or has smartphone technology reached something of a plateau? I mean, I had a iPhone 3GS for years and I held off from upgrading until the 5 was released, thinking that there'd be a step change or paradigm shift of some sort. When the time came I left Apple because looking around it seemed that all of the top of the line handsets are basically the same. I don't exactly push the envelope with my phone useage, and despite what people say I don't know many that do. In terms of the core functionality and interface experience, I couldn't find much to choose between Apple, HTC, Nokia or Samsung.
The iPhone was fantastic back in the day. The touchscreen and build quality were a real step forward and set a new standard. But these day smartphones are just another part of the scenery. Any it's not as if they're really moving forwards. The handsets have gotten as small as they can practically be, and then bigger again. Most handsets use the same style screens. Sure, we get more processing power and what not, but seriously how many cores do you need to check e-mail and post to facebook?
I'm using a Lumia 900 right now. And I'n going to stick with it until the next device comes along that changes the game on the same scale as the iPhone 3G did.
Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
No. You have it backwards. Most recent literature is crap. Then again, most of the stuff that's ever been written is also crap. The difference between the works in the canon and the stuff that's getting published today is that over time it tends to be only the worthwhile material that endures. Mainly for this reason, if you pick up a book that's still in print after a long time then it's likely to be a lot better than a random contemporary book.
The idea that nobody listens to music over twenty years old is about a dumb as it's possible to get in a syntactically valid sentence.
What I'm getting at is that we don't sing songs glorifying the violent overthrow of the state. I'm not making a value judgement about revolutions - it all seems to have worked out quite well for you. But to take an example, the UK national anthem is a dirge about God saving the Queen (it's pure bullshit and pretty embarrassing on the rare occasion we win an international sporting event). Nobody takes it very seriously and you'll be hard pressed to find an Englishman who knows much more than the first verse.
Anyway, while we're all beseeching the almighty to take care of the monarchy, you guys are singing about bombs, rockets and the havoc of war. So whenever I see our government giving corrupt tax breaks to corporations I don't expect anyone to do anything about it because, you know, sure democracy is broken, but whatta ya gonna do? Whereas in the states its all 'hoist the red flag of revolution and let all men be free' one minute and choosing between scented and unscented lube at the airport the next.
This whole NSA thing is a good example. I can't go twenty minutes without being watched on CCTV in the UK, so I've always assumed that any privacy that I think I've got is an illusion. Freedom in the Uk is whatever the government allows you to do. But we're a bunch of serfs, obsessed with social class and mostly disinterested in civil liberties. What's your excuse?
Meh, that was some considerable time ago - and we just ended up with a kind of mini monarchy for a few years before reverting to the status quo (albeit with a few more constitutional restraints on the crown). Being a regicide has never been much of a badge of honour.
More recently, we kept the monarchy in the 18th century while the French were murdering their aristocracy, we had a general strike that didn't become a communist revolution and we flat out ignored the blackshirts who were agitating in the late 30s / early 40s.
As a Brit, I've always wondered about how you guys look back on the revolution. Since the US was created out of a revolutionary war you'd think that there could be no act that is more than in keeping with the spirit and founding principles of the republic than seeking to overthrow a government that has overstepped its bounds. But most of your 'patriotic' type pundits seem to view any form of anti-establishment sentiment as either communism or treason.
In the UK we've never really gone in for violent revolution, so I can understand why our national identity doesn't lend itself to direct action. But you guys are always going on about the glory of the republic and the benefits that you gained via armed struggle against the state. How do you keep those sort if ideas straight in your heads alongside the sort of 'my country, right or wrong' jingoism that has you reciting oaths of loyalty in school and so forth?
the potential for megadisaster, though incredibly low, is severe if it ever happens.
But the point is that whereas nuclear power might cause problems if something goes wrong, it seems that fossil fuels will certainly cause problems even if everything goes perfectly as planned.
The only renewable that I can see providing real power is wood - but people get upset by the idea of burning trees. Other than that we've just got to wait for someone to work out practical fusion energy generating - and fusion power is always only a few decades away!
The article that you link to in the Daily Mail panders to a peculiar kind of 'stupid american' stereotype that we Brits cling to when we want to feel better about the end of empire and the decline of our military and industrial might. You could replace the questions with ones of similar obscurity from British history and get a similar set of responses from a random selection of British folk. Try going out onto any street in the UK and asking the yokels about the 1689 Bill of Rights. Or get them to point to the location of the Battle of Trafalgar / Waterloo / Balaclava on a map.
The average guy on the street is just as ignorant everywhere in the world.
It's still a step in the right direction—it's no longer the police's word vs. the suspect's, but "the police officer says he was having convenient technical difficulties at the same time his account of the incident is in conflict with the suspect's." It looks worse in court, since police will be more than happy to produce video when they are innocent. This is much better than no camera at all.
Not good enough. Look at the conveniently broken recording hardware that was watching while the Metropolitan Police executed Charles de Menezes on the London Underground. The evidence disappeared and was barely mentioned in subsequent press reports. Unfortunately it is the case that state owned surveillance technology is used almost exclusively to prosecute citizens and rarely as a check on the police.
My favorite news story of all time comes from the Manchester Evening News [http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/cool-cash-card-confusion-1009701].
People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...
"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
Yes, but surely the point is that the stuff that Cameron's been doing is in a whole different league to Galileo slapping together a couple of lenses and discovering that the moons of Jupiter go around in circles or just sitting down and thinking about a cage of insects buzzing about in a box on board a ship.
In physics it's pretty much the case that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. The experimental stuff takes large amounts of money. The purely theoretical stuff gets picked over by an army of professional thinkers every day. If there were any obvious flaws in relativity or quantum mechanics then it's almost certain that someone would have spotted them by now. I'm not saying that there's never going to be another paradigm shift - but it isn't going to happen by way of some amateur demonstrating that, say, GR is invalid by watching a pendulum swinging in the back yard.. In fact, any serious advance in physics will probably be driven by experimental results - and these are expensive to produce.
The moral panic that broken out in the news lately would be funny if it wasn't so fucking frightening. But mainly though it pisses me off that all of this 'think of the children' bullshit or vague allusions to stopping terrorists passes unchallenged most of the time.
Behold this master plan by the Andrea Leadsom and the Mothers Union to stop teenagers looking at porn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515
Good luck with that! But while it's not going to work, it's a great excuse to get some extra control of the internet.
And yesterday, no less a person than the Deputy Childrens Commissioner for England was making the case for mobile interet censorship on the grounds that... and I'm not making this up... children in London routinely expect to be gang raped for hours in public parks by teenagers who've been watching porn on their phones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18422204
Right on. I set traps for all sorts of rodents and pests around my garden. I even used chemicals to kill an ant nest once. For no other reason than they were annoying me. If I could have got some better shampoo out of it then that would have just been a bonus.
But that isn't the claim. The claim is that the thermal insulation was displaced by the aircraft impact. This allowed the temperature of the steel to rise to the point where it was no longer able to support the loads. Who exactly called it 'half baked'? Can you provide that quote in context?
Have you considered that the reason that most people don't share your thoughts is not because they can't think for themselves, but is in fact due to the fact that you are delusional and the rest of us are sane?
Everything that you have written is noise. Does it annoy you that I won't buy into the crazy? Oooh, a quote from Einstein. You must be soooo profound. I notice that you just assume that I haven't investigated anything for myself because I haven't come to the same batshit insane conclusions that you have.
Do you listen to yourself when you speak. Nanothermite? Riiiight! Of course. No aircraft impact? Just how god damned determined to find hidden truths do you have to be to deny the eye witness accounts of.... You know what, just forget it. It's not the factual inaccuracies that bother me, its the fucking condecending attitude that you mentalists have towards anyone who disagrees with you. You make all these snide remarks that the truth "might ruin my day" and make out like you're privy to some mystical truth about the world that the rest of us idiots couldn't handle. Fuck you, sir.
Isn't that one of the key characterisrics of the middle class? Deferred gratification leading to inter generational wealth transfer is the reason why some of my friends have had houses bought for them by their parents.
I don't think this story has anything to do with technology - just the different attitudes to money that exist at various levels of society. On the other hand, this is a huge generalisation. I also have friends who are far less well off than I am who are carrying a fraction of what I am in unsecured debt due to their traditional working class aversion to borrowing money.
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I'd mod this up if I had points. Shavano, thou art righteous.
or has smartphone technology reached something of a plateau? I mean, I had a iPhone 3GS for years and I held off from upgrading until the 5 was released, thinking that there'd be a step change or paradigm shift of some sort. When the time came I left Apple because looking around it seemed that all of the top of the line handsets are basically the same. I don't exactly push the envelope with my phone useage, and despite what people say I don't know many that do. In terms of the core functionality and interface experience, I couldn't find much to choose between Apple, HTC, Nokia or Samsung.
The iPhone was fantastic back in the day. The touchscreen and build quality were a real step forward and set a new standard. But these day smartphones are just another part of the scenery. Any it's not as if they're really moving forwards. The handsets have gotten as small as they can practically be, and then bigger again. Most handsets use the same style screens. Sure, we get more processing power and what not, but seriously how many cores do you need to check e-mail and post to facebook?
I'm using a Lumia 900 right now. And I'n going to stick with it until the next device comes along that changes the game on the same scale as the iPhone 3G did.
Most literature no older than 100 years looks now dated and plain boring (yes, even golden classics). Music from 2 decades ago is mostly stuff that nobody listens anymore
No. You have it backwards. Most recent literature is crap. Then again, most of the stuff that's ever been written is also crap. The difference between the works in the canon and the stuff that's getting published today is that over time it tends to be only the worthwhile material that endures. Mainly for this reason, if you pick up a book that's still in print after a long time then it's likely to be a lot better than a random contemporary book.
The idea that nobody listens to music over twenty years old is about a dumb as it's possible to get in a syntactically valid sentence.
What I'm getting at is that we don't sing songs glorifying the violent overthrow of the state. I'm not making a value judgement about revolutions - it all seems to have worked out quite well for you. But to take an example, the UK national anthem is a dirge about God saving the Queen (it's pure bullshit and pretty embarrassing on the rare occasion we win an international sporting event). Nobody takes it very seriously and you'll be hard pressed to find an Englishman who knows much more than the first verse.
Anyway, while we're all beseeching the almighty to take care of the monarchy, you guys are singing about bombs, rockets and the havoc of war. So whenever I see our government giving corrupt tax breaks to corporations I don't expect anyone to do anything about it because, you know, sure democracy is broken, but whatta ya gonna do? Whereas in the states its all 'hoist the red flag of revolution and let all men be free' one minute and choosing between scented and unscented lube at the airport the next.
This whole NSA thing is a good example. I can't go twenty minutes without being watched on CCTV in the UK, so I've always assumed that any privacy that I think I've got is an illusion. Freedom in the Uk is whatever the government allows you to do. But we're a bunch of serfs, obsessed with social class and mostly disinterested in civil liberties. What's your excuse?
Meh, that was some considerable time ago - and we just ended up with a kind of mini monarchy for a few years before reverting to the status quo (albeit with a few more constitutional restraints on the crown). Being a regicide has never been much of a badge of honour.
More recently, we kept the monarchy in the 18th century while the French were murdering their aristocracy, we had a general strike that didn't become a communist revolution and we flat out ignored the blackshirts who were agitating in the late 30s / early 40s.
As a Brit, I've always wondered about how you guys look back on the revolution. Since the US was created out of a revolutionary war you'd think that there could be no act that is more than in keeping with the spirit and founding principles of the republic than seeking to overthrow a government that has overstepped its bounds. But most of your 'patriotic' type pundits seem to view any form of anti-establishment sentiment as either communism or treason.
In the UK we've never really gone in for violent revolution, so I can understand why our national identity doesn't lend itself to direct action. But you guys are always going on about the glory of the republic and the benefits that you gained via armed struggle against the state. How do you keep those sort if ideas straight in your heads alongside the sort of 'my country, right or wrong' jingoism that has you reciting oaths of loyalty in school and so forth?
the potential for megadisaster, though incredibly low, is severe if it ever happens.
But the point is that whereas nuclear power might cause problems if something goes wrong, it seems that fossil fuels will certainly cause problems even if everything goes perfectly as planned.
The only renewable that I can see providing real power is wood - but people get upset by the idea of burning trees. Other than that we've just got to wait for someone to work out practical fusion energy generating - and fusion power is always only a few decades away!
Why is there no option to mod -1 too informative.
The article that you link to in the Daily Mail panders to a peculiar kind of 'stupid american' stereotype that we Brits cling to when we want to feel better about the end of empire and the decline of our military and industrial might. You could replace the questions with ones of similar obscurity from British history and get a similar set of responses from a random selection of British folk. Try going out onto any street in the UK and asking the yokels about the 1689 Bill of Rights. Or get them to point to the location of the Battle of Trafalgar / Waterloo / Balaclava on a map.
The average guy on the street is just as ignorant everywhere in the world.
It's still a step in the right direction—it's no longer the police's word vs. the suspect's, but "the police officer says he was having convenient technical difficulties at the same time his account of the incident is in conflict with the suspect's." It looks worse in court, since police will be more than happy to produce video when they are innocent. This is much better than no camera at all.
Not good enough. Look at the conveniently broken recording hardware that was watching while the Metropolitan Police executed Charles de Menezes on the London Underground. The evidence disappeared and was barely mentioned in subsequent press reports. Unfortunately it is the case that state owned surveillance technology is used almost exclusively to prosecute citizens and rarely as a check on the police.
People think I'm making stuff up when I repeat this immortal quote from the story...
"..they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
Yes, but surely the point is that the stuff that Cameron's been doing is in a whole different league to Galileo slapping together a couple of lenses and discovering that the moons of Jupiter go around in circles or just sitting down and thinking about a cage of insects buzzing about in a box on board a ship.
In physics it's pretty much the case that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. The experimental stuff takes large amounts of money. The purely theoretical stuff gets picked over by an army of professional thinkers every day. If there were any obvious flaws in relativity or quantum mechanics then it's almost certain that someone would have spotted them by now. I'm not saying that there's never going to be another paradigm shift - but it isn't going to happen by way of some amateur demonstrating that, say, GR is invalid by watching a pendulum swinging in the back yard.. In fact, any serious advance in physics will probably be driven by experimental results - and these are expensive to produce.
The moral panic that broken out in the news lately would be funny if it wasn't so fucking frightening. But mainly though it pisses me off that all of this 'think of the children' bullshit or vague allusions to stopping terrorists passes unchallenged most of the time.
Behold this master plan by the Andrea Leadsom and the Mothers Union to stop teenagers looking at porn http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826515 Good luck with that! But while it's not going to work, it's a great excuse to get some extra control of the internet.
And yesterday, no less a person than the Deputy Childrens Commissioner for England was making the case for mobile interet censorship on the grounds that... and I'm not making this up... children in London routinely expect to be gang raped for hours in public parks by teenagers who've been watching porn on their phones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18422204
Yep. I could almost mod it +1 funny. Almost.
I heard that it was going to be transparent... and shoot laser beams.
Right on. I set traps for all sorts of rodents and pests around my garden. I even used chemicals to kill an ant nest once. For no other reason than they were annoying me. If I could have got some better shampoo out of it then that would have just been a bonus.
But that isn't the claim. The claim is that the thermal insulation was displaced by the aircraft impact. This allowed the temperature of the steel to rise to the point where it was no longer able to support the loads. Who exactly called it 'half baked'? Can you provide that quote in context?
http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=909017 That is all.
My friend, you included your own citation in your signature!
Have you considered that the reason that most people don't share your thoughts is not because they can't think for themselves, but is in fact due to the fact that you are delusional and the rest of us are sane?
Everything that you have written is noise. Does it annoy you that I won't buy into the crazy? Oooh, a quote from Einstein. You must be soooo profound. I notice that you just assume that I haven't investigated anything for myself because I haven't come to the same batshit insane conclusions that you have. Do you listen to yourself when you speak. Nanothermite? Riiiight! Of course. No aircraft impact? Just how god damned determined to find hidden truths do you have to be to deny the eye witness accounts of.... You know what, just forget it. It's not the factual inaccuracies that bother me, its the fucking condecending attitude that you mentalists have towards anyone who disagrees with you. You make all these snide remarks that the truth "might ruin my day" and make out like you're privy to some mystical truth about the world that the rest of us idiots couldn't handle. Fuck you, sir.
Because it's supposed to be an encyclopedia - not a forum for debating conspiracy theories. Although, the 9/11 stuff does get a mention under False Flag opperations in the List of Conspiracy Theories page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories#False_flag_operations
Isn't that one of the key characterisrics of the middle class? Deferred gratification leading to inter generational wealth transfer is the reason why some of my friends have had houses bought for them by their parents. I don't think this story has anything to do with technology - just the different attitudes to money that exist at various levels of society. On the other hand, this is a huge generalisation. I also have friends who are far less well off than I am who are carrying a fraction of what I am in unsecured debt due to their traditional working class aversion to borrowing money.
Yeah, but I'd guess it's pretty smooth when you consider the radius of the sun is of the order 10^9 m.
America is controlled by Morons. There, I fixed it for you.