Foxit Reader is a nice alternative. It opens quickly, doesn't feel the need to update every other day or keep an updater service running all the time, and it doesn't have as nearly as many security issues. Alternatively, you could just do a search for pdf reader -adobe and come up with a variety of alternatives yourself.
Personally, I would blame Apple even more when I couldn't visit a website at all because the site was designed around Flash. Personally, I just got Flash on my Droid about a week ago and I've already hit at least a dozen sites that wouldn't have been viewable before and it was in situations where I didn't have easy access to a PC and the information was something I needed right away. Everyone here seems to want to blame the site owners because Flash is a PITA (and it is, don't get me wrong), but it sure is handy to be able to actually visit every site on the web even if it isn't designed for mobile viewing.
(or when the cable company says, "look we have tv over the internet now too" like they did with phone service)
So? Let them, then there would be three TV over IP services vying for my money instead of just two (actually between Netflix, Amazon, and the possible multitude of Android based players there will be many more than three but you get the point). Though I suspect rather than "you can't use our lines for that" it will be a computer nerd shacked up in his workshop doing tests on each of the devices that discovers that the cable company's offering magically gets better bandwidth and latency than their competition. Though which cable companies will be stupid enough to pick a fight with the likes of Google and Apple at the same time remains to be seen (but you just know there will be at least one of them that thinks they can get away with it).
Burning is also the appropriate way to dispose of a worn US flag yet there are plenty of US citizens who get very, very angry when someone does so as a sign of disrespect. Just because the action itself is acceptable under certain circumstances, doesn't mean people are going to be happy with your chosen method of saying "Everyone and everything associated with X sucks".
I know several otherwise intelligent and informed people who were convince for a year or so that we were experiencing a runaway greenhouse effect and we would end up like Venus. There were articles about it in several major newspapers and websites, with many people prominently proclaiming that it was a possibility. The rhetoric has toned down considerably since then thank god, though it is still far too high for an argument of this importance. Just because it is embarrassing to those of use that support global warming research doesn't mean that it isn't true.
Officially, negotiations are ongoing. In reality, the majority of those that would vote on it have pledged to vote no, if true, ACTA will never go though and become law. So the issue is 'all but dropped' in that the negotiations are still open, but no one on either side expects them to go anywhere.
Scientific inaccuracy doesn't bother me unless it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Take the dreaded movie The Core as an example. Ship that can withstand the Earth's pressure? Sure, movie doesn't work without it. Laser that can drill through solid rock at many kilometers per hour? Again, necessary for the story. I can deal with that because you can't make the same movie without abandoning reality.
On the other hand, boosting the power of your nuclear weapon by placing reactor fuel next to the bomb? There's a dozen more accurate ways the ending could have played out that would have left the rest of the movie unchanged. Having the characters walk from one compartment of the ship to the other, when the exterior shots clearly show that they should have to climb ladders? Completely destroys the movie for me. At that point it's not about the story at all, it's just plain laziness on the part of everyone involved. It's not the inaccuracy that ruins the movie for me, it's the laziness.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that pulling the game from your stores does not show politeness. It's a highly anticipated game that doubtless many people in the military are interested in playing, Gamestop is just saying "nope" without even asking what they think about the matter. As I said before, I could understand not putting up giant displays advertising for the game, and I can even understand putting the game behind the counter and making available by request only, I cannot understand taking that decision away soldiers themselves.
As someone below this post put it much more elegantly:
"You can't have that." "But-" "Because I RESPECT you!.
My point from my original post which you seem to have missed:
I think that we should give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play.
Telling people who are risking their lives for us that they aren't emotionally stable enough to handle this game is insulting. Maybe some of them can't, but that should be their decision, not yours or mine.
We trust those men and women with automatic rifles, artillery, tanks, fighter jets, and battleships. We trust them to shoot and kill people to (in theory anyway) protect our way of life. We trust them to literally take a bullet so that people back home don't have to (again in theory at least). I think that we should give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play. Pulling the advertisements I can agree with, maybe even putting the game behind the counter out of sight, but how can you justify making the game completely unavailable to them? But that's just my opinion.
Stupid question: why don't they run the DNA test again if they think it was flawed? Surely there is a lab somewhere with the equipment lying around that could answer the question one way or the other what the red rain is caused by. Isn't that the kind of thing that many undergrad applied genetics classes do for lab work? If nothing else, it would sure make the locals happy. I can't imagine the locals are happy about getting rain that looks suspiciously like blood, I would think they'd like an answer.
Even ignoring items 1, 2, 5, and 6, just parts of points 3 and 4 would be an incredible scientific find. Life as we know it is practically by definition powered by DNA, finding anything that reproduced similar to the way living cells do but lacked DNA would be amazing. If even that much is true, the guy is going to get a Nobel prize in 30 years (I am in no way saying that it is true or that he will get a prize). It would literally open up whole new areas of science that are currently little more than science fiction.
If said cells are from the red rain that would be a bit more interesting besides, if they're from space or not is going to be almost impossible to prove after the fact. More interesting than being able to divide at 120 degrees C would be if they can be frozen, dried out, and exposed to vacuum for a few years and still reproduce. If their spectra lines up with the spectra of clouds in interstellar space... I think you're going to need a bit more evidence to prove that that is significant. Life in general is made out of elements that are quite common in the universe, unless you can show otherwise I would be prepared to write that off as coincidence.
Assuming this is all true, you would think alien cells that are not made from DNA would be something the general scientific community would love to have samples of, for analysis.
Well... yeah. That's why what the guy claims is such a big deal. He would have been the first to discover the phenomenon. It would be cool if it's not bunk, but I'm going to wait until this gets confirmed by a few other labs around the world before I start to get too excited.
So assuming that someone believes the literal truth of the Fall as the reason why we are sent to hell... no, that still doesn't make sense. I deserve eternal punishment (and I think I could make the argument that despite what you say, the vast majority of people who believe in hell as an actual place view it as punishment) for something that my great, great, great (etc, etc) ancestors did? What kind of fucked up asshole would punish me for something that happened 6000 (or more) years ago.
Now, I could maybe, just possibly, justify belief in a hell that is possible to leave. You are kept there until you accept god's love or whatever it is that he wanted out of you in the first place. In which case, I can't imagine that hell is populated by anyone except the super religious who are so convinced that they are dirty evil sinners that they are unable to accept that god doesn't want to punish them. The irony would be delicious if we weren't talking about condemning people to an eternity in hell for doing no wrongs at all.
If God really is a psychopath; i.e., if God really is going to send you to hell for eternity because you didn't believe or did believe
It's worse than that. Can you think of anything done on earth that deserves eternal, and infinite punishment? Think about it. Hitler was obviously a horrible person and his actions led to millions of deaths, but sending Hitler to hell would condemning him to the most painful experience imaginable (according to some theists) for trillions upon trillions of years.
And then throw in that at one time or another, various religions have stated that you deserve this punishment for everything from murder to premarital sex, from worshiping the wrong god to saying the 'name' of god, from having homosexual sex to simple gluttony. In my opinion, anyone that believes in a god that would punish someone in any way for all eternity believes in a god that is a sociopathic asshole.
But if the proto-universe existed in a stable form before the Big Bang, there's no telling how long it was in that stable form. It could have taken billions of quadrillions of years for one of the forces to become decoupled from the others, the big bang would have erased any and all evidence of the time before it (with very few theoretical exceptions). So, while gravity could split into its hypothetical component parts tomorrow, the odds of that happening are probably so close to 0 as to be meaningless.
Ah, so choice is only good when it's your choice. Got it.
There's already alternatives to flash on the web, if Flash sucks that badly compared to the competition ("shitty ass flash" as you put it) only foolish companies would continue using it. All the alternatives should be supported so that the web designers can make the decision based on what technology meets the requirements, keeps costs down, and makes their customers happy. You know, as opposed to this idea that HTML 5 is going to be the ultra-hammer that magically turns every problem into a nail.
Exactly what kind of connector do they have plugged into the bottom of that thing? I thought we had gotten past this... my last 3 phones have all had charging and data connectivity of USB. Please don't tell me that a flagship product (other than Apple of course) is going away from industry standards yet again.
Just ask your boss if you can have 0.48% of the company's budget for high risk, high payoff projects (DARPA gets $3.2 billion of the military's $660 billion budget) . I'd be willing to bet that most engineering places put more than that into advanced prototyping and proof of concept designs as it is. Doesn't seem so bad when you put it that way does it?
If you take hostages and demand the the UN condemn Hitler, you're still going to be hated and reviled for threatening innocent lives. That is just the way it is and probably the way it should be.
I'm just guessing, but I have worked a little bit with security feed monitoring software before. Most likely they have 4-8 key cameras (on the registers and liquor department) which are shown 2-4 at a time and rotated through to watch for actual theft or violent behavior. Around these, they will have a number (10+) of lower priority feeds being displayed scaled down and rotated through more slowly which basically only serve the purpose of watching for weird, suspicious behavior.
The rest of the feeds probably aren't even watched but digital storage is cheap these days, it's pretty trivial to keep a decent quality recording even of 50 feeds for the past day or so, with a simple panic button to prevent deletion if something happens. Depending on how elaborate the system is, there might also be a way to flag feeds that meet certain criteria and display them in the main displays with an alert. Things like motion in what should be an empty stockroom, people moving backwards through the registers, fire doors opening, etc.
Of course, the even more likely answer to the issue of having 50 'cameras' and no one to watch them is that there are really only 5 cameras and 45 opaque plastic domes that look like cameras. That is the solution that the vast majority of stores choose to go with.
It's a DARPA project, they are almost by definition proof of concept, ten years out, 'most likely won't work this time around (but hey, wouldn't it be cool if it did?)' type projects that are designed to get the ball rolling on technology that might be possible to implement today. No one in charge of this project is expecting to roll it out into combat situations next year, they just want to see what a bit of money thrown at the problem comes up with; they literally don't even care if it's successful or not.
Like the article says, Android is becoming a big target these days and yet no one has found any significant exploits to its security model. Everything that I've read seems to think that it is as bulletproof as a modern, complex OS can be. That isn't to say that there won't be the occasional flaw but it is almost certainly orders of magnitude more secure than a certain piece of software that runs on a few billion computers around the world (including, I suspect, the majority of Slashdotters).
In the past, women were actively discouraged from entering sciences by the male dominated establishments. What women did enter science were often not credited with their work. Hell, half the female scientists in history are only well known because their research partner was their husband, the only person willing to give them equal credit for the work and even when they do research and even then it wasn't a sure thing. People still argue over how much influence Einstein's first wife had on his work.
And I think you can attribute the problems of getting young women interested in science at least partly to the fact that there are so few historical role models for them. What role models they do have were ostracized, largely uncredited, or only accepted because of the support of their husbands. It doesn't set a very good example for them to live by.
The other side of the coin is female math and science teachers who are selfdescribed to be bad at the subject that they teach. There's been lots of studies that show that a confident female teacher is all that it takes to get girls interested in science, but such teachers are surprisingly and depressingly rare.
Slashdot Mirror
Foxit Reader is a nice alternative. It opens quickly, doesn't feel the need to update every other day or keep an updater service running all the time, and it doesn't have as nearly as many security issues. Alternatively, you could just do a search for pdf reader -adobe and come up with a variety of alternatives yourself.
Personally, I would blame Apple even more when I couldn't visit a website at all because the site was designed around Flash. Personally, I just got Flash on my Droid about a week ago and I've already hit at least a dozen sites that wouldn't have been viewable before and it was in situations where I didn't have easy access to a PC and the information was something I needed right away. Everyone here seems to want to blame the site owners because Flash is a PITA (and it is, don't get me wrong), but it sure is handy to be able to actually visit every site on the web even if it isn't designed for mobile viewing.
(or when the cable company says, "look we have tv over the internet now too" like they did with phone service)
So? Let them, then there would be three TV over IP services vying for my money instead of just two (actually between Netflix, Amazon, and the possible multitude of Android based players there will be many more than three but you get the point). Though I suspect rather than "you can't use our lines for that" it will be a computer nerd shacked up in his workshop doing tests on each of the devices that discovers that the cable company's offering magically gets better bandwidth and latency than their competition. Though which cable companies will be stupid enough to pick a fight with the likes of Google and Apple at the same time remains to be seen (but you just know there will be at least one of them that thinks they can get away with it).
Burning is also the appropriate way to dispose of a worn US flag yet there are plenty of US citizens who get very, very angry when someone does so as a sign of disrespect. Just because the action itself is acceptable under certain circumstances, doesn't mean people are going to be happy with your chosen method of saying "Everyone and everything associated with X sucks".
I know several otherwise intelligent and informed people who were convince for a year or so that we were experiencing a runaway greenhouse effect and we would end up like Venus. There were articles about it in several major newspapers and websites, with many people prominently proclaiming that it was a possibility. The rhetoric has toned down considerably since then thank god, though it is still far too high for an argument of this importance. Just because it is embarrassing to those of use that support global warming research doesn't mean that it isn't true.
Officially, negotiations are ongoing. In reality, the majority of those that would vote on it have pledged to vote no, if true, ACTA will never go though and become law. So the issue is 'all but dropped' in that the negotiations are still open, but no one on either side expects them to go anywhere.
Scientific inaccuracy doesn't bother me unless it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Take the dreaded movie The Core as an example. Ship that can withstand the Earth's pressure? Sure, movie doesn't work without it. Laser that can drill through solid rock at many kilometers per hour? Again, necessary for the story. I can deal with that because you can't make the same movie without abandoning reality.
On the other hand, boosting the power of your nuclear weapon by placing reactor fuel next to the bomb? There's a dozen more accurate ways the ending could have played out that would have left the rest of the movie unchanged. Having the characters walk from one compartment of the ship to the other, when the exterior shots clearly show that they should have to climb ladders? Completely destroys the movie for me. At that point it's not about the story at all, it's just plain laziness on the part of everyone involved. It's not the inaccuracy that ruins the movie for me, it's the laziness.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that pulling the game from your stores does not show politeness. It's a highly anticipated game that doubtless many people in the military are interested in playing, Gamestop is just saying "nope" without even asking what they think about the matter. As I said before, I could understand not putting up giant displays advertising for the game, and I can even understand putting the game behind the counter and making available by request only, I cannot understand taking that decision away soldiers themselves.
As someone below this post put it much more elegantly:
"You can't have that."
"But-"
"Because I RESPECT you!.
My point from my original post which you seem to have missed:
I think that we should give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play.
Telling people who are risking their lives for us that they aren't emotionally stable enough to handle this game is insulting. Maybe some of them can't, but that should be their decision, not yours or mine.
We trust those men and women with automatic rifles, artillery, tanks, fighter jets, and battleships. We trust them to shoot and kill people to (in theory anyway) protect our way of life. We trust them to literally take a bullet so that people back home don't have to (again in theory at least). I think that we should give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play. Pulling the advertisements I can agree with, maybe even putting the game behind the counter out of sight, but how can you justify making the game completely unavailable to them? But that's just my opinion.
Stupid question: why don't they run the DNA test again if they think it was flawed? Surely there is a lab somewhere with the equipment lying around that could answer the question one way or the other what the red rain is caused by. Isn't that the kind of thing that many undergrad applied genetics classes do for lab work? If nothing else, it would sure make the locals happy. I can't imagine the locals are happy about getting rain that looks suspiciously like blood, I would think they'd like an answer.
Even ignoring items 1, 2, 5, and 6, just parts of points 3 and 4 would be an incredible scientific find. Life as we know it is practically by definition powered by DNA, finding anything that reproduced similar to the way living cells do but lacked DNA would be amazing. If even that much is true, the guy is going to get a Nobel prize in 30 years (I am in no way saying that it is true or that he will get a prize). It would literally open up whole new areas of science that are currently little more than science fiction.
If said cells are from the red rain that would be a bit more interesting besides, if they're from space or not is going to be almost impossible to prove after the fact. More interesting than being able to divide at 120 degrees C would be if they can be frozen, dried out, and exposed to vacuum for a few years and still reproduce. If their spectra lines up with the spectra of clouds in interstellar space... I think you're going to need a bit more evidence to prove that that is significant. Life in general is made out of elements that are quite common in the universe, unless you can show otherwise I would be prepared to write that off as coincidence.
Assuming this is all true, you would think alien cells that are not made from DNA would be something the general scientific community would love to have samples of, for analysis.
Well... yeah. That's why what the guy claims is such a big deal. He would have been the first to discover the phenomenon. It would be cool if it's not bunk, but I'm going to wait until this gets confirmed by a few other labs around the world before I start to get too excited.
So assuming that someone believes the literal truth of the Fall as the reason why we are sent to hell... no, that still doesn't make sense. I deserve eternal punishment (and I think I could make the argument that despite what you say, the vast majority of people who believe in hell as an actual place view it as punishment) for something that my great, great, great (etc, etc) ancestors did? What kind of fucked up asshole would punish me for something that happened 6000 (or more) years ago.
Now, I could maybe, just possibly, justify belief in a hell that is possible to leave. You are kept there until you accept god's love or whatever it is that he wanted out of you in the first place. In which case, I can't imagine that hell is populated by anyone except the super religious who are so convinced that they are dirty evil sinners that they are unable to accept that god doesn't want to punish them. The irony would be delicious if we weren't talking about condemning people to an eternity in hell for doing no wrongs at all.
If God really is a psychopath; i.e., if God really is going to send you to hell for eternity because you didn't believe or did believe
It's worse than that. Can you think of anything done on earth that deserves eternal, and infinite punishment? Think about it. Hitler was obviously a horrible person and his actions led to millions of deaths, but sending Hitler to hell would condemning him to the most painful experience imaginable (according to some theists) for trillions upon trillions of years.
And then throw in that at one time or another, various religions have stated that you deserve this punishment for everything from murder to premarital sex, from worshiping the wrong god to saying the 'name' of god, from having homosexual sex to simple gluttony. In my opinion, anyone that believes in a god that would punish someone in any way for all eternity believes in a god that is a sociopathic asshole.
But if the proto-universe existed in a stable form before the Big Bang, there's no telling how long it was in that stable form. It could have taken billions of quadrillions of years for one of the forces to become decoupled from the others, the big bang would have erased any and all evidence of the time before it (with very few theoretical exceptions). So, while gravity could split into its hypothetical component parts tomorrow, the odds of that happening are probably so close to 0 as to be meaningless.
Ah, so choice is only good when it's your choice. Got it.
There's already alternatives to flash on the web, if Flash sucks that badly compared to the competition ("shitty ass flash" as you put it) only foolish companies would continue using it. All the alternatives should be supported so that the web designers can make the decision based on what technology meets the requirements, keeps costs down, and makes their customers happy. You know, as opposed to this idea that HTML 5 is going to be the ultra-hammer that magically turns every problem into a nail.
Exactly what kind of connector do they have plugged into the bottom of that thing? I thought we had gotten past this... my last 3 phones have all had charging and data connectivity of USB. Please don't tell me that a flagship product (other than Apple of course) is going away from industry standards yet again.
Make it a statement with he or him, if you would use 'he', 'who' is correct; if you would use 'him', 'whom' is correct.
Just ask your boss if you can have 0.48% of the company's budget for high risk, high payoff projects (DARPA gets $3.2 billion of the military's $660 billion budget) . I'd be willing to bet that most engineering places put more than that into advanced prototyping and proof of concept designs as it is. Doesn't seem so bad when you put it that way does it?
If you take hostages and demand the the UN condemn Hitler, you're still going to be hated and reviled for threatening innocent lives. That is just the way it is and probably the way it should be.
I'm just guessing, but I have worked a little bit with security feed monitoring software before. Most likely they have 4-8 key cameras (on the registers and liquor department) which are shown 2-4 at a time and rotated through to watch for actual theft or violent behavior. Around these, they will have a number (10+) of lower priority feeds being displayed scaled down and rotated through more slowly which basically only serve the purpose of watching for weird, suspicious behavior.
The rest of the feeds probably aren't even watched but digital storage is cheap these days, it's pretty trivial to keep a decent quality recording even of 50 feeds for the past day or so, with a simple panic button to prevent deletion if something happens. Depending on how elaborate the system is, there might also be a way to flag feeds that meet certain criteria and display them in the main displays with an alert. Things like motion in what should be an empty stockroom, people moving backwards through the registers, fire doors opening, etc.
Of course, the even more likely answer to the issue of having 50 'cameras' and no one to watch them is that there are really only 5 cameras and 45 opaque plastic domes that look like cameras. That is the solution that the vast majority of stores choose to go with.
It's a DARPA project, they are almost by definition proof of concept, ten years out, 'most likely won't work this time around (but hey, wouldn't it be cool if it did?)' type projects that are designed to get the ball rolling on technology that might be possible to implement today. No one in charge of this project is expecting to roll it out into combat situations next year, they just want to see what a bit of money thrown at the problem comes up with; they literally don't even care if it's successful or not.
Like the article says, Android is becoming a big target these days and yet no one has found any significant exploits to its security model. Everything that I've read seems to think that it is as bulletproof as a modern, complex OS can be. That isn't to say that there won't be the occasional flaw but it is almost certainly orders of magnitude more secure than a certain piece of software that runs on a few billion computers around the world (including, I suspect, the majority of Slashdotters).
Vote "NO!" on prop infinity.
In the past, women were actively discouraged from entering sciences by the male dominated establishments. What women did enter science were often not credited with their work. Hell, half the female scientists in history are only well known because their research partner was their husband, the only person willing to give them equal credit for the work and even when they do research and even then it wasn't a sure thing. People still argue over how much influence Einstein's first wife had on his work.
And I think you can attribute the problems of getting young women interested in science at least partly to the fact that there are so few historical role models for them. What role models they do have were ostracized, largely uncredited, or only accepted because of the support of their husbands. It doesn't set a very good example for them to live by.
The other side of the coin is female math and science teachers who are selfdescribed to be bad at the subject that they teach. There's been lots of studies that show that a confident female teacher is all that it takes to get girls interested in science, but such teachers are surprisingly and depressingly rare.