hurts (or is going to hurt) a lot, I should get the chemicals pumping" reaction. I'm sure adrenaline is one of those chemicals, and you can't argue that the fight/flight response of adrenaline and associated pain killing effects isn't a clear Darwinian adaptation.
Not impressed, but here's my take
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the most revealing part was during the closing credits when they showed the wreckage on the beach with no people. My interpretation is that the entire series existed entirely in Jack's mind as the plane crashed and all passengers died on impact. Similar to the common cliche of one's "life flashing before their eyes" during a near-death experience, but in this case the result was actual death.
Many people who have a near-death experience describe comfort and moving toward a white light. This has been explained by science as the brain flooding itself with dopamine and other pleasure chemicals because it knows that it is dying and might as well go out feeling good. I think the series was an interpretation of that phenomenon - realizing that he had but seconds to live, Jack's brain created this vivid melodrama based on the wishful thinking that he'd actually survive the crash. The islands electromagnetic properties explain the crash, and the hope of reversing the crash and sending his life on a more fulfilling path (flash-sideways with Jack finding love, having a son, etc.) provides comfort.
With that being said, I think the writers took the easy way out and I'm quite disappointed having invested a significant amount of time in the series. I'm sure there will be plenty of post-game analysis and people will find tons of symbolism that was intended and even more that wasn't, so at least the discussion and speculation may fill my need for closure.
Except when you lose your wallet containing the key to your car and the likely location (via the address on your ID) to said car. Not such a great idea.
Wow, I had no idea that this was even possible - I figured the USB and firewire ports were just there for diagnostics or something. Thank you very much, I can't wait to give this a try when I get home tonight!
Same here but with Windows Vista Media Center which includes a great Netflix implementation. The PC came with a remote control which can do anything you need to within the Media Center interface and I have installed Hulu Desktop which is also remote control-friendly. Unfortunately I only have a single tuner connected to the output of my cable box with an IR blaster for changing channels and recording.
All in all, it was a completely painless setup, the only negative is that I don't have a way to get HD output from my cable box into Media Center.
Then they just "log in" to get grainy security camera footage from a convenience store that shows him 50 feet from the camera at the back of the store. A few zooms and "enhance!" operations and you can clearly see each of the hairs in the suspect's beard. Case closed.
I never implied that I supported such a decision - in fact, I do support the current plan of fines to subsidize the cost of the uninsured. As a healthy 20-something, I could easily drop my employer-subsidized insurance, pay out of pocket for an annual physical, and spend the rest of the money on a nice vacation. And hey, if I end up getting critically injured in a bizarre jet skiing accident, I can just show up at any emergency room assured that my life will be saved, courtesy of those responsible enough to budget for health insurance. BUT, I don't. And if more people would take responsibility for their health, all of our costs will go down.
I was merely using an admittedly emotionally-charged counter-example of why not having the fines wouldn't make sense without something to balance it out. Since the alternative is completely unacceptable and inhumane, then the original idea (fines) is validated.
The logical fix - the thing that would balance out a lack of a fine for not being insured - would be to turn away the uninsured people who show up at emergency rooms with broken limbs, heart attacks, strokes, etc. and let them die. All of a sudden, hospitals would become financially viable again, and healthcare costs as a whole would decrease. Those with insurance would no longer be paying a hidden tax meant to cover the uninsured. Anybody with half a brain would re-prioritize their budget and buy insurance instead of spending extra money on a premium car or other luxuries (assuming they didn't qualify for Medicaid). As a bonus, now that they've got health insurance, they'll probably realize that they may as well take advantage of it and get some preventative care, further reducing overall healthcare costs by avoiding costly diseases. Eventually, the threshold for Medicaid eligibility could even be lowered as a result of the overall cost savings, but that would take some time.
Of course, everybody knows that this would never fly, even with Republicans who despise all forms of "hand-outs". Despite the current socialist-esque emergency room policies, nobody will support a decision that mandates responsibility and fiscal restraint with potential death as the penalty for non-compliance.
I was responding to your comment on true capitalism being the same as democracy. You make a good point about Bill Gates not needing more than one health insurance policy, but in a more general sense I don't agree that you can equate a system based on accumulation of money to one based on fair representation for all. Voting with your wallet depends heavily on how big that wallet is. Democracy is meant to be a great equalizer where each person (in theory) has an equal say, regardless of who their father is, what color their skin is, or how much money they make.
In practice, our system is more of a democratic/capitalistic hybrid. Each person gets one vote, but those with money can afford to hire lobbyists to influence the people for whom the little guys voted. Both are far from perfect, but they certainly can't be considered one and the same.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First, true capitalism is democracy (People vote with their money).
Democracy is one vote per person, not one vote per dollar, per person. Should Bill Gates' single vote be worth the same as the votes of millions of people?
I read this a few years ago for the first time. I'm not a physicist but my Engineering education and general interest in science enabled me to understand most of it. Shortly thereafter I read "A Briefer History of Time" and I was very impressed with how he managed to make it much more easily understandable while not watering down the content too much. It was packed with illustrations and it seemed that it was written for the average person with an interest in physics as opposed to the physicist looking for some light reading.
No personal offense intended, but if somebody is not knowledgeable enough to figure out how to properly setup the security of a wireless router to match their "desire", as you put it, then one would hope that they would be responsible enough to seek professional assistance, or at the very least, return the router for an easier-to-use model.
Many of the latest consumer routers actually disable the wireless option at the factory, requiring the user to click through a simple wizard interface and explicitly choose whether to enable or disable security before the radio is turned on.
How is this any different from setting up a web server on the internet with a published domain name containing sensitive information with no password protection or other authentication? Should anybody who attempts to gain access be imprisoned? I would hope that most reasonable judges would see this deliberate act as implicitly granting permission, even if it is an act of omission.
But it was the purple elephant that made humans and put them on that flat world in the center of the universe. And it goes without saying that the golden flying monkey was responsible for setting the sun, the planets and all the stars in rotation around the Earth.
That's right kids, there's a big purple elephant that lives in outer space and one day that elephant had a dream about a little 2-legged creature with a big brain and tiny sex organs and when the elephant woke up, through his magical powers, his dream had become a reality and Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel appeared in the Garden of Eden on Earth, at the center of the universe. And the rest is history.
With the exception of writing low-level embedded software for very specific hardware, most of the programming opportunities out there won't care about low-level hardware/software know-how. A lot of today's jobs involve solving problems with IT/IS solutions and since most companies consider IT spending an expense or liability that should be minimized (rather than an opportunity to spend $1 to make $3) you aren't going to want to be worrying about memory allocation or pointers. Built-in garbage collectors and other features in todays higher-level languages will save you a ton of development time (at the expense of some execution time/efficiency, of course). Spending days or weeks optimizing a program to use 20% less memory or to shave 2 seconds off a 2 minute execution time just isn't worth it to the business in most cases.
Even companies that SELL software are getting more lax on this - desktop hardware is way more powerful relative to most of the software out there now than it was even 5 years ago, there's plenty of room to be sloppy if it means getting the project to market weeks or months sooner.
I could understand your complaint if this list were a headliner in Time, but this is Wired we're talking about here.
That's like expecting Comedy Central to carry political news shows... oh wait. Nevermind.
Maybe I'm way off here, but from TFA it seems like they'd bring you up to Mach 1-ish using a traditional turbine, then trigger the scramjet to get up to these ridiculous speeds... What kind of acceleration are we talking about here? The image in my mind is flipping the switch on a can of NOS in a street racer, you're not so much accelerating as blasting off. I doubt that would work in a commercial setting. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to fly in one of these, or any fighter jet for that matter, but your average LA-Hong Kong businessperson might not be so thrilled with the sensation.
Last time I checked, it's pretty easy for people with any kind of preference to install windows, use IE once to download Firefox/Opera/Lynx/etc. and delete all shortcuts to IE, never to be seen again (except maybe for Windows Update). Are we really saying that IE's significant majority in the browser market is wholly due to people's apathy/stupidity?
This will probably result in a number of death threats, but, I've tried Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape and I still choose to use IE7. Yeah, the others might be a little faster rendering pages, but I make extensive use of tabbed browsing and rarely wait for a pages to render. Firefox is a memory sieve. The others don't support Windows Authentication (yes, I know, evil M$ proprietery, etc.) but that's a requirement at work, so switching to another browser (or running 2 browsers in parallel) on principle when I'm perfectly happy with IE just doesn't appeal to me.
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Yes, but at least if you know you want to be in the NFL, you KNOW what you need to do - work hard to become damn good at Football, a game with well-defined rules.
They don't cancel your contract and kick you out of the league after 3 seasons because the commissioner arbitrarily decides that players named "Rick" or left-handed linebackers are no longer welcome.
Yes, any developer investing time and money to create a new iApplication is taking a risk that it may not be approved by the AppStore overlords. But, once their app is approved (v1.0) they should be able to reasonably expect that future versions (that don't drastically change the concept) would be able to get approval, even if it took a few tries. In this case, the entire business model went from valid/profitable to worthless without any warning and all of the time/money invested was a waste.
How do you think Apple would react if the FCC arbitrarily changed the specifications for wireless communications, turning every iPhone out there into a deaf mute? Actually, I'd kinda like to see that fight play out...
I wasn't arguing against personal sale, but rather pointing out the ineffectiveness of laws with easy workarounds. Maybe the DRM comparison was a stretch, but I still think there is a parallel there in that most of the time, the people that are penalized (even if we're just talking about having to wait a few days to get your new toy) are the law-abiding citizens. The intended targets of the law (heat-of-passion would-be criminals, felons, etc.) can simply take advantage of one of the many trivial workarounds like buying a second-hand gun from somebody listing one in the classifieds or buying from a private citizen at a gun show.
...assuming you overlook the glaring exception of the "Gun Show" loophole in many states. Like DRM, these type of regulations only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to purchase the things that they want. Sure, you'll catch the occasional idiot criminal, but for the most part the work-arounds are so trivial that anybody with even the slightest motivation can get a gun (or DRM-free media) with ease.
Actually, now that I think about it, I definitely remember seeing the intact jet engine on the beach (not spinning)... Didn't somebody get sucked into it shortly after the crash and cause it to explode? If the engine is still intact, then nobody ever got sucked into it, probably because nobody survived.
Again, if there was a tent and footsteps, then this might not hold up, but I'm not at home to confirm at the moment.
If there was a tent, I missed it. I'll have to go back to the DVR tonight. In that case though, I'd agree with your second point.
It's not a big-picture higher-logic adaptation where the brain realizes that it's going to die, but more of a "crap, this hurts (or is going to hurt) a lot, I should get the chemicals pumping" reaction. I'm sure adrenaline is one of those chemicals, and you can't argue that the fight/flight response of adrenaline and associated pain killing effects isn't a clear Darwinian adaptation.
I think the most revealing part was during the closing credits when they showed the wreckage on the beach with no people. My interpretation is that the entire series existed entirely in Jack's mind as the plane crashed and all passengers died on impact. Similar to the common cliche of one's "life flashing before their eyes" during a near-death experience, but in this case the result was actual death.
Many people who have a near-death experience describe comfort and moving toward a white light. This has been explained by science as the brain flooding itself with dopamine and other pleasure chemicals because it knows that it is dying and might as well go out feeling good. I think the series was an interpretation of that phenomenon - realizing that he had but seconds to live, Jack's brain created this vivid melodrama based on the wishful thinking that he'd actually survive the crash. The islands electromagnetic properties explain the crash, and the hope of reversing the crash and sending his life on a more fulfilling path (flash-sideways with Jack finding love, having a son, etc.) provides comfort.
With that being said, I think the writers took the easy way out and I'm quite disappointed having invested a significant amount of time in the series. I'm sure there will be plenty of post-game analysis and people will find tons of symbolism that was intended and even more that wasn't, so at least the discussion and speculation may fill my need for closure.
Except when you lose your wallet containing the key to your car and the likely location (via the address on your ID) to said car. Not such a great idea.
Wow, I had no idea that this was even possible - I figured the USB and firewire ports were just there for diagnostics or something. Thank you very much, I can't wait to give this a try when I get home tonight!
Same here but with Windows Vista Media Center which includes a great Netflix implementation. The PC came with a remote control which can do anything you need to within the Media Center interface and I have installed Hulu Desktop which is also remote control-friendly. Unfortunately I only have a single tuner connected to the output of my cable box with an IR blaster for changing channels and recording.
All in all, it was a completely painless setup, the only negative is that I don't have a way to get HD output from my cable box into Media Center.
Then they just "log in" to get grainy security camera footage from a convenience store that shows him 50 feet from the camera at the back of the store. A few zooms and "enhance!" operations and you can clearly see each of the hairs in the suspect's beard. Case closed.
I never implied that I supported such a decision - in fact, I do support the current plan of fines to subsidize the cost of the uninsured. As a healthy 20-something, I could easily drop my employer-subsidized insurance, pay out of pocket for an annual physical, and spend the rest of the money on a nice vacation. And hey, if I end up getting critically injured in a bizarre jet skiing accident, I can just show up at any emergency room assured that my life will be saved, courtesy of those responsible enough to budget for health insurance. BUT, I don't. And if more people would take responsibility for their health, all of our costs will go down.
I was merely using an admittedly emotionally-charged counter-example of why not having the fines wouldn't make sense without something to balance it out. Since the alternative is completely unacceptable and inhumane, then the original idea (fines) is validated.
QED
The logical fix - the thing that would balance out a lack of a fine for not being insured - would be to turn away the uninsured people who show up at emergency rooms with broken limbs, heart attacks, strokes, etc. and let them die. All of a sudden, hospitals would become financially viable again, and healthcare costs as a whole would decrease. Those with insurance would no longer be paying a hidden tax meant to cover the uninsured. Anybody with half a brain would re-prioritize their budget and buy insurance instead of spending extra money on a premium car or other luxuries (assuming they didn't qualify for Medicaid). As a bonus, now that they've got health insurance, they'll probably realize that they may as well take advantage of it and get some preventative care, further reducing overall healthcare costs by avoiding costly diseases. Eventually, the threshold for Medicaid eligibility could even be lowered as a result of the overall cost savings, but that would take some time.
Of course, everybody knows that this would never fly, even with Republicans who despise all forms of "hand-outs". Despite the current socialist-esque emergency room policies, nobody will support a decision that mandates responsibility and fiscal restraint with potential death as the penalty for non-compliance.
I was responding to your comment on true capitalism being the same as democracy. You make a good point about Bill Gates not needing more than one health insurance policy, but in a more general sense I don't agree that you can equate a system based on accumulation of money to one based on fair representation for all. Voting with your wallet depends heavily on how big that wallet is. Democracy is meant to be a great equalizer where each person (in theory) has an equal say, regardless of who their father is, what color their skin is, or how much money they make.
In practice, our system is more of a democratic/capitalistic hybrid. Each person gets one vote, but those with money can afford to hire lobbyists to influence the people for whom the little guys voted. Both are far from perfect, but they certainly can't be considered one and the same.
First, true capitalism is democracy (People vote with their money).
Democracy is one vote per person, not one vote per dollar, per person. Should Bill Gates' single vote be worth the same as the votes of millions of people?
I read this a few years ago for the first time. I'm not a physicist but my Engineering education and general interest in science enabled me to understand most of it. Shortly thereafter I read "A Briefer History of Time" and I was very impressed with how he managed to make it much more easily understandable while not watering down the content too much. It was packed with illustrations and it seemed that it was written for the average person with an interest in physics as opposed to the physicist looking for some light reading.
Burn it to write-once PROM chips. That should last for quite a while.
No personal offense intended, but if somebody is not knowledgeable enough to figure out how to properly setup the security of a wireless router to match their "desire", as you put it, then one would hope that they would be responsible enough to seek professional assistance, or at the very least, return the router for an easier-to-use model.
Many of the latest consumer routers actually disable the wireless option at the factory, requiring the user to click through a simple wizard interface and explicitly choose whether to enable or disable security before the radio is turned on.
How is this any different from setting up a web server on the internet with a published domain name containing sensitive information with no password protection or other authentication? Should anybody who attempts to gain access be imprisoned? I would hope that most reasonable judges would see this deliberate act as implicitly granting permission, even if it is an act of omission.
I've heard of keyloggers that actually capture an image of a small section of the screen under the pointer on each click for just that purpose.
Of course. That's a given.
But it was the purple elephant that made humans and put them on that flat world in the center of the universe. And it goes without saying that the golden flying monkey was responsible for setting the sun, the planets and all the stars in rotation around the Earth.
That's right kids, there's a big purple elephant that lives in outer space and one day that elephant had a dream about a little 2-legged creature with a big brain and tiny sex organs and when the elephant woke up, through his magical powers, his dream had become a reality and Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel appeared in the Garden of Eden on Earth, at the center of the universe. And the rest is history.
With the exception of writing low-level embedded software for very specific hardware, most of the programming opportunities out there won't care about low-level hardware/software know-how. A lot of today's jobs involve solving problems with IT/IS solutions and since most companies consider IT spending an expense or liability that should be minimized (rather than an opportunity to spend $1 to make $3) you aren't going to want to be worrying about memory allocation or pointers. Built-in garbage collectors and other features in todays higher-level languages will save you a ton of development time (at the expense of some execution time/efficiency, of course). Spending days or weeks optimizing a program to use 20% less memory or to shave 2 seconds off a 2 minute execution time just isn't worth it to the business in most cases.
Even companies that SELL software are getting more lax on this - desktop hardware is way more powerful relative to most of the software out there now than it was even 5 years ago, there's plenty of room to be sloppy if it means getting the project to market weeks or months sooner.
I could understand your complaint if this list were a headliner in Time, but this is Wired we're talking about here. That's like expecting Comedy Central to carry political news shows... oh wait. Nevermind.
Maybe I'm way off here, but from TFA it seems like they'd bring you up to Mach 1-ish using a traditional turbine, then trigger the scramjet to get up to these ridiculous speeds... What kind of acceleration are we talking about here? The image in my mind is flipping the switch on a can of NOS in a street racer, you're not so much accelerating as blasting off. I doubt that would work in a commercial setting. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to fly in one of these, or any fighter jet for that matter, but your average LA-Hong Kong businessperson might not be so thrilled with the sensation.
Last time I checked, it's pretty easy for people with any kind of preference to install windows, use IE once to download Firefox/Opera/Lynx/etc. and delete all shortcuts to IE, never to be seen again (except maybe for Windows Update). Are we really saying that IE's significant majority in the browser market is wholly due to people's apathy/stupidity?
This will probably result in a number of death threats, but, I've tried Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape and I still choose to use IE7. Yeah, the others might be a little faster rendering pages, but I make extensive use of tabbed browsing and rarely wait for a pages to render. Firefox is a memory sieve. The others don't support Windows Authentication (yes, I know, evil M$ proprietery, etc.) but that's a requirement at work, so switching to another browser (or running 2 browsers in parallel) on principle when I'm perfectly happy with IE just doesn't appeal to me.