Sorry, we'll never have one in America. We can't make proper tea, and I don't believe they can run on coffee.
We shall never experience the WHUMP-thunk of a whale and a pot of petunias landing on our shores, unless one of the Brit boffins makes a mistake and as you know that never happens.
Well, you have to understand, it was a lot harder back then. The Internet was hand-crank and you had to walk, uphill both ways, in the snow to get at it. Even in the summer in Florida, where frost-covered alligators had to be contended with. Then, you had to enter the data you wanted to post in Morse code, and use a lowercase "i" to mean "1" and an uppercase O to mean "0". Eventually, IBM invented the hand-crank typewriter, the precursor to the selectric, called the selecrank.
Anyway, you entered your data and cranked the handle a few dozen times, and it tugged on little strings which were thousands of miles long (the Earth was much bigger then, since there had to be room for all the dinosaurs). At the other end, there was a sheep with the string tied around his testicles, and the pattern of bleats could be heard for miles around.
Actually, looking at the slashdot forums and all the bleats, not much has changed.
I was listening to NPR a couple of weeks ago and one of the 50+ announcers came on during a pledge drive and started the drive off with "O. M. F. G. L. O. L. The phones are ringing off the hook!"
They had to end that pledge break early. All the 20-somethings couldn't answer the phones, and no one else could speak. All you could hear was laughter, and finally this pained young female voice comes on and says "cut to programming, now please, we can't continue" and Morning Edition starts back up.
I'm not sure if Charlie really knew what he was saying, but he's good at laughing at himself at least. His laughter was clearly audible in the crowd.
The next pledge break, you could hear everyone desperately muffling snickers whenever Charlie said anything.
OK, I know I'm going to be modded to oblivion for this, but I'll take my lumps. [dons flame-proof suit]
Research costs money. Real, honest, big money.
If you want to find a cure for things, you have to pay researchers who do this for a living and in many cases have had to study really hard in school and deserve some coin for their career risks. Then you have to give them really good equipment, and they have to spend years playing around with ideas, requesting even more expensive equipment, pulling in and compensating study subjects, asking for bizarre materials, and FSM knows what else. At the end of it, most research projects yield.. bupkus. Nada. Zero. Zilch. So you have to fund a shitload of 'em in the hopes of one major success.
Who's going to pay for it all?
Do we expect researchers to get their fancy degrees, accrue massive student loans, work hard to become experts in their fields, then eschew commercial work so they can volunteer to work for free, live in poverty, and put their kids on welfare?
Will the equipment be donated to them by manufacturing firms for the greater good of humanity?
So it all boils down to - how do you perform the research? If you want a commercial company to do it for you, then they are going to expect to make a profit in return for their risk and expense. Greater risk + greater expense = greater profit. This is the way it works.
If the government is to perform all of the research, OK. But then it's going to cost all of us more money. All of us. A lot more money.
I share your ideals of free and open research. But we'd have to extract that from the hands of those firms that we have given it to in the name of progress and economy, and pay for it ourselves.
The current system is also somewhat self-optimizing. Researchers work on things that will save maximum lives at minimum cost, simply because those things are, by definition, profitable. But they also happen to have the greatest benefit to society.
If the government controlled research, the highest-priority research would be for whatever rare disease the 3rd nephew of the senior congresscritter in charge of research appropriation had, or whatever research the company that puts its headquarters in the district of the head of the appropriations committee. Without any incentive for success, potential for success will not be a criteria in project selection, so researchers might have an incentive to stretch their projects out to ensure continued funding.
We're humans. We're imperfect. A system that assumes perfection will fail. What we got ain't pretty, but it's what we got.
If you ever get down to Orlando, FL, pay close attention to the pylons there. Many of them are Mickey Mouse Ear-shaped.
Not that I'm a big fan of rampant commercialism, but there are a crapload of shapes that are every bit as practical and structurally sound as the current ones, and require little to no extra materials. At least Disney Inc was being inventive. And I have to imagine the interlocked circles are pretty stable, on the whole.
Hell, if companies would help pay for the infrastructure, I'd be (vaguely) OK with some of them being in corporate logo shapes. I'd find that no more objectionable than the current eyesores they are, and it'd make some ad money serve some practical purpose.
True, there is certainly enough "do as I say and not as I do" going on in Congress. We'll see if, and what form, any laws take.
Actually, though, he can only expect companies in the US to do something. This works well with things like physical buildings - they either go out of business or comply.
But the Internet is a series of tubes, and those tubes go overseas. Which, of course, means that anyone producing news content for profit should obviously move across a border the instant this law passes.
They'll have to change their tagline to "YouTube. Express yourself, eh." but they'll get over it.
True, but they mix the whole "restaurant review" thing with the "possibility I might notice a friend at a nearby restaurant and pop over there instead" thing with an empty reward system somewhat analogous to./'s "karma" system.
Not a combination that appeals to everyone, of course, but if you've got a smartphone and enough friends who want to try it out, it might lead to some fun chance meetings, or you might notice a new restaurant on the map that a lot of people really seem to like (or dislike) without having to check restaurant reviews while driving somewhere on a trip.
The whole "online social" experiment is still underway. I remember IRC over bitnet fondly, and I chatted with a lot of interesting people both in the US and in foreign lands over it, and a lot more uninteresting people from everywhere, as you'd expect. I still use Instant Messenger and discussion boards (like this one, and others that aren't so topic-centered). I also use Facebook and played around with Latitude (but didn't know enough people who were interested to make it worthwhile, so I gave it up).
But if Facebook adds this feature, I might play around with it occasionally. I can understand why it might seem uninteresting, I'm just fascinated by the creative uses to which social networking is being put.
Good start, but I'd go one step further. In fact, I do.
Have your browser remember your passwords for you, but for any important passwords make the stored username and password invalid (or an incomplete one that you can enter the rest of, then just remember not to click on the "update" button that comes up). Even just dropping one character off the username and password is enough.
That way, if you are fooled into an iframed URL, you'll see the symptom you describe, but if some future bug makes the password list vulnerable to attack, any potential attacker only gets (at most) only part of each password, not all of it.
Also, always allow the bogus username/password to present once before you enter the real one. If you see a "login failed" screen that looks legit, you're probably good to go, and you can enter your real username and password. If you see anything that looks like it's trying to pretend to be your bank, you know something was wrong but you also know your account credentials didn't get disclosed.
When I'm in the mood, I'll also sometimes whip up a quick temporary guest account on my computer to click on a few of the provided links in things that are obviously bogus and enter clearly ridiculous credentials into the resulting page a few times. Even the least attentive bank IT department would probably look askance at 10 failed login attempts for user "I_AM_A_HACKER" and want to consider tracing out their IP address. I'll probably never get any actual hackers caught, but it feels as good as ripping up all the junk mail I get and returning it in the little postage-paid envelopes they so thoughtfully provide.:)
Well, of COURSE someone's gotta be the pirate, you insensitive clod! Someone's gotta fight global warming while being held in the loving embrace of His Noodly Appendages. We need all the pirates we can get.
Go to the link where the esteemed Senator is pontificating at length about the lack of subtitles (4th link in the summary, I believe).
First, you'll note that he did not upload subtitles to the videos on his site. Interesting, no? In a long pontification about the lack of accessibility on his own web site, he puts up video without subtitles. He did, at least, put up a transcript of the video on the site itself, but if you go to YouTube to find that video, it won't have the transcript. So he's seemingly in violation of his own principles (actually not at all unusual for a Congresscritter, but it's important to point these things out).
Second, you'll note that subtitles are available for that video. Since it was uploaded to YouTube, Google makes "audio transcription" available. While imperfect ("your personal courage" gets translated to "your personal carl", for example), it does get the gist of the video across.
So, if Markey is proposing that Closed Captions be available on all YouTube videos, then YouTube has already met the law to the standards Markey himself has demonstrated he wants.
No, RTP requires that sufficient data arrive in time to reconstruct the original sound, not in sequence. RTP has sequence control built into the protocol. The packets can come in in any sequence they want, but any packets that don't make it in time to be integrated into the sound are discarded because it's too late.
Let's say I send you an RTP VoIP stream that encoded to 10 packets, numbered 0 through 9, which I sent as 0123456789. Variable latency and entropy set in, and when your decoder receives them it gets them in the following order: 10436759 | 28 (the vertical line indicates the instant your decoder needed the packets, in other words packets 2 and 8 arrived after you had to reconstruct the sound).
RTP would allow you to reconstruct the sound as 01_34567_9, where the underscores represent gaps in the signal. 2 and 8, when they arrive, are thrown out, because the sound that they were needed for has already been reconstructed and played back.
If we agreed on a high-quality underlying protocol, you probably will never notice those gaps. If we both have a decent connection with little latency (or if latency isn't terribly variable) you probably won't have too many of them.
But actual sequence of packets is utterly irrelevant, provided enough (ideally all) of the packets arrive before the sound is to be reconstructed.
I suspect it has more to to with the progression of concepts.
Weapons: I had a rock, then I had a sling, then I had a bow-and-arrow, now I have a gun. I'm still hitting a target with a projectile. I take an action, something moves in roughly direction I tell it to, person or thing on other side hopefully develops a hole or wound where I intended. The method of projection and controls have changed, but the concept is the same (ready, aim, fire, yay! hit, shit! miss, target dead, target wounded, target VERY PISSED OFF).
Transportation: I had feet, then I had shoes, then I had a horse, then I had a bicycle, then I had a car. Again, still moving about, going 2 kilometers and turning left just takes less time but is the same concept. I take an action, something moves in roughly direction I tell it to, I hopefully get where I wanted to go. The controls have changed (legs->reins->handlebar->steering wheel) but the concepts aren't different (go, stop, turn left, turn right, etc).
Computers. I "power up" my "PC" and "monitor" and wait for my "desktop" in "Windows" to appear so I can "drag" a "cursor" then "double-click" on an "icon" on my "monitor" with a "mouse" to "open a window" so I can use a "program" called a "word processor" to write a "document" that is "saved" on a "subfolder" on an "external storage device" called "E:\" so I can "eject" the device before I pull it from my "USB port" on the USB "hub" that is plugged into my "case" and give it to a friend who can't read it because he uses "Office" on a "Mac" and my computer runs "Windows" so I needed to save it using a different "format" but I want to make sure not to "format" the "external storage device" to change the "format" but to "reopen" it and save it with a different "extension" and "file type".
That sentence made perfect sense, right? Of course it did. To you. But that's a shitload of novel concepts that someone who hasn't spent at least a few months in front of a computer to absorb in one sitting, yes? And that's all to write one document and save it. Nothing complex at all.
Few of these concepts have a pre-computer meaning, and when they do the analogies are distant and vague. The keyboard is analogous to a typewriter, but lacks the immediacy of space or the tactile "I push a letter, hear a bang, letter is on the paper in front of me".
It's not only that computers are new, but that they are completely new. We're not going from handwritten paper to books. We're going from immediacy to abstraction, and doing different things, and trying to express what those things are with poor analogies to similar things we've done before.
Look at most humans in a court of law. Look at many people when confronted with an engine that needs to be rebuilt, or even oil that needs to be changed. Watchmaking? Woodworking? Carving? Rolling a Kayak? Aviation? Knitting? Skiing? There are a lot of things that look really complex until you take the time to understand them, then you understand that they ARE really complex but not in the ways you imagined, and that "the bits I thought were complex are simple, but the bits I thought didn't exist are fucking complex" feeling will cause your brain to occasionally slide to "OFF".
It's called "being overwhelmed with too much new information all at once, with no way for Ye Olde Monkey Brain to categorize it into the neat little categories it's been using for the last x years."
In the case of computers, particularly if it's something you have no personal interest in but are told by someone else you need to master it.
The scam hits everyone who uses Facebook, regardless of your browser, if you fall for it.
At the END of falling for the scam, after you've coughed up your survey answers and subscribed to the application, you would then be directed to a Firefox plugin (which was not developed by the people who are perpetrating the scam), at which point you could only install the plugin if you have Firefox.
By then, the scam authors couldn't give a shit whether you can use the plugin. It's not theirs, it's just something they found and used to give their scan a razor-thin veneer of respectability. I won't argue about the utility of the plug-in, because it has nothing to do with the scam.
With extremely careful/conservative driving, I could see the mileage being nearly equivalent. This is especially true of highway mileage - once the car gets up to speed you don't take a big mileage penalty to keep a heavier car at speed. Weight is more of a loss in local driving with lots of starts/stops.
I'm struggling with the physics behind it actually increasing fuel mileage. I don't doubt your anecdote, but the explanation behind it has to be fascinating.
Unavoidable geek result, wild theories ahead. Sorry in advance.
Maybe your rear tires are significantly smoother than the fronts and you are transferring more weight to more efficient tires? Something in the profile change to the vehicle makes it more aerodynamic?
Crazy ideas, but I got nothin' better off the top of my head. And the concept of it happening, while hard to explain, is just too compelling not to try.
This means that the barriers to entry need to be reasonable, which means that any government sponsorship or support of infrastructure (such as obtaining rights-of-way to get power and roads up to the cell towers, etc) needs to be offered on an equal basis and/or not at all. Or anyone who has already built a tower with government help needs to offer space on that tower, and at reasonable rental rates.
You say:
Rather than follow your complicated prescription with hundreds of pages of regulations, just remove the barriers for new entrants. i.e. Government needs to allow a new carrier like Sprint to either erect towers, or share the existing ones with ATT, Verizon, et cetera.
Me apparently too dumb to see the difference in the two statements.
For sufficiently small values of "grade", which is anything less than about 3rd grade, IIRC.
These are middle schoolers we're talking about (last I checked, this was about 6th or 7th grade). They've been taught basic variable replacement and "solve for". Throw them an underline and they'll probably think you're treating them like a baby. But they know what it means, too.
They've also, in all likelihood, been taught what the parenthesis are for. It's not for "insert answer here".
Slashdot Mirror
If I had mod points, I'd have given you you "up to" +4,000,000,000 Funny.
Sorry, we'll never have one in America. We can't make proper tea, and I don't believe they can run on coffee.
We shall never experience the WHUMP-thunk of a whale and a pot of petunias landing on our shores, unless one of the Brit boffins makes a mistake and as you know that never happens.
You're just jealous because you didn't have access.
Well, you have to understand, it was a lot harder back then. The Internet was hand-crank and you had to walk, uphill both ways, in the snow to get at it. Even in the summer in Florida, where frost-covered alligators had to be contended with. Then, you had to enter the data you wanted to post in Morse code, and use a lowercase "i" to mean "1" and an uppercase O to mean "0". Eventually, IBM invented the hand-crank typewriter, the precursor to the selectric, called the selecrank.
Anyway, you entered your data and cranked the handle a few dozen times, and it tugged on little strings which were thousands of miles long (the Earth was much bigger then, since there had to be room for all the dinosaurs). At the other end, there was a sheep with the string tied around his testicles, and the pattern of bleats could be heard for miles around.
Actually, looking at the slashdot forums and all the bleats, not much has changed.
Baaa!
I was listening to NPR a couple of weeks ago and one of the 50+ announcers came on during a pledge drive and started the drive off with "O. M. F. G. L. O. L. The phones are ringing off the hook!"
They had to end that pledge break early. All the 20-somethings couldn't answer the phones, and no one else could speak. All you could hear was laughter, and finally this pained young female voice comes on and says "cut to programming, now please, we can't continue" and Morning Edition starts back up.
I'm not sure if Charlie really knew what he was saying, but he's good at laughing at himself at least. His laughter was clearly audible in the crowd.
The next pledge break, you could hear everyone desperately muffling snickers whenever Charlie said anything.
What do you call an umbrella?
A "Hail Fitler!"
I'm gonna get a +5 funny or a visit from the PC police. I'm going for both.
OK, I know I'm going to be modded to oblivion for this, but I'll take my lumps. [dons flame-proof suit]
Research costs money. Real, honest, big money.
If you want to find a cure for things, you have to pay researchers who do this for a living and in many cases have had to study really hard in school and deserve some coin for their career risks. Then you have to give them really good equipment, and they have to spend years playing around with ideas, requesting even more expensive equipment, pulling in and compensating study subjects, asking for bizarre materials, and FSM knows what else. At the end of it, most research projects yield.. bupkus. Nada. Zero. Zilch. So you have to fund a shitload of 'em in the hopes of one major success.
Who's going to pay for it all?
Do we expect researchers to get their fancy degrees, accrue massive student loans, work hard to become experts in their fields, then eschew commercial work so they can volunteer to work for free, live in poverty, and put their kids on welfare?
Will the equipment be donated to them by manufacturing firms for the greater good of humanity?
So it all boils down to - how do you perform the research? If you want a commercial company to do it for you, then they are going to expect to make a profit in return for their risk and expense. Greater risk + greater expense = greater profit. This is the way it works.
If the government is to perform all of the research, OK. But then it's going to cost all of us more money. All of us. A lot more money.
I share your ideals of free and open research. But we'd have to extract that from the hands of those firms that we have given it to in the name of progress and economy, and pay for it ourselves.
The current system is also somewhat self-optimizing. Researchers work on things that will save maximum lives at minimum cost, simply because those things are, by definition, profitable. But they also happen to have the greatest benefit to society.
If the government controlled research, the highest-priority research would be for whatever rare disease the 3rd nephew of the senior congresscritter in charge of research appropriation had, or whatever research the company that puts its headquarters in the district of the head of the appropriations committee. Without any incentive for success, potential for success will not be a criteria in project selection, so researchers might have an incentive to stretch their projects out to ensure continued funding.
We're humans. We're imperfect. A system that assumes perfection will fail. What we got ain't pretty, but it's what we got.
No, I believe that would be Cyst and Decease, actually.
Flash asked whether I want site to access my webcam, I said `yes`, guy saw me and said `it is OK now, thanks for your time`.
Cross-link the webcam input with Chatroulette. What could go wrong?
If you ever get down to Orlando, FL, pay close attention to the pylons there. Many of them are Mickey Mouse Ear-shaped.
Not that I'm a big fan of rampant commercialism, but there are a crapload of shapes that are every bit as practical and structurally sound as the current ones, and require little to no extra materials. At least Disney Inc was being inventive. And I have to imagine the interlocked circles are pretty stable, on the whole.
Hell, if companies would help pay for the infrastructure, I'd be (vaguely) OK with some of them being in corporate logo shapes. I'd find that no more objectionable than the current eyesores they are, and it'd make some ad money serve some practical purpose.
True, there is certainly enough "do as I say and not as I do" going on in Congress. We'll see if, and what form, any laws take.
Actually, though, he can only expect companies in the US to do something. This works well with things like physical buildings - they either go out of business or comply.
But the Internet is a series of tubes, and those tubes go overseas. Which, of course, means that anyone producing news content for profit should obviously move across a border the instant this law passes.
They'll have to change their tagline to "YouTube. Express yourself, eh." but they'll get over it.
True, but they mix the whole "restaurant review" thing with the "possibility I might notice a friend at a nearby restaurant and pop over there instead" thing with an empty reward system somewhat analogous to ./'s "karma" system.
Not a combination that appeals to everyone, of course, but if you've got a smartphone and enough friends who want to try it out, it might lead to some fun chance meetings, or you might notice a new restaurant on the map that a lot of people really seem to like (or dislike) without having to check restaurant reviews while driving somewhere on a trip.
The whole "online social" experiment is still underway. I remember IRC over bitnet fondly, and I chatted with a lot of interesting people both in the US and in foreign lands over it, and a lot more uninteresting people from everywhere, as you'd expect. I still use Instant Messenger and discussion boards (like this one, and others that aren't so topic-centered). I also use Facebook and played around with Latitude (but didn't know enough people who were interested to make it worthwhile, so I gave it up).
But if Facebook adds this feature, I might play around with it occasionally. I can understand why it might seem uninteresting, I'm just fascinated by the creative uses to which social networking is being put.
Good start, but I'd go one step further. In fact, I do.
Have your browser remember your passwords for you, but for any important passwords make the stored username and password invalid (or an incomplete one that you can enter the rest of, then just remember not to click on the "update" button that comes up). Even just dropping one character off the username and password is enough.
That way, if you are fooled into an iframed URL, you'll see the symptom you describe, but if some future bug makes the password list vulnerable to attack, any potential attacker only gets (at most) only part of each password, not all of it.
Also, always allow the bogus username/password to present once before you enter the real one. If you see a "login failed" screen that looks legit, you're probably good to go, and you can enter your real username and password. If you see anything that looks like it's trying to pretend to be your bank, you know something was wrong but you also know your account credentials didn't get disclosed.
When I'm in the mood, I'll also sometimes whip up a quick temporary guest account on my computer to click on a few of the provided links in things that are obviously bogus and enter clearly ridiculous credentials into the resulting page a few times. Even the least attentive bank IT department would probably look askance at 10 failed login attempts for user "I_AM_A_HACKER" and want to consider tracing out their IP address. I'll probably never get any actual hackers caught, but it feels as good as ripping up all the junk mail I get and returning it in the little postage-paid envelopes they so thoughtfully provide. :)
someone's got to be the pirate,
Well, of COURSE someone's gotta be the pirate, you insensitive clod! Someone's gotta fight global warming while being held in the loving embrace of His Noodly Appendages. We need all the pirates we can get.
I just about killed myself laughing and am seriously contemplating suicide because I have no mod points to offer your most brilliant post.
Slashdot should be held accountable for my impending death.
Save my life. Mod parent up. Think of my children!
Go to the link where the esteemed Senator is pontificating at length about the lack of subtitles (4th link in the summary, I believe).
First, you'll note that he did not upload subtitles to the videos on his site. Interesting, no? In a long pontification about the lack of accessibility on his own web site, he puts up video without subtitles. He did, at least, put up a transcript of the video on the site itself, but if you go to YouTube to find that video, it won't have the transcript. So he's seemingly in violation of his own principles (actually not at all unusual for a Congresscritter, but it's important to point these things out).
Second, you'll note that subtitles are available for that video. Since it was uploaded to YouTube, Google makes "audio transcription" available. While imperfect ("your personal courage" gets translated to "your personal carl", for example), it does get the gist of the video across.
So, if Markey is proposing that Closed Captions be available on all YouTube videos, then YouTube has already met the law to the standards Markey himself has demonstrated he wants.
No, RTP requires that sufficient data arrive in time to reconstruct the original sound, not in sequence. RTP has sequence control built into the protocol. The packets can come in in any sequence they want, but any packets that don't make it in time to be integrated into the sound are discarded because it's too late.
Let's say I send you an RTP VoIP stream that encoded to 10 packets, numbered 0 through 9, which I sent as 0123456789. Variable latency and entropy set in, and when your decoder receives them it gets them in the following order: 10436759 | 28 (the vertical line indicates the instant your decoder needed the packets, in other words packets 2 and 8 arrived after you had to reconstruct the sound).
RTP would allow you to reconstruct the sound as 01_34567_9, where the underscores represent gaps in the signal. 2 and 8, when they arrive, are thrown out, because the sound that they were needed for has already been reconstructed and played back.
If we agreed on a high-quality underlying protocol, you probably will never notice those gaps. If we both have a decent connection with little latency (or if latency isn't terribly variable) you probably won't have too many of them.
But actual sequence of packets is utterly irrelevant, provided enough (ideally all) of the packets arrive before the sound is to be reconstructed.
I suspect it has more to to with the progression of concepts.
Weapons: I had a rock, then I had a sling, then I had a bow-and-arrow, now I have a gun. I'm still hitting a target with a projectile. I take an action, something moves in roughly direction I tell it to, person or thing on other side hopefully develops a hole or wound where I intended. The method of projection and controls have changed, but the concept is the same (ready, aim, fire, yay! hit, shit! miss, target dead, target wounded, target VERY PISSED OFF).
Transportation: I had feet, then I had shoes, then I had a horse, then I had a bicycle, then I had a car. Again, still moving about, going 2 kilometers and turning left just takes less time but is the same concept. I take an action, something moves in roughly direction I tell it to, I hopefully get where I wanted to go. The controls have changed (legs->reins->handlebar->steering wheel) but the concepts aren't different (go, stop, turn left, turn right, etc).
Computers. I "power up" my "PC" and "monitor" and wait for my "desktop" in "Windows" to appear so I can "drag" a "cursor" then "double-click" on an "icon" on my "monitor" with a "mouse" to "open a window" so I can use a "program" called a "word processor" to write a "document" that is "saved" on a "subfolder" on an "external storage device" called "E:\" so I can "eject" the device before I pull it from my "USB port" on the USB "hub" that is plugged into my "case" and give it to a friend who can't read it because he uses "Office" on a "Mac" and my computer runs "Windows" so I needed to save it using a different "format" but I want to make sure not to "format" the "external storage device" to change the "format" but to "reopen" it and save it with a different "extension" and "file type".
That sentence made perfect sense, right? Of course it did. To you. But that's a shitload of novel concepts that someone who hasn't spent at least a few months in front of a computer to absorb in one sitting, yes? And that's all to write one document and save it. Nothing complex at all.
Few of these concepts have a pre-computer meaning, and when they do the analogies are distant and vague. The keyboard is analogous to a typewriter, but lacks the immediacy of space or the tactile "I push a letter, hear a bang, letter is on the paper in front of me".
It's not only that computers are new, but that they are completely new. We're not going from handwritten paper to books. We're going from immediacy to abstraction, and doing different things, and trying to express what those things are with poor analogies to similar things we've done before.
Look at most humans in a court of law. Look at many people when confronted with an engine that needs to be rebuilt, or even oil that needs to be changed. Watchmaking? Woodworking? Carving? Rolling a Kayak? Aviation? Knitting? Skiing? There are a lot of things that look really complex until you take the time to understand them, then you understand that they ARE really complex but not in the ways you imagined, and that "the bits I thought were complex are simple, but the bits I thought didn't exist are fucking complex" feeling will cause your brain to occasionally slide to "OFF".
It's called "being overwhelmed with too much new information all at once, with no way for Ye Olde Monkey Brain to categorize it into the neat little categories it's been using for the last x years."
In the case of computers, particularly if it's something you have no personal interest in but are told by someone else you need to master it.
Are you saying it made a lire of you, which spanned two sentences? ;)
The scam hits everyone who uses Facebook, regardless of your browser, if you fall for it.
At the END of falling for the scam, after you've coughed up your survey answers and subscribed to the application, you would then be directed to a Firefox plugin (which was not developed by the people who are perpetrating the scam), at which point you could only install the plugin if you have Firefox.
By then, the scam authors couldn't give a shit whether you can use the plugin. It's not theirs, it's just something they found and used to give their scan a razor-thin veneer of respectability. I won't argue about the utility of the plug-in, because it has nothing to do with the scam.
PS: I'd leave some sort of weight in the trunk. $2.50 a month is chump change, but chump change is still money.
With extremely careful/conservative driving, I could see the mileage being nearly equivalent. This is especially true of highway mileage - once the car gets up to speed you don't take a big mileage penalty to keep a heavier car at speed. Weight is more of a loss in local driving with lots of starts/stops.
I'm struggling with the physics behind it actually increasing fuel mileage. I don't doubt your anecdote, but the explanation behind it has to be fascinating.
Unavoidable geek result, wild theories ahead. Sorry in advance.
Maybe your rear tires are significantly smoother than the fronts and you are transferring more weight to more efficient tires? Something in the profile change to the vehicle makes it more aerodynamic?
Crazy ideas, but I got nothin' better off the top of my head. And the concept of it happening, while hard to explain, is just too compelling not to try.
Do you, by chance, always drive downhill? ;)
Me say:
This means that the barriers to entry need to be reasonable, which means that any government sponsorship or support of infrastructure (such as obtaining rights-of-way to get power and roads up to the cell towers, etc) needs to be offered on an equal basis and/or not at all. Or anyone who has already built a tower with government help needs to offer space on that tower, and at reasonable rental rates.
You say:
Rather than follow your complicated prescription with hundreds of pages of regulations, just remove the barriers for new entrants. i.e. Government needs to allow a new carrier like Sprint to either erect towers, or share the existing ones with ATT, Verizon, et cetera.
Me apparently too dumb to see the difference in the two statements.
I drank WHAT?
Socrates, (399BC)
For sufficiently small values of "grade", which is anything less than about 3rd grade, IIRC.
These are middle schoolers we're talking about (last I checked, this was about 6th or 7th grade). They've been taught basic variable replacement and "solve for". Throw them an underline and they'll probably think you're treating them like a baby. But they know what it means, too.
They've also, in all likelihood, been taught what the parenthesis are for. It's not for "insert answer here".