I'm sorry, but fuck your personal religious beliefs.
You are a health care worker. Your job is help people stay healthy. If you willfully chose to be a Typhoid Mary, then you are doing the exact opposite of what you had agreed to do and have no business being in health care.
It's not wrong. Further, your analogy is incorrect. Or at least, I should have been more clear. All the effort that has been made to keep people from doing patently stupid things, has eliminated intelligence from the natural selection equation. To use your analogy, it would be the equivalent of a bird swooping down on a predator, forcing the predators mouth open, and tapdancing on his tongue while shouting, "Hey Mom! Look at me!"
Before, said bird would be dead faster than you could say "Derp!", and any genes that allowed this bizarre behaviour would not carry forward. But now all the other birds see what the dumb bird did, and quickly swoop down and hold the predators mouth open so Derpy could get away. Derpy doesn't die, and now has the chance to pass his genes on, to the detriment of the species as a whole. Or more specifically, it *would* be a detriment if you consider intelligence to be an important characteristic of the species.
Compare to cows. Cows are not bred for intelligence. They're bred for meat and milk. It's pretty safe to say that cows are just plain dumb. There may be smart cows, but it doesn't matter because we don't keep cows for that purpose. Over time, the genes that produce smart cows may stay, or they may vanish outright, purely by chance. But the likelyhood that the smart cows genes will become dominant, is remote because there's no selective pressure to remove the cows that *don't* have those genes.
People are becoming the same way. There is no longer any advantage to being smart, so as a species we are (at best) stuck with a general level of intelligence that will no longer improve. Worst case, overall intelligence of our species will actually decrease. I read somewhere that lower IQ people also tend to breed more than higher IQ people (I can't remember where I read that... Not sure if it's true but it sounds truthy), in which case the problem is exacerbated.
True, I can't think of a more effective solution. Of course, the usual caveats (complaints of invasion of privacy, abuse by corrupt authorities) apply to such a solution, which means it'll never happen.:P
"Maybe we could just outlaw alcohol again and take care of the whole problem all at once"
Sure! Because it worked so well the first time, right?
And you'll never stop drinking because, lets face it most people *like* to drink. Drinking alcohol is buried so deeply entwined in the fabric of almost all cultures of the world, and people arn't going to just up and stop. The only realistic option is to somehow manage the risk. IMO, the penalties for repeat offences are way too low. I can understand it happening the first time because someone may not realize that that they are in fact that intoxicated. But that excuse vanishes after that. By the time someone has offended 3 or so times, they should be outright banned from driving, or even owning a vehicle.
Just because the first time or two is 'victimless', that doesn't mean the next one will be. It becomes a game of russian roulette and it's not reasonable to simply hope that the next drunk driver you come across won't splatter you across the highway.
WRT cell phones, more and more places are making it illegal to talk on a cell or to text while driving. Some ban it outright, some permit it as long as you use a handsfree kit. Cell phones are pretty new, and lawmakers can move excruciatingly slowly. I fully expect to see similar laws eventually being applied to other forms of distraction as well.
Quite simple, really. Natural selection stopped when we started slapping warning labels on everything and banning products that had even the most infinitesimal change of hurting kids. (Lawn darts, kinder eggs, etc)
So all the people that rightfully should have killed themselves off while still young, grow up, and the results speak for themselves.
I am someone who doesn't have to pretend to be a Canadian when traveling to other part of the world, for their own safety, because Americans are almost universally reviled as ignorant, self-absorbed psychos.
It's funny... Americans have been bending over and giving up their rights, right, left and center. They've given up incredibly important rights, so that it is now legal for the US gov't to seize your property and throw you in Guantanamo for years without so much as a boo.
But guns? Yeah, Dat gubmint'll take mah guns from mah cold dead hands!
Americans have allowed your country to become a fascist state, controlled by corporations and politicians so corrupt they don't even try to hide it anymore. American is now on the verge of bankruptcy. And you suck it all up as being reasonable and even *defend* the bastards that are screwing you over.
Why not? Youtube is just a web service. All microsoft has to do is set up their own. They created their own search service (bing), so I fail to see what is stopping them from making their own version of youtube.
Others have been able to do the same and be successful at it, such as Vimeo.
And your analogy doesn't even come close to matching, because Google does no such thing. There is nothing preventing me from installing alternate players on my Android phone.
For a Microsoft shill, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Your post was modded funny, but I think it should have been modded insightful. There are more than a handful of former Microsoft Partners who have been completely screwed over by Microsoft.
To me, the question is, do you treat others as wickedly as you treat the original wicked person. If you're teaching the original wicked person a lesson, then turning around and treating everyone else fairly, I have difficulty arguing against it. If you treat everyone as badly, then that's just perpetuating the same wickedness and (IMO) you're even worse than the original.
Right, because Windows 8's new UI is so wonderful and revolutionary that people are trampling themselves trying to buy new devices that use it.
Oh wait...
The UI *is* important. In fact, it's *critically* important, because that is the face of the device you interact with. So much of new technology is different only for the sake of being different, and provide absolutely nothing of value that technology of yesteryear didn't already have.
The iPad practically invented an entire new market segment, despite the entire PC industry trying to do so for decades. Why? Because they made a UI that was both attractive AND intuitive to use.
No UI will perfectly suit everyone. It needs to compliment both the device and the users intended use of said device. Microsoft is discovering that the hard way with their idiotic push to Metro.
There will always be vociferous arguments about UI, because UI is so important that it can make or break a product.
That being said, a lot of the current UI problems are because developers are look at tablets, seeing that people really like the simplified interfaces, and decide that they should do the same thing on PCs, despite the fact that the use cases for the devices are very much different. So now, and unsurprisingly, people are starting to clamor for the UIs of old, when you could still do stuff without the UI trying it's best to hobble you. Hence mass abandonment of Gnome, and articles such as this talking about old and fugly, but otherwise useful, window manager skins.
I dunno, based on what's going on I'm not sure we can blame just Ballmer. I mean, yeah we can blame him for how fantastically he's destroying Microsoft, but there are multiple reasons for that. People have caught on to Microsoft's previous efforts to monopolize markets, subvert standards bodies, etc, so that doesn't work anymore. That means Microsoft needs to innovate, and Ballmer couldn't innovate himself out of a used car lot.
But.... look at other companies. Nokia. RIM. Kodak. Polaroid. HP. Hell, even modern day darlings like Facebook can't even get past the financial starting line without tripping over it's own feet.
All these formerly massive unshakable conglomerates are collapsing.
I think this goes a very long way to showing just how badly the whole short-term, quarterly-financials, stock-price idolizing MBA crowd have managed to completely fuck up the *entire technology industry*.
Something is wrong here. Really wrong. And I don't have the foggiest idea what to do about it besides make sure I'm near a bed to dive under when everything starts collapsing.
Ironically, I actually really like the new window dressing. It feels like the OS is finally trying to get the hell out of my way, unlike XP through 7 where it for some reason wanted to compete for eyeball attraction. And it's *fast*. IMO they completely ruined a good thing with that stupid Metro crap.
I bought it because it was a version of Windows that was (finally) cheap enough to justify purchasing the full version for. I use it in a Parallels VM on my mac, and so far it performs like greased lightning. The first thing I did, of course, was install a copy of Start8. Gives you access to the metro apps, but otherwise disable Metro and you get your start menu back. There are a couple of freebee tools as well, but I found Start8 to be sufficiently better and polished to justify the 5 bucks.
For the same reason Microsoft is trying to get everyone off IE6. Because it's bloody annoying and as times goes on it costs more and more just to maintain compatibility.
Almost the entire world has moved to metric. Because the US stubbornly refuses to do so, it makes things that much more difficult and error prone for *any and all* interaction with the US. Costs, if not for any other reason, are a primary factor in this. Extra work done for conversion. Extra work done for testing. Massive quantities of money thrown out the window (such as the Lookheed thing) for nothing, just because someone makes a conversion mistake.
It's a ridiculous waste of money, and will continue to be a waste of money, for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
If you plan on centralizing all your data, that will greatly simplify your media management and space. There are tons of perfectly good ways of doing it, from buying a NAS to setting up a dedicated computer using Windows/Linux/BeOS/C64 or whatever. If you don't want to take the time to set up a good linux based solution, then I would actually recommend buying a used mac mini and either replacing the HDD with a bigger one or getting a USB3 (if the mac is new enough to support it) or a firewire external enclosure. You said you have access to an old macbook. That would probably do you perfectly. Depending on which version of OSX is on it, you could even hook it up to your TV and use it as your main media centre because it will have Front Row. (I'm dissappointed Apple got rid of it in later releases... I guess not enough people used it to justify maintaining it?)
BUT.... Getting everything together is still a fair amount of work. Not just setting up the initial system but the time spent having to rip all your media. And if that machine dies, or get stolen in a burglary, your stuff will be gone and (unless you kept all the originals in a storage locker or something) unreplaceable.
It is imperative that you get a backup solution in place, even if it's just an external HD connected via USB to the main unit. Make sure it's a nice big drive. This goes nicely with the Mac solution because Macs come with Time Machine, which is the single best backup solution I've ever seen for a personal system. It will backup your entire system to your chosen external drive, and continue to perform hourly incrementals as long as the machine is turned on, without any effort at all on your part. Better yet, you could have your backup drive in a completely different and protected location of the house and have your data backed up to it over the network.
Best of all, you could then use this setup as the basis for setting up a central encrypted repository for other more critical data like copies of your household finances, photos of everything you own to show the insurance company in case there's a fire, etc etc.
Call me old school, but the whole point of Christmas is to be together with loved ones. The idea that everyone is sitting around the tree in their pajamas, and suddenly whip out their iPhones 'n whatnot to check their email to see what presents they got, just seems.... tacky.
Unless the product in question could *only* be delivered via email, or if you were sending a gift to someone very far away and it's just more realistic to do it that way, then virtual presents just feels wrong. If you don't want to give someone a physical for some reason, then make a donation to a charity in their name or something.
Humans are naturally physical and a huge amount of our interaction with the world revolves around touch. It's already been well established, for example, that people value software far less when it's not delivered in a box than when it is. Not only will people who recieve a virtual gift be virtually guaranteed of cherishing it less, but people will be thinking (subconsciously or consciously) that the giver was somehow cheap, in some vague unidentifiable way.
It's about time all this bullshit has finally started to get sorted out. Apple's stupid patents. Samsung's abuse of patents. Now only 50 billion moar patents to go...
Here's an idea... How about researching what drove him off the deep end? Or how he managed to amass such crazy weapons so easily?
But no, instead we just get another round of political masturbation where Politicians try to make it look like they're doing something without actually doing such.
That is an excellent point, to which I don't think there is an easy answer. Collectively negotiating with the company in question, maybe? Or don't provide functionality that depends on tight coupling with a specific vendor.
Slashdot Mirror
And after all, these kids are a product of their generation!
*rimshot*
I'm sorry, but fuck your personal religious beliefs.
You are a health care worker. Your job is help people stay healthy. If you willfully chose to be a Typhoid Mary, then you are doing the exact opposite of what you had agreed to do and have no business being in health care.
PERIOD.
It's not wrong. Further, your analogy is incorrect. Or at least, I should have been more clear. All the effort that has been made to keep people from doing patently stupid things, has eliminated intelligence from the natural selection equation. To use your analogy, it would be the equivalent of a bird swooping down on a predator, forcing the predators mouth open, and tapdancing on his tongue while shouting, "Hey Mom! Look at me!"
Before, said bird would be dead faster than you could say "Derp!", and any genes that allowed this bizarre behaviour would not carry forward. But now all the other birds see what the dumb bird did, and quickly swoop down and hold the predators mouth open so Derpy could get away. Derpy doesn't die, and now has the chance to pass his genes on, to the detriment of the species as a whole. Or more specifically, it *would* be a detriment if you consider intelligence to be an important characteristic of the species.
Compare to cows. Cows are not bred for intelligence. They're bred for meat and milk. It's pretty safe to say that cows are just plain dumb. There may be smart cows, but it doesn't matter because we don't keep cows for that purpose. Over time, the genes that produce smart cows may stay, or they may vanish outright, purely by chance. But the likelyhood that the smart cows genes will become dominant, is remote because there's no selective pressure to remove the cows that *don't* have those genes.
People are becoming the same way. There is no longer any advantage to being smart, so as a species we are (at best) stuck with a general level of intelligence that will no longer improve. Worst case, overall intelligence of our species will actually decrease. I read somewhere that lower IQ people also tend to breed more than higher IQ people (I can't remember where I read that... Not sure if it's true but it sounds truthy), in which case the problem is exacerbated.
True, I can't think of a more effective solution. Of course, the usual caveats (complaints of invasion of privacy, abuse by corrupt authorities) apply to such a solution, which means it'll never happen. :P
"Maybe we could just outlaw alcohol again and take care of the whole problem all at once"
Sure! Because it worked so well the first time, right?
And you'll never stop drinking because, lets face it most people *like* to drink. Drinking alcohol is buried so deeply entwined in the fabric of almost all cultures of the world, and people arn't going to just up and stop. The only realistic option is to somehow manage the risk. IMO, the penalties for repeat offences are way too low. I can understand it happening the first time because someone may not realize that that they are in fact that intoxicated. But that excuse vanishes after that. By the time someone has offended 3 or so times, they should be outright banned from driving, or even owning a vehicle.
Just because the first time or two is 'victimless', that doesn't mean the next one will be. It becomes a game of russian roulette and it's not reasonable to simply hope that the next drunk driver you come across won't splatter you across the highway.
WRT cell phones, more and more places are making it illegal to talk on a cell or to text while driving. Some ban it outright, some permit it as long as you use a handsfree kit. Cell phones are pretty new, and lawmakers can move excruciatingly slowly. I fully expect to see similar laws eventually being applied to other forms of distraction as well.
Quite simple, really. Natural selection stopped when we started slapping warning labels on everything and banning products that had even the most infinitesimal change of hurting kids. (Lawn darts, kinder eggs, etc)
So all the people that rightfully should have killed themselves off while still young, grow up, and the results speak for themselves.
I am someone who doesn't have to pretend to be a Canadian when traveling to other part of the world, for their own safety, because Americans are almost universally reviled as ignorant, self-absorbed psychos.
Well, slashdot IS a US-centric site, and the story is about an American issue, and I am not American, so it works, no?
It's funny... Americans have been bending over and giving up their rights, right, left and center. They've given up incredibly important rights, so that it is now legal for the US gov't to seize your property and throw you in Guantanamo for years without so much as a boo.
But guns? Yeah, Dat gubmint'll take mah guns from mah cold dead hands!
Americans have allowed your country to become a fascist state, controlled by corporations and politicians so corrupt they don't even try to hide it anymore. American is now on the verge of bankruptcy. And you suck it all up as being reasonable and even *defend* the bastards that are screwing you over.
You people don't DESERVE your second amendment.
Why not? Youtube is just a web service. All microsoft has to do is set up their own. They created their own search service (bing), so I fail to see what is stopping them from making their own version of youtube.
Others have been able to do the same and be successful at it, such as Vimeo.
And your analogy doesn't even come close to matching, because Google does no such thing. There is nothing preventing me from installing alternate players on my Android phone.
For a Microsoft shill, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Your post was modded funny, but I think it should have been modded insightful. There are more than a handful of former Microsoft Partners who have been completely screwed over by Microsoft.
To me, the question is, do you treat others as wickedly as you treat the original wicked person. If you're teaching the original wicked person a lesson, then turning around and treating everyone else fairly, I have difficulty arguing against it. If you treat everyone as badly, then that's just perpetuating the same wickedness and (IMO) you're even worse than the original.
Right, because Windows 8's new UI is so wonderful and revolutionary that people are trampling themselves trying to buy new devices that use it.
Oh wait...
The UI *is* important. In fact, it's *critically* important, because that is the face of the device you interact with. So much of new technology is different only for the sake of being different, and provide absolutely nothing of value that technology of yesteryear didn't already have.
The iPad practically invented an entire new market segment, despite the entire PC industry trying to do so for decades. Why? Because they made a UI that was both attractive AND intuitive to use.
No UI will perfectly suit everyone. It needs to compliment both the device and the users intended use of said device. Microsoft is discovering that the hard way with their idiotic push to Metro.
There will always be vociferous arguments about UI, because UI is so important that it can make or break a product.
That being said, a lot of the current UI problems are because developers are look at tablets, seeing that people really like the simplified interfaces, and decide that they should do the same thing on PCs, despite the fact that the use cases for the devices are very much different. So now, and unsurprisingly, people are starting to clamor for the UIs of old, when you could still do stuff without the UI trying it's best to hobble you. Hence mass abandonment of Gnome, and articles such as this talking about old and fugly, but otherwise useful, window manager skins.
They clearly don't want to be in business anymore, and who are we to stop them? I wish them the greatest success in their... um... endeavours.
I dunno, based on what's going on I'm not sure we can blame just Ballmer. I mean, yeah we can blame him for how fantastically he's destroying Microsoft, but there are multiple reasons for that. People have caught on to Microsoft's previous efforts to monopolize markets, subvert standards bodies, etc, so that doesn't work anymore. That means Microsoft needs to innovate, and Ballmer couldn't innovate himself out of a used car lot.
But.... look at other companies. Nokia. RIM. Kodak. Polaroid. HP. Hell, even modern day darlings like Facebook can't even get past the financial starting line without tripping over it's own feet.
All these formerly massive unshakable conglomerates are collapsing.
I think this goes a very long way to showing just how badly the whole short-term, quarterly-financials, stock-price idolizing MBA crowd have managed to completely fuck up the *entire technology industry*.
Something is wrong here. Really wrong. And I don't have the foggiest idea what to do about it besides make sure I'm near a bed to dive under when everything starts collapsing.
You mean, apart from the software that is *only* sold on the app store?
Ironically, I actually really like the new window dressing. It feels like the OS is finally trying to get the hell out of my way, unlike XP through 7 where it for some reason wanted to compete for eyeball attraction. And it's *fast*. IMO they completely ruined a good thing with that stupid Metro crap.
I bought it because it was a version of Windows that was (finally) cheap enough to justify purchasing the full version for. I use it in a Parallels VM on my mac, and so far it performs like greased lightning. The first thing I did, of course, was install a copy of Start8. Gives you access to the metro apps, but otherwise disable Metro and you get your start menu back. There are a couple of freebee tools as well, but I found Start8 to be sufficiently better and polished to justify the 5 bucks.
Ilsa
For the same reason Microsoft is trying to get everyone off IE6. Because it's bloody annoying and as times goes on it costs more and more just to maintain compatibility.
Almost the entire world has moved to metric. Because the US stubbornly refuses to do so, it makes things that much more difficult and error prone for *any and all* interaction with the US. Costs, if not for any other reason, are a primary factor in this. Extra work done for conversion. Extra work done for testing. Massive quantities of money thrown out the window (such as the Lookheed thing) for nothing, just because someone makes a conversion mistake.
It's a ridiculous waste of money, and will continue to be a waste of money, for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
If you plan on centralizing all your data, that will greatly simplify your media management and space. There are tons of perfectly good ways of doing it, from buying a NAS to setting up a dedicated computer using Windows/Linux/BeOS/C64 or whatever. If you don't want to take the time to set up a good linux based solution, then I would actually recommend buying a used mac mini and either replacing the HDD with a bigger one or getting a USB3 (if the mac is new enough to support it) or a firewire external enclosure. You said you have access to an old macbook. That would probably do you perfectly. Depending on which version of OSX is on it, you could even hook it up to your TV and use it as your main media centre because it will have Front Row. (I'm dissappointed Apple got rid of it in later releases... I guess not enough people used it to justify maintaining it?)
BUT.... Getting everything together is still a fair amount of work. Not just setting up the initial system but the time spent having to rip all your media. And if that machine dies, or get stolen in a burglary, your stuff will be gone and (unless you kept all the originals in a storage locker or something) unreplaceable.
It is imperative that you get a backup solution in place, even if it's just an external HD connected via USB to the main unit. Make sure it's a nice big drive. This goes nicely with the Mac solution because Macs come with Time Machine, which is the single best backup solution I've ever seen for a personal system. It will backup your entire system to your chosen external drive, and continue to perform hourly incrementals as long as the machine is turned on, without any effort at all on your part. Better yet, you could have your backup drive in a completely different and protected location of the house and have your data backed up to it over the network.
Best of all, you could then use this setup as the basis for setting up a central encrypted repository for other more critical data like copies of your household finances, photos of everything you own to show the insurance company in case there's a fire, etc etc.
Call me old school, but the whole point of Christmas is to be together with loved ones. The idea that everyone is sitting around the tree in their pajamas, and suddenly whip out their iPhones 'n whatnot to check their email to see what presents they got, just seems.... tacky.
Unless the product in question could *only* be delivered via email, or if you were sending a gift to someone very far away and it's just more realistic to do it that way, then virtual presents just feels wrong. If you don't want to give someone a physical for some reason, then make a donation to a charity in their name or something.
Humans are naturally physical and a huge amount of our interaction with the world revolves around touch. It's already been well established, for example, that people value software far less when it's not delivered in a box than when it is. Not only will people who recieve a virtual gift be virtually guaranteed of cherishing it less, but people will be thinking (subconsciously or consciously) that the giver was somehow cheap, in some vague unidentifiable way.
It's about time all this bullshit has finally started to get sorted out. Apple's stupid patents. Samsung's abuse of patents. Now only 50 billion moar patents to go...
I feel compelled to point out that Boston went into lockdown because of Aqua Teen Hunger Force litebrite sets.
I certainly won't be the first one to try out a 3d printed dil.... condom demonstrator. Can use say 'chafe'?
It's like watching a broken record player.
Here's an idea... How about researching what drove him off the deep end? Or how he managed to amass such crazy weapons so easily?
But no, instead we just get another round of political masturbation where Politicians try to make it look like they're doing something without actually doing such.
*facepalm*
That is an excellent point, to which I don't think there is an easy answer. Collectively negotiating with the company in question, maybe? Or don't provide functionality that depends on tight coupling with a specific vendor.