Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7.
PCs held on to Dsub parallel and serial ports and PS/2 ports and floppy drives for many years after Apple kicked them to the curb. Blackberry kept making physical keyboards long after the market proved that most buyers don't care about them. Just because everyone else didn't follow Apple one year later doesn't really tell us much. It's going to take a few years for this to really play out. The other handset makers are going to be watching. If Apple sales remain strong you can bet that more of them will follow Apple's lead over time. No one should be surprised that there wasn't a stampede of removing the headphone jack in just one year.
Does anyone honestly think that Apple cares whether other companies drop the headphone jack on their phones?
Yes after a fashion. If Apple is wrong about their bet that people don't really care about the headphone jack then it will cost them business. If the other handset manufacturers follow Apple in removing the port then Apple's bet will pay off and they will continue on their merry way without the added cost and problems related to a headphone jack. If Apple turns out to be wrong and people stop or slow buying their phones because of that missing feature then you bet Apple will care.
So far it seems Apple is winning the bet because they are still selling huge numbers of smartphones and there seems to be little evidence that the lack of headphone jack is making more than a marginal dent in their business. You can be sure Apple is watching the situation but the longer things go without a drop in sales the more confident they will become about it.
Can Technology Prevent Cops From "Forgetting" To Turn On Their Body Cameras?
The title is missing some air quotes around "forgetting" because it's very unlikely that they forgot to do it. Only way they will stop "forgetting" is if there are real consequences with real teeth. Like all charges get thrown out, evidence inadmissible, suspension from job without pay, etc. Otherwise you are going to continue to see a rash of camera failures with curiously convenient timing to the benefit of the officer.
I've been flagging every as I could as "covering content".
You see ads? I have them all blocked and never see any. No I don't give a shit about slashdot's bad business model. I'd happily pay a subscription but they can't be bothered to give me the option. So fuck 'em and the ad networks they rode in on.
As others are saying, don't live in the Bay Area if you can't afford it.
So when are you planning to start paying all the people that have to work in the Bay Area salaries high enough to live there? You know like restaurant workers, garbage collectors, police and fire, school teachers, etc. Or did you just arrogantly forget about them and assume they should spend their every free hour commuting from somewhere near Nevada?
But, if you want housing that's affordable and not too far away, it's not impossible...There's the whole Central Valley within driving distance of the Bay Area. Sure, a 1-2 hour commute isn't ideal,
So you are saying there isn't affordable housing within a reasonable distance. Spending 4 hours per day in a car "isn't ideal"? That's one way to put it if you are incredibly out of touch with reality. Your salary had better WELL into six figures to justify spending that much of your life commuting. Any commute longer than an hour is just evidence of an incredibly broken and unfair urban planning system.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month
You can feed a person for that much. "Decently"? I would dispute that. They aren't going to starve if that's what you are saying but it won't be an ideal sort of diet.
Vegetables are universally-expensive--even frozen--although I don't put much stock in vegetables; I put more vegetables in stock.
Maybe if you get them at Whole Foods. Vegetables can be very economical if one bothers to shop carefully. Better yet you can even grow them yourself with some effort and seeds are incredibly cheap if you are willing/able to trade some time and effort tending them.
and we spend an utter assload (about 40%) on entertainment, luxury, and other discretionary spending, versus about 25% in the 50s.
Don't forget about the $2000 EVERY person in America (on average) pays to have a ludicrously oversized military, the $750 every person pays for interest on our national debt, the $1500 or so the government "borrows" from you from you every year to fund our government (none of which is in any danger of being paid back - and yes most US debt is borrowed from US citizens, not China) thanks to certain groups being unwilling to raise taxes to cover the bill, the $3000 that goes to social security, and another $3000 or so that goes to Medicare/Medicaid. Oh and those safety net programs the conservatives hate so much? They cost around $1000 per person every year per person - curiously barely more than the interest on the debt we pay every year to finance their aversion to taxes. Total those up and it works out to around $11-12,000 for every man, woman and child in the US on average (with a population of just over 300million). Pretty close to the total gross annual earnings of someone making minimum wage.
And in case you were wondering, NASA costs each of us approximately $60/year.
IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.
A very good analogy.
two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ.
That statement is task dependent. For some tasks it is true and for others not so much. There also are failure modes that multiple people are subject to that an individual is not. Much like your previous statement, crowds often are smarter than individuals but not universally so in all cases.
Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success.
That is contingent on what you define as "success". I'm familiar with some of the studies you are probably referring to but be careful with such generalizations.
Yeah, everything can be used for good or evil including snooping, but capitalism and greed often shift that equation in the direction of evil.
If nobody bothers to put up a fight then yes. But the evil that corporations do can be overcome. One only has to look at the number of regulations we have to see evidence that we can limit corporations. Corporations can be muzzled if enough people bother to care.
Google even mentioned the fact in their early days (do no evil). Then they started full scale snooping.
"Do no evil" was marketing from day one. Anyone who didn't realize that was either naive or an idiot. Google is an advertising company and has been from jump street. Anyone who didn't realize that they would behave with the incentives relevant to an advertising company was an idiot.
In reality, privacy is going to become a very rare commodity
It never was as common as people believed it was. A lot of stuff we thought was private in the past really wasn't. It just wasn't convenient to get the data. Now we actually have to do something about it rather than relying on the hope that others are lazy to protect our privacy. It will be an ongoing fight to balance privacy with other interests.
At least one manufacturer will see the marketing value of ''the car that does not spy on you'
More likely one manufacturer will TRY that marketing angle and then quickly figure out that very few people actually give half a shit about their privacy and abandon the attempt. The siren call of all that cash will simply be too much for them to resist for long.
Still driving my 22 year old Eclipse GSX with no onboard recording devices.
I drive WAY too much for that to be a realistic option for me. My current daily driver is a 2009 and I already have over 160,000 miles on it. If I were to keep it for 22 years at my current annual mileage I'd have over half a million miles on it at that point. It's a good vehicle but I have little confidence it will still be on the road after that much use. Mine doesn't transmit any data about my location either. I think it has an onboard black box but I'm not worried about that.
Very surprised people are going along with the 1984 snooping on everyone thing. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale.
Cautionary but complicated. I carry a smartphone because it adds significant value to my daily life. Yes it could in principle be used in a dystopian fashion but in reality it isn't. Like nuclear power or genetic engineering, the technology is neutral and whether it is a force for good or ill depends on how it is used. There are very positive benefits to tracking location and performance parameters of a vehicle. There also are some drawbacks. It's not all 1984 where everything has taken the worst possible outcome.
Why? If the definitions already were arbitrary then what's wrong with changing them to a different variety of arbitrary? Especially if the new definition makes more sense. We're talking about taxonomy here, not some law of physics.
Frankly the term planet is probably too broad to be super useful by itself. It's kind of like a genus for space objects and we need to define the species. Jupiter and Earth are both considered planets but they aren't even remotely similar to each other aside from being big and round. Ganymede and Titan are both larger than Mercury and all of the dwarf planets. It's not entirely unreasonable to call them Moon Planets even if that seems a little odd to us currently.
People get WAY too attached to the word planet. It's just a word and it doesn't matter what we attach the word to as long as we are clear about what it means. If we want to call large moons a Moon Planet, why is that a problem so long as the definition is clear? We probably should call planets like Jupiter something different than planets like Earth. It's completely fine to have multiple categories of planets and I'm pretty sure we are going to find out that there are far weirder things in the universe than what is in our little solar system.
Is the coating itself safe? We come out with "magic" materials all the time and then predictably find out later on that they have all sorts of horribly toxic side effects. Getting all the ketchup out of the bottle falls pretty low on my list of things I give a shit about.
Stallman isn't taking credit for work he didn't do. Stallman is taking credit for work he did do; Stallman is taking credit for the GNU OS.
There is no GNU OS. Stallman didn't write the kernel. The kernel defines what OS it is. Ergo Stallman is trying to take credit for work he didn't do by pointing out that other work he didn't do (GNU - others wrote those tools too under the FSF aegis) was used to enable linux to be a useful product in some cases. It's not GNU/Linux as he claims. If linux didn't use any GNU tools it would still be linux.
Because I had one and they worked. Easiest and fastest way to do the job. Used a sharp knife a few times too. Scissors didn't really work great but could do in a pinch.
I still have a sheet of those little stickers you used to close the hole to write protect the disk lying around.
Now that is a questions worthy of a "why"? Just feeling sentimental? Worried that floppies might make a come back some day? Hoping they will increase in value? I just used some tape though I do remember the stickers. Got rid of all that crap decades ago though.
I thought Android is *not* Linux? At least that's what one of my Android text books says.
Just because someone wrote something in a book doesn't automatically make it true. Books are not necessarily authoritative sources and I can provide you lots of examples of books getting "facts" very, very wrong. This evidently is one of them.
It uses the Linux kernel...
Then it is linux in addition to whatever else it is. The kernel above all else defines which operating system you are using.
but is not the same operating system that is commonly referred to as "Linux" i.e. GNU-Linux.
It's a variant of linux but not the only one. GNU/Linux is really not a single system but rather a marketing attempt by Richard Stallman to use work he and some others did to take credit for work they didn't do. There is no single one-true-linux. Any system that uses the linux kernal as its base is some variant of linux.
Android has major differences with Linux.
Android is linux as long as it uses the linux kernel. Change the kernel and you can call it something else.
I wish MBAs were judged by their ability to support and enable coworkers to achieve a common goal.
That sentence is a non-sequitur. A MBA is a college degree, not a class of people. Having a MBA doesn't grant anyone magical armor to prevent their job performance critically evaluated.
Presumably you are using MBA as a trite shorthand for someone in management who studied business in college. Guess what? They ARE judged on their ability to do exactly what you suggest. Managers who fail to support and enable co-workers to do their job generally suck at their job and generally are rewarded accordingly no different than any other job. Having an engineering degree doesn't grant one magical powers of intelligence and competence nor does it mean they are good at engineering. Some people with MBA diplomas are very good at their job. A bunch more are mediocre and some really suck. Same as with any other type of degree and job.
The one thing most managers fail to understand that most people if given a goal and all the things they need to accomplish that goal will work steadily toward it.
Many people are like that but not all. If you've managed groups of people you would know that for every motivated and hard working person out there there is a malingerer who wants a paycheck but doesn't really want to do any work. I can't put numbers to it beyond saying that the percent of the population that will be lazy and uncaring given the chance is in double digit percentages. This is particularly true if the job that needs to be done is boring, hard, dirty, or tiring.
I don't know if you've had the pleasure of dealing with fraudulent worker's comp claims. I have. You'd be amazed the lengths to which some people will go to avoid work. Many more don't take it that far but there are plenty more who do just enough to get by. Just because you make a goal doesn't mean everybody is going to be inspired by it. I've had to fire plenty of people who would much rather watch youtube videos on their phone than do their job. Maybe that means I'm not the best manager but more likely it just means that those were people who really just don't care.
If you have to drive them something is very wrong.
Not necessarily. Let's take McDonalds for example. I think we'd agree that it is a successful business. I think we'd also agree that it's not the most pleasant place to work. Pay is low, the work is tiring and boring, and your co-workers are rarely bright and motivated. Goals? Most of the workers don't care much about the goals of the company. Turnover in that company is over 100% per year. And yet they are very successful despite having a largely unmotivated workforce that turns over constantly. The people that work there want a paycheck and they harness that, deal with it, and drive their workforce to do what is needed. For the most part your typical McDonalds worker doesn't give a shit about any goal you put in front of them. They are there out of necessity and are not true believers. And that's ok as long as you know what to expect from them and build the business accordingly.
Like a sports team, the manager of the team can rarely accomplish what the athletes can. The manager may have been a great athlete in their past, but usually they were not.
And few of the athletes can accomplish what the manager can if he's decent at his job. That works both ways. Different skill sets are required for both jobs. Management rarely gets to their position by being incompetent know-nothings. They got that job because they have specific skills just like every other team member. It's not that the manager is less talented than his team, it's that he has a different set of talents to bring to the table. Each team member focuses on their role and the whole thing works. The role of the manager is to remove obstacles and keep all the parts of the team coordinated and on task.
I have yet to meet someone in upper management who knows more than his underlings.
Right... All those upper management people got there by being know-nothing idiots... [/sarcasm]
Yes you probably know more about your specific job than anyone else does. Guess what? The same is usually true for everyone in the company including management. And people don't generally get to management jobs without having a pretty good clue how things work. Management doesn't need to know every nuanced detail about how to do everything in the company. That's why they hire other people. It doesn't mean they are clueless, it means they don't have the time to do everything themselves and/or that they can hire someone who is better at a given task then they are.
Basically a smart manager hires people who are smarter than they are whenever possible. The guy in charge doesn't have to be the smartest guy in the room at all times. He just has to be the guy who can figure out who the smartest guy is for a given task (or the most economical person) and take obstacles out of their way. I have a staff of about a dozen people that report to me. For the most part I try to let them do their job without me bothering them. In some cases I actually can do their job better than they can but it would stupid of me to try because I don't have the time. That was why I hired them - I needed the help. In other cases they do their job better than I can so my job is simply to make sure they aren't interfered with. That was also why I hired them - they are better than me at those tasks. Nobody is an expert in everything and it's foolish to expect them to be.
The reality is that most of the companies would actually run better and make more money if not for idiots in charge.
You can say that about every job. Your company would do better if you were better at your job too. My company would be better if I were better at my job. That is always true in every job.
Any time the boss isn't around the company things work smoother and clients are more satisfied.
Sounds like you should be polishing your resume if your management is so incompetent.
There are new reactor designs that haven't even been built yet
Which means they are nothing more than an unproven idea whose flaws have yet to be uncovered.
that are inherently safer than the current generation, and that are much less complex designs
I'm sure they are safer. But marginal gains in safety unfortunately aren't enough. They still have a meaningful chance of catastrophic radiation release and that is even assuming they work perfectly as designed. If there is a manufacturing flaw or an engineering flaw then the risk is multi-fold worse. We have no reactor design that solves this problem even in principle much less in practice. So far it is a problem with fission that has proven to be irreducible.
Then there's using Thorium instead of Uranium. All would be better than the current generation of reactors.
Thorium is fine but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with using fission as a power source. The problem is that we have no way to be completely certain that catastrophic failure and accompanying radiation release is impossible. We have no known reactor design that can safeguard against this possibility. It's the fatal flaw in the technology. Add on the fact that fission also creates a pretty nasty waste disposal problem and it's pretty easy to see why the technology hasn't progressed further.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.
It's not a question of whether or not someone likes Apple.
Sure it is. Otherwise he wouldn't get any pleasure out of making snarky comments about how some feature in an Apple product was done somewhere else first despite the fact that very few people actually care.
Many of the "all new, we just created this and it's never been seen before!" additions to iOS have been blatant rip-offs of features in use for Android for months, if not years before Apple claims it is "all new".
Yeah yeah, Apple doesn't do anything new. Blah blah blah. Old argument. Here's the thing. Whether or not Apple is first to market with a given feature is more or less irrelevant. Very few people care if Apple or Samsung or HTC actually put the feature in a product first. What matters is A) whether that feature matters to a potential buyer enough to make them buy the product and B) whether the feature matters as a part of the entire product. I don't buy my phone piecemeal. I buy a phone with the best implemented SET of features. Worrying about who did it first is irrelevant.
It's the exact sort of crap that Apple would have sued for if the roles were reversed.
Really? What's stopping the Android handset makers from suing? You aren't going to argue that they are a bunch of nice guys who just wouldn't do that... because that would be ridiculous. I assure you Samsung will sue just as readily as Apple will. Two things there. First, Apple isn't as trigger-happy with lawsuits as you seem to imply and second, Android makers take ideas from Apple and vice-versa all the time. There are no innocent parties here.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're "on the inside", you have no way of determining what the sales figures actually are.
You mean except for the publicly available financial statements and copious public data about sales?
Yeah we have plenty of information about how many smartphones are selling and who is selling them. It's not some closely guarded secret.
Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7.
PCs held on to Dsub parallel and serial ports and PS/2 ports and floppy drives for many years after Apple kicked them to the curb. Blackberry kept making physical keyboards long after the market proved that most buyers don't care about them. Just because everyone else didn't follow Apple one year later doesn't really tell us much. It's going to take a few years for this to really play out. The other handset makers are going to be watching. If Apple sales remain strong you can bet that more of them will follow Apple's lead over time. No one should be surprised that there wasn't a stampede of removing the headphone jack in just one year.
Does anyone honestly think that Apple cares whether other companies drop the headphone jack on their phones?
Yes after a fashion. If Apple is wrong about their bet that people don't really care about the headphone jack then it will cost them business. If the other handset manufacturers follow Apple in removing the port then Apple's bet will pay off and they will continue on their merry way without the added cost and problems related to a headphone jack. If Apple turns out to be wrong and people stop or slow buying their phones because of that missing feature then you bet Apple will care.
So far it seems Apple is winning the bet because they are still selling huge numbers of smartphones and there seems to be little evidence that the lack of headphone jack is making more than a marginal dent in their business. You can be sure Apple is watching the situation but the longer things go without a drop in sales the more confident they will become about it.
Can Technology Prevent Cops From "Forgetting" To Turn On Their Body Cameras?
The title is missing some air quotes around "forgetting" because it's very unlikely that they forgot to do it. Only way they will stop "forgetting" is if there are real consequences with real teeth. Like all charges get thrown out, evidence inadmissible, suspension from job without pay, etc. Otherwise you are going to continue to see a rash of camera failures with curiously convenient timing to the benefit of the officer.
I can't remember the last time I saw anyone use AOL much less AIM. Got to be over a decade ago...
I've been flagging every as I could as "covering content".
You see ads? I have them all blocked and never see any. No I don't give a shit about slashdot's bad business model. I'd happily pay a subscription but they can't be bothered to give me the option. So fuck 'em and the ad networks they rode in on.
As others are saying, don't live in the Bay Area if you can't afford it.
So when are you planning to start paying all the people that have to work in the Bay Area salaries high enough to live there? You know like restaurant workers, garbage collectors, police and fire, school teachers, etc. Or did you just arrogantly forget about them and assume they should spend their every free hour commuting from somewhere near Nevada?
But, if you want housing that's affordable and not too far away, it's not impossible...There's the whole Central Valley within driving distance of the Bay Area. Sure, a 1-2 hour commute isn't ideal,
So you are saying there isn't affordable housing within a reasonable distance. Spending 4 hours per day in a car "isn't ideal"? That's one way to put it if you are incredibly out of touch with reality. Your salary had better WELL into six figures to justify spending that much of your life commuting. Any commute longer than an hour is just evidence of an incredibly broken and unfair urban planning system.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month
You can feed a person for that much. "Decently"? I would dispute that. They aren't going to starve if that's what you are saying but it won't be an ideal sort of diet.
Vegetables are universally-expensive--even frozen--although I don't put much stock in vegetables; I put more vegetables in stock.
Maybe if you get them at Whole Foods. Vegetables can be very economical if one bothers to shop carefully. Better yet you can even grow them yourself with some effort and seeds are incredibly cheap if you are willing/able to trade some time and effort tending them.
and we spend an utter assload (about 40%) on entertainment, luxury, and other discretionary spending, versus about 25% in the 50s.
Don't forget about the $2000 EVERY person in America (on average) pays to have a ludicrously oversized military, the $750 every person pays for interest on our national debt, the $1500 or so the government "borrows" from you from you every year to fund our government (none of which is in any danger of being paid back - and yes most US debt is borrowed from US citizens, not China) thanks to certain groups being unwilling to raise taxes to cover the bill, the $3000 that goes to social security, and another $3000 or so that goes to Medicare/Medicaid. Oh and those safety net programs the conservatives hate so much? They cost around $1000 per person every year per person - curiously barely more than the interest on the debt we pay every year to finance their aversion to taxes. Total those up and it works out to around $11-12,000 for every man, woman and child in the US on average (with a population of just over 300million). Pretty close to the total gross annual earnings of someone making minimum wage.
And in case you were wondering, NASA costs each of us approximately $60/year.
IQ is like height in basketball. The best basketball players aren't the tallest people in the world but they are all taller than average.
A very good analogy.
two people with high IQ will out-perform a single person of super high-IQ.
That statement is task dependent. For some tasks it is true and for others not so much. There also are failure modes that multiple people are subject to that an individual is not. Much like your previous statement, crowds often are smarter than individuals but not universally so in all cases.
Also, there have been lots of data collected on IQs and success.
That is contingent on what you define as "success". I'm familiar with some of the studies you are probably referring to but be careful with such generalizations.
Yeah, everything can be used for good or evil including snooping, but capitalism and greed often shift that equation in the direction of evil.
If nobody bothers to put up a fight then yes. But the evil that corporations do can be overcome. One only has to look at the number of regulations we have to see evidence that we can limit corporations. Corporations can be muzzled if enough people bother to care.
Google even mentioned the fact in their early days (do no evil). Then they started full scale snooping.
"Do no evil" was marketing from day one. Anyone who didn't realize that was either naive or an idiot. Google is an advertising company and has been from jump street. Anyone who didn't realize that they would behave with the incentives relevant to an advertising company was an idiot.
In reality, privacy is going to become a very rare commodity
It never was as common as people believed it was. A lot of stuff we thought was private in the past really wasn't. It just wasn't convenient to get the data. Now we actually have to do something about it rather than relying on the hope that others are lazy to protect our privacy. It will be an ongoing fight to balance privacy with other interests.
At least one manufacturer will see the marketing value of ''the car that does not spy on you'
More likely one manufacturer will TRY that marketing angle and then quickly figure out that very few people actually give half a shit about their privacy and abandon the attempt. The siren call of all that cash will simply be too much for them to resist for long.
Still driving my 22 year old Eclipse GSX with no onboard recording devices.
I drive WAY too much for that to be a realistic option for me. My current daily driver is a 2009 and I already have over 160,000 miles on it. If I were to keep it for 22 years at my current annual mileage I'd have over half a million miles on it at that point. It's a good vehicle but I have little confidence it will still be on the road after that much use. Mine doesn't transmit any data about my location either. I think it has an onboard black box but I'm not worried about that.
Very surprised people are going along with the 1984 snooping on everyone thing. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale.
Cautionary but complicated. I carry a smartphone because it adds significant value to my daily life. Yes it could in principle be used in a dystopian fashion but in reality it isn't. Like nuclear power or genetic engineering, the technology is neutral and whether it is a force for good or ill depends on how it is used. There are very positive benefits to tracking location and performance parameters of a vehicle. There also are some drawbacks. It's not all 1984 where everything has taken the worst possible outcome.
Get rid of that awful fucking iTunes software and let me access the phone like any normal USB device.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I opened iTunes on a desktop computer or synced my iPhone with it. That hasn't been a requirement for years.
As for using it as a USB device, I feel you but doubt it is going to happen any time soon.
Maybe stop changing arbitrary definitions.
Why? If the definitions already were arbitrary then what's wrong with changing them to a different variety of arbitrary? Especially if the new definition makes more sense. We're talking about taxonomy here, not some law of physics.
Frankly the term planet is probably too broad to be super useful by itself. It's kind of like a genus for space objects and we need to define the species. Jupiter and Earth are both considered planets but they aren't even remotely similar to each other aside from being big and round. Ganymede and Titan are both larger than Mercury and all of the dwarf planets. It's not entirely unreasonable to call them Moon Planets even if that seems a little odd to us currently.
People get WAY too attached to the word planet. It's just a word and it doesn't matter what we attach the word to as long as we are clear about what it means. If we want to call large moons a Moon Planet, why is that a problem so long as the definition is clear? We probably should call planets like Jupiter something different than planets like Earth. It's completely fine to have multiple categories of planets and I'm pretty sure we are going to find out that there are far weirder things in the universe than what is in our little solar system.
Is the coating itself safe? We come out with "magic" materials all the time and then predictably find out later on that they have all sorts of horribly toxic side effects. Getting all the ketchup out of the bottle falls pretty low on my list of things I give a shit about.
Stallman isn't taking credit for work he didn't do. Stallman is taking credit for work he did do; Stallman is taking credit for the GNU OS.
There is no GNU OS. Stallman didn't write the kernel. The kernel defines what OS it is. Ergo Stallman is trying to take credit for work he didn't do by pointing out that other work he didn't do (GNU - others wrote those tools too under the FSF aegis) was used to enable linux to be a useful product in some cases. It's not GNU/Linux as he claims. If linux didn't use any GNU tools it would still be linux.
Hole punch? Why?
Because I had one and they worked. Easiest and fastest way to do the job. Used a sharp knife a few times too. Scissors didn't really work great but could do in a pinch.
I still have a sheet of those little stickers you used to close the hole to write protect the disk lying around.
Now that is a questions worthy of a "why"? Just feeling sentimental? Worried that floppies might make a come back some day? Hoping they will increase in value? I just used some tape though I do remember the stickers. Got rid of all that crap decades ago though.
I thought Android is *not* Linux? At least that's what one of my Android text books says.
Just because someone wrote something in a book doesn't automatically make it true. Books are not necessarily authoritative sources and I can provide you lots of examples of books getting "facts" very, very wrong. This evidently is one of them.
It uses the Linux kernel...
Then it is linux in addition to whatever else it is. The kernel above all else defines which operating system you are using.
but is not the same operating system that is commonly referred to as "Linux" i.e. GNU-Linux.
It's a variant of linux but not the only one. GNU/Linux is really not a single system but rather a marketing attempt by Richard Stallman to use work he and some others did to take credit for work they didn't do. There is no single one-true-linux. Any system that uses the linux kernal as its base is some variant of linux.
Android has major differences with Linux.
Android is linux as long as it uses the linux kernel. Change the kernel and you can call it something else.
I wish MBAs were judged by their ability to support and enable coworkers to achieve a common goal.
That sentence is a non-sequitur. A MBA is a college degree, not a class of people. Having a MBA doesn't grant anyone magical armor to prevent their job performance critically evaluated.
Presumably you are using MBA as a trite shorthand for someone in management who studied business in college. Guess what? They ARE judged on their ability to do exactly what you suggest. Managers who fail to support and enable co-workers to do their job generally suck at their job and generally are rewarded accordingly no different than any other job. Having an engineering degree doesn't grant one magical powers of intelligence and competence nor does it mean they are good at engineering. Some people with MBA diplomas are very good at their job. A bunch more are mediocre and some really suck. Same as with any other type of degree and job.
The one thing most managers fail to understand that most people if given a goal and all the things they need to accomplish that goal will work steadily toward it.
Many people are like that but not all. If you've managed groups of people you would know that for every motivated and hard working person out there there is a malingerer who wants a paycheck but doesn't really want to do any work. I can't put numbers to it beyond saying that the percent of the population that will be lazy and uncaring given the chance is in double digit percentages. This is particularly true if the job that needs to be done is boring, hard, dirty, or tiring.
I don't know if you've had the pleasure of dealing with fraudulent worker's comp claims. I have. You'd be amazed the lengths to which some people will go to avoid work. Many more don't take it that far but there are plenty more who do just enough to get by. Just because you make a goal doesn't mean everybody is going to be inspired by it. I've had to fire plenty of people who would much rather watch youtube videos on their phone than do their job. Maybe that means I'm not the best manager but more likely it just means that those were people who really just don't care.
If you have to drive them something is very wrong.
Not necessarily. Let's take McDonalds for example. I think we'd agree that it is a successful business. I think we'd also agree that it's not the most pleasant place to work. Pay is low, the work is tiring and boring, and your co-workers are rarely bright and motivated. Goals? Most of the workers don't care much about the goals of the company. Turnover in that company is over 100% per year. And yet they are very successful despite having a largely unmotivated workforce that turns over constantly. The people that work there want a paycheck and they harness that, deal with it, and drive their workforce to do what is needed. For the most part your typical McDonalds worker doesn't give a shit about any goal you put in front of them. They are there out of necessity and are not true believers. And that's ok as long as you know what to expect from them and build the business accordingly.
Like a sports team, the manager of the team can rarely accomplish what the athletes can. The manager may have been a great athlete in their past, but usually they were not.
And few of the athletes can accomplish what the manager can if he's decent at his job. That works both ways. Different skill sets are required for both jobs. Management rarely gets to their position by being incompetent know-nothings. They got that job because they have specific skills just like every other team member. It's not that the manager is less talented than his team, it's that he has a different set of talents to bring to the table. Each team member focuses on their role and the whole thing works. The role of the manager is to remove obstacles and keep all the parts of the team coordinated and on task.
I have yet to meet someone in upper management who knows more than his underlings.
Right... All those upper management people got there by being know-nothing idiots... [/sarcasm]
Yes you probably know more about your specific job than anyone else does. Guess what? The same is usually true for everyone in the company including management. And people don't generally get to management jobs without having a pretty good clue how things work. Management doesn't need to know every nuanced detail about how to do everything in the company. That's why they hire other people. It doesn't mean they are clueless, it means they don't have the time to do everything themselves and/or that they can hire someone who is better at a given task then they are.
Basically a smart manager hires people who are smarter than they are whenever possible. The guy in charge doesn't have to be the smartest guy in the room at all times. He just has to be the guy who can figure out who the smartest guy is for a given task (or the most economical person) and take obstacles out of their way. I have a staff of about a dozen people that report to me. For the most part I try to let them do their job without me bothering them. In some cases I actually can do their job better than they can but it would stupid of me to try because I don't have the time. That was why I hired them - I needed the help. In other cases they do their job better than I can so my job is simply to make sure they aren't interfered with. That was also why I hired them - they are better than me at those tasks. Nobody is an expert in everything and it's foolish to expect them to be.
The reality is that most of the companies would actually run better and make more money if not for idiots in charge.
You can say that about every job. Your company would do better if you were better at your job too. My company would be better if I were better at my job. That is always true in every job.
Any time the boss isn't around the company things work smoother and clients are more satisfied.
Sounds like you should be polishing your resume if your management is so incompetent.
There are new reactor designs that haven't even been built yet
Which means they are nothing more than an unproven idea whose flaws have yet to be uncovered.
that are inherently safer than the current generation, and that are much less complex designs
I'm sure they are safer. But marginal gains in safety unfortunately aren't enough. They still have a meaningful chance of catastrophic radiation release and that is even assuming they work perfectly as designed. If there is a manufacturing flaw or an engineering flaw then the risk is multi-fold worse. We have no reactor design that solves this problem even in principle much less in practice. So far it is a problem with fission that has proven to be irreducible.
Then there's using Thorium instead of Uranium. All would be better than the current generation of reactors.
Thorium is fine but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with using fission as a power source. The problem is that we have no way to be completely certain that catastrophic failure and accompanying radiation release is impossible. We have no known reactor design that can safeguard against this possibility. It's the fatal flaw in the technology. Add on the fact that fission also creates a pretty nasty waste disposal problem and it's pretty easy to see why the technology hasn't progressed further.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.
It's not a question of whether or not someone likes Apple.
Sure it is. Otherwise he wouldn't get any pleasure out of making snarky comments about how some feature in an Apple product was done somewhere else first despite the fact that very few people actually care.
Many of the "all new, we just created this and it's never been seen before!" additions to iOS have been blatant rip-offs of features in use for Android for months, if not years before Apple claims it is "all new".
Yeah yeah, Apple doesn't do anything new. Blah blah blah. Old argument. Here's the thing. Whether or not Apple is first to market with a given feature is more or less irrelevant. Very few people care if Apple or Samsung or HTC actually put the feature in a product first. What matters is A) whether that feature matters to a potential buyer enough to make them buy the product and B) whether the feature matters as a part of the entire product. I don't buy my phone piecemeal. I buy a phone with the best implemented SET of features. Worrying about who did it first is irrelevant.
It's the exact sort of crap that Apple would have sued for if the roles were reversed.
Really? What's stopping the Android handset makers from suing? You aren't going to argue that they are a bunch of nice guys who just wouldn't do that... because that would be ridiculous. I assure you Samsung will sue just as readily as Apple will. Two things there. First, Apple isn't as trigger-happy with lawsuits as you seem to imply and second, Android makers take ideas from Apple and vice-versa all the time. There are no innocent parties here.