"This I agree with, although I can't see why they couldn't function electronically as well."
You don't mean entirely electronically, do you?
I'm an academic working in the field of medieval culture. While I can access facsimiles (print and electronic) of medieval manuscripts, it's sometimes essential to look at the originals. You can't rely on a facsimile to tell you whether pages have been removed, or whether two texts were originally bound together or created separately. A facsimile won't always show up erasures from the text.
What I'm trying to get at is that there are two ways of treating books (and other sources of printed information). The first is to see them as simple repositories of information, whose content can be translated into electronic form without any loss of meaning. The second is to see them as objects of study or artefacts in themselves. Some books can be treated in the first way without any problems; others must be treated in the second unless we're prepared to lose a lot in understanding them. For me, this second category of book is one reason why libraries will never entirely disappear.
:) Different time zones!
The rarity of email-loss is interesting to note, though. Most people have never experienced more than one or two verifiably lost emails (e.g. those that bounce back as undeliverable for no apparent reason) and yet it's certainly the most common excuse that I encounter from students for late work. If I actually believed them, I'd have to conclude that the email system at my University has at best a 75% reliability!
I live in the UK, and internet outages have been a problem for m in the past few years. Sometimes it's the ISP playing silly-buggers and cancelling my service, sometimes it's "unexplainable". Some freeview cable TV channels can only be had in certain parts of the country, and the reception regularly dies, especially in bad weather. I put up with it because there isn't a better service to be had for a sensible amount of money.
And, yes, emails do go adrift, though not often. In my case, my boyfriend wrote to me to ask whether we should keep seeing each other; I answered with a very emphatic "yes!" It never reached him; he's now my ex-. It bounced back to me a month later. Damn teh internets for ruining my love life!
I see all the anti-Japanese comments on this post, and it makes me wonder whether the Japanese are wrong to be wary of foreigners...
I find it sad that you take not speaking English as some kind of black mark. You'll find that most Americans and British people speak nothing other than their own language. Why should the Japanese, if they would rather not? Other countries are not there simply to service the needs of English-speaking tourists, and if you'd ever seen what a group of Englishmen in a sex shop looks like, you might sympathise with the Japanese for wanting to keep them out!
"there's a thousand reasons why humans should always do jobs like that"... I'm not entirely convinced by this. If we can develop robots that can perform te simple care tasks efficiently and well, we cut down on the risk of infection posed by human skin, hair, fingernails, and clothing. We also cut down on the impatience towards and mistreatment of vulnerable patients which is so often found, at least in the British health system - see this speech by a member of the House of Lords for one perspective on the health service here.
I'm not saying that humans are incapable of doing these jobs, or that all (or even a majority of) care workers are lazy or impatient. But the risks of infection and death which abound in healthcare settings suggest to me that developing machines that can do these jobs well could provide serious and life-saving improvements.
Hey, sorry - you're right, TheMeuge, I'm tired, and I didn't respond to the ramifications of the second part of your post.
I'd like to see figures that prove that the govt. of (for example) the US or the UK actually can't afford to give all its citizens the medical treatment they need - even if it meant cutting back on other things such as government bureaucracy, or taxing high-earners more efficently. I would argue that the rhetoric of "filet mignon welfare" suggests that good healthcare is a luxury. I do believe it's a right, and I also believe that there's enough money out there to pay for it. It's just badly distributed.
But before this post, like my last one, gets modded as 50% troll, I'm going to stop!
Sure, but if filet mignon were the only thing I could eat due to some rare genetic condition, would it be moral for the government to say "well, tough, you're just gonna have to starve to death because you're too poor"?
Basic food will keep me alive, even if it doesn't taste too good. Basic healthcare, on the other hand, will not necessarily be enough.
I agree with you that we shouldn't be naive about the costs of such things as medication. But the fact is that, when you claim that the prevalent opinion here is that "we should all get whatever we want, whenever we want, for free", you're equating a group of geeks' attitudes towards software with someone who earns maybe $1 a day needing treatment that will prolong/save their life - and allow them to keep earning minimum wage so that their children aren't out on the street.
So, yeah, we have to take into account the costs of research, production and so on. But don't call someone greedy when all they want is the chance to live a healthy life.
If you read the article, you'll see that this problem apparently extends beyond simple fact-checking. For example, categories such as "religion" and "political party" are already being filtered by rules which are ostensibly meant to make mobile content safe for under-18s.
I have no problem with holding the media to account, but the goverment should not be doing so when it has a vested interest in the output it would be monitoring. Further, the legislation wouldn't limit government control to matters of fact or accuracy (difficult categories to establish in the first place.)
And this is the cool thing - it's a boy magnet! I get it out in the pub or Starbucks or wherever, and attract all those furtive glances that my looks alone sadly never procured for me. I even have some guy come up to me in the pub wanting to try out my Eee. So girls, forget the Apple that says "Hi - I like pretty things and ponies!" Get an Eee instead, and men will fall at your feet.
Well, okay geeks will fall at your feet, but in my case that's the required demographic...
Seriously?
This is a great OS, which I (English major, with no previous Linux experience) got up and working in a day with no help except Google. It's so many different kinds of cool that I don't know where to begin. And you're bitching about the colour? Can you really not be bothered to make a few clicks to get a different scheme?
Your perspective is interesting, and I think that to an extent you're right - having things to do and people to do them with is incredibly important. But it's not a cure-all.
I have suffered from severe clinical depression for two long periods in the past. I'm a student (now a grad student), I read all the time, I sing in choirs and by myself, I volunteer for charities, I draw and design, I make jewelry, I sew, I love music and films, I spend lots of time with friends, I cook, I do yoga... You get my point. But when I was depressed, none of these things would help. Often I didn't have the energy to pick up a pencil and sketchbook, or even get out of bed. Music made me cry hysterically. I couldn't concentrate enough to read a whole book. Cooking nauseated me. Being around people was torment, because my depressed self-image made me believe they all hated me (and it's true that I probably wasn't much fun to be with). All I wanted was to get better, but in the end this needed medical intervention and counselling.
My friends and my interests helped me to get better. But they couldn't have done it alone. We need to take the pressure off the depressed person and their friends by recognising that you can't expect to cure depression by love alone. If drugs don't work, don't use them. But for many people. me included, they literally are a way to save a life.
It's nothing like that. I buy my music from iTunes, to play on the two iPods I have also bought from Apple. However, I would also like to play this music I've paid for on my laptop, which runs Linux. So I remove the DRM. I'm not cracking this music in order to rip anyone off, but in order that I don't get ripped off because I'm a Linux user.
Absolutely - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs reports that Steve Jobs' salary at Apple is $1 per year. I make about $10,000 - I'd swap with Steve any day...
From what I read, the harasser was very much aware of the girl's mental problems. Normally I would agree with other posters here that the suicide was not the fault of the "cute boy", but if the woman sending the messages did so knowing that she was harassing someone emotionally vulnerable, she has at least some moral culpability.
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"This I agree with, although I can't see why they couldn't function electronically as well."
You don't mean entirely electronically, do you?
I'm an academic working in the field of medieval culture. While I can access facsimiles (print and electronic) of medieval manuscripts, it's sometimes essential to look at the originals. You can't rely on a facsimile to tell you whether pages have been removed, or whether two texts were originally bound together or created separately. A facsimile won't always show up erasures from the text.
What I'm trying to get at is that there are two ways of treating books (and other sources of printed information). The first is to see them as simple repositories of information, whose content can be translated into electronic form without any loss of meaning. The second is to see them as objects of study or artefacts in themselves. Some books can be treated in the first way without any problems; others must be treated in the second unless we're prepared to lose a lot in understanding them. For me, this second category of book is one reason why libraries will never entirely disappear.
:) Different time zones! The rarity of email-loss is interesting to note, though. Most people have never experienced more than one or two verifiably lost emails (e.g. those that bounce back as undeliverable for no apparent reason) and yet it's certainly the most common excuse that I encounter from students for late work. If I actually believed them, I'd have to conclude that the email system at my University has at best a 75% reliability!
I live in the UK, and internet outages have been a problem for m in the past few years. Sometimes it's the ISP playing silly-buggers and cancelling my service, sometimes it's "unexplainable". Some freeview cable TV channels can only be had in certain parts of the country, and the reception regularly dies, especially in bad weather. I put up with it because there isn't a better service to be had for a sensible amount of money. And, yes, emails do go adrift, though not often. In my case, my boyfriend wrote to me to ask whether we should keep seeing each other; I answered with a very emphatic "yes!" It never reached him; he's now my ex-. It bounced back to me a month later. Damn teh internets for ruining my love life!
I see all the anti-Japanese comments on this post, and it makes me wonder whether the Japanese are wrong to be wary of foreigners...
I find it sad that you take not speaking English as some kind of black mark. You'll find that most Americans and British people speak nothing other than their own language. Why should the Japanese, if they would rather not? Other countries are not there simply to service the needs of English-speaking tourists, and if you'd ever seen what a group of Englishmen in a sex shop looks like, you might sympathise with the Japanese for wanting to keep them out!
"there's a thousand reasons why humans should always do jobs like that"... I'm not entirely convinced by this. If we can develop robots that can perform te simple care tasks efficiently and well, we cut down on the risk of infection posed by human skin, hair, fingernails, and clothing. We also cut down on the impatience towards and mistreatment of vulnerable patients which is so often found, at least in the British health system - see this speech by a member of the House of Lords for one perspective on the health service here.
I'm not saying that humans are incapable of doing these jobs, or that all (or even a majority of) care workers are lazy or impatient. But the risks of infection and death which abound in healthcare settings suggest to me that developing machines that can do these jobs well could provide serious and life-saving improvements.
Hey, sorry - you're right, TheMeuge, I'm tired, and I didn't respond to the ramifications of the second part of your post.
I'd like to see figures that prove that the govt. of (for example) the US or the UK actually can't afford to give all its citizens the medical treatment they need - even if it meant cutting back on other things such as government bureaucracy, or taxing high-earners more efficently. I would argue that the rhetoric of "filet mignon welfare" suggests that good healthcare is a luxury. I do believe it's a right, and I also believe that there's enough money out there to pay for it. It's just badly distributed.
But before this post, like my last one, gets modded as 50% troll, I'm going to stop!
Sure, but if filet mignon were the only thing I could eat due to some rare genetic condition, would it be moral for the government to say "well, tough, you're just gonna have to starve to death because you're too poor"?
Basic food will keep me alive, even if it doesn't taste too good. Basic healthcare, on the other hand, will not necessarily be enough.
I agree with you that we shouldn't be naive about the costs of such things as medication. But the fact is that, when you claim that the prevalent opinion here is that "we should all get whatever we want, whenever we want, for free", you're equating a group of geeks' attitudes towards software with someone who earns maybe $1 a day needing treatment that will prolong/save their life - and allow them to keep earning minimum wage so that their children aren't out on the street.
So, yeah, we have to take into account the costs of research, production and so on. But don't call someone greedy when all they want is the chance to live a healthy life.
If you read the article, you'll see that this problem apparently extends beyond simple fact-checking. For example, categories such as "religion" and "political party" are already being filtered by rules which are ostensibly meant to make mobile content safe for under-18s.
I have no problem with holding the media to account, but the goverment should not be doing so when it has a vested interest in the output it would be monitoring. Further, the legislation wouldn't limit government control to matters of fact or accuracy (difficult categories to establish in the first place.)
Well, okay geeks will fall at your feet, but in my case that's the required demographic...
Seriously? This is a great OS, which I (English major, with no previous Linux experience) got up and working in a day with no help except Google. It's so many different kinds of cool that I don't know where to begin. And you're bitching about the colour? Can you really not be bothered to make a few clicks to get a different scheme?
I dunno, but I think you missed a joke here... Think of the word "exposed" in a sexual sense, and see whether the previous comment is now funny.
Your perspective is interesting, and I think that to an extent you're right - having things to do and people to do them with is incredibly important. But it's not a cure-all. I have suffered from severe clinical depression for two long periods in the past. I'm a student (now a grad student), I read all the time, I sing in choirs and by myself, I volunteer for charities, I draw and design, I make jewelry, I sew, I love music and films, I spend lots of time with friends, I cook, I do yoga... You get my point. But when I was depressed, none of these things would help. Often I didn't have the energy to pick up a pencil and sketchbook, or even get out of bed. Music made me cry hysterically. I couldn't concentrate enough to read a whole book. Cooking nauseated me. Being around people was torment, because my depressed self-image made me believe they all hated me (and it's true that I probably wasn't much fun to be with). All I wanted was to get better, but in the end this needed medical intervention and counselling. My friends and my interests helped me to get better. But they couldn't have done it alone. We need to take the pressure off the depressed person and their friends by recognising that you can't expect to cure depression by love alone. If drugs don't work, don't use them. But for many people. me included, they literally are a way to save a life.
It's nothing like that. I buy my music from iTunes, to play on the two iPods I have also bought from Apple. However, I would also like to play this music I've paid for on my laptop, which runs Linux. So I remove the DRM. I'm not cracking this music in order to rip anyone off, but in order that I don't get ripped off because I'm a Linux user.
Absolutely - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs reports that Steve Jobs' salary at Apple is $1 per year. I make about $10,000 - I'd swap with Steve any day...
From what I read, the harasser was very much aware of the girl's mental problems. Normally I would agree with other posters here that the suicide was not the fault of the "cute boy", but if the woman sending the messages did so knowing that she was harassing someone emotionally vulnerable, she has at least some moral culpability.
I'd definitely use it - it's cool!