To be honest, your initial post sounded like "I started a romantic comedy, and I was disappointed it didn't turn into a hack'n'slash flick with a crime drama conclusion. All the good movies do that." To which I'd say, "at least you've still got 'Dusk Till Dawn.'"
If "changing your mind" = "flip-flopping" then that reputation might have affected a not-too-distant US election. I was on a financial board with a bunch of fairly religious folks, and I can't tell you how many times I saw something like "I can't vote for a flip-flopper" as the *sole* reason why someone would cast their vote one way or another. Now I realize that there may be a difference between changing your mind and being unreliably inconsistent, and I don't really want to argue which applied in that case, but the negative reaction to the idea of someone being able to change position was astounding to me.
Until we can get past the "a 2000-year-old book says it, therefore I believe it" and "some email I'm too lazy to check against snopes says it, therefore I believe it", picking up a stray scientific fact that gets overturned is the least of our problems. At least inaccurate science is in the right ballpark.
Really? I'd say the atheist, recognizing this world and this one lifetime is all he gets, has a strong incentive not to tick off someone else to the point of being shot. For the fundamentalist, death should be less of a concern.
On the other hand, I know parents who quite effectively use "time out" to teach their kids lessons. It doesn't have to be actual, physical pain to teach kids, it just has to be something the kid registers as a punishment. I've seen obnoxious kids shrug off a spanking with "that didn't hurt" and other kids genuinely contrite when they realize their actions were time-out-worthy.
I read the first book in the series in the month after I graduated college. Since that time I have held eight jobs, been laid off from two; tried four separate freelance/personal businesses on the side; changed career paths three times; lived in nine houses in three significantly different geographical locations; visited 44 of the 50 US states; had two romantic relationships with two big dry spells in between; met, romanced, and married my wife, and just celebrated our fifth anniversary with our first child on the way. It has been a really, really, really long time between the first book and the fifth.
On the other hand, I'm still driving the same Honda Civic, which I also bought that summer. It's got 200,000 miles on it, which is about one mile for each page of the Fire and Ice series.
The part where stars in the sky make you crazy and cause you to destroy your civilization? If I'm remembering the quote properly, there was a line where a character said "we tried to simulate it in a dark room with lots of holes in the roof, but they were just dots. The stars aren't anything like that."
It's been a few decades, so I might be misremembering. I do recall liking the story.
Oh, man, I didn't even notice the "km" in that post. Thought it was miles, and was skeptical, but let it slide. But km?! No frakking way 60k miles is anywhere close to "needs increased maintenance." That's barely out of the "new car smell phase" and is just hitting its stride. The difference between 5 years and 10 years (and 80k and 150k *miles*) on my Honda was basically negligible.
Well, it's a step in the right direction, I suppose. Rather than driving the car for 4 years, rolling the remaining year of the loan into the next one with higher payments, at least people are now paying off the car, enjoying the freedom of no payments for two or three months, and then starting over again.
As someone who is still driving his '97 Civic, I'm well aware that there is life after car payments, and it's glorious.
Funny story: last fall I had to switch to the valet key, because I finally wore down the primary key to the point that I was having trouble unlocking doors and starting the car. The key wore out, but the car is still doing fine!
I've never had an Apple laptop HD fail on me, and I'm on my 4th. Average age at retirement of each has been ~4-5 years. I've lost lots of batteries, a power supply, one LCD, and one motherboard, but never a hard drive.
True. Through bad timing my first computer out of college ('97) was about 10-20% underpowered (processor, ram, hard drive size) by the time it arrived, because I ordered the week before new products came out. The computer I replaced it with 3 years later had quadruple the specs or greater, across the board. On the other hand when I replaced my 5-year-old desktop last month, at best the major specs increased by 20-25% (on an admittedly lower-middle-class system). Honestly, I don't even know that I *needed* to upgrade, because the older computer still ran pretty well, but it was having some video card issues and still running XP, and I wanted a quick-and-easy fresh start with Win 7.
To go from quadrupling in three years just over a decade ago to only a modest bump over the last 5 years is a huge change in the pace of innovation.
Not directly related to that, but I've noticed we have two sockets in the house that burn through bulbs roughly every 2-3 months of light use, while the rest of the sockets and lamps tend to last upwards of a year to many years. Anyone know why that would happen?
I'm reminded of this because in my childhood home it was our garage light which burned out all the time, the opposite of your parents' situation. We tried different wattages, different manufacturers, and still it burned out five to ten times more often than any other bulb in the house.
1. This is a false dichotomy. It's not a straight-up choice between "patient care" and "getting things done quickly" with nothing in between.
2. Following HIPPA *IS* part of patient care, and failing to follow it is most definitely failing to properly care for the patient.
Try going into a restaurant sometime and have them say "we're more concerned about getting your food out in a timely fashion than cleaning the place, so we're just going to serve you food on dirty dishes."
Yep, my wife's run into variants of this. She works in health care and I've heard her say things like, "I saw a patient in the store but they didn't seem to notice me, so I couldn't say hi" or "that patient agreed to be in an article in the paper so now I can say who she is"...
1) Call me crazy, but I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for computers to track and refuse to respond to sound they're putting out of their own speakers. Though it'd be a fun prank if you could set up a login script to play a recording saying "computer, restart" and put it in an infinite loop.
Re:Voice recognition has been around since years!
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Talking To Computers?
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My co-worker in the next cube had this active, but never actually used it to open anything. However, somehow he left the settings such that whenever something crashed/errored, the computer would read the error screen out loud. He was a designer, so Photoshop crashing was his primary error. The computer always pronounced "shop" more like "show-p". Ten years later I still occasionally see an error box and mutter to myself "Photo-showp error.."
Wider dynamic range? That's like where--in a movie, as an example--it gets all quiet as the characters whisper to each other so low I have to turn up the volume to hear the plot points, and then it cuts to the next scene and my living room windows shatter when the overly loud theme music kicks in? If that's the case, I'm pretty sure I don't want that anyway.
You also overlooked another critical factor: instantaneous delivery.
Not if you only have dial-up access, and there still are a lot of people who only have access to dial-up.
Most eBooks are fairly small files. Even at dial-up speeds, you can download them right away. Compared to having books shipped, or even driving to a bookstore, that's essentially instantaneous.
... it's the whole of the UK. Otherwise, you'd have to adjust your clocks when you drive from one country to another.
1. And you think this would stop legislators from doing it anyway?
2. It's not actually as bad of a problem as you'd expect. Larger countries like the US deal with multiple time zones without too much trouble. Adjusting your clocks when you cross a national border isn't that much of a challenge.
3. The *state* I grew up in (Indiana) had more complex time issues. Most of the state didn't observe DST at all -- it was on eastern standard time during the winter, but was effectively on central time during the summer. So during the summer it was on the same time as the state to the west of it, and during the winter it was on the same time as the states north, south, and east of it. Except for two pockets which were on central time because they were close enough to large cities in Illinois, and which *did* observe DST to stay in sync with those cities. And a few more counties close to large cities to the east, which went ahead and observed Eastern DST to stay in line. I grew up talking about "fast time" and "slow time" to coordinate with people across the state borders, or even in different counties within the same state.
Hell, I lose a couple of hours of sleep every Sunday night because the weekend breaks my schedule from the previous work week. And an occasional bout of insomnia (or a really good book) can make me lose more than 4 hours maybe once a month. I'm tired, but it hasn't killed me yet. How is this one hour (in the middle of a weekend, no less) killing Danes?
The iPad may not have existed at the time, but the low-end MacBook has started at $1k for as long as I remember. Why in the world did she buy the $2,500 model? And was that a Pro, because I didn't think the standard MacBook even got that expensive? That's quite a lot of foolishness on her part. When I wanted a new Apple laptop 3 years ago I waited for them to release a new line and then bought the just-discontinued model (-$100) refurbished from Apple (-$200) for a grand total of $700. That's darn near as economical as an iPad.
Agreed. I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies. Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor. Why not just make it live action in the first place, then? But really, c'mon, don't they have any non-photogenic voice talents who could do as good or better jobs voicing the animated movies?
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To be honest, your initial post sounded like "I started a romantic comedy, and I was disappointed it didn't turn into a hack'n'slash flick with a crime drama conclusion. All the good movies do that." To which I'd say, "at least you've still got 'Dusk Till Dawn.'"
If "changing your mind" = "flip-flopping" then that reputation might have affected a not-too-distant US election. I was on a financial board with a bunch of fairly religious folks, and I can't tell you how many times I saw something like "I can't vote for a flip-flopper" as the *sole* reason why someone would cast their vote one way or another. Now I realize that there may be a difference between changing your mind and being unreliably inconsistent, and I don't really want to argue which applied in that case, but the negative reaction to the idea of someone being able to change position was astounding to me.
Until we can get past the "a 2000-year-old book says it, therefore I believe it" and "some email I'm too lazy to check against snopes says it, therefore I believe it", picking up a stray scientific fact that gets overturned is the least of our problems. At least inaccurate science is in the right ballpark.
Really? I'd say the atheist, recognizing this world and this one lifetime is all he gets, has a strong incentive not to tick off someone else to the point of being shot. For the fundamentalist, death should be less of a concern.
On the other hand, I know parents who quite effectively use "time out" to teach their kids lessons. It doesn't have to be actual, physical pain to teach kids, it just has to be something the kid registers as a punishment. I've seen obnoxious kids shrug off a spanking with "that didn't hurt" and other kids genuinely contrite when they realize their actions were time-out-worthy.
Appropriate in a discussion of fact-free science is this fact-free mudslinging. Got any examples?
This is tagged funny, but it's really true.
I read the first book in the series in the month after I graduated college. Since that time I have held eight jobs, been laid off from two; tried four separate freelance/personal businesses on the side; changed career paths three times; lived in nine houses in three significantly different geographical locations; visited 44 of the 50 US states; had two romantic relationships with two big dry spells in between; met, romanced, and married my wife, and just celebrated our fifth anniversary with our first child on the way. It has been a really, really, really long time between the first book and the fifth.
On the other hand, I'm still driving the same Honda Civic, which I also bought that summer. It's got 200,000 miles on it, which is about one mile for each page of the Fire and Ice series.
Spoken like a filthy, money-grubbing grocer! You should be ashamed of yourself, you parasite!
I'm pretty sure Scotland and Wales are part of Great Britain, aren't they?
The part where stars in the sky make you crazy and cause you to destroy your civilization? If I'm remembering the quote properly, there was a line where a character said "we tried to simulate it in a dark room with lots of holes in the roof, but they were just dots. The stars aren't anything like that."
It's been a few decades, so I might be misremembering. I do recall liking the story.
Oh, man, I didn't even notice the "km" in that post. Thought it was miles, and was skeptical, but let it slide. But km?! No frakking way 60k miles is anywhere close to "needs increased maintenance." That's barely out of the "new car smell phase" and is just hitting its stride. The difference between 5 years and 10 years (and 80k and 150k *miles*) on my Honda was basically negligible.
Well, it's a step in the right direction, I suppose. Rather than driving the car for 4 years, rolling the remaining year of the loan into the next one with higher payments, at least people are now paying off the car, enjoying the freedom of no payments for two or three months, and then starting over again.
As someone who is still driving his '97 Civic, I'm well aware that there is life after car payments, and it's glorious.
Funny story: last fall I had to switch to the valet key, because I finally wore down the primary key to the point that I was having trouble unlocking doors and starting the car. The key wore out, but the car is still doing fine!
I've never had an Apple laptop HD fail on me, and I'm on my 4th. Average age at retirement of each has been ~4-5 years. I've lost lots of batteries, a power supply, one LCD, and one motherboard, but never a hard drive.
To go from quadrupling in three years just over a decade ago to only a modest bump over the last 5 years is a huge change in the pace of innovation.
I'm reminded of this because in my childhood home it was our garage light which burned out all the time, the opposite of your parents' situation. We tried different wattages, different manufacturers, and still it burned out five to ten times more often than any other bulb in the house.
Try going into a restaurant sometime and have them say "we're more concerned about getting your food out in a timely fashion than cleaning the place, so we're just going to serve you food on dirty dishes."
Yep, my wife's run into variants of this. She works in health care and I've heard her say things like, "I saw a patient in the store but they didn't seem to notice me, so I couldn't say hi" or "that patient agreed to be in an article in the paper so now I can say who she is" ...
1) Call me crazy, but I'd guess it'd be pretty easy for computers to track and refuse to respond to sound they're putting out of their own speakers. Though it'd be a fun prank if you could set up a login script to play a recording saying "computer, restart" and put it in an infinite loop.
My co-worker in the next cube had this active, but never actually used it to open anything. However, somehow he left the settings such that whenever something crashed/errored, the computer would read the error screen out loud. He was a designer, so Photoshop crashing was his primary error. The computer always pronounced "shop" more like "show-p". Ten years later I still occasionally see an error box and mutter to myself "Photo-showp error .."
Wider dynamic range? That's like where--in a movie, as an example--it gets all quiet as the characters whisper to each other so low I have to turn up the volume to hear the plot points, and then it cuts to the next scene and my living room windows shatter when the overly loud theme music kicks in? If that's the case, I'm pretty sure I don't want that anyway.
You also overlooked another critical factor: instantaneous delivery.
Not if you only have dial-up access, and there still are a lot of people who only have access to dial-up.
Most eBooks are fairly small files. Even at dial-up speeds, you can download them right away. Compared to having books shipped, or even driving to a bookstore, that's essentially instantaneous.
... it's the whole of the UK. Otherwise, you'd have to adjust your clocks when you drive from one country to another.
1. And you think this would stop legislators from doing it anyway?
2. It's not actually as bad of a problem as you'd expect. Larger countries like the US deal with multiple time zones without too much trouble. Adjusting your clocks when you cross a national border isn't that much of a challenge.
3. The *state* I grew up in (Indiana) had more complex time issues. Most of the state didn't observe DST at all -- it was on eastern standard time during the winter, but was effectively on central time during the summer. So during the summer it was on the same time as the state to the west of it, and during the winter it was on the same time as the states north, south, and east of it. Except for two pockets which were on central time because they were close enough to large cities in Illinois, and which *did* observe DST to stay in sync with those cities. And a few more counties close to large cities to the east, which went ahead and observed Eastern DST to stay in line. I grew up talking about "fast time" and "slow time" to coordinate with people across the state borders, or even in different counties within the same state.
Hell, I lose a couple of hours of sleep every Sunday night because the weekend breaks my schedule from the previous work week. And an occasional bout of insomnia (or a really good book) can make me lose more than 4 hours maybe once a month. I'm tired, but it hasn't killed me yet. How is this one hour (in the middle of a weekend, no less) killing Danes?
The iPad may not have existed at the time, but the low-end MacBook has started at $1k for as long as I remember. Why in the world did she buy the $2,500 model? And was that a Pro, because I didn't think the standard MacBook even got that expensive? That's quite a lot of foolishness on her part. When I wanted a new Apple laptop 3 years ago I waited for them to release a new line and then bought the just-discontinued model (-$100) refurbished from Apple (-$200) for a grand total of $700. That's darn near as economical as an iPad.
Agreed. I tend to get really annoyed when animated movies use the same old big names you'd see in regular movies. Especially when they go ahead and make the character look kind of like the actor. Why not just make it live action in the first place, then? But really, c'mon, don't they have any non-photogenic voice talents who could do as good or better jobs voicing the animated movies?