So what? Do you propose we retire the word because of your extravagant reductionism?
Any time a sentient, tool-using organism decides to create or build something, whether it be for survival or amusement or any other purpose, that is an act of an artificier and the result is artificial. The word just means "man-made." We are distinct from the rest of the world because we have skill in manipulating it; that is the meaning of the word. More importantly, however, and not entirely implied by the word itself, we are capable of massively affecting it. Take responsibility for yourself and your actions; there is no cosmic master plan that absolves you of complacency.
It's perhaps not so surprising that a Twitter staffer suggested this—they more or less killed off all third-party clients to ensure their audience would be captive to promoted spam on mobile.
Firefox requires a reboot if/when it can't overwrite its files correctly. That means either you forgot to close it or there was a hung session in the background. It's been that way since... forever, I think.
A call to action? A great deal of modern advertising is about brand name recognition; that's why sponsorship deals exist, and why television is full of advertisements that merely strive to be funny and have little if anything to do with their product. Certainly there are a lot of campaigns that will depend on exploiting synthetic desires and insecurities for the rest of time (particularly beauty products) but the more aggressive they get the more transparent they get, and marketers aren't quite that stupid. Spam, "lose weight instantly" banner ads, the Shopping Channel, and other blatant predators don't represent the majority of marketing efforts either in dollar value, products covered, or marketers thus engaged.
A well-done advertisement doesn't need to risk triggering disgust; it's simply a frank presentation of services and features offered, given in a format that emphasises the audience and (if appropriate) lifestyle most likely to benefit from it, and how they might benefit from it. No one is going to find this or this manipulative, even though they both try to sell a message about why their services are superior (and the latter ad uses a fallacy to make a point.)
There's little question that the original poster was a troll; Slashdot has a rich tradition of such antics. It does fit a template, however; it's been euphemistically called "low-quality content" by Google and others, and basically consists of astroturfing by dedicated bloggers and reviewers. There was a really prominent case of this last year when Google discovered it had accidentally funded a crap-posting campaign for Chrome as part of a larger marketing deal. The same applies to the recent Amazon Vine reviews—not all of them actually instruct the reader to buy the book, which may come across as too transparent or be redundant since the user is obviously already considering it.
I would agree with you if there weren't so many episodes that were worse—Threshold (VOY), Genesis (TNG), Twilight (ENT), Spock's Brain (TOS), The Omega Glory (TOS)... I'd also like to call special attention to Journey's End (TNG) for being the worst Wesley episode imaginable, but technically that's not a premise issue.
This kind of questioning showed up when the Mimivirus, the first (?) giant amoeba virus appeared, including the bit about degenerating into a virus as a survival strategy. It turned out that all of its genes came directly from the amoebae it was infecting; it's basically just really bad at reproducing. While it would be really neat to discover the remnants of a lost superphylum or kingdom, viruses mutate much too quickly for any informative signal to be preserved.
The reality is that we've only sequenced a tiny fraction of the Earth's biodiversity. There's a lot of stuff out there that's just more of the same, especially at the microbe level. The farther back you go, the lower the likelihood of finding a surviving isolate, which is why isolated biomes like Lake Vostok and the drilling site in Northern Ontario are so important.
That's fair, although I think most of the issues that can be raised which are specific to URIs are either (a) answered by data solutions (databases have no trouble sorting Unicode text) or (b) analogous to existing problems (squatting domains by misusing ligatures is really no different from squatting on typos.) I guess having to write a regex for every gTLD ever would be a pain, but when IDN was first introduced there was an RFC (3490) that specifically set out a turnkey algorithm for ASCIIfying the whole mess. Instead of spooky invisible control codes you only need to deal with cumbersome strings clogged with hyphens.
Disagree. Advertising begets distrust; if all marketing consists of eulogy, then we will all become skeptics. A hundred years ago most people took miraculous claims at face value; now we look down upon the few who succumb to the half-hearted efforts of telemarketers, spam, and infomercials. Such marketers are destroying their own future—which, if we're lucky, means it'll all collapse sooner or later.
I think you should give ASCII a bit more credit; ~ ` ' ^ " and , were/are all supposed to be used as accent marks in the original version by backspacing over the letter and adding the necessary punctuation mark.
It's weird that you're complaining about the travails of inputting ligatures—you do know that all major platforms have IMEs that do the work for you, right? It's generally built into their regional input layout. This is what makes inputing CJK languages feasible; you run a phonetic search against the database of characters and it pulls up the ones that match. In Windows, at least, you can switch between different input languages and keyboard layouts with a mere hotkey.
And if for some reason that's not enough, one of the several Chinese IMEs is actually just a Unicode lookup; you type in the hexadecimal code of the character you want and it slaps it in your document. Requires an absurd amount of memorization to use effectively for anything, but I think in any proper Emacsian quest for completionism that's somewhat acceptable.
Despite the exciting name, all this stuff does is protect against bounces. Its appearance is somewhere between glass and metal. This better article from the site demonstrates the absurd amount of elastic energy it can handle.
Also, let's drop the "enable" part from the title: this product was already in use in both Apple products and products from other companies and has just been bought out exclusively by Apple as far as the tech sector is concerned. If anything that's a loss.
But, hey, I'm glad to know that we can finally have futuristic-looking mobile devices due to this exclusive patent licence! Thanks guys!
...well, there's a pretty simple way to check whether or not your fears are founded. Just shine a UV lamp on the keyboard and examine the shapes of the stains. This is like the forensic chemistry equivalent of a textbook physics problem set in a textbook factory.
Classic translation error. As far as hilarious editorial travesties go, I think that one's fairly understandable. Given that Estonian is pretty unambiguous about how to put the sentence in passive voice (See on hõlbustanud... instead of See lihtsustab... according to Google Translate) I'd guess the original author didn't know the exact meaning of "facilitate" in English, which is odd because Estonian has several comparable verbs which all have the same direction.
I wouldn't be so sure—Microsoft's terrible internal organization and infighting have been discussed at length in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say that this is the exact problem that makes their products what we despise. One tiny example: PowerShell was supposed to be an update for the Command Prompt, but because the group that wrote PowerShell wasn't the group in charge of the core system, it had to be shipped as a separate product. The fiefdom regime essentially makes it difficult or impossible to contribute to projects that aren't your own, creating huge barriers to contributing bugs; everything is its own little cathedral. Here's a more detailed rant on the technical consequences from an anonymous MS employee.
As someone else said, for a small subset of those films, first-party subtitles are already available, but are sold at a premium by the film's copyright holders vs. English-only versions. Thus the availability of free subtitles prevents the vendors from charging extra. (For bonus points, guess how many of the vendors' subtitles are ripped directly from the very servers they just confiscated...)
So there is business logic here, it's just the usual repugnant kind.
Apple doesn't seem to really care very much about Safari on Windows; Safari 4 failed some of the early speed comparisons, for example, because it crashed when too many tabs were opened simultaneously at the start of a browser session. You'd be better off if you were using a new version of IE. (Or, y'know, anything else.)
Copyright doesn't protect the storyline, only the details of the actual product. Take the recent film Oz, for example—they were unable to get the rights to the 1939 film from MGM, so despite the fact that the movie was probably prompted by the success of Wicked, there are no explicit references to it and some witches' names had to be changed; the only references to the 1939 film are homages like the use of black and white to denote the real world. The rest comes from the original books.
Similarly, if you've ever actually compared the Grimm versions of the fairy tales to the Disney ones, you'll find they generally feature significant plot and character differences. The Disney myths are legitimately new tellings, derived in the traditional manner from multiple sources and with additional innovations. Notice that there have been several versions of Robin Hood since Disney's.
Disney's mission to extend its copyright isn't about the stories, it's about guarding the look-and-feel of their products, and most importantly, Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse. What Disney really seeks to control by extending copyright is the distribution of merchandise with their characters' images on it, which is a huge cash cow for them. The design of Mickey, like Disney's other characters, is entirely their invention.
I'm not saying any of that is good or healthy for civilization, by the way, but the whole "Disney borrowed from the public domain yet refuses to give back" line of reasoning is based on inconsistent logic; they borrowed only the plot, not the whole product.
Lazy is not just one racial or ethnic group, it's every racial or ethnic group: the lazy rich whites steal money from the lazy black and Native American poor, while the lazy Chinese steal inventions and secrets and destroy the environment, and the lazy Indians and Hispanics steal jobs instead of fixing their own countries, and the lazy Africans accept aid instead of doing the same. "Lazy" is the ultimate, omni-purpose slur; it even transcends boundaries of race and nationality: lazy men expect the world on a platter from lazy women who can't compete on their own merits; lazy youngsters can't land the jobs that the lazy boomers who selfishly destroyed the economy demand they get; lazy atheists, Christians, and Muslims parrot rhetoric they don't really understand while making broad moral declarations they don't really adhere to.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Do you propose we retire the word because of your extravagant reductionism?
Any time a sentient, tool-using organism decides to create or build something, whether it be for survival or amusement or any other purpose, that is an act of an artificier and the result is artificial. The word just means "man-made." We are distinct from the rest of the world because we have skill in manipulating it; that is the meaning of the word. More importantly, however, and not entirely implied by the word itself, we are capable of massively affecting it. Take responsibility for yourself and your actions; there is no cosmic master plan that absolves you of complacency.
It's perhaps not so surprising that a Twitter staffer suggested this—they more or less killed off all third-party clients to ensure their audience would be captive to promoted spam on mobile.
Firefox requires a reboot if/when it can't overwrite its files correctly. That means either you forgot to close it or there was a hung session in the background. It's been that way since... forever, I think.
A call to action? A great deal of modern advertising is about brand name recognition; that's why sponsorship deals exist, and why television is full of advertisements that merely strive to be funny and have little if anything to do with their product. Certainly there are a lot of campaigns that will depend on exploiting synthetic desires and insecurities for the rest of time (particularly beauty products) but the more aggressive they get the more transparent they get, and marketers aren't quite that stupid. Spam, "lose weight instantly" banner ads, the Shopping Channel, and other blatant predators don't represent the majority of marketing efforts either in dollar value, products covered, or marketers thus engaged.
A well-done advertisement doesn't need to risk triggering disgust; it's simply a frank presentation of services and features offered, given in a format that emphasises the audience and (if appropriate) lifestyle most likely to benefit from it, and how they might benefit from it. No one is going to find this or this manipulative, even though they both try to sell a message about why their services are superior (and the latter ad uses a fallacy to make a point.)
There's little question that the original poster was a troll; Slashdot has a rich tradition of such antics. It does fit a template, however; it's been euphemistically called "low-quality content" by Google and others, and basically consists of astroturfing by dedicated bloggers and reviewers. There was a really prominent case of this last year when Google discovered it had accidentally funded a crap-posting campaign for Chrome as part of a larger marketing deal. The same applies to the recent Amazon Vine reviews—not all of them actually instruct the reader to buy the book, which may come across as too transparent or be redundant since the user is obviously already considering it.
Valid but minor—it is forever doomed to be remembered as "the episode where Wesley becomes a minor deity."
I would agree with you if there weren't so many episodes that were worse—Threshold (VOY), Genesis (TNG), Twilight (ENT), Spock's Brain (TOS), The Omega Glory (TOS)... I'd also like to call special attention to Journey's End (TNG) for being the worst Wesley episode imaginable, but technically that's not a premise issue.
I always thought those looked more like diatoms, though I guess that doesn't sell as well.
This kind of questioning showed up when the Mimivirus, the first (?) giant amoeba virus appeared, including the bit about degenerating into a virus as a survival strategy. It turned out that all of its genes came directly from the amoebae it was infecting; it's basically just really bad at reproducing. While it would be really neat to discover the remnants of a lost superphylum or kingdom, viruses mutate much too quickly for any informative signal to be preserved.
The reality is that we've only sequenced a tiny fraction of the Earth's biodiversity. There's a lot of stuff out there that's just more of the same, especially at the microbe level. The farther back you go, the lower the likelihood of finding a surviving isolate, which is why isolated biomes like Lake Vostok and the drilling site in Northern Ontario are so important.
That's fair, although I think most of the issues that can be raised which are specific to URIs are either (a) answered by data solutions (databases have no trouble sorting Unicode text) or (b) analogous to existing problems (squatting domains by misusing ligatures is really no different from squatting on typos.) I guess having to write a regex for every gTLD ever would be a pain, but when IDN was first introduced there was an RFC (3490) that specifically set out a turnkey algorithm for ASCIIfying the whole mess. Instead of spooky invisible control codes you only need to deal with cumbersome strings clogged with hyphens.
AArch64 devices are expected to begin shipping next year.
Note that a 1920x1080 monitor has 2073600 pixels, so at a legible font size it's perhaps not a very noteworthy achievement to begin with.
Disagree. Advertising begets distrust; if all marketing consists of eulogy, then we will all become skeptics. A hundred years ago most people took miraculous claims at face value; now we look down upon the few who succumb to the half-hearted efforts of telemarketers, spam, and infomercials. Such marketers are destroying their own future—which, if we're lucky, means it'll all collapse sooner or later.
Some day it'll be remembered that DARPA was involved in the creation of the internet and people will talk about it like Sauron handing out rings.
I think you should give ASCII a bit more credit; ~ ` ' ^ " and , were/are all supposed to be used as accent marks in the original version by backspacing over the letter and adding the necessary punctuation mark.
It's weird that you're complaining about the travails of inputting ligatures—you do know that all major platforms have IMEs that do the work for you, right? It's generally built into their regional input layout. This is what makes inputing CJK languages feasible; you run a phonetic search against the database of characters and it pulls up the ones that match. In Windows, at least, you can switch between different input languages and keyboard layouts with a mere hotkey.
And if for some reason that's not enough, one of the several Chinese IMEs is actually just a Unicode lookup; you type in the hexadecimal code of the character you want and it slaps it in your document. Requires an absurd amount of memorization to use effectively for anything, but I think in any proper Emacsian quest for completionism that's somewhat acceptable.
Despite the exciting name, all this stuff does is protect against bounces. Its appearance is somewhere between glass and metal. This better article from the site demonstrates the absurd amount of elastic energy it can handle.
Also, let's drop the "enable" part from the title: this product was already in use in both Apple products and products from other companies and has just been bought out exclusively by Apple as far as the tech sector is concerned. If anything that's a loss.
But, hey, I'm glad to know that we can finally have futuristic-looking mobile devices due to this exclusive patent licence! Thanks guys!
My DSLAM came up as "embedded.fizzled.trial". Still wondering if that's actually the name or just an error message...
...well, there's a pretty simple way to check whether or not your fears are founded. Just shine a UV lamp on the keyboard and examine the shapes of the stains. This is like the forensic chemistry equivalent of a textbook physics problem set in a textbook factory.
Classic translation error. As far as hilarious editorial travesties go, I think that one's fairly understandable. Given that Estonian is pretty unambiguous about how to put the sentence in passive voice (See on hõlbustanud... instead of See lihtsustab... according to Google Translate) I'd guess the original author didn't know the exact meaning of "facilitate" in English, which is odd because Estonian has several comparable verbs which all have the same direction.
...you may be on to something there.
I wouldn't be so sure—Microsoft's terrible internal organization and infighting have been discussed at length in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say that this is the exact problem that makes their products what we despise. One tiny example: PowerShell was supposed to be an update for the Command Prompt, but because the group that wrote PowerShell wasn't the group in charge of the core system, it had to be shipped as a separate product. The fiefdom regime essentially makes it difficult or impossible to contribute to projects that aren't your own, creating huge barriers to contributing bugs; everything is its own little cathedral. Here's a more detailed rant on the technical consequences from an anonymous MS employee.
As someone else said, for a small subset of those films, first-party subtitles are already available, but are sold at a premium by the film's copyright holders vs. English-only versions. Thus the availability of free subtitles prevents the vendors from charging extra. (For bonus points, guess how many of the vendors' subtitles are ripped directly from the very servers they just confiscated...)
So there is business logic here, it's just the usual repugnant kind.
It's all KHTML! Never give up dreaming.
Apple doesn't seem to really care very much about Safari on Windows; Safari 4 failed some of the early speed comparisons, for example, because it crashed when too many tabs were opened simultaneously at the start of a browser session. You'd be better off if you were using a new version of IE. (Or, y'know, anything else.)
Copyright doesn't protect the storyline, only the details of the actual product. Take the recent film Oz, for example—they were unable to get the rights to the 1939 film from MGM, so despite the fact that the movie was probably prompted by the success of Wicked, there are no explicit references to it and some witches' names had to be changed; the only references to the 1939 film are homages like the use of black and white to denote the real world. The rest comes from the original books.
Similarly, if you've ever actually compared the Grimm versions of the fairy tales to the Disney ones, you'll find they generally feature significant plot and character differences. The Disney myths are legitimately new tellings, derived in the traditional manner from multiple sources and with additional innovations. Notice that there have been several versions of Robin Hood since Disney's.
Disney's mission to extend its copyright isn't about the stories, it's about guarding the look-and-feel of their products, and most importantly, Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse. What Disney really seeks to control by extending copyright is the distribution of merchandise with their characters' images on it, which is a huge cash cow for them. The design of Mickey, like Disney's other characters, is entirely their invention.
I'm not saying any of that is good or healthy for civilization, by the way, but the whole "Disney borrowed from the public domain yet refuses to give back" line of reasoning is based on inconsistent logic; they borrowed only the plot, not the whole product.
Lazy is not just one racial or ethnic group, it's every racial or ethnic group: the lazy rich whites steal money from the lazy black and Native American poor, while the lazy Chinese steal inventions and secrets and destroy the environment, and the lazy Indians and Hispanics steal jobs instead of fixing their own countries, and the lazy Africans accept aid instead of doing the same. "Lazy" is the ultimate, omni-purpose slur; it even transcends boundaries of race and nationality: lazy men expect the world on a platter from lazy women who can't compete on their own merits; lazy youngsters can't land the jobs that the lazy boomers who selfishly destroyed the economy demand they get; lazy atheists, Christians, and Muslims parrot rhetoric they don't really understand while making broad moral declarations they don't really adhere to.
So, y'know. Take your pick.