I live in one of those "lucky big cities": Washington, DC. It takes me 45 minutes to travel the 1.6 miles to work if I use public transportation, and the roundtrip fare is $6.40 ($1.60 each way, and Metro is 50% subsidized). The subway here breaks down constantly, and is rather unpleasant -- people shit on the escalators (http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2013/05/metro-pooper.html happened yesterday), for instance.
Perhaps mass transit works better other places -- I'm sure that in (picking a city at random) Frankfurt it is more pleasant than here. But mass transit is not a land of faeries and rainbow-pooping unicorns.
Because there are lots of other things that impair your ability to drive: driving while tired, for instance. Should we not let people drive unless they've had enough sleep? At some point you have to let people make their own decisions.
Yes, this exactly. I'm the one reading it, and if I'm too lazy to resize my damn browser then it's my own fault if it's hard to read. Does the whole "line too long slows down reading" problem really cause that much of a problem? When I was writing my thesis (writing LaTeX in vim) I had the font size set to something small and the vi window fullscreened, because I needed as much damn text on the screen at once so I could refer back and forth to equations and text and so on. Imagine trying this in MS Word! "Nope, you've got the margins set to XYZ, that's all you can see at once!"
One is that the designer (of a website, of an operating system, of whatever) knows best and you don't have any special circumstances ever, and that you should just take whatever beautifully-crafted creation he gives you and use it as is.
This is the mentality behind Apple and Windows 8.
The other mentality puts value on flexibility, and claims that there is no way the designer can predict everything that a user wants a piece of software to do, or every way in which a user wants to view a website. They design things to have sensible defaults but as much customization as is practical, and allow the user to make her own choices. The original HTML did this: rather than tyrannically specifying precisely how a page should look, it specified what it should contain, and let the combination of the user and renderer determine how it should look.
This is the mentality behind Linux.
Optimal column width is not that big of a deal -- you say "something in the area of", and then a range with 50% uncertainty. I can resize my browser from full screen width to half width with one key shortcut (in KDE, not sure if OSX can do this, but it should if it can't); isn't that enough to get "close enough"?
No, because I don't foresee the ability to generate data that fast. What am I going to do, upload uncompressed 4K video signals in realtime, taken with a lens the size of a pinhead?
What I'd rather have is stability. I would be far happier with 256kbps with low, stable pings (and no packet loss) than 8Mbps that sometimes works and constantly dropped and unintelligible calls.
... I can't even reliably place voice calls in most of Washington DC, since so many frames are dropped that it's hard to understand the other party. I have 4G in places, 3G in most, and when it works it's pretty fast... if you measure "bits transmitted per ten seconds". But there is a lot more to data service than that: if all I cared about was bandwidth I'd sneakernet CF cards around. But omg speed!" is not what cellphones lack now. It's stability. Fix that, and then we can talk about speed.
It's a thing with a huge amount of content, in a pleasant, elegant, and readable form. Yes, it's mostly just plaintext. So?
The modern equivalent I think is reddit, which is similarly barebones -- just a bunch of text, and people writing text in response to text -- but it clearly works.
Ownership of (enough) heroin is also an instant felony. Never mind that heroin has to be smuggled in from overseas, and a junkie requires a continuous supply -- there are lots of junkies around.
The reason that Europe has drastically less gun crime than the US has much less to do with the differences between European and American law and much more to do with the differences between Europeans and Americans.
2. Have a botnet that you put to work mining bitcoins using other peoples electricity.
Which, legalities aside, will quickly make the production of bitcoins more expensive than any currency ever developed; And it's designed to continue to use resources up like a cancer. The Native Americans once said "Only after the white man has killed every buffalo, and cut down every tree. Only then, will the white man learn he cannot eat money." They probably didn't realize at the time that the siren call of 'digital' currency would result in the creation of a cancerous monetary system that attaches itself directly to the nervous system of society: Our energy grid.
Yes, this is exactly the point. The bitcoin system is designed to make the production of bitcoins far more expensive than their value. This doesn't mean that people will "continue to use resources like a cancer" -- if those resources are accurately priced, then people will simply stop using them to mine bitcoins. If the cost of electricity (in dollars) is drastically below the cost of electricity to society, then that's not a problem with people using electricity; it's the result of market-breaking subsidies to the production of electricity (like the failure to account for the environmental costs of burning coal). You can't blame bitcoin miners for the fact that electricity is artificially cheap.
But, even with an artificially depressed cost of electricity, eventually the cost of mining a bitcoin will be more than the value of a bitcoin. The "white man" isn't going to "kill every buffalo, cut down every tree, and try to eat money" at that point; he'll simply stop mining bitcoins and do something else (and, perhaps, use bitcoins as the medium of exchange for them).
Bitcoin doesn't depend on exponentially increasing our energy supply; only the continued mining of the things does.
I don't think our current financial system is fatally broken, so I'm not a bitcoin-nut. But the idea behind the thing is not as bad as you describe.
I know people who own guns and use them as penis magnification devices. I know people who own guns and who are kind, considerate, humble people. I know people who don't own guns and who are giant arrogant dicks. I know people who don't own guns and who are kind people.
1) Anybody can turn off the safety on a pistol, but you need the right fingerprints to fire one of these things, and
2) It is probably substantially more likely to not work as advertised, add to the cost of the weapon, or generally be a pain in the ass than a mechanical safety.
The definitions of words aren't officially set by anyone (at least, not in the English language). Society very much does have the ability to define marriage as it sees fit, but here "society" means loose, voluntary associations of people. If two ladies want to do some ritual in a church, exchange rings, and then call themselves married, and their social environment (friends, family, relations, etc.) decides to also call them "married", then for that segment of society the word "married" means, among other things, the relationship that they have. Nobody has been forced to do anything; the evangelicals don't have to refer to them as "married" if they don't want. A language is nothing more than a set of mutually agreed-upon meanings of words; you don't have to describe the ladies as married, even if people around you agree to do so. You can call them whatever you like, but you can also call a chicken "pollo" if you like.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard some viola players that I've wondered about...
Let your buddy drive?
I live in one of those "lucky big cities": Washington, DC. It takes me 45 minutes to travel the 1.6 miles to work if I use public transportation, and the roundtrip fare is $6.40 ($1.60 each way, and Metro is 50% subsidized). The subway here breaks down constantly, and is rather unpleasant -- people shit on the escalators (http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2013/05/metro-pooper.html happened yesterday), for instance.
Perhaps mass transit works better other places -- I'm sure that in (picking a city at random) Frankfurt it is more pleasant than here. But mass transit is not a land of faeries and rainbow-pooping unicorns.
Where is this?
Because there are lots of other things that impair your ability to drive: driving while tired, for instance. Should we not let people drive unless they've had enough sleep? At some point you have to let people make their own decisions.
Yes, this exactly. I'm the one reading it, and if I'm too lazy to resize my damn browser then it's my own fault if it's hard to read. Does the whole "line too long slows down reading" problem really cause that much of a problem? When I was writing my thesis (writing LaTeX in vim) I had the font size set to something small and the vi window fullscreened, because I needed as much damn text on the screen at once so I could refer back and forth to equations and text and so on. Imagine trying this in MS Word! "Nope, you've got the margins set to XYZ, that's all you can see at once!"
There are two opposing mentalities here.
One is that the designer (of a website, of an operating system, of whatever) knows best and you don't have any special circumstances ever, and that you should just take whatever beautifully-crafted creation he gives you and use it as is.
This is the mentality behind Apple and Windows 8.
The other mentality puts value on flexibility, and claims that there is no way the designer can predict everything that a user wants a piece of software to do, or every way in which a user wants to view a website. They design things to have sensible defaults but as much customization as is practical, and allow the user to make her own choices. The original HTML did this: rather than tyrannically specifying precisely how a page should look, it specified what it should contain, and let the combination of the user and renderer determine how it should look.
This is the mentality behind Linux.
Optimal column width is not that big of a deal -- you say "something in the area of", and then a range with 50% uncertainty. I can resize my browser from full screen width to half width with one key shortcut (in KDE, not sure if OSX can do this, but it should if it can't); isn't that enough to get "close enough"?
I'd be okay with that so long as motorists are allowed to, in turn, shit all over the bands used by radar guns.
No, because I don't foresee the ability to generate data that fast. What am I going to do, upload uncompressed 4K video signals in realtime, taken with a lens the size of a pinhead?
What I'd rather have is stability. I would be far happier with 256kbps with low, stable pings (and no packet loss) than 8Mbps that sometimes works and constantly dropped and unintelligible calls.
... I can't even reliably place voice calls in most of Washington DC, since so many frames are dropped that it's hard to understand the other party. I have 4G in places, 3G in most, and when it works it's pretty fast ... if you measure "bits transmitted per ten seconds". But there is a lot more to data service than that: if all I cared about was bandwidth I'd sneakernet CF cards around. But omg speed!" is not what cellphones lack now. It's stability. Fix that, and then we can talk about speed.
Here's another:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
It's a thing with a huge amount of content, in a pleasant, elegant, and readable form. Yes, it's mostly just plaintext. So?
The modern equivalent I think is reddit, which is similarly barebones -- just a bunch of text, and people writing text in response to text -- but it clearly works.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't put money into it.
If only this were true. I point you, for the most recent and egregious example, to Windows 8.
If Google and Microsoft get into a DMCA slap-fight, then it will be hilarious for the rest of us.
So is it a sitcom that is gay and about asses, or an ass sitcom that is gay, or a sitcom about gay asses?
Ask Joseph Smith; his mor(m)ons apparently figured that out.
Windows 8 encourages the hell out of piracy -- it encourages people to pirate Windows 7.
Ownership of (enough) heroin is also an instant felony. Never mind that heroin has to be smuggled in from overseas, and a junkie requires a continuous supply -- there are lots of junkies around.
The reason that Europe has drastically less gun crime than the US has much less to do with the differences between European and American law and much more to do with the differences between Europeans and Americans.
Natural selection requires a thing that makes imperfect copies of itself. A camera sitting on the shelf doesn't do that.
Yes, this is exactly the point. The bitcoin system is designed to make the production of bitcoins far more expensive than their value. This doesn't mean that people will "continue to use resources like a cancer" -- if those resources are accurately priced, then people will simply stop using them to mine bitcoins. If the cost of electricity (in dollars) is drastically below the cost of electricity to society, then that's not a problem with people using electricity; it's the result of market-breaking subsidies to the production of electricity (like the failure to account for the environmental costs of burning coal). You can't blame bitcoin miners for the fact that electricity is artificially cheap.
But, even with an artificially depressed cost of electricity, eventually the cost of mining a bitcoin will be more than the value of a bitcoin. The "white man" isn't going to "kill every buffalo, cut down every tree, and try to eat money" at that point; he'll simply stop mining bitcoins and do something else (and, perhaps, use bitcoins as the medium of exchange for them).
Bitcoin doesn't depend on exponentially increasing our energy supply; only the continued mining of the things does.
I don't think our current financial system is fatally broken, so I'm not a bitcoin-nut. But the idea behind the thing is not as bad as you describe.
I know people who own guns and use them as penis magnification devices.
I know people who own guns and who are kind, considerate, humble people.
I know people who don't own guns and who are giant arrogant dicks.
I know people who don't own guns and who are kind people.
The guns really don't have much to do with it.
Because:
1) Anybody can turn off the safety on a pistol, but you need the right fingerprints to fire one of these things, and
2) It is probably substantially more likely to not work as advertised, add to the cost of the weapon, or generally be a pain in the ass than a mechanical safety.
Why, out of curiosity, would you worry about lead solder in a thing that fires lead bullets?
It tried to run, but as soon as they fired the starting pistol it just fell over. Someone called it a "flop".
Netcraft confirms, etc.
Yes. What else would it run?
The definitions of words aren't officially set by anyone (at least, not in the English language). Society very much does have the ability to define marriage as it sees fit, but here "society" means loose, voluntary associations of people. If two ladies want to do some ritual in a church, exchange rings, and then call themselves married, and their social environment (friends, family, relations, etc.) decides to also call them "married", then for that segment of society the word "married" means, among other things, the relationship that they have. Nobody has been forced to do anything; the evangelicals don't have to refer to them as "married" if they don't want. A language is nothing more than a set of mutually agreed-upon meanings of words; you don't have to describe the ladies as married, even if people around you agree to do so. You can call them whatever you like, but you can also call a chicken "pollo" if you like.