Hey, don't knock the bubble wrap. The Ark in Space was one of the best episodes they ever made! Epic as usual.
Funny how many classic Doctor Who episodes I would class as "favorite" or "best". I had the same thing happen when I first discovered the show just a few years ago. The BBC was showing a marathon of Eccleston and Tennant episodes. Every episode was so good I thought they were just showing highlight episodes or "fan favorites". I was severely disappointed when I went online to look for more episodes and realized I had just seen ALL of Eccleston and Tennant's episodes, not just the "good" ones. I've never experienced being so satisfied by so many individual episodes of any series before. Which is why it was doubly painful when I became soured on the new direction the show has taken.
Honestly I felt like this was by far worse near the end of David Tennant's reign. While the story was that he was starting to (mistakenly) buy into his own greatness, he should never have been able to do half the stuff he did in the first place. Snap his fingers to close the door to the tardis? The trickster god indeed. To me it seems like Matt Smith's doctor relies too much on the sonic screwdriver and seems to be able to intiimidate his opponents way too easily, but David Tennant in my mind is more the Magical Space Jesus Doctor than Smith's. Having said that, I greatly enjoy the most recent episodes with the right expectations.:)
At the time I thought (and still think) that Tennant had done a marvelous job during his tenure as the Doctor and just accepted all the weirdness at the end as giving him a good send-off. But I think you're right in that it was already at that time the writers were going down the road of turning the Doctor into Magical Space Jesus. Sadly I even bought into the Matt Smith version of the Doctor for a few episodes despite some uneasiness, until about halfway through his first season when it finally dawned on me what was happening. I came back later and struggled through the second season once it found its way to Netflix, then just turned off my TV in disgust and threw my remote away after the ridiculous final scene of the second season finale. I knew then that it was over. I knew I could never watch Doctor Who again, because now it's being written by, and for, five-year-olds.
What about the first few seasons of the rebooted BSG? That was undoubtably an improvement on the original, took a vacuous but fun space opera into new territory as a dark and edgy SF psychodrama. "33" was one of the most sublime SF TV experiences that I've had in my life. Such a pity they ruined it towards the end... actually, that's unfair. They didn't ruin it, but it did drop dramatically in quallity.
You probably meant this for SirGarlon, but as for me I really couldn't get into the new BSG. Not necessarily because it was poorly written but because of the endless, unrelenting "edgy" ultra-melodrama. It just burnt me out after a few episodes, after I realized it was going to be like that for the whole series. That's one of the aspects of the new Doctor Who that I couldn't stand. When shows go super edgy and dramatic at the cost of everything else it's just not fun anymore. It becomes incredibly monotonous, emotionally speaking.
You forgot to say, "get off my lawn.":-) But I agree with you. I wish the entertainment industry would make new characters and franchises when they want something "fresh" and "edgy", instead of re-branding and re-purposing a perfectly good existing franchise into something completely different.
The funny part is that I have at least a couple decades to go before I should have even _started_ to become an old fogey who hates everything new. So there is either suddenly something seriously wrong with me after a couple of decades of enjoying absolutely everything, including some of the most awful sci-fi and fantasy imaginable, purely because it's sci-fi and fantasy, or there is something drastically wrong with the way this new stuff is being written.
Since I have no problem enjoying (and re-enjoying) nearly any sci-fi and fantasy created in the last century, even stuff I've never seen or heard of before, and stuff that was created long before my time as well as during my lifetime, I choose to believe that there really is something drastically wrong with how a lot of new stuff is being written.
And they din't use the sonic screwdriver as a deux es machina to get out of any tricky situation, rather than the Doctor using his intelligence and wits. Today, the screwdriver is a euphemism for lazy, sloppy writing. No wonder John Nathan-Turner got rid of it in 1982!
Indeed a good point. If I remember right it wasn't even introduced until episode 42 (Fury From the Deep) and used quite sparingly for the most part. Of course, since the Doctor has now transformed into Magical Space Jesus, he doesn't even need his now ridiculously powerful and versatile sonic screwdriver to work miracles. He can just stand up on a rooftop or a rock and tell a whole alien battle fleet to run away, and instead of him being immediately reduced to a pile of smoking ashes the powerful aliens actually run away! Isn't that great?
Aaaaand that pretty much sums up why I can no longer watch any new Doctor Who. Or Bond films, for that matter. Same phenomenon. So many things these days have become caricatures of themselves with no substance beneath the immaculate surface.
I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks the most recent few seasons of the show are boot-licking, Doctor-worshiping, ultra-melodramatic, vomit-inducing crap that caused Doctor Who to go from one of my favorite shows of all time to something I cannot physically stomach watching anymore. But I digress.
They turned him into a trickster God. A bit different from what came before and what you want perhaps but I quite like a lot of the stories of the Doctor as a trickster God.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up in one sentence. They turned a fun sci-fi show that happened to mainly star a quirky character called the Doctor who likes to travel to strange places and get himself into trouble and solve mysteries into a show that is almost entirely _about_ the Doctor, and changed the character so drastically he might as well be called Magical Space Jesus. You can practically see the stars in the eyes of every other character who looks at him or talks about him, as if he's the love child of Rassilon and Yahweh. Blech.
I'm glad there are lots of people who are enjoying the new show but as far as I'm concerned it is no longer Doctor Who and the character bears little resemblance to what the Doctor was as a character for the ~45 years prior to the Matt Smith seasons. It was a sad day when I realized that I just couldn't handle watching my favorite show anymore. I'll probably never find a true replacement either. Doctor Who has been quite a unique show from the very beginning.
Of course I am also one of those who hold the remarkably unpopular opinion that Man of Steel was a silly abomination directed by someone who is apparently incapable of comprehending what the Superman archetype is even supposed to represent, and that the new Star Trek films are dramatic but hollow imitations of things that already exist, but again I digress. Oh, look, explosions and lens flares 'n stuff!
They started playing Doctor Who from the start here (Australia) a while back, and I really enjoyed it. One episode was entirely set in the tardis where the tardis seemed jammed and was trying to tell them something and they had to figure out what it was. And the hand to hand combat fighting was absolutely awful. And the Dalek's spaceship wobbled on the string it was suspended on. Awesome stuff:) Unfortunately The timeslot ended up conflicting with meal times and hungry kids aren't compatible with TV watching, so i gave up watching it. This was before I had a PVR or anything.
Sounds like "Edge of Destruction", the third episode. A short two-parter, but great. Fortunately you can find all the existing classic episodes and reconstructions on torrent sites these days.
Every time I restart the series from the beginning I'm always amazed that the Daleks are introduced already in the seven-part second episode (The Mutants). One of the greatest things about the old stuff is that it was more of a serial format, where if they needed seven, eight or nine 23-minute parts to tell the complete story then that is how many parts were made to tell that story. Which resulted in quite a few "episodes" of classic Doctor Who that are really more like awesomely epic multi-threaded 2-hour and 3-hour movies. The modern "wrap it up in a single 41 minute episode or leave a cliffhanger for next season" seems incredibly lame and creatively limiting by comparison.
I wish somebody today had the balls to start some new shows using the old serial formats and the same kind of shoestring budget special effects they used to use. If they had decent actors and compelling stories it would be an absolute gold mine.
Oh my goodness I'm freaking out and waving my hands like a schoolgirl right now.
But seriously, the Web of Fear is one of my favorite classic Doctor Who episodes, despite the fact that the only available version is almost entirely an audio reconstruction with still-photograph accompaniment. Notably, this episode is where the much beloved stiff-upper-lip character Lethbridge-Stewart is first introduced. He is of course instantly recognizable even as part of an audio-only soundtrack.
As much as I enjoyed the 3rd (Jon Pertwee) and 4th (Tom Baker) Doctors, like everyone else, I'd go so far as to say that many of the 1st (William Hartnell) and 2nd (Patrick Troughton) Doctors' episodes were some of the most interesting and entertaining of the entire series, just as many of the most original and memorable episodes of Star Trek and TNG came during their first and second seasons. The more I watch the older episodes of Doctor Who the more I appreciate what they accomplished, especially in the context of the fact that the series started out in 1963 in seriously grainy black and white as basically a televised live-action play. So finding more old episodes is a big thing for me. I love 'em.
I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks the most recent few seasons of the show are boot-licking, Doctor-worshiping, ultra-melodramatic, vomit-inducing crap that caused Doctor Who to go from one of my favorite shows of all time to something I cannot physically stomach watching anymore. But I digress.
Worked at HP as a contractor before Carly Fiorina came on board.
Initially HP treated its engineers so well that I was actually contemplating working there as permanent staff. Then Carly came on board and basically killed everything that was good about the company. At some point she asked staff to waive one day of wages, because HP was going through some difficult period; a couple of months later she gives herself a 16 million dollar bonus.
Carly should write a book: 'How to kill company wide morale and get rich in one easy lesson'.
Before the Carly, people were still working around 19:00 just to finish up bits, because they felt like they were heavily invested in the success of HP, shortly after the 'merger' with Compaq at 17:05 the whole office was empty.
Quite happy I never signed on as permanent staff.
One really wonders how our capitalist society could be transformed if even a small percentage of CEOs had the personal integrity to give themselves a perfectly nice $160,000 bonus and distribute the rest of that $16 million back to the people who work for a wage. Think how motivated employees would be if they actually shared in the company's success.
Oh god, did I just turn into a Marxist or something? Fuck.
Rosa Parks was also breaking the law. I'm sure many at the time even described it as "irresponsible". She also had no particular intention of becoming a poster child for the civil rights movement. She was just tired and didn't feel like complying with an unjust law that day. After all, she and millions of others had been patiently waiting for those unjust laws to be "fixed" for their entire lives. Funny how all that patience and waiting for gradual change never seemed to accomplish a damned thing. Overnight revolutions happen precisely because people get tired of waiting their whole lives, and often the lives of their children and grandchildren, for injustices to be magically fixed slowly and gradually.
Sorry if some people are not conforming to your personally sanctioned path for changing the world. But by all means continue working on your 1,000 year plan for steady societal change. Meanwhile, be sure you don't break any laws irresponsibly.
I also used to attempt to point out the misunderstanding of this phrase. Then I grew up and realized that since at least 95% of the population now uses it the "modern" way and since the original meaning makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, it is utterly pointless to continue trying to correct this modern usage. English may not be evolving as quickly as it used to but it nevertheless is still a living language that changes over time, and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do about it. The original meaning of the phrase is archaic, and that is that. You'll be much happier if you just get over it.
Seriously, according to those silly standardized tests I have been reading and understanding literature at what they refer to as "college level" since I was in grade school, and after reading the entire Wikipedia article on the phrase recently I simply could not accept even attempting to use "begs the question" to mean what it originally meant. If it was some obscure Latin phrase, maybe, but it's in perfect modern English and the original meaning is completely counterintuitive today. Expecting anyone but a historian to use the phrase "correctly" at this point is the height of idiocy. It's like saying the phrase "going to the store" actually originally meant "coming home for tea", and demanding that everyone use it that way. The original meaning is flat out upside-down and nonsensical to modern English speakers, and is thus never going to come back in style. The battle is long over.
Back on Topic: So yeah, now we're referring to any flying object as a "drone"? I was certain that all private manned and unmanned flying objects were already under the purview of a long list of FAA regulations. Total non-story. Fine the operator for flying in a controlled airspace (city) in a location where people could be injured by a crash. Done.
Wait, no, we need more laws, because DRONNNZZZZ!!! What's next, laws to regulate "non-aerial drones" after someone runs their 40-lb RC car into a pedestrian in the middle of some other city? The terrorists sure have done a number on the "home of the brave", haven't they? Might was well just make everything civilians do illegal by default and everything the "authorities" do legal by default, since that seems to be precisely where we are headed at breakneck speed. Total authoritarian state, here we come! Woohoo!
I don't know where you saw me DEMANDING anything. I merely agreed that this is not such a big problem. At worst, you have to downgrade your iOS phone back to an older version, or refrain from upgrading it to iOS7 in the first place. Or maybe you even have to trade it in for another model.
* Huge sigh. *
You are absolutely demanding that people shut up, stop bothering you with what you see as a frivolous complaint and do one of three things, as you specify above:
1. Downgrade to iOS 6, which at this point requires jailbreaking the phone. Apple quickly stopped signing older versions of iOS once iOS 7 came out, so it is not easy to downgrade. This is outside of the realm of what most people would be willing or technically able to do. Thus, an unreasonable demand, and in no way a solution.
2. Refrain from upgrading to iOS 7. This requires hundreds of millions of people to be perfectly informed of potential issues before choosing to do the iOS 7 update, which by the way is now being PUSHED by Apple to millions of iOS 6 devices. Not automatically installed, but pushed as an automatic download and the users are being prompted to install it. Why shouldn't they listen to Apple and install the update? Without these news articles how would anyone even know this problem exists? Again, demanding something unreasonable of hundreds of millions of mostly non-technical device users, and thus not a solution.
3. Trade in the device for another model. Since another Apple device would of course come with iOS 7 installed also, what you are demanding in this case is that people stop using Apple devices entirely, ignoring the fact that if they wanted a non-Apple device they probably already would have purchased one in the first place. Even if people wanted to do this, you don't usually just walk in with a used device and pick up a new one for free, so you're demanding that they spend money to solve a problem not of their creation. Nor is it even close to painless to move one's ecosystem of information and apps from one platform to another. Again, not a very reasonable "solution" for most people.
Sure sounds like a lot of demanding to me. You don't seem to be happy to just let people continue using their iOS 7 devices while complaining to Apple to fix a problem that Apple created and which didn't exist with any previous version of iOS.
Sure, it's inconvenient, but it's not going to cause you to starve to death, or cause your children to die of dysentery.
And again, total hyperbole that came from nowhere besides your own imagination and has nothing to do with the story. There isn't a single news article that claims this is a widespread or in any way life-threatening problem (although I refer you again to the possibility that someone could be driving in traffic and have vertigo induced by glancing at their phone or even a passenger's phone during a screen transition, which could end up being pretty damn dangerous). But in the published news articles there were simply statements that some people were getting headaches and nausea from iOS 7. Simple statements that had nothing to do with starvation, dysentery, blindness or paralysis. Yet everyone reacted to the story as if the people quoted were actually complaining of such things when they clearly just find it a pain and want Apple to fix or provide a way to disable all the animations. What is the big problem with that? How is that unreasonable in any way? It's not.
Hence, it's what they call a first-world problem.
You misunderstand the way the meme/phrase "first world problem" is used on the internet. It is applied to such things as being bored for five minutes when going to the bathroom because you forgot to take your iPad with you, or not being able to change the TV channel because you're too lazy to lean forward and reach for the remote. In other words, it is a joke applied to things that are unequivocally NOT problems AT ALL. Period. Thus the or
Basically I could have told them this was going to happen because of how iOS is designed. We have about 200 and they don't leave our buildings (most of them are in classroom sets/charging carts) and I'd say at least 5-10 a week have to be factory reset because the kids remove the profile and lock the devices.
How is it this easy? Well since iOS (Android has this same issue and more, sadly), unlike say, ChromeOS, isn't designed to be managed from an enterprise level. So everything we do with policies can simply be removed by the user. No password required.
Even a moment of common-sense pondering tells me this is ridiculous. While iOS wasn't originally designed with any real enterprise management capability, that was half a decade and several generations of devices and iOS versions ago. Today there are many business oriented features in iOS and decent enterprise oriented mass-management tools available from both Apple and third parties, and Apple is making significant inroads into the enterprise market precisely because of this.
I wondered what this amazing "hack" that the students had discovered actually consisted of. From the LA Times article on this:
"Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their technique Tuesday outside school. The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf."
What exactly would be the point of Apple even bothering to provide enterprise management tools and extensive documentation if it was all so trivially easy to erase and bypass by anyone using the devices, including schoolchildren? No enterprise would ever buy such an incompetently designed product. No, this is a failure of the typically at best semi-competent IT people running the program to understand the tool they are attempting to use. As other posters have stated quite clearly, it is absolutely possible to lock down iOS devices in such a way that none of the protections can be bypassed without a total factory reset. And with the advent of the new activation protections in iOS 7 I'm not even entirely sure the device would be usable at all after a factory reset. Maybe that just keeps iPhones from being used as phones. Anyway, were the protections bypassed by doing a factory reset? Not even close.
You have to really be wearing some Apple-hate-colored glasses to immediately believe Apple would be that incompetent when designing and implementing a feature that is supposed to secure the device from the user. The far simpler and more likely explanation is that the school district failed to lock down the devices correctly in the first place, allowing the controls to be bypassed in a ridiculously trivial way (as quoted above). A classic ID-10-T error, that is in no way the fault of the iPad or iOS.
Whether it's a great idea at the end of the day to use iPads to replace expensive schoolbooks that apparently cost the school districts even more than the cost of the iPads is all going to be dependent on how they use the tool. I'll leave that discussion for another day.
Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real?
I think the "First World Problems" comment was more about iOS7-induced motion sickness than motion sickness in general.
An obvious solution would be not to use a cell phone that causes motion sickness. So this is only a 'big problem' for people who believe that they absolutely must use iOS7 -- i.e. people with an entitled "first world" mindset.
It does not meet the definition of "entitlement" when you paid hundreds of dollars for a device that worked just fine for a year or more until it was "upgraded" to iOS 7. It is you who seems to feel entitled to demand that potentially hundreds of thousands of iOS device owners be forced to give up using the devices they paid good money for, just because of a software update. These are not just brand new devices we are talking about. The new update has now been loaded on at least 250 million older iOS devices, and it is technically difficult to downgrade to iOS 6 now that Apple has stopped signing older versions of the operating system.
Even if only one-tenth of one percent of iOS device users are affected by nausea when using iOS 7, we're talking about possibly as many as half a million people by the time most of the market gets around to upgrading their devices to iOS 7. That's half a million people you are DEMANDING should immediately stop using the devices they purchased. That is completely unreasonable in my book. Some people use iOS devices as part of their employment now, as point-of-sale terminals and electronic clipboards and in various other capacities. Should those people be forced to find new jobs? What gives you the right to make such demands of even a single person, much less hundreds of thousands?
And again, if you have not personally experienced the nausea, what precisely compels you to come here and heap hatred upon those who do? This article shouldn't have even been a blip on your radar. Nevertheless you were compelled to come here and insist that the people referenced in the stories are nothing but first world entitled whiners.
As I was saying in my earlier post, this simple news story of a few people stating that iOS 7 gives them motion sickness and headaches seems to have a hugely disproportionate ability to ignite a burning ember of rage and righteous derision within at least three-quarters of the population, and it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
The reaction I've seen in both of these forums is so extreme it's actually kind of terrifying. It's so far outside of my realm of understanding that it is literally giving me the shakes
I get seasick reading in a moving car... so I don't read in a moving car.
These transitions don't happen except by user input... so just don't look at the screen when you do something that causes these transitions.
Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real? I don't know, and that's what spooks me.
The reaction is so disparaging and heartless because the people with the problem, even if real, are massive whiners.
"I now have to close my eyes or cover the screen during transitions, which is ridiculous," she told The Guardian
These people have an easy solution and it is really just pure whining. It's first world problem. These complaining are histrionics, like your "literally giving me the shakes" is.
You know what makes me mad? Those people having so little sympathy for the blind, deaf, paralyzed, or others with *real* problems to overcome that they think their complaints are anywhere nearly on the same level.
Thanks, you've provided another wonderful example of the completely hyperbolically irrational hatred that this simple story has triggered. No one has been claiming that their phone is blinding, deafening or paralyzing them, nor are they claiming that their motion sickness is somehow life threatening. They're just saying the phone is giving them motion sickness. It's a really simple, non-threatening statement. And if the issue doesn't affect you it makes ZERO sense that you felt compelled to come here filled with anger and call people you don't even know "massive whiners". The so-called "solution" of not looking at your phone while you use it is idiotically ridiculous. That's like telling people who have a cough to stop breathing as a "solution".
Do us all a favor. Go look in a mirror and say, "Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?" Do it until you figure it out.
Having vertigo so bad you can't even stand up without vomiting or at least falling over, much less walk or drive a vehicle to or from any kind of employment, is not the sort of easily dismissible non-problem to which that phrase is usually applied. Vertigo-induced nausea is a real, life-impacting and difficult to deal with medical issue. And you'd all better hope someone figures out exactly why this is happening and how to prevent it before someone starts putting visual interfaces like this in moving vehicles. The last thing we need is drivers on the freeway suddenly having vertigo from glancing at their in-dash navigation screen.
But more to the point of my subject line: There is something totally bizarre happening here. The parent comment is a prime example of a sort of (for lack of a better word) "anti-compassion" that seems to have been triggered by this story. It's like a push-button that makes normal human beings explode with derisive hatred. Even the/. editors appear to be on the bandwagon. Notice how they've put quotes around the word "sick" in the article title (even though the actual news stories do not quote that word), implying that there is no actual sickness involved, and the byline is "from the you're-not-supposed-to-eat-the-phone dept.," implying that the user has to do something monumentally stupid to deliberately invoke the effect, such as staring at the phone for 10 minutes while moving it around to trigger the parallax motion. Neither of these implied things is true in the slightest. The sickness is quite real, and easily-triggered in seconds for some of those affected.
I happened to be reading MacRumors yesterday when this story showed up in their sidebar. I checked it out and was absolutely appalled at the level of rage and vitriol in the comments that were being up-modded to the main article page. The forums were not much better. About 90% of the comments were from people who were expressing outright hatred of the "pathetic" "losers" who had dared to say that their precious iPhones were making them sick. I thought maybe there was so much backlash against the victims of nausea because it was a Mac-related forum. But coming here to/. where there is plenty of Apple-hate to go around I now realize this issue triggers a gaping primary defect in both human logic and compassion. The comments here are largely identical to the MacRumors forum posts; blaming the victims and/or unequivocally dismissing the problem as something that is either imagined, totally unimportant or completely fabricated. A large portion of the population appears to be constitutionally incapable of believing or acknowledging that this issue is real or serious, simply because it hasn't affected them personally. And it seems to go far beyond the usual "I got mine so screw you" type reaction. It's more like "I don't see the problem so FUCK YOU YOU'RE NOT FIT TO LIVE GO DIE IN A GAS CHAMBER!!!!ONE!!!!". By the way that's almost a literal quote of some of the posts I saw on MacRumors. I don't even have the imagination to begin to exaggerate what I've seen posted.
The reaction I've seen in both of these forums is so extreme it's actually kind of terrifying. It's so far outside of my realm of understanding that it is literally giving me the shakes because it strongly implies that even after decades living on this planet I don't understand what makes the average human tick AT ALL. It's no wonder I've never liked associating with more than two humans simultaneously. Y'all SCARY. Irrational doesn't even begin to describe it.
If I was a neurologist or psychologist I could probably get a grant to study this phenomenon.
Final note: Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real? I don't know, and that's what spooks me.
Damn it, Slashdot, I come here for anti-FUD, not FUD. This is just about the worst confused, untrue FUD article I've ever seen posted here.
Apple are unequivocally NOT "blocking" the use of unauthorized third-party Lightning cables. The summary/title is absolutely 100% bullshit. The article says, and I quote: "Apple will probably shut the door on the usage of [unauthorized third-party Lightning cables] in a future update." (Emphasis mine.) Which is of course a completely baseless supposition by the article author in order to get outrage-clicks. The article also clearly includes a screenshot of the actual informative warning message that pops up, which simply says, "This cable or accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPhone." With a single button that says "Dismiss".
The article also throws third-party USB chargers into the mix which has absolutely nothing to do with the cables, just adding to the confusion. Apple has no way of blocking the use of any kind of USB charger, so it doesn't even belong in this discussion. After the death and coma incidents in China they instituted a trade-in program to garner public good will, where you can buy an Apple charger at half price if you bring in a third-party USB charger, but that is neither here nor there with regard to the Lightning cables.
Look, I will be quite happy to come here and spew hatred and vitriol at Apple along with the rest of you anytime Apple ever actually does something as monumentally stupid as trying to block unauthorized Lightning cables from charging your iPhones. But until then is it really too much to ask that we only spew hatred and vitriol about things that are actually true? This is like spewing hatred at Microsoft because somebody posted a summary claiming Microsoft has kept Elvis imprisoned in their basement in Redmond for the last 40 years, while linking to an article that claims nothing of the sort. *insert WTF face here*
Really, Slashdot? Is this audience really that easy to manipulate into getting outraged by total factless bullshit that isn't even supported by the only link in the summary? Are the editors really not capable of reading a couple of short paragraphs before posting obvious bullshit summaries? (Yeah, I know, must be new around here.)
Before anyone bothers to carefully craft a response to the poster above, have a look at his comment history: this is one of the clearest examples of a Microsoft shill that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Despite your post's high "informative" mod points (at the moment) I do not believe you are correct. I was curious, so I actually did take a look at MaWeiTao's comment history, as you suggested, and see no evidence of anything but fairly well-reasoned and balanced posts on a variety of subjects, including Microsoft, where he seems to hold a remarkably neutral position rarely seen on this forum. Perhaps that is the problem? His argument that the Slashdot community tends to harbor foaming-at-the-mouth purposeless hatred for everything Microsoft does even when they haven't really done anything wrong seems to have been right on point, and even the mods agreed with him on that particular day.
Evidence of being a Microsoft shill, I do not see. What I do see is that you launched an apparently unjustified ad hominem attack against someone you happen to disagree with. Just because this person has a slightly different opinion and/or perspective about Apple and/or Microsoft and/or Nokia than you do does not make them a shill. Did MaWeiTao arouse your ire precisely because he tends to post using a very neutral, non-confrontational tone of voice? Kind of like me? He fails to constantly attack Microsoft sufficiently so that makes him a shill? His opinions could hardly be considered praise. They're just neutral.
I now wait with bated* breath for someone to baselessly accuse me of being a Microsoft shill as well, for having the temerity to defend someone who has been accused (and apparently convicted by some) of being a Microsoft shill.
* Yes that is the correct spelling. Look it up. A dictionary lookup a day keeps ignorance at bay. I just made that up.
When I can toggle my wifi on IOS in 2 clicks, call me. Until then, your posting and analogies are fanboy rants - sent from my iPhone
IOS 7 has a new "Command Center" feature that you flick up from the bottom of the screen, that gives you one-click access to most of the hardware settings. Finally. Devices back to iPhone 4 will be supported by iOS 7. Should be available within the next week or two.
Any hotel with bedbugs should be SHUT DOWN until a health department inspector can verify ALL of the bugs are gone, no ifs, no buts, mandatory shutdown. These things are a dangerous pandemic.
Dangerous pandemic? How so? Last time I was researching bedbugs I was surprised to find out that, unlike other blood suckers like ticks and mosquitos, bedbugs do not transmit disease. They are just irritants. Shutting down an entire hotel because they found a few bedbugs seems a bit extreme. Especially given that it probably wouldn't accomplish much. A new infestation could be brought in on somebody's luggage the same day they reopen.
It may be a dupe, but I distinctly remember reading post after post on that article from apparently knowledgeable people explaining in great detail how this whole "GPS spoofing" thing was supposedly nearly impossible or at least highly impractical. I am very much interested in having someone explain how these people have managed to accomplish something that is supposedly not doable.
Seems to me this represents a valid threat to the safety of using civil GPS navigation systems, on land or at sea. Most of the posts on the previous article seemed to indicate that GPS is NOT threatened at all. I am unable to rectify these two opposing points of view without further input from knowledgeable people.
How the hell this qualifies as any kind of news is beyond me. This appears to be someone's tech blog where he's basically just talking out of his ass and pulling suppositions out of thin air, about something that just happened like 24 hours ago. Suppositions which by the way are not confirmed by the only further piece of information we have, which is the statement from Apple that Mansfield will be working on special projects. He was already announced to be retiring last year and was convinced to stay on a temporary basis. Why on earth would Apple hold one executive responsible for the failure of a third-party company to effectively compete with Samsung in making chips? It's just--I can't--what?
This article is full of all kinds of fail. How about we wait a couple of days until someone actually has some factual news to report? Why the fuck is everybody and his brother jumping all over this guy all of the sudden? I expect this sort of thing from Mac _RUMORS_, but here? What the hell, Slashdot?
Why would they even need this? Policy over here is that if the car is illegally parked and blocking access to hydrants and such, they just use the their axes to go through the windows to run lines or use the very large bumpers their trucks are equipped with to quickly move the car. Anything else is just wasting time.
Sooo, ummm... what if your car _isn't_ parked illegally and they still need to move it? They trash your car anyway?...
Slashdot Mirror
Or the green bubble wrap that was suppose to be a transmorphism into an alien host.
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130529205252/the-league-of-utter-disaster-chaos-and-insanity/images/d/d3/Bubblewrapmonster.jpg
captcha: exploits
Hey, don't knock the bubble wrap. The Ark in Space was one of the best episodes they ever made! Epic as usual.
Funny how many classic Doctor Who episodes I would class as "favorite" or "best". I had the same thing happen when I first discovered the show just a few years ago. The BBC was showing a marathon of Eccleston and Tennant episodes. Every episode was so good I thought they were just showing highlight episodes or "fan favorites". I was severely disappointed when I went online to look for more episodes and realized I had just seen ALL of Eccleston and Tennant's episodes, not just the "good" ones. I've never experienced being so satisfied by so many individual episodes of any series before. Which is why it was doubly painful when I became soured on the new direction the show has taken.
Honestly I felt like this was by far worse near the end of David Tennant's reign. While the story was that he was starting to (mistakenly) buy into his own greatness, he should never have been able to do half the stuff he did in the first place. Snap his fingers to close the door to the tardis? The trickster god indeed. To me it seems like Matt Smith's doctor relies too much on the sonic screwdriver and seems to be able to intiimidate his opponents way too easily, but David Tennant in my mind is more the Magical Space Jesus Doctor than Smith's. Having said that, I greatly enjoy the most recent episodes with the right expectations. :)
At the time I thought (and still think) that Tennant had done a marvelous job during his tenure as the Doctor and just accepted all the weirdness at the end as giving him a good send-off. But I think you're right in that it was already at that time the writers were going down the road of turning the Doctor into Magical Space Jesus. Sadly I even bought into the Matt Smith version of the Doctor for a few episodes despite some uneasiness, until about halfway through his first season when it finally dawned on me what was happening. I came back later and struggled through the second season once it found its way to Netflix, then just turned off my TV in disgust and threw my remote away after the ridiculous final scene of the second season finale. I knew then that it was over. I knew I could never watch Doctor Who again, because now it's being written by, and for, five-year-olds.
What about the first few seasons of the rebooted BSG? That was undoubtably an improvement on the original, took a vacuous but fun space opera into new territory as a dark and edgy SF psychodrama. "33" was one of the most sublime SF TV experiences that I've had in my life. Such a pity they ruined it towards the end... actually, that's unfair. They didn't ruin it, but it did drop dramatically in quallity.
You probably meant this for SirGarlon, but as for me I really couldn't get into the new BSG. Not necessarily because it was poorly written but because of the endless, unrelenting "edgy" ultra-melodrama. It just burnt me out after a few episodes, after I realized it was going to be like that for the whole series. That's one of the aspects of the new Doctor Who that I couldn't stand. When shows go super edgy and dramatic at the cost of everything else it's just not fun anymore. It becomes incredibly monotonous, emotionally speaking.
But that's just me.
You forgot to say, "get off my lawn." :-) But I agree with you. I wish the entertainment industry would make new characters and franchises when they want something "fresh" and "edgy", instead of re-branding and re-purposing a perfectly good existing franchise into something completely different.
The funny part is that I have at least a couple decades to go before I should have even _started_ to become an old fogey who hates everything new. So there is either suddenly something seriously wrong with me after a couple of decades of enjoying absolutely everything, including some of the most awful sci-fi and fantasy imaginable, purely because it's sci-fi and fantasy, or there is something drastically wrong with the way this new stuff is being written.
Since I have no problem enjoying (and re-enjoying) nearly any sci-fi and fantasy created in the last century, even stuff I've never seen or heard of before, and stuff that was created long before my time as well as during my lifetime, I choose to believe that there really is something drastically wrong with how a lot of new stuff is being written.
And they din't use the sonic screwdriver as a deux es machina to get out of any tricky situation, rather than the Doctor using his intelligence and wits. Today, the screwdriver is a euphemism for lazy, sloppy writing. No wonder John Nathan-Turner got rid of it in 1982!
Indeed a good point. If I remember right it wasn't even introduced until episode 42 (Fury From the Deep) and used quite sparingly for the most part. Of course, since the Doctor has now transformed into Magical Space Jesus, he doesn't even need his now ridiculously powerful and versatile sonic screwdriver to work miracles. He can just stand up on a rooftop or a rock and tell a whole alien battle fleet to run away, and instead of him being immediately reduced to a pile of smoking ashes the powerful aliens actually run away! Isn't that great?
Aaaaand that pretty much sums up why I can no longer watch any new Doctor Who. Or Bond films, for that matter. Same phenomenon. So many things these days have become caricatures of themselves with no substance beneath the immaculate surface.
They turned him into a trickster God. A bit different from what came before and what you want perhaps but I quite like a lot of the stories of the Doctor as a trickster God.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up in one sentence. They turned a fun sci-fi show that happened to mainly star a quirky character called the Doctor who likes to travel to strange places and get himself into trouble and solve mysteries into a show that is almost entirely _about_ the Doctor, and changed the character so drastically he might as well be called Magical Space Jesus. You can practically see the stars in the eyes of every other character who looks at him or talks about him, as if he's the love child of Rassilon and Yahweh. Blech.
I'm glad there are lots of people who are enjoying the new show but as far as I'm concerned it is no longer Doctor Who and the character bears little resemblance to what the Doctor was as a character for the ~45 years prior to the Matt Smith seasons. It was a sad day when I realized that I just couldn't handle watching my favorite show anymore. I'll probably never find a true replacement either. Doctor Who has been quite a unique show from the very beginning.
Of course I am also one of those who hold the remarkably unpopular opinion that Man of Steel was a silly abomination directed by someone who is apparently incapable of comprehending what the Superman archetype is even supposed to represent, and that the new Star Trek films are dramatic but hollow imitations of things that already exist, but again I digress. Oh, look, explosions and lens flares 'n stuff!
They started playing Doctor Who from the start here (Australia) a while back, and I really enjoyed it. One episode was entirely set in the tardis where the tardis seemed jammed and was trying to tell them something and they had to figure out what it was. And the hand to hand combat fighting was absolutely awful. And the Dalek's spaceship wobbled on the string it was suspended on. Awesome stuff :) Unfortunately The timeslot ended up conflicting with meal times and hungry kids aren't compatible with TV watching, so i gave up watching it. This was before I had a PVR or anything.
Sounds like "Edge of Destruction", the third episode. A short two-parter, but great. Fortunately you can find all the existing classic episodes and reconstructions on torrent sites these days.
Every time I restart the series from the beginning I'm always amazed that the Daleks are introduced already in the seven-part second episode (The Mutants). One of the greatest things about the old stuff is that it was more of a serial format, where if they needed seven, eight or nine 23-minute parts to tell the complete story then that is how many parts were made to tell that story. Which resulted in quite a few "episodes" of classic Doctor Who that are really more like awesomely epic multi-threaded 2-hour and 3-hour movies. The modern "wrap it up in a single 41 minute episode or leave a cliffhanger for next season" seems incredibly lame and creatively limiting by comparison.
I wish somebody today had the balls to start some new shows using the old serial formats and the same kind of shoestring budget special effects they used to use. If they had decent actors and compelling stories it would be an absolute gold mine.
Oh my goodness I'm freaking out and waving my hands like a schoolgirl right now.
But seriously, the Web of Fear is one of my favorite classic Doctor Who episodes, despite the fact that the only available version is almost entirely an audio reconstruction with still-photograph accompaniment. Notably, this episode is where the much beloved stiff-upper-lip character Lethbridge-Stewart is first introduced. He is of course instantly recognizable even as part of an audio-only soundtrack.
As much as I enjoyed the 3rd (Jon Pertwee) and 4th (Tom Baker) Doctors, like everyone else, I'd go so far as to say that many of the 1st (William Hartnell) and 2nd (Patrick Troughton) Doctors' episodes were some of the most interesting and entertaining of the entire series, just as many of the most original and memorable episodes of Star Trek and TNG came during their first and second seasons. The more I watch the older episodes of Doctor Who the more I appreciate what they accomplished, especially in the context of the fact that the series started out in 1963 in seriously grainy black and white as basically a televised live-action play. So finding more old episodes is a big thing for me. I love 'em.
I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks the most recent few seasons of the show are boot-licking, Doctor-worshiping, ultra-melodramatic, vomit-inducing crap that caused Doctor Who to go from one of my favorite shows of all time to something I cannot physically stomach watching anymore. But I digress.
Hooray for more classic Doctor Who!
Worked at HP as a contractor before Carly Fiorina came on board.
Initially HP treated its engineers so well that I was actually contemplating working there as permanent staff. Then Carly came on board and basically killed everything that was good about the company. At some point she asked staff to waive one day of wages, because HP was going through some difficult period; a couple of months later she gives herself a 16 million dollar bonus.
Carly should write a book: 'How to kill company wide morale and get rich in one easy lesson'.
Before the Carly, people were still working around 19:00 just to finish up bits, because they felt like they were heavily invested in the success of HP, shortly after the 'merger' with Compaq at 17:05 the whole office was empty.
Quite happy I never signed on as permanent staff.
One really wonders how our capitalist society could be transformed if even a small percentage of CEOs had the personal integrity to give themselves a perfectly nice $160,000 bonus and distribute the rest of that $16 million back to the people who work for a wage. Think how motivated employees would be if they actually shared in the company's success.
Oh god, did I just turn into a Marxist or something? Fuck.
Rosa Parks was also breaking the law. I'm sure many at the time even described it as "irresponsible". She also had no particular intention of becoming a poster child for the civil rights movement. She was just tired and didn't feel like complying with an unjust law that day. After all, she and millions of others had been patiently waiting for those unjust laws to be "fixed" for their entire lives. Funny how all that patience and waiting for gradual change never seemed to accomplish a damned thing. Overnight revolutions happen precisely because people get tired of waiting their whole lives, and often the lives of their children and grandchildren, for injustices to be magically fixed slowly and gradually.
Sorry if some people are not conforming to your personally sanctioned path for changing the world. But by all means continue working on your 1,000 year plan for steady societal change. Meanwhile, be sure you don't break any laws irresponsibly.
"..and it begs the question: should drones be regulated?"
No it does not beg the question.
I also used to attempt to point out the misunderstanding of this phrase. Then I grew up and realized that since at least 95% of the population now uses it the "modern" way and since the original meaning makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, it is utterly pointless to continue trying to correct this modern usage. English may not be evolving as quickly as it used to but it nevertheless is still a living language that changes over time, and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do about it. The original meaning of the phrase is archaic, and that is that. You'll be much happier if you just get over it.
Seriously, according to those silly standardized tests I have been reading and understanding literature at what they refer to as "college level" since I was in grade school, and after reading the entire Wikipedia article on the phrase recently I simply could not accept even attempting to use "begs the question" to mean what it originally meant. If it was some obscure Latin phrase, maybe, but it's in perfect modern English and the original meaning is completely counterintuitive today. Expecting anyone but a historian to use the phrase "correctly" at this point is the height of idiocy. It's like saying the phrase "going to the store" actually originally meant "coming home for tea", and demanding that everyone use it that way. The original meaning is flat out upside-down and nonsensical to modern English speakers, and is thus never going to come back in style. The battle is long over.
Back on Topic: So yeah, now we're referring to any flying object as a "drone"? I was certain that all private manned and unmanned flying objects were already under the purview of a long list of FAA regulations. Total non-story. Fine the operator for flying in a controlled airspace (city) in a location where people could be injured by a crash. Done.
Wait, no, we need more laws, because DRONNNZZZZ!!! What's next, laws to regulate "non-aerial drones" after someone runs their 40-lb RC car into a pedestrian in the middle of some other city? The terrorists sure have done a number on the "home of the brave", haven't they? Might was well just make everything civilians do illegal by default and everything the "authorities" do legal by default, since that seems to be precisely where we are headed at breakneck speed. Total authoritarian state, here we come! Woohoo!
I don't know where you saw me DEMANDING anything. I merely agreed that this is not such a big problem. At worst, you have to downgrade your iOS phone back to an older version, or refrain from upgrading it to iOS7 in the first place. Or maybe you even have to trade it in for another model.
* Huge sigh. *
You are absolutely demanding that people shut up, stop bothering you with what you see as a frivolous complaint and do one of three things, as you specify above:
1. Downgrade to iOS 6, which at this point requires jailbreaking the phone. Apple quickly stopped signing older versions of iOS once iOS 7 came out, so it is not easy to downgrade. This is outside of the realm of what most people would be willing or technically able to do. Thus, an unreasonable demand, and in no way a solution.
2. Refrain from upgrading to iOS 7. This requires hundreds of millions of people to be perfectly informed of potential issues before choosing to do the iOS 7 update, which by the way is now being PUSHED by Apple to millions of iOS 6 devices. Not automatically installed, but pushed as an automatic download and the users are being prompted to install it. Why shouldn't they listen to Apple and install the update? Without these news articles how would anyone even know this problem exists? Again, demanding something unreasonable of hundreds of millions of mostly non-technical device users, and thus not a solution.
3. Trade in the device for another model. Since another Apple device would of course come with iOS 7 installed also, what you are demanding in this case is that people stop using Apple devices entirely, ignoring the fact that if they wanted a non-Apple device they probably already would have purchased one in the first place. Even if people wanted to do this, you don't usually just walk in with a used device and pick up a new one for free, so you're demanding that they spend money to solve a problem not of their creation. Nor is it even close to painless to move one's ecosystem of information and apps from one platform to another. Again, not a very reasonable "solution" for most people.
Sure sounds like a lot of demanding to me. You don't seem to be happy to just let people continue using their iOS 7 devices while complaining to Apple to fix a problem that Apple created and which didn't exist with any previous version of iOS.
Sure, it's inconvenient, but it's not going to cause you to starve to death, or cause your children to die of dysentery.
And again, total hyperbole that came from nowhere besides your own imagination and has nothing to do with the story. There isn't a single news article that claims this is a widespread or in any way life-threatening problem (although I refer you again to the possibility that someone could be driving in traffic and have vertigo induced by glancing at their phone or even a passenger's phone during a screen transition, which could end up being pretty damn dangerous). But in the published news articles there were simply statements that some people were getting headaches and nausea from iOS 7. Simple statements that had nothing to do with starvation, dysentery, blindness or paralysis. Yet everyone reacted to the story as if the people quoted were actually complaining of such things when they clearly just find it a pain and want Apple to fix or provide a way to disable all the animations. What is the big problem with that? How is that unreasonable in any way? It's not.
Hence, it's what they call a first-world problem.
You misunderstand the way the meme/phrase "first world problem" is used on the internet. It is applied to such things as being bored for five minutes when going to the bathroom because you forgot to take your iPad with you, or not being able to change the TV channel because you're too lazy to lean forward and reach for the remote. In other words, it is a joke applied to things that are unequivocally NOT problems AT ALL. Period. Thus the or
Basically I could have told them this was going to happen because of how iOS is designed. We have about 200 and they don't leave our buildings (most of them are in classroom sets/charging carts) and I'd say at least 5-10 a week have to be factory reset because the kids remove the profile and lock the devices.
How is it this easy? Well since iOS (Android has this same issue and more, sadly), unlike say, ChromeOS, isn't designed to be managed from an enterprise level. So everything we do with policies can simply be removed by the user. No password required.
Even a moment of common-sense pondering tells me this is ridiculous. While iOS wasn't originally designed with any real enterprise management capability, that was half a decade and several generations of devices and iOS versions ago. Today there are many business oriented features in iOS and decent enterprise oriented mass-management tools available from both Apple and third parties, and Apple is making significant inroads into the enterprise market precisely because of this.
I wondered what this amazing "hack" that the students had discovered actually consisted of. From the LA Times article on this:
"Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their technique Tuesday outside school. The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf."
What exactly would be the point of Apple even bothering to provide enterprise management tools and extensive documentation if it was all so trivially easy to erase and bypass by anyone using the devices, including schoolchildren? No enterprise would ever buy such an incompetently designed product. No, this is a failure of the typically at best semi-competent IT people running the program to understand the tool they are attempting to use. As other posters have stated quite clearly, it is absolutely possible to lock down iOS devices in such a way that none of the protections can be bypassed without a total factory reset. And with the advent of the new activation protections in iOS 7 I'm not even entirely sure the device would be usable at all after a factory reset. Maybe that just keeps iPhones from being used as phones. Anyway, were the protections bypassed by doing a factory reset? Not even close.
You have to really be wearing some Apple-hate-colored glasses to immediately believe Apple would be that incompetent when designing and implementing a feature that is supposed to secure the device from the user. The far simpler and more likely explanation is that the school district failed to lock down the devices correctly in the first place, allowing the controls to be bypassed in a ridiculously trivial way (as quoted above). A classic ID-10-T error, that is in no way the fault of the iPad or iOS.
Whether it's a great idea at the end of the day to use iPads to replace expensive schoolbooks that apparently cost the school districts even more than the cost of the iPads is all going to be dependent on how they use the tool. I'll leave that discussion for another day.
Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real?
I think the "First World Problems" comment was more about iOS7-induced motion sickness than motion sickness in general.
An obvious solution would be not to use a cell phone that causes motion sickness. So this is only a 'big problem' for people who believe that they absolutely must use iOS7 -- i.e. people with an entitled "first world" mindset.
It does not meet the definition of "entitlement" when you paid hundreds of dollars for a device that worked just fine for a year or more until it was "upgraded" to iOS 7. It is you who seems to feel entitled to demand that potentially hundreds of thousands of iOS device owners be forced to give up using the devices they paid good money for, just because of a software update. These are not just brand new devices we are talking about. The new update has now been loaded on at least 250 million older iOS devices, and it is technically difficult to downgrade to iOS 6 now that Apple has stopped signing older versions of the operating system.
Even if only one-tenth of one percent of iOS device users are affected by nausea when using iOS 7, we're talking about possibly as many as half a million people by the time most of the market gets around to upgrading their devices to iOS 7. That's half a million people you are DEMANDING should immediately stop using the devices they purchased. That is completely unreasonable in my book. Some people use iOS devices as part of their employment now, as point-of-sale terminals and electronic clipboards and in various other capacities. Should those people be forced to find new jobs? What gives you the right to make such demands of even a single person, much less hundreds of thousands?
And again, if you have not personally experienced the nausea, what precisely compels you to come here and heap hatred upon those who do? This article shouldn't have even been a blip on your radar. Nevertheless you were compelled to come here and insist that the people referenced in the stories are nothing but first world entitled whiners.
As I was saying in my earlier post, this simple news story of a few people stating that iOS 7 gives them motion sickness and headaches seems to have a hugely disproportionate ability to ignite a burning ember of rage and righteous derision within at least three-quarters of the population, and it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
The reaction I've seen in both of these forums is so extreme it's actually kind of terrifying. It's so far outside of my realm of understanding that it is literally giving me the shakes
I get seasick reading in a moving car... so I don't read in a moving car.
These transitions don't happen except by user input... so just don't look at the screen when you do something that causes these transitions.
Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real? I don't know, and that's what spooks me.
The reaction is so disparaging and heartless because the people with the problem, even if real, are massive whiners.
"I now have to close my eyes or cover the screen during transitions, which is ridiculous," she told The Guardian
These people have an easy solution and it is really just pure whining. It's first world problem. These complaining are histrionics, like your "literally giving me the shakes" is.
You know what makes me mad? Those people having so little sympathy for the blind, deaf, paralyzed, or others with *real* problems to overcome that they think their complaints are anywhere nearly on the same level.
Thanks, you've provided another wonderful example of the completely hyperbolically irrational hatred that this simple story has triggered. No one has been claiming that their phone is blinding, deafening or paralyzing them, nor are they claiming that their motion sickness is somehow life threatening. They're just saying the phone is giving them motion sickness. It's a really simple, non-threatening statement. And if the issue doesn't affect you it makes ZERO sense that you felt compelled to come here filled with anger and call people you don't even know "massive whiners". The so-called "solution" of not looking at your phone while you use it is idiotically ridiculous. That's like telling people who have a cough to stop breathing as a "solution".
Do us all a favor. Go look in a mirror and say, "Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?" Do it until you figure it out.
First world problems.
Having vertigo so bad you can't even stand up without vomiting or at least falling over, much less walk or drive a vehicle to or from any kind of employment, is not the sort of easily dismissible non-problem to which that phrase is usually applied. Vertigo-induced nausea is a real, life-impacting and difficult to deal with medical issue. And you'd all better hope someone figures out exactly why this is happening and how to prevent it before someone starts putting visual interfaces like this in moving vehicles. The last thing we need is drivers on the freeway suddenly having vertigo from glancing at their in-dash navigation screen.
But more to the point of my subject line: There is something totally bizarre happening here. The parent comment is a prime example of a sort of (for lack of a better word) "anti-compassion" that seems to have been triggered by this story. It's like a push-button that makes normal human beings explode with derisive hatred. Even the /. editors appear to be on the bandwagon. Notice how they've put quotes around the word "sick" in the article title (even though the actual news stories do not quote that word), implying that there is no actual sickness involved, and the byline is "from the you're-not-supposed-to-eat-the-phone dept.," implying that the user has to do something monumentally stupid to deliberately invoke the effect, such as staring at the phone for 10 minutes while moving it around to trigger the parallax motion. Neither of these implied things is true in the slightest. The sickness is quite real, and easily-triggered in seconds for some of those affected.
I happened to be reading MacRumors yesterday when this story showed up in their sidebar. I checked it out and was absolutely appalled at the level of rage and vitriol in the comments that were being up-modded to the main article page. The forums were not much better. About 90% of the comments were from people who were expressing outright hatred of the "pathetic" "losers" who had dared to say that their precious iPhones were making them sick. I thought maybe there was so much backlash against the victims of nausea because it was a Mac-related forum. But coming here to /. where there is plenty of Apple-hate to go around I now realize this issue triggers a gaping primary defect in both human logic and compassion. The comments here are largely identical to the MacRumors forum posts; blaming the victims and/or unequivocally dismissing the problem as something that is either imagined, totally unimportant or completely fabricated. A large portion of the population appears to be constitutionally incapable of believing or acknowledging that this issue is real or serious, simply because it hasn't affected them personally. And it seems to go far beyond the usual "I got mine so screw you" type reaction. It's more like "I don't see the problem so FUCK YOU YOU'RE NOT FIT TO LIVE GO DIE IN A GAS CHAMBER!!!!ONE!!!!". By the way that's almost a literal quote of some of the posts I saw on MacRumors. I don't even have the imagination to begin to exaggerate what I've seen posted.
The reaction I've seen in both of these forums is so extreme it's actually kind of terrifying. It's so far outside of my realm of understanding that it is literally giving me the shakes because it strongly implies that even after decades living on this planet I don't understand what makes the average human tick AT ALL. It's no wonder I've never liked associating with more than two humans simultaneously. Y'all SCARY. Irrational doesn't even begin to describe it.
If I was a neurologist or psychologist I could probably get a grant to study this phenomenon.
Final note: Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real? I don't know, and that's what spooks me.
Damn it, Slashdot, I come here for anti-FUD, not FUD. This is just about the worst confused, untrue FUD article I've ever seen posted here.
Apple are unequivocally NOT "blocking" the use of unauthorized third-party Lightning cables. The summary/title is absolutely 100% bullshit. The article says, and I quote: "Apple will probably shut the door on the usage of [unauthorized third-party Lightning cables] in a future update." (Emphasis mine.) Which is of course a completely baseless supposition by the article author in order to get outrage-clicks. The article also clearly includes a screenshot of the actual informative warning message that pops up, which simply says, "This cable or accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPhone." With a single button that says "Dismiss".
The article also throws third-party USB chargers into the mix which has absolutely nothing to do with the cables, just adding to the confusion. Apple has no way of blocking the use of any kind of USB charger, so it doesn't even belong in this discussion. After the death and coma incidents in China they instituted a trade-in program to garner public good will, where you can buy an Apple charger at half price if you bring in a third-party USB charger, but that is neither here nor there with regard to the Lightning cables.
Look, I will be quite happy to come here and spew hatred and vitriol at Apple along with the rest of you anytime Apple ever actually does something as monumentally stupid as trying to block unauthorized Lightning cables from charging your iPhones. But until then is it really too much to ask that we only spew hatred and vitriol about things that are actually true? This is like spewing hatred at Microsoft because somebody posted a summary claiming Microsoft has kept Elvis imprisoned in their basement in Redmond for the last 40 years, while linking to an article that claims nothing of the sort. *insert WTF face here*
Really, Slashdot? Is this audience really that easy to manipulate into getting outraged by total factless bullshit that isn't even supported by the only link in the summary? Are the editors really not capable of reading a couple of short paragraphs before posting obvious bullshit summaries? (Yeah, I know, must be new around here.)
Slashdot, today, I am disappoint. >:-|
Before anyone bothers to carefully craft a response to the poster above, have a look at his comment history: this is one of the clearest examples of a Microsoft shill that I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Despite your post's high "informative" mod points (at the moment) I do not believe you are correct. I was curious, so I actually did take a look at MaWeiTao's comment history, as you suggested, and see no evidence of anything but fairly well-reasoned and balanced posts on a variety of subjects, including Microsoft, where he seems to hold a remarkably neutral position rarely seen on this forum. Perhaps that is the problem? His argument that the Slashdot community tends to harbor foaming-at-the-mouth purposeless hatred for everything Microsoft does even when they haven't really done anything wrong seems to have been right on point, and even the mods agreed with him on that particular day.
Evidence of being a Microsoft shill, I do not see. What I do see is that you launched an apparently unjustified ad hominem attack against someone you happen to disagree with. Just because this person has a slightly different opinion and/or perspective about Apple and/or Microsoft and/or Nokia than you do does not make them a shill. Did MaWeiTao arouse your ire precisely because he tends to post using a very neutral, non-confrontational tone of voice? Kind of like me? He fails to constantly attack Microsoft sufficiently so that makes him a shill? His opinions could hardly be considered praise. They're just neutral.
I now wait with bated* breath for someone to baselessly accuse me of being a Microsoft shill as well, for having the temerity to defend someone who has been accused (and apparently convicted by some) of being a Microsoft shill.
* Yes that is the correct spelling. Look it up. A dictionary lookup a day keeps ignorance at bay. I just made that up.
Blargh... I'm having Saturn 3 flashbacks. Anyone seen Harvey Keitel wandering around?
When I can toggle my wifi on IOS in 2 clicks, call me.
Until then, your posting and analogies are fanboy rants
- sent from my iPhone
IOS 7 has a new "Command Center" feature that you flick up from the bottom of the screen, that gives you one-click access to most of the hardware settings. Finally. Devices back to iPhone 4 will be supported by iOS 7. Should be available within the next week or two.
Also... Get the hell off their lawns, you young whippersnappers!
Any hotel with bedbugs should be SHUT DOWN until a health department inspector can verify ALL of the bugs are gone, no ifs, no buts, mandatory shutdown. These things are a dangerous pandemic.
Dangerous pandemic? How so? Last time I was researching bedbugs I was surprised to find out that, unlike other blood suckers like ticks and mosquitos, bedbugs do not transmit disease. They are just irritants. Shutting down an entire hotel because they found a few bedbugs seems a bit extreme. Especially given that it probably wouldn't accomplish much. A new infestation could be brought in on somebody's luggage the same day they reopen.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/26/2344215/gps-spoofing-with-3000-worth-of-equipment-and-a-laptop
It may be a dupe, but I distinctly remember reading post after post on that article from apparently knowledgeable people explaining in great detail how this whole "GPS spoofing" thing was supposedly nearly impossible or at least highly impractical. I am very much interested in having someone explain how these people have managed to accomplish something that is supposedly not doable.
Seems to me this represents a valid threat to the safety of using civil GPS navigation systems, on land or at sea. Most of the posts on the previous article seemed to indicate that GPS is NOT threatened at all. I am unable to rectify these two opposing points of view without further input from knowledgeable people.
How the hell this qualifies as any kind of news is beyond me. This appears to be someone's tech blog where he's basically just talking out of his ass and pulling suppositions out of thin air, about something that just happened like 24 hours ago. Suppositions which by the way are not confirmed by the only further piece of information we have, which is the statement from Apple that Mansfield will be working on special projects. He was already announced to be retiring last year and was convinced to stay on a temporary basis. Why on earth would Apple hold one executive responsible for the failure of a third-party company to effectively compete with Samsung in making chips? It's just--I can't--what?
This article is full of all kinds of fail. How about we wait a couple of days until someone actually has some factual news to report? Why the fuck is everybody and his brother jumping all over this guy all of the sudden? I expect this sort of thing from Mac _RUMORS_, but here? What the hell, Slashdot?
Why would they even need this? Policy over here is that if the car is illegally parked and blocking access to hydrants and such, they just use the their axes to go through the windows to run lines or use the very large bumpers their trucks are equipped with to quickly move the car. Anything else is just wasting time.
Sooo, ummm... what if your car _isn't_ parked illegally and they still need to move it? They trash your car anyway? ...