Maybe people drive faster because it's such a frustrating situation, at least in the US.
Let me get your logic straight: You're going to speed so you won't be late, rather than leaving earlier so you won't be late?
It takes me half an hour and two toll roads that cost over $2 a day. If I don't take the toll roads it's even longer in the car.
Perhaps you should move closer to your place of employment, or find employment closer to you?
It really grinds my nerves that voters continue shoot down competent public transportation
...
Competent public transportation is like santa claus; It doesn't exist. The reason why public transportation is only available in a select subset of US cities is because we have so damn much land that it's easier to create an urban sprawl than increase population density (and standard of living costs) to the point where public transportation is viable. Public transportation has only proven itself in the US in cities that have some kind of geophysical barrier to growth or another reason why urban sprawl cannot occur.
I really just hate driving. Even without all the traffic, I'd rather just get on a train and have someone else do the driving. You can drive and eat breakfast, listen to music, and basically turn your car into a living room, but you need only see rush hour once to see that everyone does it poorly.
You need to live somewhere else, probably in a different country, if you want that.
Traffic would probably move faster if people didn't try.
The speed traffic moves is based on capacity divided by use. It's a myth that there's some guy at the head of the long line driving 15 MPH and clear roads for miles ahead of him.
Article title: ESA Launches GOCE To Map Earth's Gravity Article quote:...to enable us to address the challenges of global climate change.
Great. Now we're going to have to start ejecting people into orbit because they stayed under their carbon credits quota, but they had too much gravitational pull and that's damaging the environment. I can just see the green movement in five years: "Stop warping spacetime! Excercise! And screw the whales."
The problem here isn't improvements in technology but rather user expectations. This should be a familiar problem to almost everyone here. What's amazing about this is that there are so many drivers on the road with little or no formal training, there aren't more accidents. These are people who are routinely lulled into a sense of security because they repeatedly engage in dangerous behavior without consequences. Well, what's the natural, human, thing to do when you do something a hundred times without ill-effect? You assume it's safe. You've driven with that 64 oz big gulp between your legs, a cheeseburger propped up on your leg, fries in the cup holder, while talking to a friend in the next seat doing the same thing how many times? Too many to count. And you haven't been in an accident. It's precisely this erosion of standards that leads to accidents, and the ONLY -- and I repeat ONLY -- way to safeguard against it is routine training.
Which is the one thing nobody will ever agree to, because they think driving is a right, not a priviledge. Afterall, it's all those other jerks that are causing problems, not me, right? Just like how something like 90% of drivers think they're "above average", huh. If you want to solve the accident rate problem, the solution is training and certification by a competent authority and stiff punishments for non-compliance with those standards. Hard pill to swallow though, as entrenched as the automobile is in our culture and the sense of entitlement -- even repeat DUI offenders insist they should have their license.
I live in Minnesota where all drivers are required by law to carry insurance. It sounds like a good idea and there's a load of people who want to scream about personal responsibility. What nobody talks about though is that nobody really pays the same for insurance. Men pay more than women, people who drive certain models of vehicles or live in certain zip codes pay more, or if they live within x miles of a certain intersection. These factors can play a far larger role on a person's insurance rates than their driving record -- case in point, I know a woman who has been in four accidents, has three speeding tickets, an couple illegal turns, and a DUI. Her insurance is still half of a man I know who got one speeding ticket. They are the same age, and live in the same zipcode -- the difference is gender and the vehicles they drive. Insurance companies aren't required to publish their methods of calculating what rates a person will pay out, and they certainly would fight tooth and nail to have such methodology scrutinized. Like the rubbish about how men are more prone to accidents (thus justifying the higher fees) -- this was true in the 1970s when women didn't routinely own vehicles, but these days the accident rate is a lot closer to parity than it was then, but nobody has updated their methods because while parity in per capita accidents has closed, the difference in pay between men and women didn't keep up -- so men pay more because insurance companies can charge them more.
This is the problem with insurance -- it's not based on a person's ability to drive, or their record, but rather those very intangibles like race and sex. Insurance is a fundamentally discriminatory institution.
Speaking as one of those aging boomers, age profiling is OK. So is racial, gender, sexual preference and religious profiling. We operating in a mysterious and complex world while suffering from a poverty of information. It's all about getting all the data you can, baby... its all about the data...
Sure, until someone spots a trend that Christians show a greater tendancy towards dementia than Atheists. Then it's a throw-down. Nevermind that it might be an exploratory study, or not be statistically significant (3%?), etc., the problem is as soon as we start doing these kinds of analysis people will take it out of proportion to either support or refute their own niche. The end result is social chaos. No, profiling is not okay. Gathering data is all fine and good, but there's serious ethical questions about how that data is packaged and released.
I mean, look at how many people think evolution is "just a theory", and you might start to realize just how dangerous a little knowledge is in the hands of morons.
Ah.. sorry. Footnote: I was referring to the government's interest in controlling various chemicals in my previous example, not trying to imply ephedrine is an explosive. Though, if you take too much of it something will explode.:)
This compound is used to fire ejection seats out of aircraft. As well, ammonium perchlorate -- pure, not this compound, is an explosive according to OSHA. How hard would it be to synthesize ammonium perchlorate from APCP? If it is not overly difficult, the BATF has every reason to be worried that mass distribution of this without licensing could open a channel for acquiring explosives materials domestically and in bulk under the guise of "hobbyist". It wouldn't be the first time -- pseudoephedrine can be readily broken down to ephedrine, which is one of the components needed for methanphetamine production (and derivatives).
Perhaps someone with credentials in chemistry beyond self-educated (as I am) could comment on the feasibility of this?
If Intel becomes the exclusive provider of x86 chips, they'll be smacked by the government with anti-trust litigation (Note: I did not say WHICH government, my fellow silly Americans). It was the same with Apple being the company Microsoft pointed to when it was hit with anti-trust. Intel is simply hoping that AMD is too fearful to engage in litigation, or risk folding the business, simply to expose Intel to government action -- they are betting that AMD simply accepts whatever monthly tribute is required by Intel, thus assuring it's continued irrelevance without being wholly dismissed out of the market. If AMD still had its balls, they'd call the bluff and tell Intel to go to hell -- because Intel needs AMD a lot more than they're letting on.
If that's true of this software developed by IBM's Indian research arm and pilot tested in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, then I suspect it will also handle a lot of other English-speaking people.
It can handle accents but it must be programmed in; Voice recognition software is significantly about heuristic algorithms -- guessing what accent, doing differential analysis, etc. But it also succeeds because it often limits itself to yes/no or multiple choice answers -- that is, the answer must be one of those presented. Voice recognition that tries to do free-form recognition has an unacceptably high error rate. Therefore, it doesn't matter where it's tested, or what language. It only reaches a passable level of reliability when it is purpose-built for environment and language, and the answers are discrete.
As if English-speaking people from the midwestern United States don't.
English-speaking with a midwestern accent is generally viewed as the most easily understood amongst all english accents; And this accent is the one used for many (if not most) television reporters, voice recordings intended for mass audience, etc. Most other accents are defined by how they mangle certain syllables.
Voice tech has an achilles heel: It's called accents. Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States. But if you have an accent and have ever tried to "interact" with one of those voice mail systems that are speech-activated rather than touch-tone, the words unholy rage doesn't begin to describe the frustration of listening to a soothing voice repeatedly saying "I'm sorry, I do not understand your request" and then endlessly repeats the menus. Pressing '0', if you're wondering, will only make the system remind you that it (a) only speaks english and (b) while it can process touch tones, it won't -- because it hates you.
And IBM wants to bring this unique hell to the web? What kind of sadists are these people? As if websites that require Flash and the horrors that server-side Java unleashed wasn't enough...
So let me get this straight, you get modded +5 insightful for essentially calling everyone an idiot because "DRM" could only mean iTunes? Let's have a review of what "DRM" is on/related to the iPhone:
The applications are locked down and can only be purchased from Apple, The hardware is locked only to certain cell phone vendors (in most markets), The TRSS headset connector is recessed on the original (not 3G), requiring purchase of either an adapter or an apple-branded headset, Battery cannot be replaced by the user (arguably another case of hardware-based DRM as this is a standard industry feature on most other phones), Over 200 patents filed regarding the iPhone hardware -- many of which are bogus -- and massive legal campaigns to prevent any direct competition, oh... and iTunes.
And about "bitching"... I think Apple's use of DRM and relative popularity amongst the mainstream has catapulted these issues into the public eye and an awful lot of people don't know what they're missing and would be rightfully upset to find out that Apple is only offering a fraction of the potential of the hardware to their users, simply because Apple feels it's the only one that can deliver them "the right experience". And regardless of how many people do or don't disagree with me, it doesn't change the fact that removing DRM from the iPhone would add tons of functionality to it -- more than bigger batteries, applications, or accessories ever could.
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." ~ William Shakespeare
Why web developers should be dragged out and shot
on
Site Compatibility and IE8
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web? There's all this crap being tacted onto what constitutes a "web browser" that it's becoming less and less a browser and more and more a platform every day. This is not the direction we want to go right now. A lightweight browser that can present information in a variety of devices is where the web needs to stay: Accessibility is more important than features. HTML, XML, CSS, and maybe some javascript is all the farther anyone needs to go. But then Flash came along and suddenly you've got crap that can't be indexed and is inaccessible to people who are blind or deaf, and increasingly devices like mobile phones which have enough power to do the basics aren't enough because the standards are getting jacked up to the point that we have to cram a laptop's worth of computing resources into a form factor that can fit in your hand, and a battery life of less than a day.
This so-called progress is a step in the wrong direction. We need to work on a set of standards that can be implimented with minimal computational resources, is flexible enough to offer a range of presentation options sufficient for most information (images, text, some video and audio) -- and leave it at that. By extending the web into areas reserved for applications and then trying to do everything at once (cross-platform, intensive computations, entire application suites stuffed into web browsers) we are opening a can of worms that promises to segment the web into a million incompatible methods.
We need to work on making this information as available and accessible as possible, not coming up with fancy new ways to make it inaccessible to larger and larger groups of people in the name of progress.
There is no denying the "specialness" of people like Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein. Why, then, should you deny the specialness of someone who is arguably less special than they are, but more special than you are? Simple jealousy?
No. Success depends on a lot more than just a person's innate "specialness". Or I can be more blunt: They just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and had what was needed. There have been hundreds of failed Nikola Teslas -- I could manufacture him on an assembly line and sprinkle copies throughout society and I'd be unlikely to reproduce what the original did, simply because the environmental factors would be lacking. I'm sorry, because I know everyone wants to feel special and unique, that they all have a shot at being great because of some innate "specialness" they have. But the truth is that without the right environmental circumstances, you're not going to be any different than me or a thousand other people with that same innate "specialness".
But sooner or later, someone would have come up with a multimedia markup extension for gopher, and then gopher would have been the WWW, just with a different protocol.
And in the last sentence you completely dismiss your own argument. Call me confused, but you're agreeing with me. Why?
People think that if Person X hadn't been around we might not have Technology Y. Okay, this is based on the idea that somehow Person X has some unique ability and only Person X can create Technology Y. Hate to break it to you, but you're not special. Neither is Person X. Second, the reason we have Technology Y is because we needed it. If those needs haven't gone away, then the pressure to fill that void remains -- and somebody else will come along and fill it eventually. Now you're right that maybe Betamax might have beaten VHS if not for a disturbance in the force, or it would have been HD-DVD instead of Bluray, or whatever... But we'd still have high density optical media. Gopher would have died simply because it didn't meet the needs of the population. Maybe it wouldn't be HTTP that replaced it five, or ten years later, but something like it would have been created.
I thought it might have been because of my gender, but I try not to attribute to malice (or discrimination) that which can be equally explained by stupidity. And stupidity seems like a very reasonable conclusion in that case. So yeah, I was pissed for awhile, but I got over it. Finding another job though has been difficult and I have been laughed out of the interviewer's office a few times already -- it's hard to be taken seriously by people who don't know me. The flip of this though is if I can get my foot in the door, I usually get the respect I deserve as quickly as anyone else.
Well, did you send flowers? No. Did you write anything but crappy emo poetry? No. Actually, no poetry at all. How about flaunting yourself in tight outfits, or at least making some minimal effort to be sexual? No there too. And apparently Microsoft is a louzy kisser (way too much tongue). Big surprise the relationship failed.
More seriously: What do these people expect? The economy is crap. Nobody's going to be trying anything new right now. And neither side spent much on marketing from everything I'm reading. And at any rate, their marketing strategy is crabbed -- you open with support, not a feature set. Whatever feature set is being offered better be one for one what they have now or don't even bother. Support is the key here -- they should have been screaming "We have technicians trained for this! Really! More than you can fit on a bus!" Except that would be a lie. So they focus on what they can effect: Which is some limited marketing propaganda that won't fool anyone. Microsoft lost its crown jewels when Vista tanked. Now everything they say comes under scrutiny -- Apple's been taking free potshots at them in the general media for about a year now and I see average people parroting those "Hi, I'm a Mac; Hi, I'm a PC" commercials. This relationship needs some pizzaz back in it, and instead Novell comes home to Microsoft wearing a familiar wonderbra and fishnet stockings?! Seriously, we're all supportive of Microsoft getting in touch with it's softer, less monopolistic side, but crossdressing in linux is not the answer. -_-
Sir, two things: First, I don't know who modded you to +5, but it's a rather disgusting display of ignorance on this forum. Second, nobody's saying men and women aren't different, but socially and legally we can achieve parity. Biological predestination and arguments about what is "natural" has kept society's unnatural system of injustice alive and well for several thousand years. Now, your so-called arguments in turn:
Admittedly those differences are tied to (what should be) relatively minor things like women being generally smaller and needing more maternity leave than fathers need paternity leave due to having to actually carry to term and give birth but those differences do exist.
Men and women should have equal family medical leave; A child's needs do not stop at birth.
The law should respect those differences because sometimes you need to treat people differently in order to treat them equally.
Separate but equal didn't work in the 1960s. We had a civil war over the idea of "treating people differently". All of the civil rights progress in this country has revolved around breaking that mindset. And the law has moved slowly in this direction as well because the life of the law is not knowledge, or some concept of justice -- the life of the law is experience. And experience has been telling us for the past two hundred years in this country and the past ten thousand of human evolution that we cannot treat people differently and achieve social equality. The idea that function follows form (biology) has been antiquidated since the industrial revolution in the 1930s when differences in physical strength became meaningless -- and eliminated any argument for division of the labor of the two sexes in every substantive way.
Slashdot Mirror
Could I maybe get it for $1000 without Vista?
Maybe people drive faster because it's such a frustrating situation, at least in the US.
Let me get your logic straight: You're going to speed so you won't be late, rather than leaving earlier so you won't be late?
It takes me half an hour and two toll roads that cost over $2 a day. If I don't take the toll roads it's even longer in the car.
Perhaps you should move closer to your place of employment, or find employment closer to you?
It really grinds my nerves that voters continue shoot down competent public transportation
...
Competent public transportation is like santa claus; It doesn't exist. The reason why public transportation is only available in a select subset of US cities is because we have so damn much land that it's easier to create an urban sprawl than increase population density (and standard of living costs) to the point where public transportation is viable. Public transportation has only proven itself in the US in cities that have some kind of geophysical barrier to growth or another reason why urban sprawl cannot occur.
I really just hate driving. Even without all the traffic, I'd rather just get on a train and have someone else do the driving. You can drive and eat breakfast, listen to music, and basically turn your car into a living room, but you need only see rush hour once to see that everyone does it poorly.
You need to live somewhere else, probably in a different country, if you want that.
Traffic would probably move faster if people didn't try.
The speed traffic moves is based on capacity divided by use. It's a myth that there's some guy at the head of the long line driving 15 MPH and clear roads for miles ahead of him.
When did "Global Warming" become politically incorrect and "Climate Change" became politically correct?
When they realized they might be wrong.
Article title: ESA Launches GOCE To Map Earth's Gravity ...to enable us to address the challenges of global climate change.
Article quote:
Great. Now we're going to have to start ejecting people into orbit because they stayed under their carbon credits quota, but they had too much gravitational pull and that's damaging the environment. I can just see the green movement in five years: "Stop warping spacetime! Excercise! And screw the whales."
The problem here isn't improvements in technology but rather user expectations. This should be a familiar problem to almost everyone here. What's amazing about this is that there are so many drivers on the road with little or no formal training, there aren't more accidents. These are people who are routinely lulled into a sense of security because they repeatedly engage in dangerous behavior without consequences. Well, what's the natural, human, thing to do when you do something a hundred times without ill-effect? You assume it's safe. You've driven with that 64 oz big gulp between your legs, a cheeseburger propped up on your leg, fries in the cup holder, while talking to a friend in the next seat doing the same thing how many times? Too many to count. And you haven't been in an accident. It's precisely this erosion of standards that leads to accidents, and the ONLY -- and I repeat ONLY -- way to safeguard against it is routine training.
Which is the one thing nobody will ever agree to, because they think driving is a right, not a priviledge. Afterall, it's all those other jerks that are causing problems, not me, right? Just like how something like 90% of drivers think they're "above average", huh. If you want to solve the accident rate problem, the solution is training and certification by a competent authority and stiff punishments for non-compliance with those standards. Hard pill to swallow though, as entrenched as the automobile is in our culture and the sense of entitlement -- even repeat DUI offenders insist they should have their license.
These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.
It doesn't evolve for 95 million years? It could have been a government octopus.
I live in Minnesota where all drivers are required by law to carry insurance. It sounds like a good idea and there's a load of people who want to scream about personal responsibility. What nobody talks about though is that nobody really pays the same for insurance. Men pay more than women, people who drive certain models of vehicles or live in certain zip codes pay more, or if they live within x miles of a certain intersection. These factors can play a far larger role on a person's insurance rates than their driving record -- case in point, I know a woman who has been in four accidents, has three speeding tickets, an couple illegal turns, and a DUI. Her insurance is still half of a man I know who got one speeding ticket. They are the same age, and live in the same zipcode -- the difference is gender and the vehicles they drive. Insurance companies aren't required to publish their methods of calculating what rates a person will pay out, and they certainly would fight tooth and nail to have such methodology scrutinized. Like the rubbish about how men are more prone to accidents (thus justifying the higher fees) -- this was true in the 1970s when women didn't routinely own vehicles, but these days the accident rate is a lot closer to parity than it was then, but nobody has updated their methods because while parity in per capita accidents has closed, the difference in pay between men and women didn't keep up -- so men pay more because insurance companies can charge them more.
This is the problem with insurance -- it's not based on a person's ability to drive, or their record, but rather those very intangibles like race and sex. Insurance is a fundamentally discriminatory institution.
You don't need to worry much about girls downloading porn. It's slashfic you should fear. buwhahaha!
Speaking as one of those aging boomers, age profiling is OK. So is racial, gender, sexual preference and religious profiling. We operating in a mysterious and complex world while suffering from a poverty of information. It's all about getting all the data you can, baby... its all about the data...
Sure, until someone spots a trend that Christians show a greater tendancy towards dementia than Atheists. Then it's a throw-down. Nevermind that it might be an exploratory study, or not be statistically significant (3%?), etc., the problem is as soon as we start doing these kinds of analysis people will take it out of proportion to either support or refute their own niche. The end result is social chaos. No, profiling is not okay. Gathering data is all fine and good, but there's serious ethical questions about how that data is packaged and released.
I mean, look at how many people think evolution is "just a theory", and you might start to realize just how dangerous a little knowledge is in the hands of morons.
Ah.. sorry. Footnote: I was referring to the government's interest in controlling various chemicals in my previous example, not trying to imply ephedrine is an explosive. Though, if you take too much of it something will explode. :)
This compound is used to fire ejection seats out of aircraft. As well, ammonium perchlorate -- pure, not this compound, is an explosive according to OSHA. How hard would it be to synthesize ammonium perchlorate from APCP? If it is not overly difficult, the BATF has every reason to be worried that mass distribution of this without licensing could open a channel for acquiring explosives materials domestically and in bulk under the guise of "hobbyist". It wouldn't be the first time -- pseudoephedrine can be readily broken down to ephedrine, which is one of the components needed for methanphetamine production (and derivatives).
Perhaps someone with credentials in chemistry beyond self-educated (as I am) could comment on the feasibility of this?
If Intel becomes the exclusive provider of x86 chips, they'll be smacked by the government with anti-trust litigation (Note: I did not say WHICH government, my fellow silly Americans). It was the same with Apple being the company Microsoft pointed to when it was hit with anti-trust. Intel is simply hoping that AMD is too fearful to engage in litigation, or risk folding the business, simply to expose Intel to government action -- they are betting that AMD simply accepts whatever monthly tribute is required by Intel, thus assuring it's continued irrelevance without being wholly dismissed out of the market. If AMD still had its balls, they'd call the bluff and tell Intel to go to hell -- because Intel needs AMD a lot more than they're letting on.
If that's true of this software developed by IBM's Indian research arm and pilot tested in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, then I suspect it will also handle a lot of other English-speaking people.
It can handle accents but it must be programmed in; Voice recognition software is significantly about heuristic algorithms -- guessing what accent, doing differential analysis, etc. But it also succeeds because it often limits itself to yes/no or multiple choice answers -- that is, the answer must be one of those presented. Voice recognition that tries to do free-form recognition has an unacceptably high error rate. Therefore, it doesn't matter where it's tested, or what language. It only reaches a passable level of reliability when it is purpose-built for environment and language, and the answers are discrete.
As if English-speaking people from the midwestern United States don't.
English-speaking with a midwestern accent is generally viewed as the most easily understood amongst all english accents; And this accent is the one used for many (if not most) television reporters, voice recordings intended for mass audience, etc. Most other accents are defined by how they mangle certain syllables.
Voice tech has an achilles heel: It's called accents. Most voice software works great for english-speaking people in the midwestern United States. But if you have an accent and have ever tried to "interact" with one of those voice mail systems that are speech-activated rather than touch-tone, the words unholy rage doesn't begin to describe the frustration of listening to a soothing voice repeatedly saying "I'm sorry, I do not understand your request" and then endlessly repeats the menus. Pressing '0', if you're wondering, will only make the system remind you that it (a) only speaks english and (b) while it can process touch tones, it won't -- because it hates you.
And IBM wants to bring this unique hell to the web? What kind of sadists are these people? As if websites that require Flash and the horrors that server-side Java unleashed wasn't enough...
So let me get this straight, you get modded +5 insightful for essentially calling everyone an idiot because "DRM" could only mean iTunes? Let's have a review of what "DRM" is on/related to the iPhone:
The applications are locked down and can only be purchased from Apple,
The hardware is locked only to certain cell phone vendors (in most markets),
The TRSS headset connector is recessed on the original (not 3G), requiring purchase of either an adapter or an apple-branded headset,
Battery cannot be replaced by the user (arguably another case of hardware-based DRM as this is a standard industry feature on most other phones),
Over 200 patents filed regarding the iPhone hardware -- many of which are bogus -- and massive legal campaigns to prevent any direct competition,
oh...
and iTunes.
And about "bitching"... I think Apple's use of DRM and relative popularity amongst the mainstream has catapulted these issues into the public eye and an awful lot of people don't know what they're missing and would be rightfully upset to find out that Apple is only offering a fraction of the potential of the hardware to their users, simply because Apple feels it's the only one that can deliver them "the right experience". And regardless of how many people do or don't disagree with me, it doesn't change the fact that removing DRM from the iPhone would add tons of functionality to it -- more than bigger batteries, applications, or accessories ever could.
Most Asked for Feature that Will Never Be Implimented on an Apple Product: Removing the DRM.
"God has given you one face, and you make yourself another."
~ William Shakespeare
People, the web is fine for multimedia and information presentation, but why is there this constant push to integrate everything into the web? There's all this crap being tacted onto what constitutes a "web browser" that it's becoming less and less a browser and more and more a platform every day. This is not the direction we want to go right now. A lightweight browser that can present information in a variety of devices is where the web needs to stay: Accessibility is more important than features. HTML, XML, CSS, and maybe some javascript is all the farther anyone needs to go. But then Flash came along and suddenly you've got crap that can't be indexed and is inaccessible to people who are blind or deaf, and increasingly devices like mobile phones which have enough power to do the basics aren't enough because the standards are getting jacked up to the point that we have to cram a laptop's worth of computing resources into a form factor that can fit in your hand, and a battery life of less than a day.
This so-called progress is a step in the wrong direction. We need to work on a set of standards that can be implimented with minimal computational resources, is flexible enough to offer a range of presentation options sufficient for most information (images, text, some video and audio) -- and leave it at that. By extending the web into areas reserved for applications and then trying to do everything at once (cross-platform, intensive computations, entire application suites stuffed into web browsers) we are opening a can of worms that promises to segment the web into a million incompatible methods.
We need to work on making this information as available and accessible as possible, not coming up with fancy new ways to make it inaccessible to larger and larger groups of people in the name of progress.
Well, except in Alabama, where pi day is 03/01. :D /yes, it's been debunked //it says something that people believed it ///i still think it's funny
There is no denying the "specialness" of people like Nikola Tesla or Albert Einstein. Why, then, should you deny the specialness of someone who is arguably less special than they are, but more special than you are? Simple jealousy?
No. Success depends on a lot more than just a person's innate "specialness". Or I can be more blunt: They just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and had what was needed. There have been hundreds of failed Nikola Teslas -- I could manufacture him on an assembly line and sprinkle copies throughout society and I'd be unlikely to reproduce what the original did, simply because the environmental factors would be lacking. I'm sorry, because I know everyone wants to feel special and unique, that they all have a shot at being great because of some innate "specialness" they have. But the truth is that without the right environmental circumstances, you're not going to be any different than me or a thousand other people with that same innate "specialness".
But sooner or later, someone would have come up with a multimedia markup extension for gopher, and then gopher would have been the WWW, just with a different protocol.
And in the last sentence you completely dismiss your own argument. Call me confused, but you're agreeing with me. Why?
People think that if Person X hadn't been around we might not have Technology Y. Okay, this is based on the idea that somehow Person X has some unique ability and only Person X can create Technology Y. Hate to break it to you, but you're not special. Neither is Person X. Second, the reason we have Technology Y is because we needed it. If those needs haven't gone away, then the pressure to fill that void remains -- and somebody else will come along and fill it eventually. Now you're right that maybe Betamax might have beaten VHS if not for a disturbance in the force, or it would have been HD-DVD instead of Bluray, or whatever... But we'd still have high density optical media. Gopher would have died simply because it didn't meet the needs of the population. Maybe it wouldn't be HTTP that replaced it five, or ten years later, but something like it would have been created.
I thought it might have been because of my gender, but I try not to attribute to malice (or discrimination) that which can be equally explained by stupidity. And stupidity seems like a very reasonable conclusion in that case. So yeah, I was pissed for awhile, but I got over it. Finding another job though has been difficult and I have been laughed out of the interviewer's office a few times already -- it's hard to be taken seriously by people who don't know me. The flip of this though is if I can get my foot in the door, I usually get the respect I deserve as quickly as anyone else.
I have no recollection of that event, senator. Besides, what else am I supposed to do when I've been out of work this long?
Well, did you send flowers? No. Did you write anything but crappy emo poetry? No. Actually, no poetry at all. How about flaunting yourself in tight outfits, or at least making some minimal effort to be sexual? No there too. And apparently Microsoft is a louzy kisser (way too much tongue). Big surprise the relationship failed.
More seriously: What do these people expect? The economy is crap. Nobody's going to be trying anything new right now. And neither side spent much on marketing from everything I'm reading. And at any rate, their marketing strategy is crabbed -- you open with support, not a feature set. Whatever feature set is being offered better be one for one what they have now or don't even bother. Support is the key here -- they should have been screaming "We have technicians trained for this! Really! More than you can fit on a bus!" Except that would be a lie. So they focus on what they can effect: Which is some limited marketing propaganda that won't fool anyone. Microsoft lost its crown jewels when Vista tanked. Now everything they say comes under scrutiny -- Apple's been taking free potshots at them in the general media for about a year now and I see average people parroting those "Hi, I'm a Mac; Hi, I'm a PC" commercials. This relationship needs some pizzaz back in it, and instead Novell comes home to Microsoft wearing a familiar wonderbra and fishnet stockings?! Seriously, we're all supportive of Microsoft getting in touch with it's softer, less monopolistic side, but crossdressing in linux is not the answer. -_-
Sir, two things: First, I don't know who modded you to +5, but it's a rather disgusting display of ignorance on this forum. Second, nobody's saying men and women aren't different, but socially and legally we can achieve parity. Biological predestination and arguments about what is "natural" has kept society's unnatural system of injustice alive and well for several thousand years. Now, your so-called arguments in turn:
Admittedly those differences are tied to (what should be) relatively minor things like women being generally smaller and needing more maternity leave than fathers need paternity leave due to having to actually carry to term and give birth but those differences do exist.
Men and women should have equal family medical leave; A child's needs do not stop at birth.
The law should respect those differences because sometimes you need to treat people differently in order to treat them equally.
Separate but equal didn't work in the 1960s. We had a civil war over the idea of "treating people differently". All of the civil rights progress in this country has revolved around breaking that mindset. And the law has moved slowly in this direction as well because the life of the law is not knowledge, or some concept of justice -- the life of the law is experience. And experience has been telling us for the past two hundred years in this country and the past ten thousand of human evolution that we cannot treat people differently and achieve social equality. The idea that function follows form (biology) has been antiquidated since the industrial revolution in the 1930s when differences in physical strength became meaningless -- and eliminated any argument for division of the labor of the two sexes in every substantive way.