Even the Euro carriers are better than the American ones. I wish we would let foreign carriers compete on flights that have both end points in the USA. Might make them at least consider some customer service.
It does not seem to be a geography problem, Air Canada is fine.
The good Euro carriers, at least. EasyJet is the worst airline I've every flown, followed by Ryan Air. I guess that the Chinese flight I took a few years back would qualify as the worst I've ever had if I could consider it to be a proper airline instead of a collection of debris hurdling through the sky. On average, though, my experience matches yours. Air France/British/Lufthansa are nicer than Delta/United/American.
What's the best way to introduce astronomy to kids in developing countries? Or, to put it in a different way, how would you get kids interested in astronomy without help of latest technology (other than a decent pair of binoculars)? A related questions would be - what would make the best first impact on them? (The idea is to make that one big impression in the beginning so that they are interested in it from the go).
Get to a dark sky and point out constellations. Have kids draw the bright objects in the sky. Wait a couple hours and have them draw the sky again. Wait a week and then do drawings at the same time of night. Repeat for a month.
Talk about the various motions you've observed together. You'll see the Earth's rotation, the Moon's orbit and lack of rotation relative to Earth, the Moon's orientation changing with respect to the Sun (phases), the Moon falling behind the stars as each week passes, planets changing location, and if you bring binoculars (you should) you can do a parallel project in a single night to see Jupiter's brightest satellites changing position in just a few hours.
A lot of kids like to do things rather than hear about them. This gets them doing real observational experiments and lets them make the interpretive translation of data to an understanding of behavior.
If you could give Apollo-level funding to a single NASA program, what would it be? Would you direct that money internally or involve private space companies?
Finally, what do you think of lunar-based observatories from a cost vs. performance standpoint?
I hate stating something like this without any citation, but when I was reading some textbook for a class my girlfriend was taking back in college I was surprised that flight evolved separately multiple times according to the fossil record. Intermediate wings must provide a pretty statistically significant benefit.
A lot of these issues can already be addressed with treatments and replacements. Which raises interesting questions. Even if this medicine turns out to be affordable, the treatments to keep the body going beyond its designed lifespan most likely will be very expensive. So on what basis will this life-extending drug be given out? Will it only be issued in cases where it will help a person reach a natural age with a decent quality of life? Or will anyone able to pay for it be able to obtain it?
There's already growing resentment against the fabled 1% who own almost everything... just imagine what will happen when people find out that "the rich" also get to live about 70 years longer than the rest of us. On the other hand, how fair is it to withhold life saving/extending treatment from someone willing and able to pay for it? (Assuming that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us)
Are you a commercial for the upcoming movie, _In_Time_?
Just had a cop come by the university to discuss this. In California at least, photos like that are not admissible as evidence. They may allow the police to get your laptop back, but if you press charges those photos, keystrokes, etc are going to be thrown out before they ever see the judge.
Don't you have Find My Mac or something like that on MacBooks? I thought logmein was more of a VPN thing.
From experience with friends who've tracked down their laptops and mobile phones, throughout the US the police won't do anything in any circumstance. Even if you track down the identity of the person with your phone/laptop and get pictures of the thief using it, the police will tell you they won't do anything about it. Recovery comes from taking those pictures and then filing a civil suit, and that's not easy.
However, if you have any influence with the police or know someone who does, the picture changes dramatically. With a policeman friend you can probably get it back in a few minutes by driving over to the thief's house with the policeman in uniform to make you more persuasive. Also, it's not that the police aren't allowed to help you once you've got strong evidence, it's that they choose not to do so.
In summary, in my experience photos and IP logs and such will actually let you win in court (the thief won't even have a lawyer, so you don't need to worry about evidence being challenged as long as the judge is sympathetic) but won't get the police to do anything for you.
"Hungry like the wolf: A word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths," Legal and Criminological Psychology
With an irresponsible paper title like that, the authors were inviting a media circus. We're talking about research into people with mental disorder here, not a new friday night drama series.
I assume the title is referring to the eponymous main character of Steppenwolf, a Hermann Hesse novel about a man who might be described as a psychopath.
It's driving force is a desire for equality, where equality means that you get free money from the government.
To be fair, I think the driving force is more like frustration. While they don't seem to be focusing that feeling very much, I think it's reasonable to be frustrated with a lot of things in the world, including a lot of economic things. In some ways I think that the "we're angry and we don't know what to do" attitude is more rational than the more commonly espoused "we're angry and that means we should vote for [insert name of newest doppelganger candidate representing a major political party and promising change in Washington]."
A lot of people like to complain about changes to Slashdot's interface or Slashdot's long lead time before posting breaking news and point to them as the end of the site. They're wrong, and while the interface may sometimes go through phases where only a few web browsers work well with it, these aren't even serious threats to the quality of the site.
However, I think that the trend of posting stories based on tiny, screwy blog posts when there's a comprehensive primary source just a click away really does detract from the quality here. I know this isn't new, but I think it really is getting worse. Some story submitters very consistently point to a small set of terrible blogs that benefit from the traffic but offer terrible accounts of the real story.
I think that we need more editing done between story submission and publishing to the front page and a commitment to at least have a single editor spend 5 minutes looking at TFA and when appropriate adding a direct link to a real source.
Dammit. That's the wrong way!!! I have an HP Touchpad, and the hardware is mediocre, but WebOS is a work of art. Otoh, I also have multiple android 2.2 & honeycomb devices, and by and large they're fast and flexible, but the OS and app markets are buggy and malware-infested. Why port the middling-common-denominator OS to HP's crummy hardware? "Upgrading" the HP tablets by loading Android is like upgrading a Ford Fiesta with an Isuzu diesel. Sure it'll keep you on the road, but it ain't pretty and it ain't gonna be fun.
What's *really* worth someone's time and effort is a port of WebOS to better hardware. Ginmme an illicit port of WebOS to some of the nicer Samsung 5-10in tablets, the Lenovo K tablet, etc etc (anything with more ports and a faster proc) and I'd be all over it.
The Touchpad's hardware isn't really a problem relative to other tablets. The Galaxy Tabs and iPads have similar guts; they're only significantly better in the GPU end of things. I think that you really want a redesign of WebOS to make it more efficient without ditching the UI.
True G+ doesn't have much going for it now, but Google has a card up it's sleeve that no one else does - the search engine. I predict that they start to integrate G+ into search in creative ways that give people some benefits that they can't get on Facebook. They essentially have data on what every internet user is looking at any moment.. they will use this to make a more compelling social experience, and find ways to suck people into using G+.
Isn't that useful to advertisers but detrimental to users?
Google+ had its numbers go up by 1200% upon opening to the public. Of those new users, 40% stuck around, for a net increase of 480%. Slashdot's headline? "Google+ user base down 60%! It must be dying!" I've seen powerdrills with less spin.
I doubt that even 40% of people who have Facebook accounts still use them.
sounds to me like the megahertz game and the feature game all over again. On something with a small screen I don't really want tinier writing because it's a 1080p device and I want it useful. having a zillion gestures that different applications subset is not useful. Having a few gestures that all apps use in common ways it useful. I'll take complex on my desktop, but Simple and useful is what I want in a phone. Now one might say, well to each his own. But that's the point. If all phones work pretty much the same I don't have to learn how to use a different phone. It's not how most people want to expend brain cycles.
Is this where Apple fans begin to make the decisive turn from "iPhones are the best and do the most" to "iPhones do less, run slower, and have fewer pixels because high speed and resolution overload are confusing for grandma?"
Let me guess, you had to wait for all those little voting people to click the plus sign on your stupid firehose before you could, you know, post probably the biggest tech-related story of the week, or the month for that matter.
Pathetic, Slashdot, absolutely pathetic. I mean, you let a stupid autism story get posted before the Steve Job's story.
At any rate, whatever you may have thought of his motives, the tech world has lost one of its towering figures. Condolences to his family.
Slashdot has never been and will never be about breaking news as quickly as possible. The value of Slashdot is the community. Your criticism has absolutely zero bearing on anything meaningful.
Chrome is great if you have a few windows open because its faster than FF but when you start opening 10+ windows you start using a LOT of memory. I was using 12 windows and it took up 2GB and I opened the same windows in firefox and it only took 400MB
I don't know why people keep on harping on FF for memory usage when chrome CLEARLY uses more.
Faster for javascript but still slower (lower framerate) than FF for scrolling through a lot of html, which for me is a lot more common. The only browsers smoother than FF on Windows are IE9 and Opera, but I don't want to use either of those.
In many places you don't pay for incoming calls at all. The caller pays a higher rate for calling a cell phone instead. Of course that means you can't put cell phones and land line phones in the same area code prefix blocks since there has to be some way to tell which is which when making a call.
This is true throughout Europe. Unfortunately the higher rate for calling a cell phone is often 1-2 _orders_of_magnitude_ higher if you're calling from the states on a calling card. Before Skype I used to talk to my girlfriend in Europe for 1 cent a minute if she found a landline or 20-50 cents a minute if I had to call her cell. At ~3000 minutes a month and grad student incomes it meant we had to put a lot of effort into finding reliable pay phones.
Abstinence, combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies might actually extinguish HIV from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely.
If you want to discuss fairy tales, similarly probable is that quantum mechanics will allow all the HIV to tunnel its way off the planet at the same moment.
Why bother buying them if it's "on a whim to see if it's worth the effort of buying them"? At any rate, Oblivion sold nearly two million copies in its first month (long before the bargain bin), so it seems you're in a tiny little minority when it comes to not liking Beth's product.
2 million out of all active 360 and gaming PC owners is a tiny minority. The GP is in the vast majority.
Bethesda should care about this. They're unlikely to lose a single sale due to Mojang's use of the word sales, but they've likely lost thousands of sales already due to their lawsuit. I went from "buy Skyrim and all its non-DLC sequels on launch day" to "never buy another product from any studio inside of Bethesda unless it's used."
Slashdot Mirror
Even the Euro carriers are better than the American ones. I wish we would let foreign carriers compete on flights that have both end points in the USA. Might make them at least consider some customer service.
It does not seem to be a geography problem, Air Canada is fine.
The good Euro carriers, at least. EasyJet is the worst airline I've every flown, followed by Ryan Air. I guess that the Chinese flight I took a few years back would qualify as the worst I've ever had if I could consider it to be a proper airline instead of a collection of debris hurdling through the sky. On average, though, my experience matches yours. Air France/British/Lufthansa are nicer than Delta/United/American.
If Wium were the singular, Wia would be the plural.
Really? What changed?
Nothing - it never worked. We're just more public about the repercussions now.
Use the same emphasis and timing you'd use to say Maximus or Tacitus and say the words "urine us."
What's the best way to introduce astronomy to kids in developing countries? Or, to put it in a different way, how would you get kids interested in astronomy without help of latest technology (other than a decent pair of binoculars)? A related questions would be - what would make the best first impact on them? (The idea is to make that one big impression in the beginning so that they are interested in it from the go).
Get to a dark sky and point out constellations. Have kids draw the bright objects in the sky. Wait a couple hours and have them draw the sky again. Wait a week and then do drawings at the same time of night. Repeat for a month.
Talk about the various motions you've observed together. You'll see the Earth's rotation, the Moon's orbit and lack of rotation relative to Earth, the Moon's orientation changing with respect to the Sun (phases), the Moon falling behind the stars as each week passes, planets changing location, and if you bring binoculars (you should) you can do a parallel project in a single night to see Jupiter's brightest satellites changing position in just a few hours.
A lot of kids like to do things rather than hear about them. This gets them doing real observational experiments and lets them make the interpretive translation of data to an understanding of behavior.
If you could give Apollo-level funding to a single NASA program, what would it be? Would you direct that money internally or involve private space companies?
Finally, what do you think of lunar-based observatories from a cost vs. performance standpoint?
I hate stating something like this without any citation, but when I was reading some textbook for a class my girlfriend was taking back in college I was surprised that flight evolved separately multiple times according to the fossil record. Intermediate wings must provide a pretty statistically significant benefit.
A lot of these issues can already be addressed with treatments and replacements. Which raises interesting questions. Even if this medicine turns out to be affordable, the treatments to keep the body going beyond its designed lifespan most likely will be very expensive. So on what basis will this life-extending drug be given out? Will it only be issued in cases where it will help a person reach a natural age with a decent quality of life? Or will anyone able to pay for it be able to obtain it?
There's already growing resentment against the fabled 1% who own almost everything... just imagine what will happen when people find out that "the rich" also get to live about 70 years longer than the rest of us. On the other hand, how fair is it to withhold life saving/extending treatment from someone willing and able to pay for it? (Assuming that one rich guy extending his life isn't going to affect the amount of healthcare available to the rest of us)
Are you a commercial for the upcoming movie, _In_Time_?
Just had a cop come by the university to discuss this. In California at least, photos like that are not admissible as evidence. They may allow the police to get your laptop back, but if you press charges those photos, keystrokes, etc are going to be thrown out before they ever see the judge.
Don't you have Find My Mac or something like that on MacBooks? I thought logmein was more of a VPN thing.
From experience with friends who've tracked down their laptops and mobile phones, throughout the US the police won't do anything in any circumstance. Even if you track down the identity of the person with your phone/laptop and get pictures of the thief using it, the police will tell you they won't do anything about it. Recovery comes from taking those pictures and then filing a civil suit, and that's not easy.
However, if you have any influence with the police or know someone who does, the picture changes dramatically. With a policeman friend you can probably get it back in a few minutes by driving over to the thief's house with the policeman in uniform to make you more persuasive. Also, it's not that the police aren't allowed to help you once you've got strong evidence, it's that they choose not to do so.
In summary, in my experience photos and IP logs and such will actually let you win in court (the thief won't even have a lawyer, so you don't need to worry about evidence being challenged as long as the judge is sympathetic) but won't get the police to do anything for you.
With an irresponsible paper title like that, the authors were inviting a media circus. We're talking about research into people with mental disorder here, not a new friday night drama series.
I assume the title is referring to the eponymous main character of Steppenwolf, a Hermann Hesse novel about a man who might be described as a psychopath.
It's driving force is a desire for equality, where equality means that you get free money from the government.
To be fair, I think the driving force is more like frustration. While they don't seem to be focusing that feeling very much, I think it's reasonable to be frustrated with a lot of things in the world, including a lot of economic things. In some ways I think that the "we're angry and we don't know what to do" attitude is more rational than the more commonly espoused "we're angry and that means we should vote for [insert name of newest doppelganger candidate representing a major political party and promising change in Washington]."
that number in the tens!
Actually, I see the number 1 use case for this as cheating on a partner.
It's actually pretty relevant to about 100 million employees in the United States. I suspect people work for corporations in other countries as well.
Follow the links to a more balanced story.
A lot of people like to complain about changes to Slashdot's interface or Slashdot's long lead time before posting breaking news and point to them as the end of the site. They're wrong, and while the interface may sometimes go through phases where only a few web browsers work well with it, these aren't even serious threats to the quality of the site.
However, I think that the trend of posting stories based on tiny, screwy blog posts when there's a comprehensive primary source just a click away really does detract from the quality here. I know this isn't new, but I think it really is getting worse. Some story submitters very consistently point to a small set of terrible blogs that benefit from the traffic but offer terrible accounts of the real story.
I think that we need more editing done between story submission and publishing to the front page and a commitment to at least have a single editor spend 5 minutes looking at TFA and when appropriate adding a direct link to a real source.
Dammit. That's the wrong way!!! I have an HP Touchpad, and the hardware is mediocre, but WebOS is a work of art. Otoh, I also have multiple android 2.2 & honeycomb devices, and by and large they're fast and flexible, but the OS and app markets are buggy and malware-infested. Why port the middling-common-denominator OS to HP's crummy hardware? "Upgrading" the HP tablets by loading Android is like upgrading a Ford Fiesta with an Isuzu diesel. Sure it'll keep you on the road, but it ain't pretty and it ain't gonna be fun.
What's *really* worth someone's time and effort is a port of WebOS to better hardware. Ginmme an illicit port of WebOS to some of the nicer Samsung 5-10in tablets, the Lenovo K tablet, etc etc (anything with more ports and a faster proc) and I'd be all over it.
The Touchpad's hardware isn't really a problem relative to other tablets. The Galaxy Tabs and iPads have similar guts; they're only significantly better in the GPU end of things. I think that you really want a redesign of WebOS to make it more efficient without ditching the UI.
iGoogle for the eventual Apple acquisition of the hegemonic Google. Imagine a hedgemon consuming a hedgemon.
Cheers.
Yours In Marxism,
K. Trout,
Is hedgemon a pokemon who lives in a bush?
True G+ doesn't have much going for it now, but Google has a card up it's sleeve that no one else does - the search engine. I predict that they start to integrate G+ into search in creative ways that give people some benefits that they can't get on Facebook. They essentially have data on what every internet user is looking at any moment.. they will use this to make a more compelling social experience, and find ways to suck people into using G+.
Isn't that useful to advertisers but detrimental to users?
Google+ had its numbers go up by 1200% upon opening to the public. Of those new users, 40% stuck around, for a net increase of 480%. Slashdot's headline? "Google+ user base down 60%! It must be dying!" I've seen powerdrills with less spin.
I doubt that even 40% of people who have Facebook accounts still use them.
Every new version demands more hardware resources and is following the Microsoft model - bloat, bloat, bloat.
Every new version of Android has increased the system's speed on existing hardware. It's getting more efficient, not less.
sounds to me like the megahertz game and the feature game all over again. On something with a small screen I don't really want tinier writing because it's a 1080p device and I want it useful. having a zillion gestures that different applications subset is not useful. Having a few gestures that all apps use in common ways it useful. I'll take complex on my desktop, but Simple and useful is what I want in a phone. Now one might say, well to each his own. But that's the point. If all phones work pretty much the same I don't have to learn how to use a different phone. It's not how most people want to expend brain cycles.
Is this where Apple fans begin to make the decisive turn from "iPhones are the best and do the most" to "iPhones do less, run slower, and have fewer pixels because high speed and resolution overload are confusing for grandma?"
Let me guess, you had to wait for all those little voting people to click the plus sign on your stupid firehose before you could, you know, post probably the biggest tech-related story of the week, or the month for that matter.
Pathetic, Slashdot, absolutely pathetic. I mean, you let a stupid autism story get posted before the Steve Job's story.
At any rate, whatever you may have thought of his motives, the tech world has lost one of its towering figures. Condolences to his family.
Slashdot has never been and will never be about breaking news as quickly as possible. The value of Slashdot is the community. Your criticism has absolutely zero bearing on anything meaningful.
Chrome is great if you have a few windows open because its faster than FF but when you start opening 10+ windows you start using a LOT of memory. I was using 12 windows and it took up 2GB and I opened the same windows in firefox and it only took 400MB
I don't know why people keep on harping on FF for memory usage when chrome CLEARLY uses more.
Faster for javascript but still slower (lower framerate) than FF for scrolling through a lot of html, which for me is a lot more common. The only browsers smoother than FF on Windows are IE9 and Opera, but I don't want to use either of those.
Hopefully this gives the PRC a greater incentive to minimize future space debris so we don't see another of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
In many places you don't pay for incoming calls at all. The caller pays a higher rate for calling a cell phone instead. Of course that means you can't put cell phones and land line phones in the same area code prefix blocks since there has to be some way to tell which is which when making a call.
This is true throughout Europe. Unfortunately the higher rate for calling a cell phone is often 1-2 _orders_of_magnitude_ higher if you're calling from the states on a calling card. Before Skype I used to talk to my girlfriend in Europe for 1 cent a minute if she found a landline or 20-50 cents a minute if I had to call her cell. At ~3000 minutes a month and grad student incomes it meant we had to put a lot of effort into finding reliable pay phones.
Abstinence, combined with existing anti-retroviral therapies might actually extinguish HIV from the face of the earth in only a few decades, if used widely.
If you want to discuss fairy tales, similarly probable is that quantum mechanics will allow all the HIV to tunnel its way off the planet at the same moment.
Why bother buying them if it's "on a whim to see if it's worth the effort of buying them"? At any rate, Oblivion sold nearly two million copies in its first month (long before the bargain bin), so it seems you're in a tiny little minority when it comes to not liking Beth's product.
2 million out of all active 360 and gaming PC owners is a tiny minority. The GP is in the vast majority.
Bethesda should care about this. They're unlikely to lose a single sale due to Mojang's use of the word sales, but they've likely lost thousands of sales already due to their lawsuit. I went from "buy Skyrim and all its non-DLC sequels on launch day" to "never buy another product from any studio inside of Bethesda unless it's used."