One thing I've noticed is that adults are less likely to call other adults out on profanity around children. I remember as a kid going to baseball games it was pretty unusual for someone to swear and not be called out on it. The swearing happened, as a kid I was aware of it, but I also saw the adults around me taking the time to ask the person to mind their language.
Maybe I'm just old and cranky, but that kind of thing doesn't happen as much anymore. Adults are either a lot more tolerant or much more timid in engaging the lewd individual and asking them to stop. I miss that.
I'd hate to be going to the school that gets open source Android tablets instead of an iPad. Can you imagine how much you would get picked on. Android is like the K-Mart of tablets.
If by that you mean that it is capable of doing all of the same things at half the price but without the iBrand, then I would be happy to shop at K-Mart. That's actually where I do shop for office supplies and low end household electrics. The products work just fine at a fraction of the price.
I would be happy to send my kid to school with an Android tablet. At least then he might get a chance to learn something about how to make his software running on his device do what he wants it to do. That's better than having Apple tell kids what apps are suited for their iEducation.
The readers are already wicked cheap. And for the existing libraries of free books they are wonderful. What fails is the content delivery system, where the cost of new e-books is not significantly less than the cost of new paper books. $140 for a Kindle is what I consider to be dirt cheap. Even cheaper readers are on the horizon. But I'm not going to do that if I have to pay $6.99 for a e-book when I could just buy the paperback for $7.99.
The tech is there. The content delivery model is not quite ready yet.
I did find it humorous how many derided the retailer at being at fault for selling the game. With users like this what hope is there for the old model.
But the problem is with the retailers. Specifically that the retailers are not being held accountable for selling software which requires license agreements that you are not made aware of at the time of purchase. If I buy a game and am later confronted with draconian DRM measures that I am not comfortable agreeing to, then my recourse is to take that game right back to the retailer and get my money back.
If people start holding them accountable for selling crap like this, they will be putting pressure back on the publishers to stop putting that junk into their games. As a proud American it pains me to say this, but the Europeans have the right idea on that one.
At the end of the day after I pay private institutions for my education, health care, housing, and other taxable services I end up with a lot less than 25% of what I take in. I'm not saying that Government is the most efficient organization to be managing all of those things, but at some level I don't really care where the money goes so long as I get the services.
I'm not going to say that you are wrong, but the term "rich" also implies the possession of accumulated wealth.
For example if someone just took a promotion and is now making 201k with little accumulated wealth, I could see the argument that they are not "upper class". I don't know if I would call them rich based on that income alone, but I think they should definitely be able to handle that tax burden. If at that income level they aren't already rich, they will be soon enough.
I hope there's an intelligence test you have to pass before being allowed guns in America, as you'd obviously fail it spectacularly and not be allowed access to tools which are extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.
Intelligence =! Responsibility.
Or perhaps it does, and we should limit privileges and freedoms only to those "qualified" to possess them. Maybe we should impose Intelligence tests for voters as well. Or set up separate court systems to handle cases involving the unintelligent. Limiting full citizenship to people that demonstrate competency is attractive for a number of reasons. I am sure that they make sense for some societies. However, this is not how people do things in the United States of America. Every citizen is a full citizen and is equal under the law.
This is the second contradictory response I have posted to you today, so I want to apologize for sounding unnecessarily contrary. I am sure that if we met face to face we could have a polite and meaningful discussion. So please believe me that I say the following in as polite a voice as I can:
You do not belong in America.
Limited rights and enfranchisement is a decidedly un-American thing. We are a nation that would rather extend these rights and freedoms to illegals than risk preventing citizens from exercising them. We literally fought a war to break ourselves free from an Empire that did this.
Up in Maine open carry is allowed in most areas, and concealed carry (by permit) is allowed most everywhere else. The permit is fairly easy to obtain after a very sensible State regulated safety course. AFAIK the only place in Maine where concealed carry is legally prohibited is inside the State House (property owners of course have the right to ban it on their property as well).
Most police are familiar with the laws regarding open carry but discourage it. I suppose I can understand their motivation for not wanting everyone walking around with a gun on their hip. I remember an instance where a friend of mine was open carrying inside a Wal-Mart, a couple of tourists up from Massachusetts saw the gun and called the police. My friend was totally within his rights to carry into the store, but I think the police also had some justification for asking him why the hell he was carrying a gun with him into Wal-Mart. I suppose it pays to be informed about the law.
I have since moved to Boston. Birthplace of the revolution, where open carry is verboten, concealed carry is limited to LEO's, and even owning a firearm means putting the gun and yourself on a registry.
This is a valid comment only in a war zone or following the breakdown of civilization.
Or a mugging. Or a home invasion.
We shouldn't be worried about some buff guy bullying his way through a business meeting or shoving his way ahead of me in line at Starbucks. You are right that in normal life people won't "do what they will". There are rules and social norms that prevent such behaviors.
But without a reasonable means of protection weaker individuals are at the mercy of malicious stronger individuals. And without that means of protection those malicious stronger individuals have the unilateral ability to create a conflict situation. In self defense terms this is what is called a force disparity. Guns could be thought of as a force equalizer. They give everyone the same level of power and the same ability to project that power.
Other tools exist to do the same (i.e. spray, defense training, etc) but nothing levels the playing field like firearms. Do you really expect Police to be able to protect you in a conflict situation? Supposing you would even be able to get on your phone to call them, how long do you suppose it would take them to respond? I would encourage you to look into the typical response times for emergency services in your area. I don't know what they are exactly, but I would wager their response time is greater than the time it would take someone to stick a knife in you.
If I really want to kill someone and simply don't care about getting caught, there's not a lot they can do about it anyway.
In the most cordial and respectful way that I can, I have to disagree. The right to self defense is something that most (all?) societies recognize. Whether or not you are likely to prevent them from killing you, you have the right to use any means at your disposal to protect yourself.
I don't understand how paid commercial ads could ever be "useful" to those exposed to them. Thankfully there are things like Adblock Plus.
One could make the argument that accurately targeted ads do benefit the user. They make me aware of products I might be interested in that I was not previously aware of.
The big reason of course is that those commercial ads are funding the awesome free services that I use all the time. The ads themselves may not benefit me, but they allow Google to keep on doing its thing, which does benefit me.
For the same reason I still allow Slashdot to display me advertisements. I have the option to disable advertising, but I don't. If a service relies on advertising dollars to function and I enjoy the service, then it is in my best interests in making sure the advertisers feel like they can reach out to me through that service. Adblock is fine on an individual level. But If everyone used it then advertisers would stop paying money to post ads.
Being adults at work we also have immediate access to e-mail, which serves some of the same purpose as texting. If I used SMS instead of e-mail for all of my really brief asynchronous communications I think I would approach 50 a day. Obviously YMMV.
Though like you I much prefer to call. Especially when the communication is complicated and there may be a need for follow up questions.
I wonder if this includes the bulk texts to multiple recipients. I get junk texts from one of my cousins all the time, she just spams some messages indiscriminately to her address book.
100/day might just be 5 texts sent to 20 people. Still ridiculous, but less time consuming.
I get the best of both worlds on that one. Services like Google voice (or any other automated transcription service) allow me to read the voicemail almost immediately and replay it nearly on command. In my opinion this is superior to simply text, though that is in large part because I would much rather have someone call me than text me.
Different strokes for different folks. I like having multiple means of communication available on my phone. I prefer voice, many of my friends prefer text. It is a good thing that all of our phones are capable of doing both.
Honestly, I hope they find some better way for teens (or anyone, really) to send small bits of text to others with mobile devices in the near future.... I'm thinking we need some kind of stripped-down EEG device for mobile phones...
The first thought that jumped into my head was that if your message is too complex to compose on a keypad why not just call the person? Old guys love to joke about this, but lots of people forget that their phones can actually make phone calls. At worst they don't pick up and you leave a voicemail.
EEG enabled phones would be awesome for a number of reasons though. When you consider the possibility of implanted cell phone components you pretty much have the ultimate hands free device. I'm just no so sure I would want to give my phone access to my thoughts though. I'm an Android user, and as convenient as it is to have Google indexing my e-mails, voicemails, and GPS location I don't know how comfortable I would be with them indexing my brain.
I'm the same age range, and though I feel like a teenage girl whenever I use it it is becoming one of my most reliable means of communicating. It's nice because it forces you to boil down your message into simple and direct language. You just don't have the freedom to be as long winded as you might be in an e-mail.
The major reason I like it is that it allows people to respond at their own convenience. It gives you a way to request a timely but non-immediate response. IMO the urgency of a text message falls somewhere between a phone call and an e-mail.
But the proper way to communicate disagreement should be to respond with a reasoned counterargument, the goal being to show the justification for your disagreement and allow future readers the benefit of seeing your reasoning.
A "-1 Disagree" mod is anonymous censorship at it's worst. It adds nothing to the discourse. If all that you can add to the discussion is "I Disagree", then you can't add anything of merit to the discussion.
For a good SciFi novel, pass all the rest and pick up Robert A. Heinleins' Starship Troopers.
So your suggestion is to skip every other sci-fi novel that is not itself a wildly successful classic and the book to which most other sci-fi combat stories are compared? Your bookshelf must be pretty bare.
The Halo books are for children, not for adults...For a good SciFi novel, pass all the rest and pick up Robert A. Heinleins' Starship Troopers.
...aaaaand in case you weren't aware, some of Heinlein's best work was his children's stories.
Bungie's people talked about some of their inspirations during the press around the release of the first Halo. As far as I remember Starship Troopers, Ender's Game, and Ringworld were big sources of inspiration (Ringworld for obvious reasons).
I was surprised. I borrowed "The Fall of Reach" from a friend expecting it to be barely readable garbage. It was really well written, and happened to also tell a pretty cool story.
Colas are a poor place to be trying to get your caffeine fix from. Instant coffee crystals are where it's at. You can make yourself a super strong cup in mere moments. Or, if you are like me, you may prefer just to take a spoonful and rub it right into your gums. Also Excedrine has a worthwhile amount of caffeine. I've definitely used it in to get through some boring meetings, and most of college.
That said, I've definitely worked with people who will bring a 2 liter of cola to work with them every day. I don't doubt many people crave soft drinks, but if they took a moment to understand the underlying chemistry they would realize it would be much easier to get it in concentrated form.
That's funny, because I had always thought that it was because they were moving away from real Chicken meat and instead using the "meat" from a sterile GM'd chicken-like animal.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've noticed is that adults are less likely to call other adults out on profanity around children. I remember as a kid going to baseball games it was pretty unusual for someone to swear and not be called out on it. The swearing happened, as a kid I was aware of it, but I also saw the adults around me taking the time to ask the person to mind their language.
Maybe I'm just old and cranky, but that kind of thing doesn't happen as much anymore. Adults are either a lot more tolerant or much more timid in engaging the lewd individual and asking them to stop. I miss that.
I'd hate to be going to the school that gets open source Android tablets instead of an iPad. Can you imagine how much you would get picked on. Android is like the K-Mart of tablets.
If by that you mean that it is capable of doing all of the same things at half the price but without the iBrand, then I would be happy to shop at K-Mart. That's actually where I do shop for office supplies and low end household electrics. The products work just fine at a fraction of the price.
I would be happy to send my kid to school with an Android tablet. At least then he might get a chance to learn something about how to make his software running on his device do what he wants it to do. That's better than having Apple tell kids what apps are suited for their iEducation.
The readers are already wicked cheap. And for the existing libraries of free books they are wonderful. What fails is the content delivery system, where the cost of new e-books is not significantly less than the cost of new paper books. $140 for a Kindle is what I consider to be dirt cheap. Even cheaper readers are on the horizon. But I'm not going to do that if I have to pay $6.99 for a e-book when I could just buy the paperback for $7.99.
The tech is there. The content delivery model is not quite ready yet.
Steam is invasive and essentially arbitrary.
I did find it humorous how many derided the retailer at being at fault for selling the game. With users like this what hope is there for the old model.
But the problem is with the retailers. Specifically that the retailers are not being held accountable for selling software which requires license agreements that you are not made aware of at the time of purchase. If I buy a game and am later confronted with draconian DRM measures that I am not comfortable agreeing to, then my recourse is to take that game right back to the retailer and get my money back.
If people start holding them accountable for selling crap like this, they will be putting pressure back on the publishers to stop putting that junk into their games. As a proud American it pains me to say this, but the Europeans have the right idea on that one.
At the end of the day after I pay private institutions for my education, health care, housing, and other taxable services I end up with a lot less than 25% of what I take in. I'm not saying that Government is the most efficient organization to be managing all of those things, but at some level I don't really care where the money goes so long as I get the services.
I'm not going to say that you are wrong, but the term "rich" also implies the possession of accumulated wealth.
For example if someone just took a promotion and is now making 201k with little accumulated wealth, I could see the argument that they are not "upper class". I don't know if I would call them rich based on that income alone, but I think they should definitely be able to handle that tax burden. If at that income level they aren't already rich, they will be soon enough.
Apostrophes.
Elegant weapons for a more civilized time.
I hope there's an intelligence test you have to pass before being allowed guns in America, as you'd obviously fail it spectacularly and not be allowed access to tools which are extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.
Intelligence =! Responsibility.
Or perhaps it does, and we should limit privileges and freedoms only to those "qualified" to possess them. Maybe we should impose Intelligence tests for voters as well. Or set up separate court systems to handle cases involving the unintelligent. Limiting full citizenship to people that demonstrate competency is attractive for a number of reasons. I am sure that they make sense for some societies. However, this is not how people do things in the United States of America. Every citizen is a full citizen and is equal under the law.
This is the second contradictory response I have posted to you today, so I want to apologize for sounding unnecessarily contrary. I am sure that if we met face to face we could have a polite and meaningful discussion. So please believe me that I say the following in as polite a voice as I can:
You do not belong in America.
Limited rights and enfranchisement is a decidedly un-American thing. We are a nation that would rather extend these rights and freedoms to illegals than risk preventing citizens from exercising them. We literally fought a war to break ourselves free from an Empire that did this.
Up in Maine open carry is allowed in most areas, and concealed carry (by permit) is allowed most everywhere else. The permit is fairly easy to obtain after a very sensible State regulated safety course. AFAIK the only place in Maine where concealed carry is legally prohibited is inside the State House (property owners of course have the right to ban it on their property as well).
Most police are familiar with the laws regarding open carry but discourage it. I suppose I can understand their motivation for not wanting everyone walking around with a gun on their hip. I remember an instance where a friend of mine was open carrying inside a Wal-Mart, a couple of tourists up from Massachusetts saw the gun and called the police. My friend was totally within his rights to carry into the store, but I think the police also had some justification for asking him why the hell he was carrying a gun with him into Wal-Mart. I suppose it pays to be informed about the law.
I have since moved to Boston. Birthplace of the revolution, where open carry is verboten, concealed carry is limited to LEO's, and even owning a firearm means putting the gun and yourself on a registry.
This is a valid comment only in a war zone or following the breakdown of civilization.
Or a mugging. Or a home invasion.
We shouldn't be worried about some buff guy bullying his way through a business meeting or shoving his way ahead of me in line at Starbucks. You are right that in normal life people won't "do what they will". There are rules and social norms that prevent such behaviors.
But without a reasonable means of protection weaker individuals are at the mercy of malicious stronger individuals. And without that means of protection those malicious stronger individuals have the unilateral ability to create a conflict situation. In self defense terms this is what is called a force disparity. Guns could be thought of as a force equalizer. They give everyone the same level of power and the same ability to project that power.
Other tools exist to do the same (i.e. spray, defense training, etc) but nothing levels the playing field like firearms. Do you really expect Police to be able to protect you in a conflict situation? Supposing you would even be able to get on your phone to call them, how long do you suppose it would take them to respond? I would encourage you to look into the typical response times for emergency services in your area. I don't know what they are exactly, but I would wager their response time is greater than the time it would take someone to stick a knife in you.
If I really want to kill someone and simply don't care about getting caught, there's not a lot they can do about it anyway.
In the most cordial and respectful way that I can, I have to disagree. The right to self defense is something that most (all?) societies recognize. Whether or not you are likely to prevent them from killing you, you have the right to use any means at your disposal to protect yourself.
I don't understand how paid commercial ads could ever be "useful" to those exposed to them. Thankfully there are things like Adblock Plus.
One could make the argument that accurately targeted ads do benefit the user. They make me aware of products I might be interested in that I was not previously aware of.
The big reason of course is that those commercial ads are funding the awesome free services that I use all the time. The ads themselves may not benefit me, but they allow Google to keep on doing its thing, which does benefit me.
For the same reason I still allow Slashdot to display me advertisements. I have the option to disable advertising, but I don't. If a service relies on advertising dollars to function and I enjoy the service, then it is in my best interests in making sure the advertisers feel like they can reach out to me through that service. Adblock is fine on an individual level. But If everyone used it then advertisers would stop paying money to post ads.
Being adults at work we also have immediate access to e-mail, which serves some of the same purpose as texting. If I used SMS instead of e-mail for all of my really brief asynchronous communications I think I would approach 50 a day. Obviously YMMV.
Though like you I much prefer to call. Especially when the communication is complicated and there may be a need for follow up questions.
I wonder if this includes the bulk texts to multiple recipients. I get junk texts from one of my cousins all the time, she just spams some messages indiscriminately to her address book.
100/day might just be 5 texts sent to 20 people. Still ridiculous, but less time consuming.
Regarding point 6...
I get the best of both worlds on that one. Services like Google voice (or any other automated transcription service) allow me to read the voicemail almost immediately and replay it nearly on command. In my opinion this is superior to simply text, though that is in large part because I would much rather have someone call me than text me.
Different strokes for different folks. I like having multiple means of communication available on my phone. I prefer voice, many of my friends prefer text. It is a good thing that all of our phones are capable of doing both.
5pm doesn't work for me. I need to drop off my dry cleaning by 4:45 and pick the kids up from practice by ten after.
I wish you had just called me so we could negotiate a time to meet.
Honestly, I hope they find some better way for teens (or anyone, really) to send small bits of text to others with mobile devices in the near future.... I'm thinking we need some kind of stripped-down EEG device for mobile phones...
The first thought that jumped into my head was that if your message is too complex to compose on a keypad why not just call the person? Old guys love to joke about this, but lots of people forget that their phones can actually make phone calls. At worst they don't pick up and you leave a voicemail.
EEG enabled phones would be awesome for a number of reasons though. When you consider the possibility of implanted cell phone components you pretty much have the ultimate hands free device. I'm just no so sure I would want to give my phone access to my thoughts though. I'm an Android user, and as convenient as it is to have Google indexing my e-mails, voicemails, and GPS location I don't know how comfortable I would be with them indexing my brain.
I'm the same age range, and though I feel like a teenage girl whenever I use it it is becoming one of my most reliable means of communicating. It's nice because it forces you to boil down your message into simple and direct language. You just don't have the freedom to be as long winded as you might be in an e-mail.
The major reason I like it is that it allows people to respond at their own convenience. It gives you a way to request a timely but non-immediate response. IMO the urgency of a text message falls somewhere between a phone call and an e-mail.
But the proper way to communicate disagreement should be to respond with a reasoned counterargument, the goal being to show the justification for your disagreement and allow future readers the benefit of seeing your reasoning.
A "-1 Disagree" mod is anonymous censorship at it's worst. It adds nothing to the discourse. If all that you can add to the discussion is "I Disagree", then you can't add anything of merit to the discussion.
For a good SciFi novel, pass all the rest and pick up Robert A. Heinleins' Starship Troopers.
So your suggestion is to skip every other sci-fi novel that is not itself a wildly successful classic and the book to which most other sci-fi combat stories are compared? Your bookshelf must be pretty bare.
The Halo books are for children, not for adults...For a good SciFi novel, pass all the rest and pick up Robert A. Heinleins' Starship Troopers.
...aaaaand in case you weren't aware, some of Heinlein's best work was his children's stories.
Bungie's people talked about some of their inspirations during the press around the release of the first Halo. As far as I remember Starship Troopers, Ender's Game, and Ringworld were big sources of inspiration (Ringworld for obvious reasons).
I was surprised. I borrowed "The Fall of Reach" from a friend expecting it to be barely readable garbage. It was really well written, and happened to also tell a pretty cool story.
Would such a self repairing Pinto then be capable of reproduction if it gets cut in half?
... and bra underwire (I wouldn't expect most Slashdotters to have practical experience with any of these, of course).
It's true, I prefer a wireless man-zier. Much more comfortable to wear while hunched over a keyboard all day.
Colas are a poor place to be trying to get your caffeine fix from. Instant coffee crystals are where it's at. You can make yourself a super strong cup in mere moments. Or, if you are like me, you may prefer just to take a spoonful and rub it right into your gums. Also Excedrine has a worthwhile amount of caffeine. I've definitely used it in to get through some boring meetings, and most of college.
That said, I've definitely worked with people who will bring a 2 liter of cola to work with them every day. I don't doubt many people crave soft drinks, but if they took a moment to understand the underlying chemistry they would realize it would be much easier to get it in concentrated form.
That's funny, because I had always thought that it was because they were moving away from real Chicken meat and instead using the "meat" from a sterile GM'd chicken-like animal.