I'm sure you're very proud that you read above 2nd grade level, but when you get to seventh or eighth grade, you'll find that your teachers call this a "run-on sentence", and penalize you for writing such sentences yourself. They'll also point out that "US Justice Department has sent letter" is missing an article.
While we're on the topic of grammar, we should note that a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction (e.g. ", and") is equivalent to a full stop, so your post is equivalent to the following:
... call this a "run-on sentence." Penalize you for writing such sentences yourself....
This is what we call a sentence fragment. I don't know if your original sentence would be considered a run-on or a fragment, but it's incorrect either way. Also note that the period or comma comes before, not after, the double quote mark.
Despite these minor errors, we all somehow understood what you meant. Isn't it just magical?
Unless you want to have two windows open side-by-side. My laptop's resolution is 1280x800, and even with a tiling WM I have to wrap lines at 74 characters. I wouldn't mind having a few extra columns of pixels. As for vertical resolution--extra scrolling hasn't bothered me that much. I'm already at 800; 768 rows isn't that much less.
Citation needed. The vast majority of high school kids I know can do basic things, but web development? I don't think so. I doubt there's a significant difference in the tech skills of the current and previous generations (tech skills != wasting time on facebook). I'd be interested to see if there's a study on the subject, but I don't have time to look anything up right now.
Regardless, parents would just have to use a little common sense. Don't give the kid access to your email account, and be a little suspicious if your child all of a sudden gives you a link to a website that tells you not to worry about checking up on your child's school work.
For someone who wants a smartphone as an upgrade from the combination of a dumbphone and PDA but isn't yet ready to pay $336 more per year, what U.S. carrier do you recommend? T-Mobile?
This is exactly what I did. I switched from my verizon cheapo dumbphone ($20/month for unlimited texting & $0.25/minute) and ipod touch to an exhibit 2 on T-Mobile ($15/month for unlimited texting & $0.10/minute). It doesn't have any data though, the cheapest plan with that was $30/month. It's not so bad since I'm usually in range of wifi, but I really wish I could pay for data the same way I pay for minutes.
Also, T-Mobile's service definitely isn't as good as Verizon's. It's not a huge problem though, I can usually get texts to go through. Sometimes they'll refuse to send, but I think it's due to a bug in android.
they taught us to use 9 and 3 or 8 and 4, whichever we prefer. I usually drive with right hand at 2 or 4, but when I turn, am driving in a narrow lane, etc. I'll drive with both hands.
I don't really give a lot of weight to what they taught at driver's ed. It seemed like they were only interested in turning us into as cautious drivers as they possibly could, nevermind congestion. e.g., they said we should have at least a car's length between the next car when stopped in traffic. I'd hate to see everyone do that at a busy intersection! Another one, from my sister: How many seconds should you have between you and the car in front of you while on the freeway? 10 seconds.
You know what I wish they would have told me? To mind when I'm going slower than surrounding traffic and holding people up, and then to either speed up or move to the slow lane. I learned that one on my own.
There was at least one part of driver's ed I enjoyed though. The teacher told us of a kid who was on a drive with his instructor. He was going down the highway, when a bunny moved onto the road some ways ahead. The kid asked his instructor what he should do, to which he replied, "You're just gonna have to hit it." The kid was a bit nervous, but aknowledged it. Fortunately, the bunny ended up hopping to the side of the road before they reached it. However, not wanting to disobey his instructor, the kid swerves off the road and hits the bunny. It took us a good 5-10 minutes to stop laughing... I guess the instructor should've been more specific!
You're a rarity. Most people don't bother culling accounts - their innate insecurity, which led them to friend total strangers in the first place to bolster their sense of self-worth, prevents that.
Ok, so you state that a lot of Facebook users are insecure.
This sort of behaviour leads to some funny results. One of my friends, as part of a study, was asked to contact - by phone - a bunch of people picked at random from a person's friends list for a marketing project. These were all people the person had said they knew because "I don't just friend anybody..." Not one of them knew the guy.
Alright, so at least one guy has friended a bunch of people on Facebook that he doesn't know.
Facebook == lame.
This is the part I don't get. Having insecure users doesn't imply that Facebook is lame.
(Also, what's with the whole "foo == bar" construct anyway? It doesn't make sense to me, shouldn't it be something more like "foo.bar == true"?)
It's quite likely you'll waste your entire career doing nothing of real note, and nothing you worked on will be remembered by anyone.
Hearing things like this is one of the reasons I want to work in a startup after I get my CS degree. I know a lot of people recommend against the idea, e.g. saying how you'll use all your savings, the startup will fail, you'll save up some more, and the process repeats over and over again. Perhaps I'm naive, but I just don't care. I've heard so much about how crappy jobs are that I don't know if I could take it. That, and I've read so much of Paul Graham's writings that I'm probably indoctrinated. I just hope that I can pull it off. It'd be a dream come true to not have to worry about making a living, then I could spend my time playing clarinet and writing OSS. But in the mean time, I suppose I'll just keep studying...
I agree completely. I'm 17, and I've only known two or three other people my age that are skilled with computers. The vast majority know nothing beyond the basics, and they readily admit this. Not trying to be elitist here, but I'm tired of adults going on and on about how kids these days are so special.
contract-free ("Monthly4G"), no data on T-Mobile is what I do (or rather, is what I'll do once the minutes on my verizon phone run out). I bought an Exhibit II android phone from walmart for $200, and once I activate it I'll be paying $15/month for unlimited texting and $0.10/minute for calling (on verizon it was $20/month and $0.25/minute, what a ripoff).
I'd agree with you on service. Verizon's customer support has always been very helpful. I couldn't even find a place to email T-Mobile though, which was a huge pain. I'm not a customer yet of course, but I'm a bit annoyed that they don't even have this basic functionality.
Coverage has been the opposite for me, but I guess it varies with location. It was never a problem with verizon, but the T-Mobile phone typically shows an extra bar of signal.
I believe T-Mobile has another contract-free plan that's $30/month for unlimited calling & texting, plus "unlimited" (200 MB) of data. If those plans are too much, T-Mobile has different pay-as-you-go plans which might be good if you don't use the phone a whole lot. I haven't really looked at them though.
I dunno how iOS works, but on the Android platform the user has to clear RAM manually. Otherwise apps will consume it til theres none left which leads to a crash. Apple probably handles this a bit more elegantly.
It isn't any better on ios. I've had apps that eat memory until the device crashed. And Apple apparently thinks their users shouldn't have to worry about having "open" and "closed" apps, so they obfuscate things to create the idea that apps are "always open" (read: multitasking keeps them running which slows down the device until it either crashes or is rebooted. Thanks Apple!) Be grateful that in Android they give you the option to clear RAM manually.
It's one of the many reasons I jailbreak actually. it gives me a simple way to close apps when I'm done and I can clear RAM, which adds stability and battery life. Apple: Don't treat your users like idiots. Pretending that your iDevices have unlimited resources will not make it so.
I use the command line all the time, I like to customize stuff, etc, typical linux geek stuff. That doesn't mean I think everyone else should use Linux the way I do or use Linux at all. And if I'm going to write some software on my own time, who do you think I'm going to write it for? Some random Average User or myself? Why on earth would I ever write software that I wouldn't use myself if I'm not getting compensated in some way?
The unspoken premise was that if the religion is false, the teachings will probably not improve quality of life. The truth of that statement will of course depend on the teachings. For things like "don't kill" and "help your neighbor" you are correct that the premise would be false. However, consider for example something like prayer. Personally, I don't think that praying would have any effect on my life if there wasn't someone to hear it, yet I've noticed a positive effect many times. You could argue that the act of praying can have positive mental effects on its own (e.g. It might relieve stress), or that I'm simply falling for the placebo effect. But based on my own experiences and contemplation, I don't think so IMHO. As for "it may not be convincing to others" -- what I meant is that faith comes as a result of one's own doings and experiences. If I, because of my own experiences, believe a religion is true, that won't make another person believe because they haven't had my experiences. Hearing about them from me won't be nearly as convincing as actually feeling them.
I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but I thought I'd ask about something since you did it several times.
Mozilla are not a search company.
I believe it should be 'is', not 'are', because Mozilla is singular. If Mozilla was plural, you would say "Mozilla are not search companies". Also further down:
Google really don't care
I believe it should be "Google really doesn't care".
People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.
YOU are the product! Oooga booga booga!
In all seriousness, can we put this one to rest for a bit? People aren't Google's product. If anything, people's information is Google's product. Even then, it depends on exactly how you define 'product'. Personally, I think of Google's product as search because that's what the company is built around. Sure, the revenue comes from advertising, but only because that's the best way to monetize search.
First of all, thank you for that post. It's refreshing to read some thoughtful discussion every now and then. I'll attempt to explain my own thoughts on faith. I might have a bit of overlap with your comment.
There's an important difference between faith and believing something just for the heck of it (or, as I'd call it, "blind faith"). Faith, to me, means that you have a significantly good reason to believe something is true and can therefore assert that whatever that "something" infers is true. Faith is believing in whatever the original idea infers. For instance, if you have good reason to believe that Christianity is true, then you would have faith that the bible's teachings are true.
The obvious question is, what is "significantly good reason"? It'll vary from person to person, but for me (and I would think many others), it's because I've put my church's teachings into practice and found that they have improved my quality of life. As an example, I think more clearly, am more productive and am happier in general when I pray and read the scriptures everyday (I say scriptures because I read the bible in addition to other texts). Others can ridicule me all they want and talk about how my belief is "illogical" and "unscientific", but it won't change what I have experienced for myself. Indeed, it's very scientific: I started with an assumption, conducted an experiment, and found that my experience supported the original assumption. My own faith may not be very convincing to others, but that's the beauty of it: In order to truely have faith, you have to get it for yourself. It'll never be satisfying enough to rely on the belief of others.
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I'm sure you're very proud that you read above 2nd grade level, but when you get to seventh or eighth grade, you'll find that your teachers call this a "run-on sentence", and penalize you for writing such sentences yourself. They'll also point out that "US Justice Department has sent letter" is missing an article.
While we're on the topic of grammar, we should note that a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction (e.g. ", and") is equivalent to a full stop, so your post is equivalent to the following:
... call this a "run-on sentence." Penalize you for writing such sentences yourself. ...
This is what we call a sentence fragment. I don't know if your original sentence would be considered a run-on or a fragment, but it's incorrect either way. Also note that the period or comma comes before, not after, the double quote mark.
Despite these minor errors, we all somehow understood what you meant. Isn't it just magical?
might as well just join the tautology club
yeah, that's one my (many) pet peeves. Seems like it's short for "I very much agree with this".
so... "use the right maxim for the right job"?
I got married on Friday the 13th
Happy anniversary!
Horizontal resolution is entirely irrelevant.
Unless you want to have two windows open side-by-side. My laptop's resolution is 1280x800, and even with a tiling WM I have to wrap lines at 74 characters. I wouldn't mind having a few extra columns of pixels. As for vertical resolution--extra scrolling hasn't bothered me that much. I'm already at 800; 768 rows isn't that much less.
Kids are waaaaay more tech savvy than parents
Citation needed. The vast majority of high school kids I know can do basic things, but web development? I don't think so. I doubt there's a significant difference in the tech skills of the current and previous generations (tech skills != wasting time on facebook). I'd be interested to see if there's a study on the subject, but I don't have time to look anything up right now.
Regardless, parents would just have to use a little common sense. Don't give the kid access to your email account, and be a little suspicious if your child all of a sudden gives you a link to a website that tells you not to worry about checking up on your child's school work.
For someone who wants a smartphone as an upgrade from the combination of a dumbphone and PDA but isn't yet ready to pay $336 more per year, what U.S. carrier do you recommend? T-Mobile?
This is exactly what I did. I switched from my verizon cheapo dumbphone ($20/month for unlimited texting & $0.25/minute) and ipod touch to an exhibit 2 on T-Mobile ($15/month for unlimited texting & $0.10/minute). It doesn't have any data though, the cheapest plan with that was $30/month. It's not so bad since I'm usually in range of wifi, but I really wish I could pay for data the same way I pay for minutes.
Also, T-Mobile's service definitely isn't as good as Verizon's. It's not a huge problem though, I can usually get texts to go through. Sometimes they'll refuse to send, but I think it's due to a bug in android.
they taught us to use 9 and 3 or 8 and 4, whichever we prefer. I usually drive with right hand at 2 or 4, but when I turn, am driving in a narrow lane, etc. I'll drive with both hands.
I don't really give a lot of weight to what they taught at driver's ed. It seemed like they were only interested in turning us into as cautious drivers as they possibly could, nevermind congestion. e.g., they said we should have at least a car's length between the next car when stopped in traffic. I'd hate to see everyone do that at a busy intersection! Another one, from my sister: How many seconds should you have between you and the car in front of you while on the freeway? 10 seconds.
You know what I wish they would have told me? To mind when I'm going slower than surrounding traffic and holding people up, and then to either speed up or move to the slow lane. I learned that one on my own.
There was at least one part of driver's ed I enjoyed though. The teacher told us of a kid who was on a drive with his instructor. He was going down the highway, when a bunny moved onto the road some ways ahead. The kid asked his instructor what he should do, to which he replied, "You're just gonna have to hit it." The kid was a bit nervous, but aknowledged it. Fortunately, the bunny ended up hopping to the side of the road before they reached it. However, not wanting to disobey his instructor, the kid swerves off the road and hits the bunny. It took us a good 5-10 minutes to stop laughing... I guess the instructor should've been more specific!
You're a rarity. Most people don't bother culling accounts - their innate insecurity, which led them to friend total strangers in the first place to bolster their sense of self-worth, prevents that.
Ok, so you state that a lot of Facebook users are insecure.
This sort of behaviour leads to some funny results. One of my friends, as part of a study, was asked to contact - by phone - a bunch of people picked at random from a person's friends list for a marketing project. These were all people the person had said they knew because "I don't just friend anybody..." Not one of them knew the guy.
Alright, so at least one guy has friended a bunch of people on Facebook that he doesn't know.
Facebook == lame.
This is the part I don't get. Having insecure users doesn't imply that Facebook is lame.
(Also, what's with the whole "foo == bar" construct anyway? It doesn't make sense to me, shouldn't it be something more like "foo.bar == true"?)
Whooshen!
soviet russia, etc etc
4. Profit!!
It's quite likely you'll waste your entire career doing nothing of real note, and nothing you worked on will be remembered by anyone.
Hearing things like this is one of the reasons I want to work in a startup after I get my CS degree. I know a lot of people recommend against the idea, e.g. saying how you'll use all your savings, the startup will fail, you'll save up some more, and the process repeats over and over again. Perhaps I'm naive, but I just don't care. I've heard so much about how crappy jobs are that I don't know if I could take it. That, and I've read so much of Paul Graham's writings that I'm probably indoctrinated. I just hope that I can pull it off. It'd be a dream come true to not have to worry about making a living, then I could spend my time playing clarinet and writing OSS. But in the mean time, I suppose I'll just keep studying...
I don't watch movies. Could someone get this in terms of LOCs?
I agree completely. I'm 17, and I've only known two or three other people my age that are skilled with computers. The vast majority know nothing beyond the basics, and they readily admit this. Not trying to be elitist here, but I'm tired of adults going on and on about how kids these days are so special.
contract-free ("Monthly4G"), no data on T-Mobile is what I do (or rather, is what I'll do once the minutes on my verizon phone run out). I bought an Exhibit II android phone from walmart for $200, and once I activate it I'll be paying $15/month for unlimited texting and $0.10/minute for calling (on verizon it was $20/month and $0.25/minute, what a ripoff).
I'd agree with you on service. Verizon's customer support has always been very helpful. I couldn't even find a place to email T-Mobile though, which was a huge pain. I'm not a customer yet of course, but I'm a bit annoyed that they don't even have this basic functionality.
Coverage has been the opposite for me, but I guess it varies with location. It was never a problem with verizon, but the T-Mobile phone typically shows an extra bar of signal.
I believe T-Mobile has another contract-free plan that's $30/month for unlimited calling & texting, plus "unlimited" (200 MB) of data. If those plans are too much, T-Mobile has different pay-as-you-go plans which might be good if you don't use the phone a whole lot. I haven't really looked at them though.
I dunno how iOS works, but on the Android platform the user has to clear RAM manually. Otherwise apps will consume it til theres none left which leads to a crash. Apple probably handles this a bit more elegantly.
It isn't any better on ios. I've had apps that eat memory until the device crashed. And Apple apparently thinks their users shouldn't have to worry about having "open" and "closed" apps, so they obfuscate things to create the idea that apps are "always open" (read: multitasking keeps them running which slows down the device until it either crashes or is rebooted. Thanks Apple!) Be grateful that in Android they give you the option to clear RAM manually.
It's one of the many reasons I jailbreak actually. it gives me a simple way to close apps when I'm done and I can clear RAM, which adds stability and battery life. Apple: Don't treat your users like idiots. Pretending that your iDevices have unlimited resources will not make it so.
You scoff.
So much for homework today...
This is exactly what I was going to post.
I use the command line all the time, I like to customize stuff, etc, typical linux geek stuff. That doesn't mean I think everyone else should use Linux the way I do or use Linux at all. And if I'm going to write some software on my own time, who do you think I'm going to write it for? Some random Average User or myself? Why on earth would I ever write software that I wouldn't use myself if I'm not getting compensated in some way?
The unspoken premise was that if the religion is false, the teachings will probably not improve quality of life. The truth of that statement will of course depend on the teachings. For things like "don't kill" and "help your neighbor" you are correct that the premise would be false. However, consider for example something like prayer. Personally, I don't think that praying would have any effect on my life if there wasn't someone to hear it, yet I've noticed a positive effect many times. You could argue that the act of praying can have positive mental effects on its own (e.g. It might relieve stress), or that I'm simply falling for the placebo effect. But based on my own experiences and contemplation, I don't think so IMHO. As for "it may not be convincing to others" -- what I meant is that faith comes as a result of one's own doings and experiences. If I, because of my own experiences, believe a religion is true, that won't make another person believe because they haven't had my experiences. Hearing about them from me won't be nearly as convincing as actually feeling them.
Yeah, after I posted I realized it may have been that. Thanks for the clarification.
I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but I thought I'd ask about something since you did it several times.
Mozilla are not a search company.
I believe it should be 'is', not 'are', because Mozilla is singular. If Mozilla was plural, you would say "Mozilla are not search companies". Also further down:
Google really don't care
I believe it should be "Google really doesn't care".
The last bit was correct though:
MS is basically held up by its marketing
People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.
YOU are the product! Oooga booga booga!
In all seriousness, can we put this one to rest for a bit? People aren't Google's product. If anything, people's information is Google's product. Even then, it depends on exactly how you define 'product'. Personally, I think of Google's product as search because that's what the company is built around. Sure, the revenue comes from advertising, but only because that's the best way to monetize search.
First of all, thank you for that post. It's refreshing to read some thoughtful discussion every now and then. I'll attempt to explain my own thoughts on faith. I might have a bit of overlap with your comment.
There's an important difference between faith and believing something just for the heck of it (or, as I'd call it, "blind faith"). Faith, to me, means that you have a significantly good reason to believe something is true and can therefore assert that whatever that "something" infers is true. Faith is believing in whatever the original idea infers. For instance, if you have good reason to believe that Christianity is true, then you would have faith that the bible's teachings are true.
The obvious question is, what is "significantly good reason"? It'll vary from person to person, but for me (and I would think many others), it's because I've put my church's teachings into practice and found that they have improved my quality of life. As an example, I think more clearly, am more productive and am happier in general when I pray and read the scriptures everyday (I say scriptures because I read the bible in addition to other texts). Others can ridicule me all they want and talk about how my belief is "illogical" and "unscientific", but it won't change what I have experienced for myself. Indeed, it's very scientific: I started with an assumption, conducted an experiment, and found that my experience supported the original assumption. My own faith may not be very convincing to others, but that's the beauty of it: In order to truely have faith, you have to get it for yourself. It'll never be satisfying enough to rely on the belief of others.