Once AI can pretend to learn, have 'emotion' and think abstractly, in a way that is convincing enough to 70-80% of people out there, 'intelligence' will be replicated in silicon.
I don't think anyone will have a problem with their house welcoming them home and asking how their day was, when no one else is there.
Not true.
You can remove partitions and FAT, or you can write a 0 to every byte on the harddrive.
But neither of these will make sure you don't have malware in bios, which can only be done by flashing a known clean bios update, and protecting the bios from being flashed by the OS.
Is building on science learned from others thinking inside the box? So to you, 'outside the box' is completely imagination with no foundation of any kind? By these terms, no one who speaks any language could ever write anything original. And math must be inside the box too, so no numbers may be involved. An outside the box concept must have absolutely no basis in reality according to you sir. Your definition seems a bit skewed. Original thought can still occur and it can exist within a predefined world of math, science, and language. In fact, the more you learn about various subject matter (anything, logical or not, in my opinion), the more likely you are to have an 'outside the box' thought because the more boxes you have, the more you can connect between them and then imagine other boxes which have not been 'discovered' yet.
And what is your reasoning behind this? I don't think mastery of X is NECESSARILY a precursor to an innovation of X. *You* (and everyone you've ever met) might produce ridiculous nonsense not knowing X, but you aren't everyone. Maybe on a statistical level you are correct, but only because the world is mostly filled with morons. But you can't pretend that everyone on earth is a moron, just because you haven't met a genius before. You can't outright say that no one could innovate X without completely mastering every aspect of X.
It's like saying, inventing a new method of transportation is impossible unless you've mastered engineered bikes, cars, buses, trains, and planes. It's simply not true.
If you actually apply your logic to the post you replied to, it makes even less sense.
Quite possible?? LOL.. This begin in the mid to late 90s, a ton of virii were simulating fake clicks making the author tons of money that probably was detected VERY quickly as soon as ad companies wised up and realize they were paying large sums of money for nothing, being scammed by smart programmers. But they still make money this way today unfortunately. And the smartest ones now aren't even illegal, just using a loophole not found yet.
Agreed! I would love to see this in the mix. And maybe the future progression will be something along these lines: Eventually there will be 2 way monitor/screen communication that verifies that the ad is actually visually playing. And maybe eventually we will have eye tracking that verifies that our eyes are actually pointing towards the ads (I believe this technology is already being engineered as we speak). And past that, our neural implants will be able to tell whether we are consciously accepting the advertising. I hope by then our association with moving pictures and audio as reality has significantly declined and being a luddite / anti-technologist will take on a much more important meaning. For now its much more important that we understand and embrace this technology.
This person has never been a 1099 contractor. He might never understand the amount of receipts we end up with at the end of the year. Last year I ended up with 8 envelopes packed full of cryptic receipts.. Imagine the time it would take to scan and file each one of them? Not so bad if you do it every day, but I didn't do my taxes until the day before they were due like most Americans.. =]
The thing is, AT&T doesn't care about their copper (last-mile) network anymore. It is costing them WAY too much to maintain it, they make virtually no money off it, and they are not sad to have people switch to other services for that. It's the mobile market that is the only thing they care about, it's where they make all the money, and what they think is the future, money best spent upgrading this. However I really don't see how the rising cost of gas is causing them to implement caps. It's really to make more money off the services than the original unlimited plans. Since now Netflix is rising in popularity so much, & AT&T didn't upgrade their network when they took all the subsidized money to do just that, it went in the pockets of executives, and in upgrading their mobile network, and buying more small companies to have an even greater monopoly. Now they don't even want to supply the pipes for big video, so they are capping and hyping Uverse to hope to get people to switch! It's really not cost-efficient for them to supply TV and light web browsing over a 3meg/6meg pipe, they'd MUCH rather just supply light web browsing.. Facebook etc.. They realize that Netflix is killing their network and are hoping that 5-10% of their userbase (Netflix/Hulu junkies etc) will switch services to remain uncapped, is what it seems like to me..
I think it's ridiculous to say that since Apple is making huge profits on their systems now that they can keep it up once the market is fully saturated with tablets (I know, theres tons of cheap knockoffs now, and a host of workable android tabs, but they mostly all suck @ price per performance atm, which is all I care about). It's never smart to invest in 1st gen/ 2nd gen technology, as if you wait a few years before entering the market, as you get the most of price/performance then. Fanboys keep saying how iPads outshadow everything else in the market in terms of sales and market share, which is true now. But wait a year or two, once the market is completely saturated with competent tablets (if the form factor stays in popularity that long), someone will put out an Android tablet in the $300-$500 range that will put the iPads to shame, and Apple will really have to show us the money and keep innovating. Apple products are currently for people with gadget envy & superiority complexes, or with tons of money to throw away for little functionality improvements in my opinion. They really are netbook like toys (with a huge app market) when it comes down to it. Apple products always have been expensive toys, considering you can do everything (technically, not including the app market of course, but who cares imo) on a PC you can on an Apple for 1/3 the price. (PC Hardware has always been 1-3 steps ahead of apple and now Apple is running on x86 anyway to even try to be a competitor). To be honest, the only genuine use for a tablet for me is WiFi, light web browsing and PDF viewing, editing, & sig-cap for work, & the ability to plug in a real keyboard (and a serial, or usb port with drivers for a usb->serial) is a huge incentive, everything else is done better on a laptop or phone. Offer me a combination of all 3 devices (laptop, tablet, phone) and maybe there will be real reason to spend >$300. I know, skype on 3g/4g, etc etc, not interested in your lowly capped plans tho. The CPU/GPU processing power in tablets is simply not there yet, but it will be soon with the market its achieving.. And for MUCH cheaper when the market is more than 3million people with money to blow =] How big is the laptop market? Just wait, once it includes enterprise (that's smart enough to wait until the Apple hysteria dies down and serious competitors arise like Dell/HP/etc 3rd gen+)
At least the fact that it is EVIDENCE SUPPORTED makes it an actual hypothesis instead of a faith driven belief. Science has the good nature to prove itself wrong from time to time, and I can't think of a time where scientists killed over their beliefs. That often 'far from conclusive' evidence is still subject to rigorous testing and scientific method, and can lead to further discovery, where faith driven arguments lead nowhere.
The fact that new science is heavily debated hardly makes it less science! It just isn't fully understood yet, and we accept that. I'd rather have a temporary 'well... sorta' hypothesis or even a stimulating conversation about a subject, than an unprovable and obviously wrong 'answer'.
Linux is not an operating system for morons. 80% of PC users out there are morons, kids, & grandpas, who could care less about the stability, flexibility, and efficiency of a solid, written from the ground up network-driven os. You know what will change in the next 15 years? Big business (retail stores everywhere, I am seeing this first hand at the moment, and actively participating in the implementation) is going to switch all their development and all their production servers and workstations to linux. Why? Because it has proven itself as a stable operating system thats free (they'll save millions on licensing) and does EVERYTHING they need, and the cost of switching is less than the licensing fees they'd pay with MS over the next 10 years. Nationwide retail chains are converting to linux to stay competitive, while some have been using it on their POSs for 10 years already, with no issues.
And, I can show you quite a few apps and drivers that don't work with Windows 7 that worked flawlessly with XP, although most are intentional because greedy companies want consumers to buy something new so limit or eradicate their legacy driver support. It happens ALL THE TIME. And I can show you tons of linux apps that work flawlessly with different kernels. This part of your argument is overly exaggerated. Linux is the type of OS that, once you get it working, it will work forever if you don't break it. Something that is essential in the world of networking. Just because your 80% of pc users that are morons that come to computer shops to get their computer 'fixed', doesn't mean that an OS that you and they don't like is 'broken'. All of your justifications for why linux is bad are flawed. Nobody here really gives a fuck about what Dell sells. Only people who care are in the PC retail industry. We are developers and techies. Anyone worth a grain of salt in IT builds and fixes their own systems. It's so simple, a caveman could do it. And for just about every Quicken/Quickbooks, PhotoShop, etc, there is a FREE CLONE on linux!! My father has been in the DB industry for 30 years, has been a huge advocate of MS products since way back, developer subcription to MSDN/technet, all of that, and is now telling me, 'You should think about focusing more on linux. It's the way things are going to be moving in the next 20 years.'
If you own (or work at) a computer shop, your argument makes sense, because you probably make a few dollars off the top everytime someone buys a copy of OEM Windows off you. You will never legally make a dime off linux and you don't want to spend the time learning how to make apps work with it (since its such a small desktop market share atm), and that pisses you off because you want to be a guru that can make anything work. I understand why you say these things, but your reasoning is flawed. Linux is steadily gaining market share (given at a very low rate). MS will have to lower their prices substantially to keep up with it eventually. Its the economically efficient answer in computing. I don't give a fuck about what retailers are selling to Joe Blow right now. People are also throwing away hundreds to thousands of dollars on Apple products and apps that supposedly 'changed the face' of phones & consumer computing gadgets, but some fancy touchscreen gui doesn't make me want to spend my money on a glorified toy.
Actually, this wasn't technically the worst oil spill in the history of the world. It was the worst spill in the history of the US, but there have been far greater world spills. Less than 20 years ago, in Kuwait, around 520 million gallons flowed from multiple wellheads. The slick was 4" deep for ~4000 sq. miles. Envirowonk 10 largest oil spills Also, although it would be nice to be able to hold someone directly responsible for these kind of spills and the traumatic reach that devastates our ecosystems, there is no price in the world that will return things to their natural health. No matter what, we will have to suffer the consequences of the paid off regulators, and the greed of the companies that just want to maximize profits. Trillions of dollars won't put our fragile system back together the way it was. Life on earth is forever changed by this type of catastrophe, while we might not see direct changes right away, each act contributes to the overall decay of life on the planet due to this greed.
Roffle. Your post is indistinguishable from pure truth. Sums up the high school (and early work (and maybe 85% of life in general)) experience perfectly for most of us here =]
How much would you be willing to pay per game hour?
I think daily passes at $1 a day or so would be a good way for blizz to get a few casual players back. That would be double their current rate ($.50 a day) as well. I just can't justify spending $15 a month if I might play for 1-4 days in a month (if that) for a total of 8-20 hours. This is coming from someone who used to play 8-16 hrs a day in vanilla (played since before Gates of AQ opened), raiding til TBC then becoming a casual pug raider in Wotlk. I've noticed that the times that have been the most fun to me are (vanilla when the game is still new) & the exploration and grind when the expansion hits. Cata is the first expansion that I am not buying day of release and actually might never buy. To be honest I don't really care if I ever play wow again, I have put thousands of hours into the game, done the guild raiding thing, arena/pvp thing, world pvp thing, auction house thing, grind new characters thing, etc, and theres just no draw to it anymore. The social aspect doesn't matter to me as no IRL friends or family play on my server anymore, the vanilla guildies are long gone. Grinding out characters to 80 and geared just really lost its point to me, when PVP sucks in my battlegroup and arena is pointless, as is raid encounters in the end. For years I thought that I couldn't play another game after wow because I looked at games as so dramatically different post-wow.. But I resisted the urge to buy Cata, and I've been working so much that I truly don't care. And to be honest, I have more fun with FPS shooters or racing games, it gets the heartrate going a little faster on killstreaks/etc, where when you down a boss in Wow because your group is geared/skilled enough, its pretty anti-climatic. Loot drops / guild spam / chatty crap. I can see why the game got so popular, people are social creatures mostly, and work harder towards a goal if there is competition, even if there's no real life gains. I might try a wow2 or world of [etc] if one were to come out, but I don't know if I will ever buy cata. This is coming from a hardcore ex-wow addict who lost interest in most everything else in life when I started playing. The first two years of my daughters life I spent more time in wow than I did with my family.. For nothing.. All my friends had lost respect for me completely as being a wow-shutin and I didn't care at the time.. It upsets me to think how irresponsible that was, but luckily the family recovered from it when I finally got motivated and started a better career in IT. That part of my life is over and I'll never be more than casual now, if I end up playing again. But while $15 a month is not much too spend on an addiction, I'd rather not give the money away to blizzard to play maybe 1-4 days a month. The game is just too much of a timesink to seriously compete at anymore IMO unless you have absolutely no responsibilities. Then you're just a hard-core wow nerd in the parents basement. And whats the point of playing casual unless you just really like questing or pug PVP..
Are you suggesting we lower taxes for the rich? By 'the bottom 50% of the country' do you mean the people that are living in dumpsters, on the street, have no house/car/job? And the struggling families barely making it on minimum wage jobs living in tiny apartments taking the bus to work? Maybe they should dig deeper and pay some more tax, and let the corporate executive wastes that already inherited a sh1t ton of money from their family have a tax break so they can throw it away on some new gamble or clutter their house with some new gadget to check their facebook or some other useless item.. The top 1% SHOULD pay 38% of the taxes imo. Or GTFO this country and go buy a private island. This number only seems high to you because maybe you don't realize the extent of their wealth. 'In 2004, the top 1% controlled 50.3% of the financial assets while the bottom 90% only held 14.4% of the total US financial assets.' [wikipedia]
Maybe I am jaded because 1/100th of our country has more than half the wealth and even owning my own business I am just above the bottom 50% average AGI.
You really believe that he believed that he could change things? You don't think he might just be another puppet like all the rest of the politicians become? (Except maybe the far-left and far-far-right.. Libertarian, green party, etc.. And even they are subjected to this!)
You're deluded if you think the FDA actually 'inspects our food'... The FDA is the biggest waste of taxpayer money I've ever seen. Test drugs for less than a year on humans for clinical trials???? I believe that the chemists of the world are still playing with legos when working with our brains and bodies and that maybe a 20 year study would be safer to study long-term effects of new drugs. We are playing with mother nature and evolution.
As far as inspecting our food, how much of that do you think really happens? Billions of dollars of products move into the bodies of consumers every year and you think that everything can really be inspected? If one in a million products is actually 'inspected' I would be suprised. If there is an outbreak of something or some metal breaks off in a machine that makes ho-hos, that batch is quarantined (or w/e) by the companies QC usually before it makes it out to store shelves, but as far as really protecting us from anything long-term, or keeping us healthy, the FDA does nothing. GMO's with mandatory warning labels? Not yet.. HFCS mandatory warning labels? Not yet.. Among many other things..
But to refute your points..
(1) - Just because its huge, are you arguing that its efficient and not worth looking into streamlining? Maybe it's not feasible to make drastic cuts, but hire a few teams of analysts to see how we can consolidate and it will pay for itself within a couple of years. It's not like we can afford the government waste we are experiencing forever.
(2) - Point made. Still, there is no reason why we shouldn't see what we can do with it. Just because the point of the government is to spend money, doesn't mean that the people paying for it via taxes shouldn't have a say in how the money is spent.
(3) - This argument makes me sick. Bureaucracy will be the downfall of our nation. If the current system doesn't work, FIX IT (the 2 party system is broken). If we can't make changes that are more cost-efficient & work, DON'T MAKE THEM. But at the same time, DON'T just say 'its too hard to fix' and walk away from the problem. Cuts need to be made everywhere to help us balance out. I'm so sick of people being in the mindset that our two century old country is going to be able to sustain its current growth without being dynamic. It's like the longer we stay a major power, the worse it gets. Maybe we need our economy to topple more and another great depression or prohibition to get people really ready for change. All the money in the world is worth nothing with a system that doesn't work. But it really comes back to education, values, and morality, and the number of brainwashed and hypocritical non-thinkers out there who are willing to watch everything go down the tubes for our kids just because a problem (or many) seemed to hard to solve or even think about solving, because we hire actors as politicians who do nothing but follow money. Maybe this is a very communist thought, but I think CEO's of huge corporations (especially ones being bailed out) should have salary caps, along with entertainment & sports stars, and remove salary caps for Teachers and Educators. And raise taxes on the top 5% drastically and lower taxes for the lowest brackets. Fix the flow of the economic pyramid. This is one of the main problems with America imo.. Greed is sending even the educated & well-meaning to the poorhouse!
try playing gta4 on a low end system. but that game is a bad example because the optimization is crap. even high end systems with older videocards fail to run the game smoothly. and the load times are insanely bad, almost worse than console unless you run raid or ssd.. sata300 is not fast enough? =S
disagree. I until recently had mid (to low) range hardware and let me tell you, the gaming experience is not nearly the same as with high end.. For example I was running a C2D 1.8ghz @ 800fsb, 3g ddr2 533, radeon x1300 512m, and could only play l4d2 @ 800x600 min settings. (mostly graphics). Then I upgraded my card to an xfx radeon hd 4870, but gameplay was still sluggish with better settings unless it was 800x600 still. Then I upgraded to a used nvidia nforce 680i sli, q6600, 4g ddr2-1066, with the same video 4870, and a 24" 1080p monitor. this system SCREAMS playing games @ 1080p hardly ever wavering under 60fps. Gaming is just not the same on the low range stuff, even though I played for years in lowest settings, its not the same experience. My scores are so much higher with a new system, its silly.. Ironically, after re-realizing this I am playing games less than ever now =\
1st generation technology: twice the price, twice the issues, all for keeping up w/ the joneses imo. better to stay at least a year behind current technology (3g or 4g is better) in my opinion. I am a major slacker tho too and still fail to see the necessity of fast colorful flash app type internet on the cellphone. I know someday it will have something useful for me, but not now really. Right now its still somewhat pointless and expensive for me. The only thing I'd use it for is scheduling honestly. But it is fun watching people (lining up before it opens) scrambling to get into that Apple/at&t store and get themselves a $200+ multitouch paperweight.. Or people spending $900+ on a phone even! I'd much rather spend the money on my pc where I spend most of my time, and could feel the most tangible upgrade. And there is magicjack for voice communication which the price of really shows my generational technology argument. But I guess my opinion doesn't count because a phone is still just a phone to me! (god I sound old) The popularity of the smartphone to me is suprising, I chalk it up to newest & greatest toy syndrome. It will all shrink even smaller over time until it relatively disappears to us, and someday kids will say 'you used to have to have a giant handheld device to connect to the internet'
But the same rule applies here: 1st generation technology is almost always a fail for price/performance ratio. At least for these widely adopted technologies.
But what certainly seems true is that a much lower percentage of people now know the nuts and bolts of how things work. I attribute this to several things:
(1) It's harder to *get at* the nuts an bolts now- there are far more layers of abstraction in the way.
You think a much lower percentage NOW know how systems work? Are you serious? Back in 1980 it's maybe.00001% of the total population or less that truly understand fundamental electricity, how squarewaves flow through chips turning things off and on in sequence, on certain pins at certain rates to achieve certain functions, programming, etc.. mostly because of the cost/obscurity of these systems, and you pretty much had to be a scientist to find practical use in one. Now you can throw a rock out your window and likely hit someone who understands these concepts (maybe because I live next to a state college its more likely).. Mainly because of widespread access to information and the internet, anyone halfway interested can learn how things work. But I highly doubt the percentage of people that understand bits and bytes is LESS than it was in 1980, one of the first years pc hardware became standardized. But I can see your point in that before the standardization, everyone who was interested DID have to know how it worked pretty much. Nowdays to 90% of the population its like, hey magician, fix my computer, do your voodoo tricks and make my internet work again... An old computer to me is still an Imsai, first one I ever laid eyes on. I can remember looking up at greenscreen/orange monochrome monitors for as long as I can remember. My first was an 8088 PC-XT so I might still be a youngun to you. But I guess you're right, when you had to buy your own chips/components, solder your boards together and program your own 'OS', you are more likely to understand the internals of a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Once AI can pretend to learn, have 'emotion' and think abstractly, in a way that is convincing enough to 70-80% of people out there, 'intelligence' will be replicated in silicon. I don't think anyone will have a problem with their house welcoming them home and asking how their day was, when no one else is there.
Yeah, because educational staff are allowed to possess weapons on school grounds.
Not true. You can remove partitions and FAT, or you can write a 0 to every byte on the harddrive. But neither of these will make sure you don't have malware in bios, which can only be done by flashing a known clean bios update, and protecting the bios from being flashed by the OS.
Ordered from extreme pizza last month, they delivered some great pizza and a 24oz craft beer. It was heavenly.
Is building on science learned from others thinking inside the box? So to you, 'outside the box' is completely imagination with no foundation of any kind? By these terms, no one who speaks any language could ever write anything original. And math must be inside the box too, so no numbers may be involved. An outside the box concept must have absolutely no basis in reality according to you sir. Your definition seems a bit skewed. Original thought can still occur and it can exist within a predefined world of math, science, and language. In fact, the more you learn about various subject matter (anything, logical or not, in my opinion), the more likely you are to have an 'outside the box' thought because the more boxes you have, the more you can connect between them and then imagine other boxes which have not been 'discovered' yet.
And what is your reasoning behind this? I don't think mastery of X is NECESSARILY a precursor to an innovation of X. *You* (and everyone you've ever met) might produce ridiculous nonsense not knowing X, but you aren't everyone. Maybe on a statistical level you are correct, but only because the world is mostly filled with morons. But you can't pretend that everyone on earth is a moron, just because you haven't met a genius before. You can't outright say that no one could innovate X without completely mastering every aspect of X. It's like saying, inventing a new method of transportation is impossible unless you've mastered engineered bikes, cars, buses, trains, and planes. It's simply not true. If you actually apply your logic to the post you replied to, it makes even less sense.
Quite possible?? LOL.. This begin in the mid to late 90s, a ton of virii were simulating fake clicks making the author tons of money that probably was detected VERY quickly as soon as ad companies wised up and realize they were paying large sums of money for nothing, being scammed by smart programmers. But they still make money this way today unfortunately. And the smartest ones now aren't even illegal, just using a loophole not found yet.
Agreed! I would love to see this in the mix. And maybe the future progression will be something along these lines: Eventually there will be 2 way monitor /screen communication that verifies that the ad is actually visually playing. And maybe eventually we will have eye tracking that verifies that our eyes are actually pointing towards the ads (I believe this technology is already being engineered as we speak). And past that, our neural implants will be able to tell whether we are consciously accepting the advertising. I hope by then our association with moving pictures and audio as reality has significantly declined and being a luddite / anti-technologist will take on a much more important meaning. For now its much more important that we understand and embrace this technology.
I was gunna say, I've been using playon to watch netflix on my g tablet which is running vegantab (2.3) rooted.. it sure does work..
This person has never been a 1099 contractor. He might never understand the amount of receipts we end up with at the end of the year. Last year I ended up with 8 envelopes packed full of cryptic receipts.. Imagine the time it would take to scan and file each one of them? Not so bad if you do it every day, but I didn't do my taxes until the day before they were due like most Americans.. =]
The thing is, AT&T doesn't care about their copper (last-mile) network anymore. It is costing them WAY too much to maintain it, they make virtually no money off it, and they are not sad to have people switch to other services for that. It's the mobile market that is the only thing they care about, it's where they make all the money, and what they think is the future, money best spent upgrading this. However I really don't see how the rising cost of gas is causing them to implement caps. It's really to make more money off the services than the original unlimited plans. Since now Netflix is rising in popularity so much, & AT&T didn't upgrade their network when they took all the subsidized money to do just that, it went in the pockets of executives, and in upgrading their mobile network, and buying more small companies to have an even greater monopoly. Now they don't even want to supply the pipes for big video, so they are capping and hyping Uverse to hope to get people to switch! It's really not cost-efficient for them to supply TV and light web browsing over a 3meg/6meg pipe, they'd MUCH rather just supply light web browsing .. Facebook etc.. They realize that Netflix is killing their network and are hoping that 5-10% of their userbase (Netflix/Hulu junkies etc) will switch services to remain uncapped, is what it seems like to me..
I think it's ridiculous to say that since Apple is making huge profits on their systems now that they can keep it up once the market is fully saturated with tablets (I know, theres tons of cheap knockoffs now, and a host of workable android tabs, but they mostly all suck @ price per performance atm, which is all I care about). It's never smart to invest in 1st gen/ 2nd gen technology, as if you wait a few years before entering the market, as you get the most of price/performance then. Fanboys keep saying how iPads outshadow everything else in the market in terms of sales and market share, which is true now. But wait a year or two, once the market is completely saturated with competent tablets (if the form factor stays in popularity that long), someone will put out an Android tablet in the $300-$500 range that will put the iPads to shame, and Apple will really have to show us the money and keep innovating. Apple products are currently for people with gadget envy & superiority complexes, or with tons of money to throw away for little functionality improvements in my opinion. They really are netbook like toys (with a huge app market) when it comes down to it. Apple products always have been expensive toys, considering you can do everything (technically, not including the app market of course, but who cares imo) on a PC you can on an Apple for 1/3 the price. (PC Hardware has always been 1-3 steps ahead of apple and now Apple is running on x86 anyway to even try to be a competitor). To be honest, the only genuine use for a tablet for me is WiFi, light web browsing and PDF viewing, editing, & sig-cap for work, & the ability to plug in a real keyboard (and a serial, or usb port with drivers for a usb->serial) is a huge incentive, everything else is done better on a laptop or phone. Offer me a combination of all 3 devices (laptop, tablet, phone) and maybe there will be real reason to spend >$300. I know, skype on 3g/4g, etc etc, not interested in your lowly capped plans tho. The CPU/GPU processing power in tablets is simply not there yet, but it will be soon with the market its achieving.. And for MUCH cheaper when the market is more than 3million people with money to blow =] How big is the laptop market? Just wait, once it includes enterprise (that's smart enough to wait until the Apple hysteria dies down and serious competitors arise like Dell/HP/etc 3rd gen+)
At least the fact that it is EVIDENCE SUPPORTED makes it an actual hypothesis instead of a faith driven belief. Science has the good nature to prove itself wrong from time to time, and I can't think of a time where scientists killed over their beliefs. That often 'far from conclusive' evidence is still subject to rigorous testing and scientific method, and can lead to further discovery, where faith driven arguments lead nowhere.
The fact that new science is heavily debated hardly makes it less science! It just isn't fully understood yet, and we accept that. I'd rather have a temporary 'well... sorta' hypothesis or even a stimulating conversation about a subject, than an unprovable and obviously wrong 'answer'.
And, I can show you quite a few apps and drivers that don't work with Windows 7 that worked flawlessly with XP, although most are intentional because greedy companies want consumers to buy something new so limit or eradicate their legacy driver support. It happens ALL THE TIME. And I can show you tons of linux apps that work flawlessly with different kernels. This part of your argument is overly exaggerated. Linux is the type of OS that, once you get it working, it will work forever if you don't break it. Something that is essential in the world of networking. Just because your 80% of pc users that are morons that come to computer shops to get their computer 'fixed', doesn't mean that an OS that you and they don't like is 'broken'. All of your justifications for why linux is bad are flawed. Nobody here really gives a fuck about what Dell sells. Only people who care are in the PC retail industry. We are developers and techies. Anyone worth a grain of salt in IT builds and fixes their own systems. It's so simple, a caveman could do it. And for just about every Quicken/Quickbooks, PhotoShop, etc, there is a FREE CLONE on linux!! My father has been in the DB industry for 30 years, has been a huge advocate of MS products since way back, developer subcription to MSDN/technet, all of that, and is now telling me, 'You should think about focusing more on linux. It's the way things are going to be moving in the next 20 years.'
If you own (or work at) a computer shop, your argument makes sense, because you probably make a few dollars off the top everytime someone buys a copy of OEM Windows off you. You will never legally make a dime off linux and you don't want to spend the time learning how to make apps work with it (since its such a small desktop market share atm), and that pisses you off because you want to be a guru that can make anything work. I understand why you say these things, but your reasoning is flawed. Linux is steadily gaining market share (given at a very low rate). MS will have to lower their prices substantially to keep up with it eventually. Its the economically efficient answer in computing. I don't give a fuck about what retailers are selling to Joe Blow right now. People are also throwing away hundreds to thousands of dollars on Apple products and apps that supposedly 'changed the face' of phones & consumer computing gadgets, but some fancy touchscreen gui doesn't make me want to spend my money on a glorified toy.
Actually, this wasn't technically the worst oil spill in the history of the world. It was the worst spill in the history of the US, but there have been far greater world spills. Less than 20 years ago, in Kuwait, around 520 million gallons flowed from multiple wellheads. The slick was 4" deep for ~4000 sq. miles. Envirowonk 10 largest oil spills Also, although it would be nice to be able to hold someone directly responsible for these kind of spills and the traumatic reach that devastates our ecosystems, there is no price in the world that will return things to their natural health. No matter what, we will have to suffer the consequences of the paid off regulators, and the greed of the companies that just want to maximize profits. Trillions of dollars won't put our fragile system back together the way it was. Life on earth is forever changed by this type of catastrophe, while we might not see direct changes right away, each act contributes to the overall decay of life on the planet due to this greed.
Roffle. Your post is indistinguishable from pure truth. Sums up the high school (and early work (and maybe 85% of life in general)) experience perfectly for most of us here =]
How much would you be willing to pay per game hour?
I think daily passes at $1 a day or so would be a good way for blizz to get a few casual players back. That would be double their current rate ($.50 a day) as well. I just can't justify spending $15 a month if I might play for 1-4 days in a month (if that) for a total of 8-20 hours. This is coming from someone who used to play 8-16 hrs a day in vanilla (played since before Gates of AQ opened), raiding til TBC then becoming a casual pug raider in Wotlk. I've noticed that the times that have been the most fun to me are (vanilla when the game is still new) & the exploration and grind when the expansion hits. Cata is the first expansion that I am not buying day of release and actually might never buy. To be honest I don't really care if I ever play wow again, I have put thousands of hours into the game, done the guild raiding thing, arena/pvp thing, world pvp thing, auction house thing, grind new characters thing, etc, and theres just no draw to it anymore. The social aspect doesn't matter to me as no IRL friends or family play on my server anymore, the vanilla guildies are long gone. Grinding out characters to 80 and geared just really lost its point to me, when PVP sucks in my battlegroup and arena is pointless, as is raid encounters in the end. For years I thought that I couldn't play another game after wow because I looked at games as so dramatically different post-wow.. But I resisted the urge to buy Cata, and I've been working so much that I truly don't care. And to be honest, I have more fun with FPS shooters or racing games, it gets the heartrate going a little faster on killstreaks/etc, where when you down a boss in Wow because your group is geared/skilled enough, its pretty anti-climatic. Loot drops / guild spam / chatty crap. I can see why the game got so popular, people are social creatures mostly, and work harder towards a goal if there is competition, even if there's no real life gains. I might try a wow2 or world of [etc] if one were to come out, but I don't know if I will ever buy cata. This is coming from a hardcore ex-wow addict who lost interest in most everything else in life when I started playing. The first two years of my daughters life I spent more time in wow than I did with my family.. For nothing.. All my friends had lost respect for me completely as being a wow-shutin and I didn't care at the time.. It upsets me to think how irresponsible that was, but luckily the family recovered from it when I finally got motivated and started a better career in IT. That part of my life is over and I'll never be more than casual now, if I end up playing again. But while $15 a month is not much too spend on an addiction, I'd rather not give the money away to blizzard to play maybe 1-4 days a month. The game is just too much of a timesink to seriously compete at anymore IMO unless you have absolutely no responsibilities. Then you're just a hard-core wow nerd in the parents basement. And whats the point of playing casual unless you just really like questing or pug PVP..
Are you suggesting we lower taxes for the rich? By 'the bottom 50% of the country' do you mean the people that are living in dumpsters, on the street, have no house/car/job? And the struggling families barely making it on minimum wage jobs living in tiny apartments taking the bus to work? Maybe they should dig deeper and pay some more tax, and let the corporate executive wastes that already inherited a sh1t ton of money from their family have a tax break so they can throw it away on some new gamble or clutter their house with some new gadget to check their facebook or some other useless item.. The top 1% SHOULD pay 38% of the taxes imo. Or GTFO this country and go buy a private island. This number only seems high to you because maybe you don't realize the extent of their wealth. 'In 2004, the top 1% controlled 50.3% of the financial assets while the bottom 90% only held 14.4% of the total US financial assets.' [wikipedia] Maybe I am jaded because 1/100th of our country has more than half the wealth and even owning my own business I am just above the bottom 50% average AGI.
You really believe that he believed that he could change things? You don't think he might just be another puppet like all the rest of the politicians become? (Except maybe the far-left and far-far-right.. Libertarian, green party, etc.. And even they are subjected to this!)
As far as inspecting our food, how much of that do you think really happens? Billions of dollars of products move into the bodies of consumers every year and you think that everything can really be inspected? If one in a million products is actually 'inspected' I would be suprised. If there is an outbreak of something or some metal breaks off in a machine that makes ho-hos, that batch is quarantined (or w/e) by the companies QC usually before it makes it out to store shelves, but as far as really protecting us from anything long-term, or keeping us healthy, the FDA does nothing. GMO's with mandatory warning labels? Not yet.. HFCS mandatory warning labels? Not yet.. Among many other things..
But to refute your points..
(1) - Just because its huge, are you arguing that its efficient and not worth looking into streamlining? Maybe it's not feasible to make drastic cuts, but hire a few teams of analysts to see how we can consolidate and it will pay for itself within a couple of years. It's not like we can afford the government waste we are experiencing forever.
(2) - Point made. Still, there is no reason why we shouldn't see what we can do with it. Just because the point of the government is to spend money, doesn't mean that the people paying for it via taxes shouldn't have a say in how the money is spent.
(3) - This argument makes me sick. Bureaucracy will be the downfall of our nation. If the current system doesn't work, FIX IT (the 2 party system is broken). If we can't make changes that are more cost-efficient & work, DON'T MAKE THEM. But at the same time, DON'T just say 'its too hard to fix' and walk away from the problem. Cuts need to be made everywhere to help us balance out. I'm so sick of people being in the mindset that our two century old country is going to be able to sustain its current growth without being dynamic. It's like the longer we stay a major power, the worse it gets. Maybe we need our economy to topple more and another great depression or prohibition to get people really ready for change. All the money in the world is worth nothing with a system that doesn't work. But it really comes back to education, values, and morality, and the number of brainwashed and hypocritical non-thinkers out there who are willing to watch everything go down the tubes for our kids just because a problem (or many) seemed to hard to solve or even think about solving, because we hire actors as politicians who do nothing but follow money. Maybe this is a very communist thought, but I think CEO's of huge corporations (especially ones being bailed out) should have salary caps, along with entertainment & sports stars, and remove salary caps for Teachers and Educators. And raise taxes on the top 5% drastically and lower taxes for the lowest brackets. Fix the flow of the economic pyramid. This is one of the main problems with America imo.. Greed is sending even the educated & well-meaning to the poorhouse!
try playing gta4 on a low end system. but that game is a bad example because the optimization is crap. even high end systems with older videocards fail to run the game smoothly. and the load times are insanely bad, almost worse than console unless you run raid or ssd.. sata300 is not fast enough? =S
disagree. I until recently had mid (to low) range hardware and let me tell you, the gaming experience is not nearly the same as with high end.. For example I was running a C2D 1.8ghz @ 800fsb, 3g ddr2 533, radeon x1300 512m, and could only play l4d2 @ 800x600 min settings. (mostly graphics). Then I upgraded my card to an xfx radeon hd 4870, but gameplay was still sluggish with better settings unless it was 800x600 still. Then I upgraded to a used nvidia nforce 680i sli, q6600, 4g ddr2-1066, with the same video 4870, and a 24" 1080p monitor. this system SCREAMS playing games @ 1080p hardly ever wavering under 60fps. Gaming is just not the same on the low range stuff, even though I played for years in lowest settings, its not the same experience. My scores are so much higher with a new system, its silly.. Ironically, after re-realizing this I am playing games less than ever now =\
They should also get rid of all the sports teams, not fair to the handicapped.
But the same rule applies here: 1st generation technology is almost always a fail for price/performance ratio. At least for these widely adopted technologies.
But what certainly seems true is that a much lower percentage of people now know the nuts and bolts of how things work. I attribute this to several things:
(1) It's harder to *get at* the nuts an bolts now- there are far more layers of abstraction in the way.
You think a much lower percentage NOW know how systems work? Are you serious? Back in 1980 it's maybe .00001% of the total population or less that truly understand fundamental electricity, how squarewaves flow through chips turning things off and on in sequence, on certain pins at certain rates to achieve certain functions, programming, etc.. mostly because of the cost/obscurity of these systems, and you pretty much had to be a scientist to find practical use in one. Now you can throw a rock out your window and likely hit someone who understands these concepts (maybe because I live next to a state college its more likely).. Mainly because of widespread access to information and the internet, anyone halfway interested can learn how things work. But I highly doubt the percentage of people that understand bits and bytes is LESS than it was in 1980, one of the first years pc hardware became standardized. But I can see your point in that before the standardization, everyone who was interested DID have to know how it worked pretty much. Nowdays to 90% of the population its like, hey magician, fix my computer, do your voodoo tricks and make my internet work again... An old computer to me is still an Imsai, first one I ever laid eyes on. I can remember looking up at greenscreen/orange monochrome monitors for as long as I can remember. My first was an 8088 PC-XT so I might still be a youngun to you. But I guess you're right, when you had to buy your own chips/components, solder your boards together and program your own 'OS', you are more likely to understand the internals of a computer.