Poor analogy. The iPhone vs Android thing is strongly correlated with zip code, in other words income. Its simply a matter of getting what you want vs getting what your finances force you to settle for. Sure there are a few who shriek about the "walled garden", a loud minority, sort of like Linux desktop users.
I've never chosen my phone based solely on price. Most phones tend to be free or nearly so with their contract so price isn't a significant factor for most people. I also don't have much preference of android vs iphone. The reason I've always owned android and never owned iphone is because apple doesn't make a phone with a physical keyboard. Ironically, it looks like I will finally be switching to iphone because everyone else has also stopped manufacturing high-end phones with keyboards so by switching to iphone I at least have a large selection of keyboard cases to choose from.
You don't expect 3d printing organs to advance at all in 75 years!? Given how much they have advanced in the last decade you think we've hit a wall? That's pretty pessimistic! I take it you're not a fan of the work by the SENS and Aubrey De Grey crowd either? I'm of the belief there are people alive today who will be alive well past the next century.
Ok, so you can 3D print me an organ. So what? Ignoring the fact that at 90+ you probably aren't going to survive a transplant, are you going to replace all my organs? What about my brain? I'm sorry, but organ transplants are not the solution to the aging problem. They can definitely help people get to the finish line of 100 but they aren't going to get you to 200. If I was Bill Gates and didn't want to die, I think the most promising areas of research are probably stem cell, alzheimer's, telemeres, cancer, and progeria. I agree that Aubrey De Grey is in one of the right areas to possibly help but 3D printing organs is not one of those areas.
I understand your point, but sometimes technology doesn't move in inches, it makes huge changes or none at all. A breakthrough in stem cell research might suddenly give us the ability to live practically forever.
That's why I said "short of a major breakthrough". We've definitely amassed a large amount of knowledge on telemeres, stem cells, etc... and I myself am hoping for one of these major breakthroughs and I hope to be young enough to be able to take advantage of it but as it stands right now I don't even know of even any experimental treatments looking to halt or reverse the aging process which is what we really need to do to get significantly past the 100 mark. My guess is that when/if it happens that it will probably first be for premature aging or it's possible that it will be discovered by accident when we realize that some treatment for demetia or cancer has allowed someone to reach 150. If it's the latter and we have to wait for someone currently alive to reach 150 before we accidently discover it then unfortunately it will probably be too late for me and most of the people on this site.
Except that office is (by my definition) a power user. Probably over half of all phones sold (iphones included) are used by people who use it primarily as a phone, might install 5-6 apps in the life of the phone (if they even know how to install an app), will occasionally use the GPS, take a few photos, and never use 16G of storage.
Apple is pretty much saying that if you want to record videos, store your entire mp3 collection, or install dozens of apps then get the upgrade.
And if you're born today, by the time you're 75, you should have four or five decades left*.
Based on current trends and short of a major breakthru there is no way someone born today will live to be 120-130. We've gotten pretty good at extending the quality of life and even getting more people past the 100 goalpost but we've made little or no progress on actually extending life to any significant extent. 100 seems to be the age that no matter what you do and how healthy you appear to be that you start having multiple system failures.
The same is true of buying stock in companies that have a majority shareholder.
Not quite. There are minority shareholder laws which prevent such things as creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for a dollar. Those laws only go so far though. They don't prevent you from creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for their fair market value. So basically, minority shareholder laws don't prevent majority shareholders from screwing over the minority shareholders but they do prevent majority shareholders from COMPLETELY screwing over minority shareholders.
As a side note, many investment sites like the motley fool actually like when management owns a significant portion of the company as it means that they actually have some skin in the game and are less likely to screw the stockholders over in other ways.
According to Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=define+astronaut), an astronaut is "a person who is trained to travel in a spacecraft". It doesn't say you have to "add" to the mission.
According to that definition then someone who is trained and never leaves the ground has more right to that name than someone who pays $250k to be a passenger on a spacecraft. I don't think being called an "astronaut" should be the goal but rather that you've been to outer space.
Personally, the description of what you're buying, to me, leaves a lot to be desired. Before I would buy a ticket, I would want to know there was ample time to experience weightlessness and take pictures out the window. Does anyone know exactly how long in space you're actually buying? It sounds like a quick up and back down with maybe a few minutes of weightlessness. To me, that's barely worth it at free. I would want to spend at least an hour if not 24 hours. Less than an hour and there are cheaper options like the "vomit comet".
Umm, no. Nexus devices are supported for 18 months as they specifically say
You're trying to argue but I think you just proved his point. Considering that most phones in the USA are still sold with a 24 month contract, having only 18 months worth of support is a complete joke. 48 months should be the bare minimum but even then it's hard to argue against the fact that both sides are doing their own version of "planned obsolescence". Some of this will happen naturally as newer systems are faster but it's annoying when you are forced to upgrade just to maintain status quo. I had an older android phone and eventually had to upgrade because many of the apps stopped supporting my phone.
Exactly. We really need to replace DNS with something that is distributed. Something closer to bitcoin. Ideally there would be a way to register a new domain and then all the nodes come to an agreement and after that point if there is a dispute then all the nodes can vote on who owns that domain. Something outside the control of any one organization or country where noone had the ability to DDOS a dns provider, make a website go dark by confiscating its domain, etc...
If you buy a shit-load of food and waste most of it, clearly your "interesting thing" is clearly untrue. The amount of food wasted in the west is ridiculous.
Waste most of it? Who does that? It could get wasted in the supply chain before it gets to my house but with a family of four, I doubt I throw away more than 500 calories a week and there is no way that I come close to throwing away more calories than we eat. The estimates I see are generally a 25-30% waste which isn't even close to "most of it" and even alot of that "waste" is in the supply chain and isn't truly wasted but is instead feed to livestock or otherwise salvaged.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that every single American were living on 5000 calories per day. They aren't, but let's assume an extreme case.
Let's further assume that every single American could manage nicely on 1200 calories per day. They can't, but let's be extreme again.
In that case (large overestimate of food used, similarly extreme underestimate of food needed), we'd be able to feed approximately 1B more people on the food we "waste".
Which is 25% of the expected growth....
You're forgetting that all calories are not equal. American's consume a lot of corn in the form of beef and ethanol. If you include the amount of corn required to make all the chicken, beef, and ethanol and also add in all the calories that could be grown instead of tobacco, cotton, etc... then it's possible that the average american consumes considerably more than 5000 "equivalent" calories.
Note that the income of the 1%, if distributed evenly among the 99% would represent only about a 14% pay raise across the board. The wealth of the 1% would nearly double the wealth of the average American, if uniformly distributed.
I think it was rockafeller that when asked by a reporter why he didn't distribute his wealth to the poor that he reached in his pocket and gave the reporter 3 cents and said "here's your share of my wealth". The 1% are extremely rich but you're right, evenly distributed across the remaining 99% doesn't really help much.
Arguably not when a large (poor) African family consumes fewer resources than a small (rich) family elsewhere.
One of the interesting things about food is that no matter how rich or how poor you are you can only consume so much food. Not for sure the exact range but everyone probably falls within a fairly narrow range of about 1000-5000 calories. Anything outside of that range and you'll quickly die. Obviously beef consumes more corn than eating the corn directly and a huge SUV probably consumes more ethanol than eating beef so a small rich family does consume more overall resources but when it comes to just food the large poor family consumes alot more food. In times of overpopulation we could easily cut out the beef and ethanol and have plenty of food to feed the world's population but it's doubtful that that would actually happen.
The only exception I know of in the USA is certain companies (like insurance companies, trucking companies, or life guards) that require passing a certain test or having a particular certification. In almost all legitimate cases you can take the test from multiple 3rd parties and the test or certification transfers to other similiar type job and even in those cases most of the better companies will pay you to take the test or provide the training free of charge. I would be very reluctant to work at any job that required you to pay for your own background check, drug test, etc... as in most cases either these companies are scams or at best extremely cheap.
You can still buy high quality stuff (like car door handles) but there isn't much of a demand for it because most people aren't willing to pay the premium for the product. As a raw material, plastic is basically free but a chunk of aluminum is only a few dollars so it's not the raw materials. It's most likely that the equipment to manufacture aluminum molds is much more costly than the equipment to manufacture plastic molds because even in places where there is sufficient demand and competition you still see a significant price jump to get metal vs plastic.
Ok, a figerprint scanner might be overly complicated but then why did you then proceed to invent an even more complicated system using picture ids, payment cards, pin numbers, touch screens, etc.. Seems like your system is alot more complicated than a simple finger scan. Kids are notorious about losing things among other reasons.
The main reason I would object to a fingerprint scan would be because I don't want the fingerprint to go elsewhere and the precendence of getting kids used to giving away their biometrics.
Our school uses a pin number. In kindergarten they all learn a 6 digit student number then they all type it in to eat lunch. They don't have problem with stolen pin numbers because it pops up the name to the cashier who quickly learns the kids names. Might not work in a larger school but even in a larger school if it said the name out loud then their classmates would easily recognise if it said a different name.
Well, I have very recently been witness to a friend that had a problem with its gmail, and could quite quickly contact someone on google's support forums. They're not easy to reach if you don't know what to look for. Their reply on their email should include the link to those forums. Simple as that. But I imagine they don't want it to be easily found, they'd be horribly swamped.
This is exactly right. Their business model doesn't include tech support. I read somewhere that facebook makes something like 50 cents a month per user. You can't do much tech support for that. They would have have to completely change their business model. I run a website with a completely different business model and we include a phone number. It's amazing how often we end up having to diagnose 3rd party software whether it is a virus or a virus scanner that is interfering with our customer's use of our website. We could tell them "not our problem" but then we would potentially lose them as a customer.
Bicycles honestly do belong on the road. Where else are you going to put them, on the sidewalk? There are pedestrians up there.
There are also plenty of "dual-use" trails which allow both bikes and pedestrians which don't seem to have a problem with both coexisting on a single path.
Bicycles honestly do belong on the road. Where else are you going to put them, on the sidewalk? There are pedestrians up there.
In the town I live in there are zero pedestrians. Building codes must have even changed as some of the newer neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks. As most neighborhoods do still have sideways and noone uses them, it would be much safer to beef up the sidewalks for bicycles than add bike lanes. Sidewalks are several feet from the curb and you are much less likely to end up getting ran over by a car or hit a car door that is being opened. A sidewalk is also less likely to collect broken bottles and debris like bike paths built on the shoulder do. Bicycles are also generally slow enough that if there is a pedestrian that either the bike or the pedestrian can get out of the way and a pedestrian is much less likely to get seriously injured getting hit by a bike than a biker is getting hit by a car. It would be cheaper, safer, and make more sense to convert sidewalks into bike paths than it would be to convert the shoulder into a bike path which is what most cities seem to be trying to do now.
THEM: Hi this is Microsoft and... US: hang up
Done. Fuck this war.
That's exactly what they want. It's the same reason that scammers say they are from nigeria even when they aren't. They don't want to talk to you. They want the non-gullible to hang up as quickly as possible so they can quickly find the little old lady who they can steal from. They called my mom and luckily she had 2 things going for her. First, she doesn't know enough to actually follow their instructions and second, she called me. Otherwise she would probably be out some money and I would be left cleaning up the mess. So sure, it's easier to hang up on them but you are actually doing them a favor and helping them out by doing so.
Would you describe yourself as one of Slashdot's customers?
Of course I'm one of slashdot's customers. Slashdot would be out of business if we (the customers) stopped coming to their website. I tend to use the term "user" instead of "customer" but it's the same thing. Slashdot has a business model where instead of charging their customers $5/month they have found advertisers that are willing to foot the bill in exchange for advertisements but that doesn't really change who they are providing a service to just who is paying for it.
Yes, but unfortunately there is still a lot of "not my department" going on there too. Our company is a large enough advertiser (several thousand a month) that not only can we call them but they will actually call us if we shut our account off. So if we have a problem directly related to our advertising account then it is easy to get someone on the phone that attempts to help us. Unfortunately, if we have a problem with gmail, we are still up a creek because they don't seem to have any ability to either help you or connect you with a different department that can help you. I'm assuming if our accounts were a couple order of magnitudes bigger that they would be able to find the phone numbers of the people in the other departments but as it stands we're in the same boat as everyone else outside of that one department.
So.... how are you fixed for firewood and natural gas?
Practically noone stores natural gas. There is LNG and CNG but it's not really very common especially not for households. You're probably thinking of propane. Many rural people not connected to natural gas have a propane tank in their yards.
It's actually a rather decent book. You should read it. It has other insights which are equally intriguing. Like the fact that most people's friends and coworkers tend to be close in intelligence, socioeconomics, etc... Most people with college degrees are surrounded by people with college degrees. Heck, 1 in 5 people don't graduate from HS but if you have a college degree I doubt you can name a single friend you have that doesn't have a HS degree and I would be very surprised if you could name 5 unless you happen to work in an occupation that crosses boundaries. This clumping is probably just as much a factor as many other factors people tend to look at. We try to pretend we have a classless society but when a person with a 130 IQ only hangs around with other people with a 130 IQ they get a very skewed view of the world.
I don't think the point is to trust them. The point is to let them out a little early to save money while also keeping them in line while they reestablish themself in society. A person who has a house, a job, a girlfriend, etc... is much less likely to slip back into crime when the monitoring device eventually comes off than someone who is dropped on the street the day after their sentence is up with nothing to their name.
The correct solution is to put all the "phone" functionality (antenna, transmitter, etc.) in the "watch", and use the "phone" as nothing more than a remote display and computing platform.
This is completely backwards. The cpu, antenna, and trasmitter are the bulky items as well as the power hungry items that need bulky batteries. That's the part (along with the large display) that needs to be tucked away. The watch should basically just be a fancy remote display and remote buttons for the phone. A small VNC type remote display protocol would probably work perfectly. The cpu hungry app can run on the phone and export it's display to the watch (obviously taking into account the smaller screen size). The apps would still be android/iphone apps. It would just be that now your android/iphone has a 2nd virtual screen and a few extra buttons that it can interact with.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor analogy. The iPhone vs Android thing is strongly correlated with zip code, in other words income. Its simply a matter of getting what you want vs getting what your finances force you to settle for. Sure there are a few who shriek about the "walled garden", a loud minority, sort of like Linux desktop users.
I've never chosen my phone based solely on price. Most phones tend to be free or nearly so with their contract
so price isn't a significant factor for most people. I also don't have much preference of android vs iphone. The
reason I've always owned android and never owned iphone is because apple doesn't make a phone with a physical
keyboard. Ironically, it looks like I will finally be switching to iphone because everyone else has also stopped
manufacturing high-end phones with keyboards so by switching to iphone I at least have a large selection of
keyboard cases to choose from.
You don't expect 3d printing organs to advance at all in 75 years!? Given how much they have advanced in the last decade you think we've hit a wall? That's pretty pessimistic! I take it you're not a fan of the work by the SENS and Aubrey De Grey crowd either? I'm of the belief there are people alive today who will be alive well past the next century.
Ok, so you can 3D print me an organ. So what? Ignoring the fact that at 90+ you probably aren't going to survive a transplant, are you
going to replace all my organs? What about my brain? I'm sorry, but organ transplants are not the solution to the aging problem.
They can definitely help people get to the finish line of 100 but they aren't going to get you to 200. If I was Bill Gates and didn't want
to die, I think the most promising areas of research are probably stem cell, alzheimer's, telemeres, cancer, and progeria.
I agree that Aubrey De Grey is in one of the right areas to possibly help but 3D printing organs is not one of those areas.
I understand your point, but sometimes technology doesn't move in inches, it makes huge changes or none at all. A breakthrough in stem cell research might suddenly give us the ability to live practically forever.
That's why I said "short of a major breakthrough". We've definitely amassed a large amount of knowledge on telemeres, stem cells, etc...
and I myself am hoping for one of these major breakthroughs and I hope to be young enough to be able to take advantage of it but
as it stands right now I don't even know of even any experimental treatments looking to halt or reverse the aging process which is
what we really need to do to get significantly past the 100 mark. My guess is that when/if it happens that it will probably first be
for premature aging or it's possible that it will be discovered by accident when we realize that some treatment for demetia or cancer
has allowed someone to reach 150. If it's the latter and we have to wait for someone currently alive to reach 150 before we
accidently discover it then unfortunately it will probably be too late for me and most of the people on this site.
Except that office is (by my definition) a power user. Probably over half of all phones sold (iphones included) are used
by people who use it primarily as a phone, might install 5-6 apps in the life of the phone (if they even know how to install an app),
will occasionally use the GPS, take a few photos, and never use 16G of storage.
Apple is pretty much saying that if you want to record videos, store your entire mp3 collection, or install dozens of apps then get the upgrade.
And if you're born today, by the time you're 75, you should have four or five decades left*.
Based on current trends and short of a major breakthru there is no way someone born today will live to be 120-130.
We've gotten pretty good at extending the quality of life and even getting more people past the 100 goalpost but
we've made little or no progress on actually extending life to any significant extent. 100 seems to be the age that
no matter what you do and how healthy you appear to be that you start having multiple system failures.
The same is true of buying stock in companies that have a majority shareholder.
Not quite. There are minority shareholder laws which prevent such things as creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for a dollar.
Those laws only go so far though. They don't prevent you from creating a new company and selling all your assets to them for their fair market value.
So basically, minority shareholder laws don't prevent majority shareholders from screwing over the minority shareholders but they do prevent majority
shareholders from COMPLETELY screwing over minority shareholders.
As a side note, many investment sites like the motley fool actually like when management owns a significant portion of the company as it
means that they actually have some skin in the game and are less likely to screw the stockholders over in other ways.
According to Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=define+astronaut), an astronaut is "a person who is trained to travel in a spacecraft". It doesn't say you have to "add" to the mission.
According to that definition then someone who is trained and never leaves the ground has more right to that name
than someone who pays $250k to be a passenger on a spacecraft. I don't think being called an "astronaut" should
be the goal but rather that you've been to outer space.
Personally, the description of what you're buying, to me, leaves a lot to be desired. Before I would buy a ticket,
I would want to know there was ample time to experience weightlessness and take pictures out the window.
Does anyone know exactly how long in space you're actually buying? It sounds like a quick up and back down
with maybe a few minutes of weightlessness. To me, that's barely worth it at free. I would want to spend at
least an hour if not 24 hours. Less than an hour and there are cheaper options like the "vomit comet".
Umm, no. Nexus devices are supported for 18 months as they specifically say
You're trying to argue but I think you just proved his point. Considering that most phones in the USA are
still sold with a 24 month contract, having only 18 months worth of support is a complete joke. 48 months
should be the bare minimum but even then it's hard to argue against the fact that both sides are doing their
own version of "planned obsolescence". Some of this will happen naturally as newer systems are faster
but it's annoying when you are forced to upgrade just to maintain status quo. I had an older android
phone and eventually had to upgrade because many of the apps stopped supporting my phone.
Exactly. We really need to replace DNS with something that is distributed. Something closer to bitcoin.
Ideally there would be a way to register a new domain and then all the nodes come to an agreement and
after that point if there is a dispute then all the nodes can vote on who owns that domain. Something
outside the control of any one organization or country where noone had the ability to DDOS a dns
provider, make a website go dark by confiscating its domain, etc...
If you buy a shit-load of food and waste most of it, clearly your "interesting thing" is clearly untrue. The amount of food wasted in the west is ridiculous.
Waste most of it? Who does that? It could get wasted in the supply chain before it gets to my house but with a family of four, I doubt
I throw away more than 500 calories a week and there is no way that I come close to throwing away more calories than we eat.
The estimates I see are generally a 25-30% waste which isn't even close to "most of it" and even alot of that "waste" is in the
supply chain and isn't truly wasted but is instead feed to livestock or otherwise salvaged.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that every single American were living on 5000 calories per day. They aren't, but let's assume an extreme case.
Let's further assume that every single American could manage nicely on 1200 calories per day. They can't, but let's be extreme again.
In that case (large overestimate of food used, similarly extreme underestimate of food needed), we'd be able to feed approximately 1B more people on the food we "waste".
Which is 25% of the expected growth....
You're forgetting that all calories are not equal. American's consume a lot of corn in the form of beef and ethanol. If you include
the amount of corn required to make all the chicken, beef, and ethanol and also add in all the calories that could be grown instead
of tobacco, cotton, etc... then it's possible that the average american consumes considerably more than 5000 "equivalent" calories.
Note that the income of the 1%, if distributed evenly among the 99% would represent only about a 14% pay raise across the board. The wealth of the 1% would nearly double the wealth of the average American, if uniformly distributed.
I think it was rockafeller that when asked by a reporter why he didn't distribute his wealth to the poor that he reached in
his pocket and gave the reporter 3 cents and said "here's your share of my wealth". The 1% are extremely rich but you're
right, evenly distributed across the remaining 99% doesn't really help much.
Arguably not when a large (poor) African family consumes fewer resources than a small (rich) family elsewhere.
One of the interesting things about food is that no matter how rich or how poor you are you can only consume so much food.
Not for sure the exact range but everyone probably falls within a fairly narrow range of about 1000-5000 calories. Anything
outside of that range and you'll quickly die. Obviously beef consumes more corn than eating the corn directly and a huge
SUV probably consumes more ethanol than eating beef so a small rich family does consume more overall resources but when
it comes to just food the large poor family consumes alot more food. In times of overpopulation we could easily cut out the
beef and ethanol and have plenty of food to feed the world's population but it's doubtful that that would actually happen.
if you're paying, then it's not a job.
The only exception I know of in the USA is certain companies (like insurance companies, trucking companies, or life guards) that require passing
a certain test or having a particular certification. In almost all legitimate cases you can take the test from multiple 3rd parties and the test or
certification transfers to other similiar type job and even in those cases most of the better companies will pay you to take the test or provide the
training free of charge. I would be very reluctant to work at any job that required you to pay for your own background check, drug test, etc... as in
most cases either these companies are scams or at best extremely cheap.
You can still buy high quality stuff (like car door handles) but there isn't much of a demand for it
because most people aren't willing to pay the premium for the product.
As a raw material, plastic is basically free but a chunk of aluminum is only a few dollars so it's
not the raw materials. It's most likely that the equipment to manufacture aluminum molds is
much more costly than the equipment to manufacture plastic molds because even in places
where there is sufficient demand and competition you still see a significant price jump to get
metal vs plastic.
Ok, a figerprint scanner might be overly complicated but then why did you then proceed to invent
an even more complicated system using picture ids, payment cards, pin numbers, touch screens, etc..
Seems like your system is alot more complicated than a simple finger scan. Kids are notorious
about losing things among other reasons.
The main reason I would object to a fingerprint scan would be because I don't want the fingerprint to
go elsewhere and the precendence of getting kids used to giving away their biometrics.
Our school uses a pin number. In kindergarten they all learn a 6 digit student number then they all
type it in to eat lunch. They don't have problem with stolen pin numbers because it pops up the
name to the cashier who quickly learns the kids names. Might not work in a larger school but even
in a larger school if it said the name out loud then their classmates would easily recognise if it
said a different name.
Well, I have very recently been witness to a friend that had a problem with its gmail, and could quite quickly contact someone on google's support forums. They're not easy to reach if you don't know what to look for. Their reply on their email should include the link to those forums. Simple as that. But I imagine they don't want it to be easily found, they'd be horribly swamped.
This is exactly right. Their business model doesn't include tech support. I read somewhere that facebook makes something like
50 cents a month per user. You can't do much tech support for that. They would have have to completely change their business
model. I run a website with a completely different business model and we include a phone number. It's amazing how often we
end up having to diagnose 3rd party software whether it is a virus or a virus scanner that is interfering with our customer's use
of our website. We could tell them "not our problem" but then we would potentially lose them as a customer.
Bicycles honestly do belong on the road. Where else are you going to put them, on the sidewalk? There are pedestrians up there.
There are also plenty of "dual-use" trails which allow both bikes and pedestrians which don't seem to have a problem
with both coexisting on a single path.
Bicycles honestly do belong on the road. Where else are you going to put them, on the sidewalk? There are pedestrians up there.
In the town I live in there are zero pedestrians. Building codes must have even changed as some of the newer neighborhoods don't even have
sidewalks. As most neighborhoods do still have sideways and noone uses them, it would be much safer to beef up the sidewalks for bicycles
than add bike lanes. Sidewalks are several feet from the curb and you are much less likely to end up getting ran over by a car or hit a car door
that is being opened. A sidewalk is also less likely to collect broken bottles and debris like bike paths built on the shoulder do. Bicycles are
also generally slow enough that if there is a pedestrian that either the bike or the pedestrian can get out of the way and a pedestrian is much
less likely to get seriously injured getting hit by a bike than a biker is getting hit by a car. It would be cheaper, safer, and make more sense to
convert sidewalks into bike paths than it would be to convert the shoulder into a bike path which is what most cities seem to be trying to do now.
THEM: Hi this is Microsoft and...
US: hang up
Done. Fuck this war.
That's exactly what they want. It's the same reason that scammers say they are from nigeria even when they aren't.
They don't want to talk to you. They want the non-gullible to hang up as quickly as possible so they can quickly find
the little old lady who they can steal from. They called my mom and luckily she had 2 things going for her. First,
she doesn't know enough to actually follow their instructions and second, she called me. Otherwise she would
probably be out some money and I would be left cleaning up the mess. So sure, it's easier to hang up on them but
you are actually doing them a favor and helping them out by doing so.
Would you describe yourself as one of Slashdot's customers?
Of course I'm one of slashdot's customers. Slashdot would be out of business if we (the customers) stopped coming to their website.
I tend to use the term "user" instead of "customer" but it's the same thing. Slashdot has a business model where instead of charging
their customers $5/month they have found advertisers that are willing to foot the bill in exchange for advertisements but that doesn't
really change who they are providing a service to just who is paying for it.
Yes, but unfortunately there is still a lot of "not my department" going on there too. Our company is a large enough advertiser (several thousand a month)
that not only can we call them but they will actually call us if we shut our account off. So if we have a problem directly related to our advertising account
then it is easy to get someone on the phone that attempts to help us. Unfortunately, if we have a problem with gmail, we are still up a creek because they
don't seem to have any ability to either help you or connect you with a different department that can help you. I'm assuming if our accounts were a couple
order of magnitudes bigger that they would be able to find the phone numbers of the people in the other departments but as it stands we're in the same
boat as everyone else outside of that one department.
So.... how are you fixed for firewood and natural gas?
Practically noone stores natural gas. There is LNG and CNG but it's not really very common especially not for households.
You're probably thinking of propane. Many rural people not connected to natural gas have a propane tank in their yards.
It's actually a rather decent book. You should read it. It has other insights which are equally
intriguing. Like the fact that most people's friends and coworkers tend to be close in intelligence,
socioeconomics, etc... Most people with college degrees are surrounded by people with
college degrees. Heck, 1 in 5 people don't graduate from HS but if you have a college degree
I doubt you can name a single friend you have that doesn't have a HS degree and I would be
very surprised if you could name 5 unless you happen to work in an occupation that crosses
boundaries. This clumping is probably just as much a factor as many other factors people
tend to look at. We try to pretend we have a classless society but when a person with a
130 IQ only hangs around with other people with a 130 IQ they get a very skewed view of the
world.
I don't think the point is to trust them. The point is to let them out a little early to save money while also keeping them
in line while they reestablish themself in society. A person who has a house, a job, a girlfriend, etc... is much less
likely to slip back into crime when the monitoring device eventually comes off than someone who is dropped on the
street the day after their sentence is up with nothing to their name.
The correct solution is to put all the "phone" functionality (antenna, transmitter, etc.) in the "watch", and use the "phone" as nothing more than a remote display and computing platform.
This is completely backwards. The cpu, antenna, and trasmitter are the bulky items as well as the power hungry items that need bulky batteries.
That's the part (along with the large display) that needs to be tucked away. The watch should basically just be a fancy remote display and remote
buttons for the phone. A small VNC type remote display protocol would probably work perfectly. The cpu hungry app can run on the phone and
export it's display to the watch (obviously taking into account the smaller screen size). The apps would still be android/iphone apps. It would
just be that now your android/iphone has a 2nd virtual screen and a few extra buttons that it can interact with.