We just hit the evolutionary lottery, as it were: opposable thumbs, high intelligence, complex vocal communication, abstract thought, and self-awareness.
If it was the dolphins that gained self-awareness, they'd be studying humans, lamenting the fact that humans are quite smart, they're just crippled by the lack of a dorsal fin.
We have good features, and poor ones. That we think the features we have are THE GOOD ONES TO HAVE is a bit of ignorance, because we KNOW the benefits of the features we have, see the good things that can be done with them, and DON'T KNOW what great things we could have done if we'd only had wings, gills, pouches, fins, etc.
For us non-USA folk, could you Americans give us geographical guidance when referring to US states, e.g. rather than just saying "New England", could you provide similar context, for example, say "New England is a small state on the East Coast of the USA, known for its historical districts, American Football team and..."
While that's not a bad idea, to be fair, I'd dare say most US states are bigger than most European countries. So, you'd certainly be forgiven for not knowing anything about Rhode Island, I think ignorance about California, New England, New York, etc., is about on-par with not knowing anything about France, UK, Germany, etc., and I seriously doubt you'll find many Americans who are that stupid.
Of course, not everyone should be expected to have a good knowledge of geography, but it's always a balance for how much does one dumb down every sentence to accommodate possible ignorance. There are significant downsides.
It's because it uses very intelligent humor (most of the time) and it targets a very large, but very specific, audience.
No. XKCD is a special case. It works, despite the lousy graphics, because the graphics are completely unnecessary. XKCD could be a quote-of-the-day site, without any illustration, and get the point across just as well.
Compare it to Penny Arcade, which very often has numerous visual gags, which would NEVER work if the graphics were difficult to comprehend due to low resolution or poor artwork.
Dilbert has certainly been much improved by the switch from black line-drawings to full-color.
Sometimes the press publishes embarrassing, inconvenient, or dangerous information. Those are the times when society is asked, "Is the freedom to publish a core value enshrined in a special place in our society or not?"
"The press" has special privileges, and in exchange, must behave responsibly, and usually do so. The question is, what happens when they shirk their responsibility, and how far and wide are we willing to extend the privileges of the press (everyone who can type is a reporter now...)?
I showed that at 10 dollars a gallon the civic hybrid finally paid for itself in the typical 5 year ownership term over the non-hybrid
Cost of ownership can vary by an order of magnitude depending on the number of miles you drive. You have conspicuously omitted that figure in your ridiculous claims, here.
This is the fallacy of minimum wage laws: low value work is either not offered, is off-shored, or disappears into the black market.
No, actually what happens is, when it's no longer economical to pay someone to perform a task, the task is either partially or fully automated, to the point that fewer people can do the work, and the employer can afford to pay a decent wage for the job.
Eliminating the minimum wage would eliminate the motivation to increase automation, and improve salaries and working conditions.
Maybe they're interested in understanding people, maybe they're interested in how to run a business, maybe they just want to know everything about training dogs.
My math teacher used to say: Even if you're going to become an actor or an athlete, you still need to know math, or else you can expect your accountant to take all your money.
The same is true of the tools that are critical to whatever it is that you do. Lack of knowledge about the cars people drive day-in and day-out is not just a big money vacuum, but a major cause of death. Computers are becoming just as important.
I have always wondered how these GPL folks determine that a product contains GPLed code. How do they do it?
Download the firmware. Extract it as much as you can. It may be compressed, try hitting it with zip -FF and then unzip. Once you've got it as extracted as you think you can manage, run "strings" on the binary. Do any of the error messages, command-line options, etc, it prints out, happen to look like any software you know?
Does it take input you can generate? I know KISS was confirmed to have used MPlayer's code, despite their denials, because it was able to play the proprietary subtitle format that was only shortly before created for MPlayer. And Mike Melanson did a good job interrogating YouTube, determining what version of libavcodec they were using based on uploading problematic video samples (that he had commited fixes for), and determining the time frame where those few bugfixes were commited, yet others were not..
Beyond that, you can usually modify the firmware just a bit to enable telnet, or drop you into a command-line, rather than continuing to start the important programs... From there, a simple "--version" might work. You can try different command-line combinations to determine whether it matches exactly with anything you recognize.
I've been on 5hr flights -- they're no fun. I can only imagine some of the really long flights must be friggin' brutal. Give it hotel amenities, a bar, a dance floor -- whatever -- and send people on a more leisurely trip without jamming them in like cattle and shoving them through airports. I can see it being a popular mode of travel.
It's the same situation with commercial jets versus trains, yet here in the US, Amtrak needs to be heavily subsidized to continue to operate. Not to mention the old ocean liners (ala. Titanic).
There apparently aren't enough people who care enough about their own comfort and dignity to be willing to have their trip take 4X longer.
The government needs to be once again a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The idea that we EVER had a government without entrenched corruption, gerrymandering, and other political manipulation, is laughable. The further back you go, the more flagrant the corruption gets.
They list a handful of completely unrelated parts, and complain THEY cost more than $35. This thing certainly won't be using an eInk screen, so quoting prices for those is FUD. It probably won't be using a high-capacity LiIon battery either, and a small NiMH battery is only a couple bucks (not $7.50). The $35 price tag for components is a stretch, but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities.
Hell, I could do it if you want a low-end B&W LCD, instead of a backlit color screen. I've wired enough microcontrollers to 7-segment LCDs with $10 of equipment to know it's feasable if your requirements are modest (and reading eBooks certainly doesn't require much). "Personal Organizers" were quite literally FREE for a couple years there in the early 2000s, before PDAs took off. Now they'll run $10 or so, but are only a very small step away from conversion into a full, networkable computer.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University.
Actually, to be allowed to compete, you are required to meet numerous other restrictions, like requiring that other sports be provided. After those requirements are taken into account, football often DOESN'T make money for the school.
Black & While LCDs are absolutely DIRT CHEAP, readable in all light conditions, and use a trickle of power. Additionally, you no longer need the additional digital to RF conversion steps, which certainly cost a decent amount of money.
Reading from the screen is not hard. Even on old TV sets.
Yes. Yes it is. Interlacing is BAD. VGA-resolution is bad. No magic will fix that.
Teletext exists since ages and nobody complains about it being unreadable.
Teletext takes up, what, 1/5th of the screen for TWO LINES of text? Yeah, at those sizes, anybody can read them. Trying to read a lengthy document like that proves VERY cumbersome. Non-stop scrolling to the next few lines, and an exhausting experience as your eyes have to travel vastly further than they should, or would on a decent monitor, or book page.
Yeah, text as 24x80 is readable, but even them, you don't want to be subjected to it, if you have a choice.
Time was when "research" and "AT&T" were damn near synonymous.
There was a time when Nuclear Power Plants and "Westinghouse" were nearly synonymous, yet now they're making cheap toasters that don't work.
The "AT&T" of today only happens to use the same name as the "AT&T" of years ago. Other than that, they died out entirely, much like Polaroid. What's now calling itself AT&T is, in fact, SBC, and has all the baggage associated with that shiftless company.
Considering how big AT&T is again there really isn't anything anyone can do even if they did move openly. Boycott? HA!, how many of us can afford to give up our cell phones, home phones and Internet connections in protest? AT&T knows they have most of us by the tender bits.
AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all provide competitive cell phone service. Sure, maybe you'd have to give up the exact model of cell phone you currently use, but that's it.
"Home phone" is a bit of an anachronism now. Wire a cell phone into your lines at home, and it's your home phone now. FIOS and cable are just VoIP now. You can go with them, or some other 3rd party VoIP service (magic jack, et al.).
And as for internet, most people that can get high-speed at all, have at least a couple choices of providers these days. Don't like the telco? Try the cable co. Bet they'll provide better service at nearly as low of a price. And lots of people that are happy with their internet service, are switching to wireless anyhow... Sprint's EVDO is below $60/mo. WiFi is free in many cases. Cell phone plans often come with data service as well. etc.
Even if I'm wrong about exactly when emulation has ended or will end, it will end at some point. That is the problem with exponential growth in a finite world.
You're right... Sometime approaching the heat-death of the universe, emulating video game consoles will become impractical. Sad that.
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If it was the dolphins that gained self-awareness, they'd be studying humans, lamenting the fact that humans are quite smart, they're just crippled by the lack of a dorsal fin.
We have good features, and poor ones. That we think the features we have are THE GOOD ONES TO HAVE is a bit of ignorance, because we KNOW the benefits of the features we have, see the good things that can be done with them, and DON'T KNOW what great things we could have done if we'd only had wings, gills, pouches, fins, etc.
Radio is NOT proof that TV doesn't need pictures...
While that's not a bad idea, to be fair, I'd dare say most US states are bigger than most European countries. So, you'd certainly be forgiven for not knowing anything about Rhode Island, I think ignorance about California, New England, New York, etc., is about on-par with not knowing anything about France, UK, Germany, etc., and I seriously doubt you'll find many Americans who are that stupid.
Of course, not everyone should be expected to have a good knowledge of geography, but it's always a balance for how much does one dumb down every sentence to accommodate possible ignorance. There are significant downsides.
All Kelvin, all the time?
Lying to the FBI is a crime.
If you don't mind going to jail, sure, you have LOTS of options. He could have just ignored the gag order and blabbed about it everywhere.
No. XKCD is a special case. It works, despite the lousy graphics, because the graphics are completely unnecessary. XKCD could be a quote-of-the-day site, without any illustration, and get the point across just as well.
Compare it to Penny Arcade, which very often has numerous visual gags, which would NEVER work if the graphics were difficult to comprehend due to low resolution or poor artwork.
Dilbert has certainly been much improved by the switch from black line-drawings to full-color.
"The press" has special privileges, and in exchange, must behave responsibly, and usually do so. The question is, what happens when they shirk their responsibility, and how far and wide are we willing to extend the privileges of the press (everyone who can type is a reporter now...)?
Not yet, but we're working on it.
Cost of ownership can vary by an order of magnitude depending on the number of miles you drive. You have conspicuously omitted that figure in your ridiculous claims, here.
No, actually what happens is, when it's no longer economical to pay someone to perform a task, the task is either partially or fully automated, to the point that fewer people can do the work, and the employer can afford to pay a decent wage for the job.
Eliminating the minimum wage would eliminate the motivation to increase automation, and improve salaries and working conditions.
My math teacher used to say: Even if you're going to become an actor or an athlete, you still need to know math, or else you can expect your accountant to take all your money.
The same is true of the tools that are critical to whatever it is that you do. Lack of knowledge about the cars people drive day-in and day-out is not just a big money vacuum, but a major cause of death. Computers are becoming just as important.
That's quite the logical fallacy you've got going there...
"I was just driving along, and happened to see a dragon at the side of the road."
"I'm sure if I was intentionally looking for dragons, I'd find lots of them!"
Download the firmware. Extract it as much as you can. It may be compressed, try hitting it with zip -FF and then unzip. Once you've got it as extracted as you think you can manage, run "strings" on the binary. Do any of the error messages, command-line options, etc, it prints out, happen to look like any software you know?
Does it take input you can generate? I know KISS was confirmed to have used MPlayer's code, despite their denials, because it was able to play the proprietary subtitle format that was only shortly before created for MPlayer. And Mike Melanson did a good job interrogating YouTube, determining what version of libavcodec they were using based on uploading problematic video samples (that he had commited fixes for), and determining the time frame where those few bugfixes were commited, yet others were not..
Beyond that, you can usually modify the firmware just a bit to enable telnet, or drop you into a command-line, rather than continuing to start the important programs... From there, a simple "--version" might work. You can try different command-line combinations to determine whether it matches exactly with anything you recognize.
It's the same situation with commercial jets versus trains, yet here in the US, Amtrak needs to be heavily subsidized to continue to operate. Not to mention the old ocean liners (ala. Titanic).
There apparently aren't enough people who care enough about their own comfort and dignity to be willing to have their trip take 4X longer.
I think THE SUN would beg to differ...
The idea that we EVER had a government without entrenched corruption, gerrymandering, and other political manipulation, is laughable. The further back you go, the more flagrant the corruption gets.
Of course it is. Once it's just around the corner, it's boring, since you've seen every tiny step leading up to it.
Meanwhile, these days, I can just go out and buy an electric car...
They list a handful of completely unrelated parts, and complain THEY cost more than $35. This thing certainly won't be using an eInk screen, so quoting prices for those is FUD. It probably won't be using a high-capacity LiIon battery either, and a small NiMH battery is only a couple bucks (not $7.50). The $35 price tag for components is a stretch, but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities.
Hell, I could do it if you want a low-end B&W LCD, instead of a backlit color screen. I've wired enough microcontrollers to 7-segment LCDs with $10 of equipment to know it's feasable if your requirements are modest (and reading eBooks certainly doesn't require much). "Personal Organizers" were quite literally FREE for a couple years there in the early 2000s, before PDAs took off. Now they'll run $10 or so, but are only a very small step away from conversion into a full, networkable computer.
Actually, to be allowed to compete, you are required to meet numerous other restrictions, like requiring that other sports be provided. After those requirements are taken into account, football often DOESN'T make money for the school.
Black & While LCDs are absolutely DIRT CHEAP, readable in all light conditions, and use a trickle of power. Additionally, you no longer need the additional digital to RF conversion steps, which certainly cost a decent amount of money.
Yes. Yes it is. Interlacing is BAD. VGA-resolution is bad. No magic will fix that.
Teletext takes up, what, 1/5th of the screen for TWO LINES of text? Yeah, at those sizes, anybody can read them. Trying to read a lengthy document like that proves VERY cumbersome. Non-stop scrolling to the next few lines, and an exhausting experience as your eyes have to travel vastly further than they should, or would on a decent monitor, or book page.
Yeah, text as 24x80 is readable, but even them, you don't want to be subjected to it, if you have a choice.
There was a time when Nuclear Power Plants and "Westinghouse" were nearly synonymous, yet now they're making cheap toasters that don't work.
The "AT&T" of today only happens to use the same name as the "AT&T" of years ago. Other than that, they died out entirely, much like Polaroid. What's now calling itself AT&T is, in fact, SBC, and has all the baggage associated with that shiftless company.
AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all provide competitive cell phone service. Sure, maybe you'd have to give up the exact model of cell phone you currently use, but that's it.
"Home phone" is a bit of an anachronism now. Wire a cell phone into your lines at home, and it's your home phone now. FIOS and cable are just VoIP now. You can go with them, or some other 3rd party VoIP service (magic jack, et al.).
And as for internet, most people that can get high-speed at all, have at least a couple choices of providers these days. Don't like the telco? Try the cable co. Bet they'll provide better service at nearly as low of a price. And lots of people that are happy with their internet service, are switching to wireless anyhow... Sprint's EVDO is below $60/mo. WiFi is free in many cases. Cell phone plans often come with data service as well. etc.
You're right... Apple does a tremendous job reducing the expectations of functionality and convenience that their users perceive.
You're right... Sometime approaching the heat-death of the universe, emulating video game consoles will become impractical. Sad that.