Cursive is... pretty. That's about it. And that's when you can still read it clearly.
As long as people don't lose the ability to read it, it doesn't matter if they can't write it. There's plenty of ways to be expressive in handwriting style, and people who want to use handwriting in that way will put the effort in and develop the skill. I'm certain that people will find value in this and will do it on their own.
This will still be true even if many people do not do it, because the people who wouldn't be bothered to learn it on their own would not have been the people to use it in real life anyway.
There's no need to waste scholastic resources teaching this to kids, especially when there are so many other things that they need to learn that are more important.
Ok, then, at what point will a customer say "This is small enough/too small, and I would like to keep miniaturizing the electronics while keeping the chassis the same size, and could you please add battery life, because I'd like to use this all day on a charge (this time fo realz)?
It's like a video game where you keep powering up one attribute every time you can, and never upgrade anything else. At some point, you reach a point in the game where you can't do what you need to do unless you start dumping points into neglected attributes. To my way of thinking, the market has been selecting singlemindedly, and maybe they've been right up til now, but at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you can start putting resources to better use elsewhere.
Sure, of course. But that's precisely my point. Consumers select for weight/portability, not for battery life. It's not that the battery life problem can't be solved, it's that the market (apparently) doesn't want the solution.
Some day, we'll have 4oz. laptops, and people will still complain that they don't fold up into a subspace pocket dimension when they're not needed. And the battery life will still be 90-180 minutes. And people living in this future world will be incapable of lugging a, say, 2-lb laptop that could offer them a 480 minute battery.
If laptops were still 2 inches thick, and you crammed battery into as much of that two inches as you could, and the rest of it was ultra-modern, high-performance architecture that they can now cram into sub-1", we'd have no complaints about battery life. Just some ugly-ass fat laptops that would Fucking Rule(tm) for 16 hours on a charge. Imagine a 2-lb ultaportable with a 5-lb battery.
We don't need to focus on improving battery life; we need to focus on designing laptops so that thinner and lighter doesn't always win out, forcing a sacrifice in battery size as a consequence. Or we need to focus on getting Marketing to convince markets that shrinking every year isn't necessarily in their best interests after all, or at least isn't the only way to go.
If there's truly a market for long battery life, it could be served in this way. So, why isn't it?
NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.
Everything else is moot if we let that happen.
Unfortunately Congress is more concerned with steroids in baseball. Sometimes I think we deserve to become extinct.
If we just gave enough steroids to the baseball players, they could probably hit any threatening meteors, asteroids, or comets out of the solar system, thereby solving both problems.
...who the idiots were who conceived of this study;-)
A person who is always wrong is completely useless. A person who is always right, but is a jerk, is useful, so of course you'd put up with him being a jerk. But in real life, no one is ever always right or always wrong. There are competent people and incompetent people, but even competent people make mistakes or are wrong from time to time. I'd rather deal with someone who is pleasant, and I'd rather deal with someone who is correct more often than not. But if someone's a jerk and right more often than someone who's nicer, but still right a fair amount of the time, I might prefer the nicer person. Working with nicer people is generally more pleasant and more productive.
People learn more the more they do stuff, and the nicer a person is, the more people are willing not just to work with them, but to teach them things. If someone is a jerk and an idiot, I have no desire to help them, and will do everything I can to route around them or get rid of them. If someone is nice and an idiot, I tend to give them a chance to learn whatever I can help them to understand better, and in time they may end up becoming more useful. Perhaps not as useful as someone who has a strong natural aptitude for the subject, but perhaps useful enough to retain in the organization. If not, they get let go too.
Lower latency isn't necessarily better. As long as latency is belong a certain threshhold, it's fine. Trading off the capability of a modern console vs. the capability of a vintage console, I'll take the modern console any day.
Gameplay style, on the other hand, is a different matter. The modern games I enjoy playing the most are the ones they classify as "retro". Mega Man 9, Geometry Wars, Pac Man Championship Edition, etc. You could port most of these games to Atari 2600, Colecovision, or NES, and still have a recognizable, full-featured version (or close), but the improvements in graphical polish that I see on retro games compared to the original generation that inspired them still gives the modern games the edge, in my opinion. Modern remakes of classics are some of my favorites.
Flash does notify me when there's an update available. I'm confused as to what more is needed, other than a truly secure Flash, and a secure environment to run it in.
I don't know why anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Pen and paper isn't worse, it's a different medium. It's a far richer medium, as well, with fewer restrictions on what can be done. If you want to have a social experiment, pen/paper or live-action are really a better experience for the participants than an mmorpg is.
Despite not understanding the article, the grandparent managed to translate it into mmorpg-speak pretty darn accurately. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I thought that was remarkable.
But then, "impossible planet" is probably also a poor choice of words (I'm not clear as to whose). But clearly, it's not impossible if it really is out there. It's interesting, and perhaps currently doesn't make sense based on what we believe we know about planets and stars, but not impossible. Either our model is wrong, or our measurements are wrong; the universe is right.
If we think something is "impossible" and we're looking right at it, that's our problem. Hopefully, with more measurements, more thought, and more information, we'll be able to resolve that problem.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
To be fair, I did not accuse scientists of being presumptuous. Rather, I asked for a quantification of how presumptuous the claims are, based on the data and the methods that we currently have. If anyone's actually being presumptuous, it's more likely either the science journalists or the slasdot editors.
I meant to point out that if you take a moment to think about it, these claims are likely tentative, based on what they currently can tell to the best of their ability; not solid, final and authorative. But it seems that a lot of people who have responded thought I was accusing scientists of jumping to conclusions.
Why do you think physicists need to visit a planet to be able to make reliable measurements about them?
I'm not saying that, exactly; I'm saying that when we measure things, we have greater confidence in them when we have multiple ways of measuring, and they all agree.
Visiting and making more direct observations would be such a way; I can't really think of any others, since I'm not actually a scientist.
But it seems to me that if we had multiple independent confirmations of the observation, using different methodologies, and they all agreed, we'd be much more confident in the interpretations and conclusions.
I like the idea that depressed people can have deeper thoughts than everyone else just by calling them some fancy name. I bet that helps them feel better about how shitty their lives are. It's no wonder that Thesaurus and Therapy both start with TH. THPBBBPPP!
How presumptuous is it for these physicists to make claims about exoplanets, when no one has been able to visit them to confirm anything that our measurements are telling us *might* be out there? How confident is astrophysics in what they're seeing and interpreting?
Slashdot Mirror
Cursive is... pretty. That's about it. And that's when you can still read it clearly.
As long as people don't lose the ability to read it, it doesn't matter if they can't write it. There's plenty of ways to be expressive in handwriting style, and people who want to use handwriting in that way will put the effort in and develop the skill. I'm certain that people will find value in this and will do it on their own.
This will still be true even if many people do not do it, because the people who wouldn't be bothered to learn it on their own would not have been the people to use it in real life anyway.
There's no need to waste scholastic resources teaching this to kids, especially when there are so many other things that they need to learn that are more important.
Ok, then, at what point will a customer say "This is small enough/too small, and I would like to keep miniaturizing the electronics while keeping the chassis the same size, and could you please add battery life, because I'd like to use this all day on a charge (this time fo realz)?
It's like a video game where you keep powering up one attribute every time you can, and never upgrade anything else. At some point, you reach a point in the game where you can't do what you need to do unless you start dumping points into neglected attributes. To my way of thinking, the market has been selecting singlemindedly, and maybe they've been right up til now, but at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you can start putting resources to better use elsewhere.
Sure, of course. But that's precisely my point. Consumers select for weight/portability, not for battery life. It's not that the battery life problem can't be solved, it's that the market (apparently) doesn't want the solution.
Some day, we'll have 4oz. laptops, and people will still complain that they don't fold up into a subspace pocket dimension when they're not needed. And the battery life will still be 90-180 minutes. And people living in this future world will be incapable of lugging a, say, 2-lb laptop that could offer them a 480 minute battery.
But it's not 200% of the weight of the laptop that they owned 5, 7, or 10 years ago, which they were willing to lug around everywhere.
If laptops were still 2 inches thick, and you crammed battery into as much of that two inches as you could, and the rest of it was ultra-modern, high-performance architecture that they can now cram into sub-1", we'd have no complaints about battery life. Just some ugly-ass fat laptops that would Fucking Rule(tm) for 16 hours on a charge. Imagine a 2-lb ultaportable with a 5-lb battery.
We don't need to focus on improving battery life; we need to focus on designing laptops so that thinner and lighter doesn't always win out, forcing a sacrifice in battery size as a consequence. Or we need to focus on getting Marketing to convince markets that shrinking every year isn't necessarily in their best interests after all, or at least isn't the only way to go.
If there's truly a market for long battery life, it could be served in this way. So, why isn't it?
Sorry, that's just what happens when you contract Knight Rider Technologies as your marketing consultant.
Someone should pop a CAP in their ASS. Just sayin'.
NASA should be spending most - if not all - of its budget preparing to avert a comet/asteroid from hitting earth.
Everything else is moot if we let that happen.
Unfortunately Congress is more concerned with steroids in baseball.
Sometimes I think we deserve to become extinct.
If we just gave enough steroids to the baseball players, they could probably hit any threatening meteors, asteroids, or comets out of the solar system, thereby solving both problems.
The city sewage treatment plant has announced that everybody owns their own flushings.
...who the idiots were who conceived of this study ;-)
A person who is always wrong is completely useless. A person who is always right, but is a jerk, is useful, so of course you'd put up with him being a jerk. But in real life, no one is ever always right or always wrong. There are competent people and incompetent people, but even competent people make mistakes or are wrong from time to time. I'd rather deal with someone who is pleasant, and I'd rather deal with someone who is correct more often than not. But if someone's a jerk and right more often than someone who's nicer, but still right a fair amount of the time, I might prefer the nicer person. Working with nicer people is generally more pleasant and more productive.
People learn more the more they do stuff, and the nicer a person is, the more people are willing not just to work with them, but to teach them things. If someone is a jerk and an idiot, I have no desire to help them, and will do everything I can to route around them or get rid of them. If someone is nice and an idiot, I tend to give them a chance to learn whatever I can help them to understand better, and in time they may end up becoming more useful. Perhaps not as useful as someone who has a strong natural aptitude for the subject, but perhaps useful enough to retain in the organization. If not, they get let go too.
10 Submit $MYAPPLICATION
20 GOTO 10
Lower latency isn't necessarily better. As long as latency is belong a certain threshhold, it's fine. Trading off the capability of a modern console vs. the capability of a vintage console, I'll take the modern console any day.
Gameplay style, on the other hand, is a different matter. The modern games I enjoy playing the most are the ones they classify as "retro". Mega Man 9, Geometry Wars, Pac Man Championship Edition, etc. You could port most of these games to Atari 2600, Colecovision, or NES, and still have a recognizable, full-featured version (or close), but the improvements in graphical polish that I see on retro games compared to the original generation that inspired them still gives the modern games the edge, in my opinion. Modern remakes of classics are some of my favorites.
Flash does notify me when there's an update available. I'm confused as to what more is needed, other than a truly secure Flash, and a secure environment to run it in.
I'm holding out for the porn version, Genital Horse Spittle.
Great donkey scenes.
Notice that Google is not having "Screw Microsoft" meetings in DC
I'd be very surprised at Google if they did this... What did they spend all that time creating Wave for?
4. Evolve ability to metabolize plastic.
5. ???
6. Profit!
I don't know why anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Pen and paper isn't worse, it's a different medium. It's a far richer medium, as well, with fewer restrictions on what can be done. If you want to have a social experiment, pen/paper or live-action are really a better experience for the participants than an mmorpg is.
Despite not understanding the article, the grandparent managed to translate it into mmorpg-speak pretty darn accurately. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I thought that was remarkable.
Knowing how quickly the roads in my city turn into potholes, the upkeep on this is something I can't even fathom.
Agreed; my word choice could have been better.
But then, "impossible planet" is probably also a poor choice of words (I'm not clear as to whose). But clearly, it's not impossible if it really is out there. It's interesting, and perhaps currently doesn't make sense based on what we believe we know about planets and stars, but not impossible. Either our model is wrong, or our measurements are wrong; the universe is right.
If we think something is "impossible" and we're looking right at it, that's our problem. Hopefully, with more measurements, more thought, and more information, we'll be able to resolve that problem.
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
To be fair, I did not accuse scientists of being presumptuous. Rather, I asked for a quantification of how presumptuous the claims are, based on the data and the methods that we currently have. If anyone's actually being presumptuous, it's more likely either the science journalists or the slasdot editors.
I meant to point out that if you take a moment to think about it, these claims are likely tentative, based on what they currently can tell to the best of their ability; not solid, final and authorative. But it seems that a lot of people who have responded thought I was accusing scientists of jumping to conclusions.
Why do you think physicists need to visit a planet to be able to make reliable measurements about them?
I'm not saying that, exactly; I'm saying that when we measure things, we have greater confidence in them when we have multiple ways of measuring, and they all agree.
Visiting and making more direct observations would be such a way; I can't really think of any others, since I'm not actually a scientist.
But it seems to me that if we had multiple independent confirmations of the observation, using different methodologies, and they all agreed, we'd be much more confident in the interpretations and conclusions.
I like the idea that depressed people can have deeper thoughts than everyone else just by calling them some fancy name. I bet that helps them feel better about how shitty their lives are. It's no wonder that Thesaurus and Therapy both start with TH. THPBBBPPP!
How presumptuous is it for these physicists to make claims about exoplanets, when no one has been able to visit them to confirm anything that our measurements are telling us *might* be out there? How confident is astrophysics in what they're seeing and interpreting?
So then I go and check your History Block blocklist while you're away from keyboard, and you're still hosed.