That would work. I find the following method to work well when I know exactly what I want and want the salesdroid to understand that his blathering will be unable to change my wishes;
You: "I would like to cancel my AOL account."
Usual Response: "You really should reconsider blah blah"
Wait a few seconds.
You: "May I ask a question?"
Usual response: "Sure, go ahead."
You: "Are you able to understand plain english?"
Response: some variation on yes.
You: "Is any part of 'I want to cancel my account' giving you troubles ?
[free](*) Matter of fact, the commonly-accepted modern use of the term by businesses and manufacturers is misleading in my opinion, because it's not "free" from obligation.
Not just your opinion. In jurisdictions with stricter truth in advertising laws the US use is outlawed.
In Norway, for example, it has been established that "free" and "gratis" are actual wordws with actual meaning, meaning being "without compensation" compensation is not limited to cash.
So offers of type: "Sign up to X services and get an Ipod for free" are considered untruthful advertising. If you have to compensate the company in some way for getting the ipod, then obviously it's *not* free.
Same goes for "Buy 5 cans of spam and get a 6th one for free".
Obviosly you can do that, you only need to do it truthfully: the 6th can isn't "free". You could for example say: "Pay for 5 boxes of spam and get 6." or "sign up for X services and get an ipod."
In the US "free" in advertising almost *never* actually means free.
I don't get that either. It's like some people consider it almost a crime to not be reachable by all people, at all times.
Sorry, you have no rigth to contact anyone at any time unless the recipient wants you to. If I on my own determines that dealing with email from china wastes more time than it gains in entertainment/opportunities/whatever-i-value then that's my desition.
I get the same with cellphones. For a long time I didn't have one, people moaned and bitched that I wasn't "accessible". Then I got one -- for the express purpose of being able to phone for assistance if my old car broke down. People moaned and bitched that I never turned it on. Why would I ? The cellphone was never there for the purpose of making me contactable.
Who the hell ever decided that everyone has a duty to be contactable by anyone at all times ?
Evolution has made it so that they can detect cheating mates better.
That makes no sense. Why would it be more evolutionary important for a woman to detect a cheating mate than the other way around ? Infact the oposite can be very easily argued:
A woman *knows* she is the mother of her child. There is no (or ignorably low) risk of spending time, energy and resources into bringing up someone elses child. This is for males a very real risk, one which it would be evolutionary advantageous to avoid.
A woman needs 2 different things from men for her child to have the best chanses. First she needs sperm with the best possible genes. Secondly she needs help, resources and support in bringing up the child. Notice that there's no reason these two needs to come from the same man.
Infact it'd probably be beneficial to be able to select the two separately. The genes should come from the strong, physically able, intelligent man. And the support/resources should come from the well-off man. (this may, or may not, be the same person offcourse!)
Summary: If a female cheats the (evolutionary!) disadvantages for the male partner is disastrous: he'll spend a lot of energy, time and resources improving the odds of a child that does not carry any of his genes.
If a male cheats, the evolutionary disadvantages for the female partner are small. If she doesn't even discover it, it means the male is still fulfilling his role as a parent of her children, so the negative impact on the chanse of her children is close to zero.
describe a scheme that will work and allow all people involved to be making the same amount of money they're making now (not an unreasonable stipulation, I think).
Yes, it is *very* unreasonable. New technologies sometimes makes old services or technologies obsolete. This frequently leads to people who used to make money providing those services or technologies to loose money.
Claiming that it's "reasonable" that "all people involved" in the old bussiness of printing and distributing books should earn as much as they did before in the new technology of electronically distributing books is just as reasonable as demanding that the ice-man should keep his pay after the invention of the refridgerator, or that the buggy and whip manufacturers should have the right to hold back the progress of the automobile.
Some jobs remain. Digital books still need one or more authors, good editors, artwork, marketing, and (minimal) distribution. They don't need printing-presses, paper, ink, trucks to drag them around, large shelves for standing on and so on. Those services and technologies are simply, as far as ebooks are concerned, obsolete.
You don't find many monks earning a living by hand-writing bibles these days. Thats a result of the (according to you) "unreasonable" idea that some jobs become obsolete when new technologies solve the same problem simpler/cheaper/better.
By definition, the north polar ice cap is displacing exactly its own mass in water. If it were to melt, the displaced water would take exactly the same amount of volume as the submerged ice. This would cause the world's ocean levels to rise by the exact amount of zero plus the volume of several dozen annoyed polar bears.
Actually no. The polar-bears are already either walking on top of the ice, or swimming in the water, in both cases they're already displacing exactly their weight of water, so the addition of polar-bears make no difference to the sealevel.
So the sealevel would rise by zero. Not zero plus X polar-bears.
Unless, offcourse, some of the ice that's melting is actually lying on land, and not floating in the sea. This is very likely the case, afterall even in the Arctic there's places like Greenland and the Antarctic is pretty much all on land.
The problem isn't with the tools. The problem is when people start using the tool automatically and stop thinking.
Half the time if you buy two gadgets at $11 each from some random vendor on a used-gadgets-market the vendor will reach for his calculator to calculate the grand total of $22.
Some of the time they'll even look at you in an amazed kind of way if you tell them it's $22. Then they'll punch it into the calculator anyway and be doubly amayed when they discover that is it, infact, $22.
Here's a hint: They're called 120W for a reason, reason being that their normal power. If they are powered from 15V, this means they'll draw around 8A, not 14A.
There are *noone* sitting in the "seat" infront of 99% of Googles machines. That's the point you're missing.
Way to expensive for what you get.
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Offering a 33% discount is a joke considering that:
The E-book expires after 5 months.
The E-book cannnot be bougth used or resold.
The E-book is only usable on a single computer.
The E-book saves printing shipping and handling for the physical book.
Given those restrictions, there's still books I'd consider buying as E-books, those I'm fairly sure I'll read once and forget about. But even then I'd have to get a *lot* more than 33% discount, that's a total joke. It means the e-book is still a lot more expensive than buying a used book, or buying a new book and selling it when you're bored of it.
If "collecting these items" is "tedious" for "many", why then do you insist on collecting them ?
Better yet: If the stuff you currently have to do to obtain the items is "tedious", to most players, why is that in the game then, instead of something *fun* ?
If a game requires you to do a macro-like job repeatedly for a long-long time, then that's not a very good game-design, is it ?
It's not that hard. The cards are not stacked against you.
In the contrary, storage falls in price quicker than most peoples storage-needs grow. 4GB today is a trivial amount of data, and it'll be even more so in the future.
I am lucky enough to have 2 computers in the house. The weekly backup is as simple as clicking one button and wait for rsync to complete. About once a month I plug in a usb-harddisk and make a copy of everything i care for on there. This disk is normally stored in my parents house a few km from where I live.
Total effort: weekly clicking of a single button. monthly attach-click-wait-detach.
On the other hand I'm really not sure what I can sensibly do to protect my negatives from becoming unusable, destroyed or lost, other than to scan them and preserve them digitally that is.
In my case, the files first og on my computer. There they're indexed with Kimdaba, including a flag for if they're "printworthy" or not.
Irregularily (basically whenever I feel like it) I'll order prints of the ones that are worthwhile. For me that's maybe 1/3rd of the pictures.
I don't see how this is very much different from earlier. I don't have the hassle of film and development, and I know I can still order perfect copies from perfect digital file 50 years from now (assuming I'm still alive).
I can also with no effort at all send pictures to grandmothers, uncles, friends or whomever a process that used to take literally weeks or months and cost effort, time and money.
apples to oranges. Blowing up a 3MP digital snapshot to 6ft you'll certainly notice it just doesn't have enough resolution to make that look good. (not if intended to be viewed up close anyway)
But the thing is, neither does a 35mm film camera.
A professional SLR-digital camera has 10-20 megapixels these days, and optics equally good as those on a film-SLR.
Yes there'll be people using film 10 or 20 years from now, like there's people using vinyl.
It won't be because the film is *better* in any measurable way though, just as a vinyl cannot compete with even a CD in practicality and fidelity.
Yes, people pay others to mow lawns and wash cars even though they could do so themselves.
But there's an important difference: Those are *tedious* tasks. Online gaming is supposed to be a *fun* task.
Why play an online game at all if it's tedious ? If a task is perceived as tedious by a large portion of the players, then why put that task into the game at all ?
No. You miss the point. What is the substantial differnce between these two sentences:
Yes, it is obvious that a week split into days. Days are natural units.
What's *not* obvious is that it makes sense to combine precisely *7* days into the next-larger unit. And then we pack something like 4.3 of these units ("weeks") into the next larger unit.
7 days in a week is equally arbitrary as 24 hours in a day. And according to one argument you hear in favour of 12-24-60 (ease of division) 7 is a distinctly bad choise. As are 31.
Okay, so there's 12 inces in a foot. But how many feet are there in a mile then? Or the other way, what's the next smaller step than an inch ? Generally half, quarter and so on are used, which means it's base 2 and so for example 1/12 inch is *not* easily expressed.
The US system means like 3 different measures for length, none of which related in a straigthforward way, and none of which are related to other measures like volume in any sensible way whatsoever. (quick now how many gallons is 1 cubic foot ?)
Or to put it short: The US "system" is no system at all but rather a historical accident.
You're confusing "life" with "intelligence" or some other human trait.
Asking at which point something becomes self-aware is a very different question from asking when something is alive.
Bacteria, fish, spiders, algae and 3 day old embryos are all alive, allthough none of them are self-aware. (not likely anyway)
We award special protections to humans. But rarely are we forced to explain exactly why. What is the criteria a being must fulfill to obtain this special protection ?
Some say merely having a metabolism and human DNA is enough. In this case embryos qualify, and things like letting braindead humans die is murder.
Others say only humans with a brain functioning to the point where they're self-aware qualify. By that definition embryos don't qualify. A minor problem is that newborns probably also does not qualify. (there's no test a new-born human can pass that say a pig cannot.) Human babies surpass livestock in intelligence somewhere between 6 months and 3 years (depending on who you believe)
Makes no sense. If there's no need to split a week in say 2, why is there then a obvious and important need to split a day in two ?
The issue isn't if there's a smaller unit you can just use multiplies of, sure there is, in both cases. Instead of 1/7 week you just say day. And instead of 1/12 day you say hour, so what ?
Point is, there/isn't/ a half week, not as an integer number of days anyway. Nor 1/3 or 1/4 or any other fraction of a week (since 7 is prime).
On the other hand we're repeatedly told that the fact that 12,24 and 60 are easily dividible is a large advantage for their use in timekeeping. There *is* a simple half-hour, 1/4 hour, 1/5 and 1/6 hour. We're told this is an advantage, but at the same time the fact that the 31day month and the 7day week doesn't have any of these is *not* a disadvantage.
I say it is. A month with an *integer* number of weeks in it would have obvious benefits.
Yeah, sure, there's a lot of things in nature that take a more-or-less fixed amount of time.
I was more thinking of *current* cycles that any usable time-system would need to adapt to though, not so much historical.
The Moon *has* a more-or-less steady cycle, but I would argue that to modern man it is not very important, if you ask a random person what moonface is today, or when next fullmoon is, they're unlikely to even know.
Same goes for the other examples you give.
As for 24 and 60 being easily dividible in a lot of ways (60 can be divided in 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30 parts) this is true, but I am fairly sure the simple frmer with no knowledge of fractions wanting to divide his 12 hours of light evenly between 3 fields wouldn't have a watch anyway. If he was very lucky his village could have a big clock I guess. He'd be more likely to go by the movement of the sun than anything else.
That's not *so* ancient. In Norway (where I come from) there's lots of mountains with names like "dinner-mountain", named so because as viewed from some nearby village, it'd be dinnertime when the sun was directly above it.
Also, if the thing with divisibility was so important, that'd be a bloody good argument against weeks with 7 days and months with 31 days.
Time is arbitrary. There's really just two time-periods that are "naturals", and even those are arbitrary in the sense that if we lived on a different planet they'd be different.
One is a day. The other is a Year. It's logical to have some unit of time be equal to the time between one mid-day and the next mid-day. Same goes for the distance from one mid-summer to the next mid-summer.
I'm aware that both of these "natural constants" aren't really constant, but rather change over time as the rotation of the earth and earths distance to the sun is changes. But they're close to constant with the sort of precision that matters to everyday people doing everyday things.
All the rest is arbitrary. There's no reason a year is divided in exactly 12 months, or that there's 7 days in a week, or that there's 24 hours in a day or 60 minutes in an hour.
or be like certain Octavias where a software-upgrade increased mileage at subzero temperatures from something like 30 mpg up to almost 40, a very worthwhile fix if you happen to live somewhere cold.
Slashdot Mirror
You: "I would like to cancel my AOL account."
Usual Response: "You really should reconsider blah blah"
Wait a few seconds.
You: "May I ask a question?"
Usual response: "Sure, go ahead."
You: "Are you able to understand plain english?"
Response: some variation on yes.
You: "Is any part of 'I want to cancel my account' giving you troubles ?
Not just your opinion. In jurisdictions with stricter truth in advertising laws the US use is outlawed.
In Norway, for example, it has been established that "free" and "gratis" are actual wordws with actual meaning, meaning being "without compensation" compensation is not limited to cash.
So offers of type: "Sign up to X services and get an Ipod for free" are considered untruthful advertising. If you have to compensate the company in some way for getting the ipod, then obviously it's *not* free.
Same goes for "Buy 5 cans of spam and get a 6th one for free".
Obviosly you can do that, you only need to do it truthfully: the 6th can isn't "free". You could for example say: "Pay for 5 boxes of spam and get 6." or "sign up for X services and get an ipod."
In the US "free" in advertising almost *never* actually means free.
Sorry, you have no rigth to contact anyone at any time unless the recipient wants you to. If I on my own determines that dealing with email from china wastes more time than it gains in entertainment/opportunities/whatever-i-value then that's my desition.
I get the same with cellphones. For a long time I didn't have one, people moaned and bitched that I wasn't "accessible". Then I got one -- for the express purpose of being able to phone for assistance if my old car broke down. People moaned and bitched that I never turned it on. Why would I ? The cellphone was never there for the purpose of making me contactable.
Who the hell ever decided that everyone has a duty to be contactable by anyone at all times ?
That makes no sense. Why would it be more evolutionary important for a woman to detect a cheating mate than the other way around ? Infact the oposite can be very easily argued:
A woman *knows* she is the mother of her child. There is no (or ignorably low) risk of spending time, energy and resources into bringing up someone elses child. This is for males a very real risk, one which it would be evolutionary advantageous to avoid.
A woman needs 2 different things from men for her child to have the best chanses. First she needs sperm with the best possible genes. Secondly she needs help, resources and support in bringing up the child. Notice that there's no reason these two needs to come from the same man.
Infact it'd probably be beneficial to be able to select the two separately. The genes should come from the strong, physically able, intelligent man. And the support/resources should come from the well-off man. (this may, or may not, be the same person offcourse!)
Summary: If a female cheats the (evolutionary!) disadvantages for the male partner is disastrous: he'll spend a lot of energy, time and resources improving the odds of a child that does not carry any of his genes.
If a male cheats, the evolutionary disadvantages for the female partner are small. If she doesn't even discover it, it means the male is still fulfilling his role as a parent of her children, so the negative impact on the chanse of her children is close to zero.
Are you saying anyone who ever took part in a boxing-match can be sued for assault in the UK ?
Yes, it is *very* unreasonable. New technologies sometimes makes old services or technologies obsolete. This frequently leads to people who used to make money providing those services or technologies to loose money.
Claiming that it's "reasonable" that "all people involved" in the old bussiness of printing and distributing books should earn as much as they did before in the new technology of electronically distributing books is just as reasonable as demanding that the ice-man should keep his pay after the invention of the refridgerator, or that the buggy and whip manufacturers should have the right to hold back the progress of the automobile.
Some jobs remain. Digital books still need one or more authors, good editors, artwork, marketing, and (minimal) distribution. They don't need printing-presses, paper, ink, trucks to drag them around, large shelves for standing on and so on. Those services and technologies are simply, as far as ebooks are concerned, obsolete.
You don't find many monks earning a living by hand-writing bibles these days. Thats a result of the (according to you) "unreasonable" idea that some jobs become obsolete when new technologies solve the same problem simpler/cheaper/better.
Actually no. The polar-bears are already either walking on top of the ice, or swimming in the water, in both cases they're already displacing exactly their weight of water, so the addition of polar-bears make no difference to the sealevel.
So the sealevel would rise by zero. Not zero plus X polar-bears.
Unless, offcourse, some of the ice that's melting is actually lying on land, and not floating in the sea. This is very likely the case, afterall even in the Arctic there's places like Greenland and the Antarctic is pretty much all on land.
Half the time if you buy two gadgets at $11 each from some random vendor on a used-gadgets-market the vendor will reach for his calculator to calculate the grand total of $22.
Some of the time they'll even look at you in an amazed kind of way if you tell them it's $22. Then they'll punch it into the calculator anyway and be doubly amayed when they discover that is it, infact, $22.
Here's a hint: They're called 120W for a reason, reason being that their normal power. If they are powered from 15V, this means they'll draw around 8A, not 14A.
Or if it offers dream or hopes of escaping pority. Lotteries sell more to the poor than the rich.
There are *noone* sitting in the "seat" infront of 99% of Googles machines. That's the point you're missing.
Given those restrictions, there's still books I'd consider buying as E-books, those I'm fairly sure I'll read once and forget about. But even then I'd have to get a *lot* more than 33% discount, that's a total joke. It means the e-book is still a lot more expensive than buying a used book, or buying a new book and selling it when you're bored of it.
If "collecting these items" is "tedious" for "many", why then do you insist on collecting them ?
Better yet: If the stuff you currently have to do to obtain the items is "tedious", to most players, why is that in the game then, instead of something *fun* ?
If a game requires you to do a macro-like job repeatedly for a long-long time, then that's not a very good game-design, is it ?
In the contrary, storage falls in price quicker than most peoples storage-needs grow. 4GB today is a trivial amount of data, and it'll be even more so in the future.
I am lucky enough to have 2 computers in the house. The weekly backup is as simple as clicking one button and wait for rsync to complete. About once a month I plug in a usb-harddisk and make a copy of everything i care for on there. This disk is normally stored in my parents house a few km from where I live.
Total effort: weekly clicking of a single button. monthly attach-click-wait-detach.
On the other hand I'm really not sure what I can sensibly do to protect my negatives from becoming unusable, destroyed or lost, other than to scan them and preserve them digitally that is.
Irregularily (basically whenever I feel like it) I'll order prints of the ones that are worthwhile. For me that's maybe 1/3rd of the pictures.
I don't see how this is very much different from earlier. I don't have the hassle of film and development, and I know I can still order perfect copies from perfect digital file 50 years from now (assuming I'm still alive).
I can also with no effort at all send pictures to grandmothers, uncles, friends or whomever a process that used to take literally weeks or months and cost effort, time and money.
But the thing is, neither does a 35mm film camera.
A professional SLR-digital camera has 10-20 megapixels these days, and optics equally good as those on a film-SLR.
Yes there'll be people using film 10 or 20 years from now, like there's people using vinyl.
It won't be because the film is *better* in any measurable way though, just as a vinyl cannot compete with even a CD in practicality and fidelity.
But there's an important difference: Those are *tedious* tasks. Online gaming is supposed to be a *fun* task.
Why play an online game at all if it's tedious ? If a task is perceived as tedious by a large portion of the players, then why put that task into the game at all ?
Yes, it is obvious that a week split into days. Days are natural units.
What's *not* obvious is that it makes sense to combine precisely *7* days into the next-larger unit. And then we pack something like 4.3 of these units ("weeks") into the next larger unit.
7 days in a week is equally arbitrary as 24 hours in a day. And according to one argument you hear in favour of 12-24-60 (ease of division) 7 is a distinctly bad choise. As are 31.
Mathemathically it's arbitrary ofcourse, non-optimal I don't know, atleast there's no large advantages with any base.
Okay, so there's 12 inces in a foot. But how many feet are there in a mile then? Or the other way, what's the next smaller step than an inch ? Generally half, quarter and so on are used, which means it's base 2 and so for example 1/12 inch is *not* easily expressed.
The US system means like 3 different measures for length, none of which related in a straigthforward way, and none of which are related to other measures like volume in any sensible way whatsoever. (quick now how many gallons is 1 cubic foot ?)
Or to put it short: The US "system" is no system at all but rather a historical accident.
Asking at which point something becomes self-aware is a very different question from asking when something is alive.
Bacteria, fish, spiders, algae and 3 day old embryos are all alive, allthough none of them are self-aware. (not likely anyway)
We award special protections to humans. But rarely are we forced to explain exactly why. What is the criteria a being must fulfill to obtain this special protection ?
Some say merely having a metabolism and human DNA is enough. In this case embryos qualify, and things like letting braindead humans die is murder.
Others say only humans with a brain functioning to the point where they're self-aware qualify. By that definition embryos don't qualify. A minor problem is that newborns probably also does not qualify. (there's no test a new-born human can pass that say a pig cannot.) Human babies surpass livestock in intelligence somewhere between 6 months and 3 years (depending on who you believe)
So what exactly is the criteria ?
The issue isn't if there's a smaller unit you can just use multiplies of, sure there is, in both cases. Instead of 1/7 week you just say day. And instead of 1/12 day you say hour, so what ?
Point is, there /isn't/ a half week, not as an integer number of days anyway. Nor 1/3 or 1/4 or any other fraction of a week (since 7 is prime).
On the other hand we're repeatedly told that the fact that 12,24 and 60 are easily dividible is a large advantage for their use in timekeeping. There *is* a simple half-hour, 1/4 hour, 1/5 and 1/6 hour. We're told this is an advantage, but at the same time the fact that the 31day month and the 7day week doesn't have any of these is *not* a disadvantage.
I say it is. A month with an *integer* number of weeks in it would have obvious benefits.
I was more thinking of *current* cycles that any usable time-system would need to adapt to though, not so much historical.
The Moon *has* a more-or-less steady cycle, but I would argue that to modern man it is not very important, if you ask a random person what moonface is today, or when next fullmoon is, they're unlikely to even know.
Same goes for the other examples you give.
As for 24 and 60 being easily dividible in a lot of ways (60 can be divided in 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30 parts) this is true, but I am fairly sure the simple frmer with no knowledge of fractions wanting to divide his 12 hours of light evenly between 3 fields wouldn't have a watch anyway. If he was very lucky his village could have a big clock I guess. He'd be more likely to go by the movement of the sun than anything else.
That's not *so* ancient. In Norway (where I come from) there's lots of mountains with names like "dinner-mountain", named so because as viewed from some nearby village, it'd be dinnertime when the sun was directly above it.
Also, if the thing with divisibility was so important, that'd be a bloody good argument against weeks with 7 days and months with 31 days.
One is a day. The other is a Year. It's logical to have some unit of time be equal to the time between one mid-day and the next mid-day. Same goes for the distance from one mid-summer to the next mid-summer.
I'm aware that both of these "natural constants" aren't really constant, but rather change over time as the rotation of the earth and earths distance to the sun is changes. But they're close to constant with the sort of precision that matters to everyday people doing everyday things.
All the rest is arbitrary. There's no reason a year is divided in exactly 12 months, or that there's 7 days in a week, or that there's 24 hours in a day or 60 minutes in an hour.
or be like certain Octavias where a software-upgrade increased mileage at subzero temperatures from something like 30 mpg up to almost 40, a very worthwhile fix if you happen to live somewhere cold.