Reading just bits and pieces of this lady's blog it is quite apparent that she is full-on batshit, tea-party, paranoid-about-liberal-media crazy. Ignoring the fact that most of her wrath should be directed toward the insane policies of GoDaddy who are the ones who decided to shut down ALL her sites over a single photograph, she needs to have someone with backbone sue her dumb ass for slander and defamation so she can see how the law actually works. She needs a massive mental slap upside the head to rattle her brain back into place. She's pulling conspiracies out of thin air left and right, making all kinds of accusations without a shred of evidence. Oh, her evidence is, "I don't believe in coincidences."
I love the cognitive dissonance of these people. She quotes a supposed conservative psychologist expounding on some sort of horribly obvious but also incredibly nebulous psychological "problem" with Obama: "His externalizing all blame to conservatives, George W. Bush, or the “racist” bogeyman hints at persecutory delusions." Funny, I thought that's what conservatives were doing all day long, in the other direction. Externalizing all blame for literally EVERYTHING to liberals and Obama. Pot, kettle, carbon motherfuckin' black.
Wow. Just wow. Reading that blog is scary. She should apply for a job at Fox News. I'm sure she'd fit in perfectly. Now excuse me while I go scrub the crazy out of my brain with some Dragonball.
How do I know? Because I am currently dating a shemale. I really cute and loving one, mind you.
And I'm sure that she just loves being called a shemale, too! Never mind that every transgendered person I've ever met has generally considered the term to be pretty damn derogatory.
Secretly videotaping interracial sex is just as bad. How do I know? Because I'm currently dating a nigger. I really cute and loving one, mind you.
WTF are you talking about? The N-word is a purely derogatory slang form of the descriptive word "negro", which of course merely means "black". I've never heard anyone else imply that the descriptive term "shemale" is offensive in any way, just as the equally descriptive term "ladyboy" is not offensive. Racial slurs are in a whole different class. Being offended by a purely descriptive term makes no sense. That would be like me being offended by someone calling me a "white male". That's taking offense-sensitivity a bit far.
You probably would have received a slightly more useful set of responses if you were able to be more clear about what sort of nefarious "things" this person is expecting to uncover with all this NSA-level data monitoring of his own home network. I think it's really hard for most of us to imagine that any of this would be more effective than a simple heart-to-heart family talk about the perils of the interwebs.
But the bottom line is that this sort of project is miles outside your realm of expertise, which you've already admitted to when you submitted the original post. What you should have done (before asking the internet to condense several years of network security expertise into a five minute tutorial) is referred your "client" to a real network security specialist agency, or perhaps even the FBI if he really has some preliminary evidence of some kind of wrongdoing happening on his network. Those are the sort of people who have the resources to actually conduct a non-pointless investigation of this type. But the chances that the situation actually calls for such parties to be involved are practically nil.
'It doesn't speed, it doesn't cut you off, it doesn't tailgate,' says Tom Jacobs, a spokesman for the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles.
Anybody who equates breaking the speed limit as automatic excessive speeding is a tool. The speed limit on my local highway is 55mph, the average speed is close to 70. It's a safe speed. Many areas put an artificially low speed to collect tickets at will.
In fact, it would be highly dangerous to go 55mph. You'd get rear ended in no time not to mention road rage.
I do love how speeders justify their speeding by pointing out how it's safe and acceptable because "everybody does it". Doesn't matter how many people are also violating the law along with you, you're still a douchebag speeder who is endangering all the poor silly people attempting to avoid exceeding the posted speed limit. If you want to drive faster than the speed limit you should be lobbying to have the speed limit increased. But no, you have to "stick it to the man" and drive whatever speed you feel like driving so you can show everybody how much smarter you are than the guys who put up the speed limit signs.
As for being so safe, I do hope you realize that increasing your speed from 55mph to 70mph nearly DOUBLES the kinetic energy of your vehicle, and increases your required stopping distance from around 150ft to around 240ft (on DRY pavement). Yeah, real safe.
Might want to get some therapy for that road rage too.
The only reason people don't like it is because they are used to film looking another way. It has nothing to do with what is actually happening on screen, or some magical quality that allows 24fps to transport you to another place.
If all films changed to this, in three years no one would have an issue with it. In 10 years, people would say that older movies looked to "fake."
It's all what you are acclimated to.
I am going to have to strongly disagree with this assessment. All my life so far I have always had eyes that are more sensitive to both color quality and frame rates than most of the people around me. I have always been bothered by CRT monitors set to 60hz, and as soon as I learned that you could increase the frame rate to 75hz or 85hz I did so on every computer I ever sat in front of, because otherwise I'd get a headache. Fluorescent lights always used to bother me, before they came out with new types of ballasts that weren't restricted to 60hz. Every computer monitor that was still set to 256 colors got changed to at least thousands of colors when I sat down in front of it (16 million colors if possible), because the lack of color depth was blindingly obvious to me and annoying.
I waited to buy an LCD TV until I could afford to get one with at least a 120hz refresh rate, because it was quite obvious to my eyes when comparing models at the store that 60hz just wasn't enough to give a clear, ghost-free, jitter-free picture. I'd probably be even happier with one of the newer 240hz models because I could see a slight difference with those even over the 120hz models, but couldn't afford one at the time.
In other words, I have *always* been the first person I know to move to the newer, faster, sharper stuff whenever possible because my eyes can actually see the difference and appreciate it.
But you know what? The frame rate of the actual video programming displayed on the TV does not seem to conform to the same rules. Cinematic 24fps movies have never bothered my eyes, nor does 30fps TV. What does bother my eyes is stuff like soaps and amateur films that are filmed at higher frame rates. They just don't look right. Yes, they look more "real". But for some bizarre reason, they also look amateur, and "cheap", and have significantly less dramatic impact. I am far from the only one to notice this.
We've had this kind of programming available for decades. We've had plenty of time to "acclimate" to faster frame rates, yet nobody in their right mind has ever released a 60fps film because they know it will end up looking and feeling like a soap opera, and it will feel like a home-made movie, and people will hate it. That's just the way it is. There's nothing magical about it, it's just the way our visual cortex works. And until we evolve new visual cortexes, I call BS on all you people calling everyone who hates films with faster frame rates "whiners". Feel free to attempt to move to a higher frame rate as a standard for films, but just don't be surprised when everyone ends up either consciously or unconsciously hating the "new" films. Because I don't believe for a second that everyone will just get used to it and start loving how much all new movies feel like cheap soaps. Ain't gonna happen.
Higher resolution was a bit jarring for some people, but easy to get used to. But higher frame rates? I don't think the phenomenon of converting still frames to "motion" in the brain is that simple.
550 billion particles? That's it? How exactly does that equate to a "full observable-universe simulation"? Last I checked, the minimum estimate for our galaxy alone was 100 billion stars. Multiply that by at least 100 billion other *galaxies* and we're looking at... uh... a much larger number to even begin to simulate the entire observable universe.
I'm sure I'm significantly misunderstanding something about the simulation parameters though.
Wasn't the air so devoid of moisture there that you needed a breathing apparatus to not dessicate that way?
No. You misunderstand the purpose of the stillsuit. On Arrakis there was enough humidity for plants such as cacti and small desert animals such as the desert mouse (muad'dib) and the hawk to survive even in the deep desert. Even in the Atacama in Chile, the driest place on Earth, you will be fine as long as you have enough drinking water. The reason the stillsuit and mask were needed was due to the fact that there were so few water sources, not because of a lack of moisture in the air. If there had been sources of water available (such as drilled wells) in the deep desert they would have no particular need to recycle the body's moisture with a stillsuit.
Besides which, you would only become desiccated after you're dead. Before that it's dehydration. And you're actually more likely to get dehydrated while climbing Mount Everest than while wandering in the Sahara. Cold air holds less moisture and the lower air pressure also helps dehydrate you very efficiently.
I saw a couple of demo files years and years ago. DOS-based stuff. I think they were probably 16k files. I was amazed at how long the animations and music lasted from a 16KB EXE file. The demo just went on and on, for like ten minutes. Had some fairly impressive animations too. But it was all line-based sorts of things, like old screen savers.
But this... this is insane. I can't even believe what I'm seeing. I'm downloading the 720p version of the first video in MP4 format, and it's 91MB. A 91MB full-motion video rendered from a 64KB demo file. That's just nuts. It frazzles my brain to even think about how this is possible.
Yeah, that's a good question actually. I wondered the same thing about the Boeshield T9 product, but I've been assured by several people that it doesn't interfere with physical contacts.
Maybe these coatings provide just enough electrical isolation to keep voltage from shorting through liquids between physically separated components while still allowing current to flow between metal contacts that are physically touching. That would be my best guess. But I really don't know for sure.
Hate to reply to myself, but I'd like to point out to everyone who seems flabbergasted by this concept that it isn't really a new idea, the idea of allowing water into a device but protecting the internal surfaces, contacts and circuit boards from actually coming in contact with the water molecules.
Case in point, Boeshield T9. Invented by engineers at Boeing for coating internal areas of airplanes where it is difficult to get physical access. It's basically a wax suspended in a solvent solution. You spray it on something, for instance a circuit board, the solvent evaporates and leaves the wax which acts as an electrical insulator and water repellent, to prevent corrosion damage. Works pretty well, too.
How well? A work acquaintance of mine tells a story about a welding machine he treated by immersing it in a barrel of T9. It somehow went overboard from his fishing boat. You know, in the ocean. Saltwater. The electronics would have normally been irreparable from corrosion the moment it entered the water. He's a diver, so a couple weeks later he goes down (it's in about thirty feet of water) and brings it back up. Cleans it out and plugs it in. It works, and he still uses it today.
So yeah, not a new idea, making something waterproof even when it's full of water. But T9 is just wax, so not physically very durable, and I think immersing things like LCD panels in T9 in liquid form probably wouldn't work out well. So really the only exciting thing about these coatings is that they are supposedly quite durable and are compatible with the whole device, including the delicate parts like the LCD panels.
You've been somehow modded +5, Informative while being entirely incorrect.
These "nanocoating" waterproofing products, and Liquipel specifically, absolutely do not keep any liquids from penetrating into the device. The very idea that a coating could keep water out of speaker grills and docking/USB ports or even a micro SIM slot is patently ridiculous anyway. We're not talking about Gore-Tex or something where the holes are only a few thousand times the size of a water molecule. That's the scale where your pressure argument might start to make sense.
You have to realize the reason they are touting these treatments as "nanocoatings" is because they (allegedly) coat every internal nook and cranny inside the device with a permanent layer of highly water-repellent stuff that is only a few molecules thick.
Oh yes, you can be assured that your iPad will be full of water as soon as you jump in the pool, but the point of the coating (allegedly) is that the water molecules can never actually come into contact with anything inside the device. So nothing shorts out, the device keeps working normally, and you just let the water drain out when you leave the pool/beach/shower/whatever. Supposedly. The demo videos on their website are fairly impressive though. They even imply that treated devices will survive going through the laundry. But you can clearly see that the devices get filled with water when submerged, and have to be drained when taken out of the water. The job of the coating is simply to keep the liquid from damaging anything, not to keep liquids out.
As to how they manage to really coat everything perfectly enough at the molecular level to make it reliable, I'm sure that's a big part of their proprietary process. I'm guessing it has to be done while the device is at least partially disassembled. There is a competitor to Liquipel that has been advertising a service to waterproof an iPod Shuffle, for a cost of something like $175. I doubt that the process would be that expensive if it didn't involve the labor cost of disassembling and reassembling the Shuffle.
This article about Liquipel is of course just astroturfing, but if these coatings in general are really as durable as implied it will completely change the way we treat personal electronics around liquids. Someday it may confuse your children when you absent-mindedly admonish them to stop playing with their supersoakers around you while you read a book in the backyard on your seventh-generation iPad. Your iPad by that point may be far more resistant to water than you are. Spill coffee on your laptop again? Go rinse it off (with soapy water) in the sink, while it's still running!
I think you'd be surprised with what a great pair of winter tires will do on a little four-cylinder FWD car.
Off topic but very important: It is dangerous to be recommending that anyone put a "pair" of winter tires on any vehicle. Winter tires need to be installed on all wheels, not just the drive wheels. If the winter tires are on the rear wheels, you will lose control when cornering or attempting to avoid road hazards (such as pedestrians) since the steering tires will have poor traction. If the winter tires are on the front, the back end will have a strong tendency to want to flip around in front whenever you come to a hard stop. In other words, the car will either keep going straight ahead when you need it to turn, or it will go sideways or worse when you need it to stay straight. Neither is a good situation.
You will also lose at least one or two car lengths in stopping ability with only two winter tires. That could mean the difference between you or someone else living or dying in a lot of driving situations. Getting T-boned by a garbage truck or having it whiz by six inches from your front end.
Here is a great YouTube video that demonstrates a couple of these issues:
Having said all that, yes it is shocking how effective a set of good winter tires are at improving the ability to get around safely in the winter. It's scary watching all the people who still drive around with "all-season" tires in snow and ice, slipping and sliding all over the road. I think winter tires are even required by law in parts of Europe. Unfortunately, I'd estimate another 30-45 years before the US catches on to the fact that thousands of vehicular deaths and accidents and probably tens of millions in property damages could be avoided each year just by making winter tires mandatory in cold areas.
P.S. For those too lazy to do their own research, just get a set of the latest Bridgestone Blizzaks that fit your vehicle. They seem to be best overall performers in the tests I found while doing my own research.
You know, I recently finally read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki, and it really helped crystallize some things that I've long understood only intuitively. Namely, that spending several decades of my life navigating an increasingly unstable, career-antagonistic world economy while attempting to save up enough on an average salary to buy houses, cars, send kids to college and live on during an all-too-brief retirement period far off in the unknown future... is a really fucked up way to live.
The way most of us live our lives is called the Rat Race for a reason, and it's even more of a dead end proposition today than it was when Kiyosaki first published the book a decade ago. The days of stable life-long careers and pleasant retirement on guaranteed company retirement accounts are long gone (if they ever really existed). Many of the new generation of workers, the so-called Millennials, have already realized that if you can't enjoy life along the way, there isn't much point wasting most of your life helping someone at the top of the pyramid get obscenely rich while you and everyone around you struggle to make ends meet. So companies are already learning to make concessions in terms of flexibility about time off, quality of work facilities and many other things, in order to attract and retain enough employees to stay in business. Sooner or later I think the whole human race will begin to wise up in a similar fashion. Human beings are not just born to be money-making machines.
How does this apply to longer lifespans? Well, right now this situation really only applies to a few areas of business where the main workforce required are young, creative people. But I think the end result of continued worldwide industrial automation, increased Internet access, increased personal health and increased human longevity will mean that eventually, if you want a human being to work for you, then you'll need to do whatever it takes to provide an environment where that human being feels like they aren't wasting their lives by giving you their time. For many people that will mean more vacation time. Eventually, a _lot_ more vacation time. Maybe flexible schedules like two weeks on, two weeks off, or six months on, six months off, instead of today's typical 50 weeks on, 2 weeks off(!). A lot of people already live like this in various ways today. They take temporary or seasonal jobs and then enjoy life for a few months out of each year. For other people it may mean that they will demand to be part-owner of whatever company they work for. Either way the whole landscape of economies and employment will have to change over the next century or two until some kind of equilibrium is reached between the need to produce things and the desire to simply enjoy being alive.
Already there are a great many people in this world who can easily work for a few years, then buy themselves a small boat or an RV or build a small house and then basically live off the land and spend most of the rest of their lives doing nothing that pure capitalistic society would ever consider "productive". Yet, are they a burden on anyone simply by virtue of not having a 9-to-5 job for 50 weeks a year? Not really. This will only become more and more true in the future as the cost of producing things like solar panels and other technology decreases. In the future, either hundreds of millions of people will starve for lack of work as everything becomes automated, or we will have to come up with a new way of living life that doesn't place such a ridiculous emphasis on the necessity of having "gainful employment" during the best part of our lives. The only possible way to continue living our lives as employees the way we are now will require completely outlawing most forms of automation, and I don't see that ever happening.
In four years I'll be starting a company based on the idea of having a device that stores all your photos, emails, and applications locally so you aren't tied to the cloud.
You're a little late. You have to hand it to Apple yet again, their new iCloud service is mainly used not to _store_ but to _sync_ your apps, music, photos, contacts, calendar events and documents between your devices, where almost everything is then stored locally on each device or computer. Gee whiz, how about that. What a concept, huh? An iCloud outage will just mean you temporarily won't be able to sync things between devices. Most people probably won't even notice if it doesn't last more than a day.
I don't know if their iMessage service requires iCloud, but even if it does it would fall back to SMS if iCloud is down. So all in all they seem to have really thought things through with their implementation of cloud services.
Wow. I am rather disturbed by the amount of ignorance being displayed over this article simply because the word "magnet" was mentioned. These are not refrigerator magnets or Q-Ray bracelets we're talking about here. With TMS we're talking something like a one TESLA electromagnetic coil placed right next to your skull that goes snap-snap-snap every time it goes off, momentarily creating an intensely powerful magnetic field that can either stimulate or supress the electrical activity in the targeted part of the brain. The effects are mild and temporary, but very real.
It's one thing to be skeptical of a product someone is trying to sell you, and quite another to ignorantly dismiss perfectly sound basic scientific research just because they used a word that has been misappropriated by snake oil salesmen.
The idea that stimulating or supressing a certain part of the brain can induce behavior modification is not new either. Any sort of damage to the left temporal prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain right under your left temple) is strongly correlated with having dark, intensely homicidal and/or suicidal thoughts. Many doctors have noted immediate positive post-operation personality shifts in patients who have had large tumors or cysts removed that were pressing on this area of the brain. It should not be much of a stretch to imagine that other behaviors can be modified by manipulating other parts of the brain.
I also find it bizarre that people keep commenting that they don't believe the brain can be "forced" to lie. I think a number of pathological liars who have had their lives ruined by having the constant overpowering urge to lie all the time would beg to differ.
I think the main thing we are learning these days is that the human brain is both more complex than we ever imagined and, in some very disturbing ways, far LESS complex than we would like it to be. But if we freely embrace the new knowledge we are gaining we may be close to learning how to actually repair many of the "broken" human beings that we now just keep in cages because we don't know what else to do with them. Not lobotomize or brainwash, but actually repair, back to what the rest of us consider "normal". To me, what is going on in neuroscience these days is very exciting. Ripe for abuse, of course, but still exciting because of the positive possibilities.
I live in a small town (pop. about 9,000) where they recently replaced a busy round-robin type of four-way stop with a small roundabout. Before the change it was a rather nasty affair getting through the center of town, even in low traffic times. People were constantly losing their place in the queue and there were many near-accidents every day. Morning and evening there were cars lined up for a block or more and it would take several minutes to get through the queue, and then once you got to the intersection you'd have to decide whether you or the other cars stopped first. It was unpleasant.
The new roundabout was hotly debated for a long time. Many people did not want it. I think in the end the state DoT just basically said "we're building it whether you like it or not". I was unsure myself whether it would actually be an improvement. The circle is quite small, so there isn't much room to get in before cars enter the circle from your left. Each entrance is only a couple of car lengths apart. Nevertheless, it was built, and it works surprisingly well. Even at busy times of day the lines are much smaller and move much faster. When there are no lines there are some asshats who can't be bothered to slow down to the posted 15mph when they zip through, but even so it ends up being pretty easy to get through, and even if someone is close behind you or jumps into the circle in front of you the traffic is at least flowing in the same direction, so it is relatively easy to avoid collisions by just slowing down a bit. Much safer than when one person at the four-way is driving straight through and somebody across from them decides to come out and turn left into their path at the same time. There were a lot of almost head-on collisions when it was a four-way.
All-in-all, a vast improvement, and as soon as American drivers see roundabouts more often I'm sure they will work even better. As long as they are properly implemented, I think they should be welcomed.
What the hell do they put into that package to make it 4 GB? Isn't XCode just an IDE and a compiler bundled together?
There are tons of libraries and frameworks for the current version of OS X as well as for past versions of OS X (for cross-compiling projects) and now for different versions of iOS, since the iOS SDK is included. There are also sample projects and an interface builder and debuggers and probably lots of other neat things that I'm not even aware of.
What you install to your hard drive may not end up being that big since there is a lot of optional stuff included in the main XCode download. So no, it's not just an IDE and a compiler. And it would be quite silly of Apple to include something so huge and unnecessary with every download of Lion. Anyone who wants it can just download it separately.
XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.
10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL.
Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Otherwise, what's going to magically read your DVD or USB Flash Key? And I rashly assume that you can't run the installer if your machine has booted into 10.5.x...
Umm, no. You are very confused. Unless that was meant as a joke. How could anyone ever install an operating system if you needed an operating system installed to install an operating system? Google "BIOS" and "bootable DVD".
Every OS X intall disc has been a bootable image (already containing a fully bootable copy of OS X) that allows installation onto a clean hard drive. The Lion installer contains the same standard bootable disc image. The only difference is that the computer can apparently be booted from that disc image while it is still just sitting on the hard drive (if you are running Snow Leopard 10.6.8). That is, Lion REQUIRES no external boot media, but it can still be used from external boot media if you so choose, and if you have the very simple knowledge to open Disk Utility on ANY Mac and "restore" the DMG file onto a DVD or USB flash drive or external USB or FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive. Anyone who "administrates" Macs should already know how to do this, so I'm really not sure why so many Mac admins are freaking out about the no-media policy. Some "Real" Mac admins are probably out there somewhere NetInstalling the new Lion install image on hundreds of machines at the same time as we speak.
If you are running anything prior to Snow Leopard 10.6.8, you will of course have to either upgrade your machine to Snow Leopard first or or use external install media just as you would with a clean machine. Either way, not really a big deal. Seriously.
The Doctor's Wife episode was one of the very worst, in my opinion. The show managed to go for decades prior to that episode WITHOUT stooping to explicitly stating exactly why the TARDIS never seemed to go where it was told. Now apparently the answer to everything is that the Doctor has to be in a pseudo-sexual relationship with every woman on the show, including the "female" TARDIS consciousness. That was never what the show was about. It's been turned into a soap opera in space apparently in an attempt to make the Doctor more "human" so he'll appeal to a wider audience. The problem is, the Doctor ISN'T human, and was never meant to be. It just doesn't work for me anymore. The show seems like something that's being dumbed down to try and appeal to a lowest common denominator audience.
Of course, that's all just my subjective opinion. But I think it says something that I can repeatedly watch hundreds of older episodes of a show and then suddenly I can't stand watching new episodes. I'm certainly not the only one strongly disliking the new stuff.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
Last season was terrible about this, and it's carried over into this season despite the new Doctor and change of show runner. The cocky Doctor needs to go.
That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. He seems to think he's a cross between Superman and Jesus Christ now, like he's both invincible and can do no wrong even while people are getting killed all around him. In the real world (where the Doctor used to live) that kind of crap would have gotten his ass atomized a dozen times over by now.
I don't want to watch the Superchrist Spacey Soap Opera Show, I want to watch Doctor Who, where a clever guy encounters strange alien mysteries and narrowly avoids getting killed by being clever, not by being stupidly arrogant and self-absorbed and melodramatic.
You're reply is quite amusing, probably unintentionally. You like the show except for all the boring, predictable, nonsensical and annoying parts? Perhaps you just haven't reached your saturation point yet for those elements like I did from the very first episode this season. I gave it a couple more tries hoping it would get better, but it didn't. I didn't even bother watching the second part of the episode you're referring to, because I was thoroughly disgusted by the time the first half was over.
I have noticed the clues to some over-arcing theme that will certainly be wrapped up at the end of the season, but a grand finale won't save save something for me that has such awful individual episodes.
To each their own. By all means, enjoy the show as long as you are able.
Unfortunately the Daleks aren't the only thing that needs a break. So does the Doctor. He has become a bad charicature of himself.
This new season is sort of like being forced to watch a Jerry Bruckheimer film every weekend, with all of the ludicrously over-dramatic theme music and gag-me-with-a-spoon melodramatic themes. Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season. And the ridiculous "mysterious" River Song character that keeps being forced into every episode for some unknown reason just makes me want to vomit. Every time she smugly says her signature line I want someone to punch her in the mouth.
The plots, and the Doctor himself, are so incoherent that even I barely know what the hell just happened at the end of an episode, and I'm normally the guy in the room who is explaining the plot twists to others. The new episodes make almost zero sense, like they're using some random plot element generator to write the stories for them. The behavior of the characters no longer rings true, so the stories fall flat. The new Doctor comes across as a gibbering moron who doesn't pay attention to anyone or anything besides himself and yet magically finds his way out of every possible situation without seeming to have the slightest clue what he's doing.
I've managed to find and watch nearly every episode of the old series (thanks Pirate Bay!) and thoroughly enjoyed almost every single episode, from the first Doctor right up through all the David Tennant seasons. But this newest stuff has pretty much made me stop wanting to watch the show, at least until they get new writers. It takes some real talent to screw up a show that has been pretty entertaining for decades already using a very simple formula. They should really just rename the show to "The Something Horribly Bad Happens to the Tardis Every Week Show" which seems to be the common theme now.
... aaaand congratulations on proving my point yet again. Your reply is simply replete with the arrogance of the standard doctor vs. patient relationship that is held up by far too many medical professionals as being the correct way to treat people who are coming to them for help. Human beings are not statistics and they really don't appreciate being treated as such. If my kid has a runny nose and you tell me it's just a cold, fine. I'll go home. If my kid hasn't been able to ingest food or water for five fucking DAYS I don't give a rusty fuck how fucking superior you think you are, you better do something more than just look at the kid or I will happily "fuck off" and find a new doctor, or the hospital administrator, until _I_ am satisfied that my kid isn't going to die.
You may not consider it the doctor's job to treat the parents as well as the patient, but my job for damn sure is to keep my kid alive, not to just take your fucking word that everything will be fine. Because in the real world, a funny thing happens: Sometimes doctors are wrong, sometimes they miss something, and people die even when all the doctors said they were going to be fine. In fact, it seems to happen quite often. Doctors sometimes screw up. Nurses sometimes screw up. I know this from experience. They are people and people make mistakes. Doctors are not gods.
I know doing more involved testing on every patient is infeasible. I know it's really hard as a medical professional to avoid developing the attitude that everyone who doesn't listen to you is a moron. Most of them probably are, which doesn't help. I'm just saying you need to look at things from their perspective as well as your own, if you want to actually help people rather than just "see patients". Having the attitude that everyone who isn't a doctor is a moron who should just do what they're told without question is not a helpful attitude in any way.
Lose the elitist attitude and you're sure to have a better relationship with the rest of humanity. Doctors too often seem to forget that no doctor knows everything. In short, cut regular people some fucking slack, asshole. Or find a different profession. Like repairing copiers instead of repairing people. Copiers won't talk back or question your diagnosis.
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Reading just bits and pieces of this lady's blog it is quite apparent that she is full-on batshit, tea-party, paranoid-about-liberal-media crazy. Ignoring the fact that most of her wrath should be directed toward the insane policies of GoDaddy who are the ones who decided to shut down ALL her sites over a single photograph, she needs to have someone with backbone sue her dumb ass for slander and defamation so she can see how the law actually works. She needs a massive mental slap upside the head to rattle her brain back into place. She's pulling conspiracies out of thin air left and right, making all kinds of accusations without a shred of evidence. Oh, her evidence is, "I don't believe in coincidences."
I love the cognitive dissonance of these people. She quotes a supposed conservative psychologist expounding on some sort of horribly obvious but also incredibly nebulous psychological "problem" with Obama: "His externalizing all blame to conservatives, George W. Bush, or the “racist” bogeyman hints at persecutory delusions." Funny, I thought that's what conservatives were doing all day long, in the other direction. Externalizing all blame for literally EVERYTHING to liberals and Obama. Pot, kettle, carbon motherfuckin' black.
Wow. Just wow. Reading that blog is scary. She should apply for a job at Fox News. I'm sure she'd fit in perfectly. Now excuse me while I go scrub the crazy out of my brain with some Dragonball.
How do I know? Because I am currently dating a shemale. I really cute and loving one, mind you.
And I'm sure that she just loves being called a shemale, too! Never mind that every transgendered person I've ever met has generally considered the term to be pretty damn derogatory.
Secretly videotaping interracial sex is just as bad. How do I know? Because I'm currently dating a nigger. I really cute and loving one, mind you.
WTF are you talking about? The N-word is a purely derogatory slang form of the descriptive word "negro", which of course merely means "black". I've never heard anyone else imply that the descriptive term "shemale" is offensive in any way, just as the equally descriptive term "ladyboy" is not offensive. Racial slurs are in a whole different class. Being offended by a purely descriptive term makes no sense. That would be like me being offended by someone calling me a "white male". That's taking offense-sensitivity a bit far.
You probably would have received a slightly more useful set of responses if you were able to be more clear about what sort of nefarious "things" this person is expecting to uncover with all this NSA-level data monitoring of his own home network. I think it's really hard for most of us to imagine that any of this would be more effective than a simple heart-to-heart family talk about the perils of the interwebs.
But the bottom line is that this sort of project is miles outside your realm of expertise, which you've already admitted to when you submitted the original post. What you should have done (before asking the internet to condense several years of network security expertise into a five minute tutorial) is referred your "client" to a real network security specialist agency, or perhaps even the FBI if he really has some preliminary evidence of some kind of wrongdoing happening on his network. Those are the sort of people who have the resources to actually conduct a non-pointless investigation of this type. But the chances that the situation actually calls for such parties to be involved are practically nil.
Anybody who equates breaking the speed limit as automatic excessive speeding is a tool. The speed limit on my local highway is 55mph, the average speed is close to 70. It's a safe speed. Many areas put an artificially low speed to collect tickets at will.
In fact, it would be highly dangerous to go 55mph. You'd get rear ended in no time not to mention road rage.
I do love how speeders justify their speeding by pointing out how it's safe and acceptable because "everybody does it". Doesn't matter how many people are also violating the law along with you, you're still a douchebag speeder who is endangering all the poor silly people attempting to avoid exceeding the posted speed limit. If you want to drive faster than the speed limit you should be lobbying to have the speed limit increased. But no, you have to "stick it to the man" and drive whatever speed you feel like driving so you can show everybody how much smarter you are than the guys who put up the speed limit signs.
As for being so safe, I do hope you realize that increasing your speed from 55mph to 70mph nearly DOUBLES the kinetic energy of your vehicle, and increases your required stopping distance from around 150ft to around 240ft (on DRY pavement). Yeah, real safe.
Might want to get some therapy for that road rage too.
The only reason people don't like it is because they are used to film looking another way. It has nothing to do with what is actually happening on screen, or some magical quality that allows 24fps to transport you to another place.
If all films changed to this, in three years no one would have an issue with it. In 10 years, people would say that older movies looked to "fake."
It's all what you are acclimated to.
I am going to have to strongly disagree with this assessment. All my life so far I have always had eyes that are more sensitive to both color quality and frame rates than most of the people around me. I have always been bothered by CRT monitors set to 60hz, and as soon as I learned that you could increase the frame rate to 75hz or 85hz I did so on every computer I ever sat in front of, because otherwise I'd get a headache. Fluorescent lights always used to bother me, before they came out with new types of ballasts that weren't restricted to 60hz. Every computer monitor that was still set to 256 colors got changed to at least thousands of colors when I sat down in front of it (16 million colors if possible), because the lack of color depth was blindingly obvious to me and annoying.
I waited to buy an LCD TV until I could afford to get one with at least a 120hz refresh rate, because it was quite obvious to my eyes when comparing models at the store that 60hz just wasn't enough to give a clear, ghost-free, jitter-free picture. I'd probably be even happier with one of the newer 240hz models because I could see a slight difference with those even over the 120hz models, but couldn't afford one at the time.
In other words, I have *always* been the first person I know to move to the newer, faster, sharper stuff whenever possible because my eyes can actually see the difference and appreciate it.
But you know what? The frame rate of the actual video programming displayed on the TV does not seem to conform to the same rules. Cinematic 24fps movies have never bothered my eyes, nor does 30fps TV. What does bother my eyes is stuff like soaps and amateur films that are filmed at higher frame rates. They just don't look right. Yes, they look more "real". But for some bizarre reason, they also look amateur, and "cheap", and have significantly less dramatic impact. I am far from the only one to notice this.
We've had this kind of programming available for decades. We've had plenty of time to "acclimate" to faster frame rates, yet nobody in their right mind has ever released a 60fps film because they know it will end up looking and feeling like a soap opera, and it will feel like a home-made movie, and people will hate it. That's just the way it is. There's nothing magical about it, it's just the way our visual cortex works. And until we evolve new visual cortexes, I call BS on all you people calling everyone who hates films with faster frame rates "whiners". Feel free to attempt to move to a higher frame rate as a standard for films, but just don't be surprised when everyone ends up either consciously or unconsciously hating the "new" films. Because I don't believe for a second that everyone will just get used to it and start loving how much all new movies feel like cheap soaps. Ain't gonna happen.
Higher resolution was a bit jarring for some people, but easy to get used to. But higher frame rates? I don't think the phenomenon of converting still frames to "motion" in the brain is that simple.
550 billion particles? That's it? How exactly does that equate to a "full observable-universe simulation"? Last I checked, the minimum estimate for our galaxy alone was 100 billion stars. Multiply that by at least 100 billion other *galaxies* and we're looking at... uh... a much larger number to even begin to simulate the entire observable universe.
I'm sure I'm significantly misunderstanding something about the simulation parameters though.
Wasn't the air so devoid of moisture there that you needed a breathing apparatus to not dessicate that way?
No. You misunderstand the purpose of the stillsuit. On Arrakis there was enough humidity for plants such as cacti and small desert animals such as the desert mouse (muad'dib) and the hawk to survive even in the deep desert. Even in the Atacama in Chile, the driest place on Earth, you will be fine as long as you have enough drinking water. The reason the stillsuit and mask were needed was due to the fact that there were so few water sources, not because of a lack of moisture in the air. If there had been sources of water available (such as drilled wells) in the deep desert they would have no particular need to recycle the body's moisture with a stillsuit.
Besides which, you would only become desiccated after you're dead. Before that it's dehydration. And you're actually more likely to get dehydrated while climbing Mount Everest than while wandering in the Sahara. Cold air holds less moisture and the lower air pressure also helps dehydrate you very efficiently.
I saw a couple of demo files years and years ago. DOS-based stuff. I think they were probably 16k files. I was amazed at how long the animations and music lasted from a 16KB EXE file. The demo just went on and on, for like ten minutes. Had some fairly impressive animations too. But it was all line-based sorts of things, like old screen savers.
But this... this is insane. I can't even believe what I'm seeing. I'm downloading the 720p version of the first video in MP4 format, and it's 91MB. A 91MB full-motion video rendered from a 64KB demo file. That's just nuts. It frazzles my brain to even think about how this is possible.
So in the future we'll all be driving electric-hydrogen vehicles covered in a sort of shag carpet of nanowire trees?
That...
is...
AWESOME!
Yeah, that's a good question actually. I wondered the same thing about the Boeshield T9 product, but I've been assured by several people that it doesn't interfere with physical contacts.
Maybe these coatings provide just enough electrical isolation to keep voltage from shorting through liquids between physically separated components while still allowing current to flow between metal contacts that are physically touching. That would be my best guess. But I really don't know for sure.
Hate to reply to myself, but I'd like to point out to everyone who seems flabbergasted by this concept that it isn't really a new idea, the idea of allowing water into a device but protecting the internal surfaces, contacts and circuit boards from actually coming in contact with the water molecules.
Case in point, Boeshield T9. Invented by engineers at Boeing for coating internal areas of airplanes where it is difficult to get physical access. It's basically a wax suspended in a solvent solution. You spray it on something, for instance a circuit board, the solvent evaporates and leaves the wax which acts as an electrical insulator and water repellent, to prevent corrosion damage. Works pretty well, too.
How well? A work acquaintance of mine tells a story about a welding machine he treated by immersing it in a barrel of T9. It somehow went overboard from his fishing boat. You know, in the ocean. Saltwater. The electronics would have normally been irreparable from corrosion the moment it entered the water. He's a diver, so a couple weeks later he goes down (it's in about thirty feet of water) and brings it back up. Cleans it out and plugs it in. It works, and he still uses it today.
So yeah, not a new idea, making something waterproof even when it's full of water. But T9 is just wax, so not physically very durable, and I think immersing things like LCD panels in T9 in liquid form probably wouldn't work out well. So really the only exciting thing about these coatings is that they are supposedly quite durable and are compatible with the whole device, including the delicate parts like the LCD panels.
You've been somehow modded +5, Informative while being entirely incorrect.
These "nanocoating" waterproofing products, and Liquipel specifically, absolutely do not keep any liquids from penetrating into the device. The very idea that a coating could keep water out of speaker grills and docking/USB ports or even a micro SIM slot is patently ridiculous anyway. We're not talking about Gore-Tex or something where the holes are only a few thousand times the size of a water molecule. That's the scale where your pressure argument might start to make sense.
You have to realize the reason they are touting these treatments as "nanocoatings" is because they (allegedly) coat every internal nook and cranny inside the device with a permanent layer of highly water-repellent stuff that is only a few molecules thick.
Oh yes, you can be assured that your iPad will be full of water as soon as you jump in the pool, but the point of the coating (allegedly) is that the water molecules can never actually come into contact with anything inside the device. So nothing shorts out, the device keeps working normally, and you just let the water drain out when you leave the pool/beach/shower/whatever. Supposedly. The demo videos on their website are fairly impressive though. They even imply that treated devices will survive going through the laundry. But you can clearly see that the devices get filled with water when submerged, and have to be drained when taken out of the water. The job of the coating is simply to keep the liquid from damaging anything, not to keep liquids out.
As to how they manage to really coat everything perfectly enough at the molecular level to make it reliable, I'm sure that's a big part of their proprietary process. I'm guessing it has to be done while the device is at least partially disassembled. There is a competitor to Liquipel that has been advertising a service to waterproof an iPod Shuffle, for a cost of something like $175. I doubt that the process would be that expensive if it didn't involve the labor cost of disassembling and reassembling the Shuffle.
This article about Liquipel is of course just astroturfing, but if these coatings in general are really as durable as implied it will completely change the way we treat personal electronics around liquids. Someday it may confuse your children when you absent-mindedly admonish them to stop playing with their supersoakers around you while you read a book in the backyard on your seventh-generation iPad. Your iPad by that point may be far more resistant to water than you are. Spill coffee on your laptop again? Go rinse it off (with soapy water) in the sink, while it's still running!
Something to think about.
I think you'd be surprised with what a great pair of winter tires will do on a little four-cylinder FWD car.
Off topic but very important: It is dangerous to be recommending that anyone put a "pair" of winter tires on any vehicle. Winter tires need to be installed on all wheels, not just the drive wheels. If the winter tires are on the rear wheels, you will lose control when cornering or attempting to avoid road hazards (such as pedestrians) since the steering tires will have poor traction. If the winter tires are on the front, the back end will have a strong tendency to want to flip around in front whenever you come to a hard stop. In other words, the car will either keep going straight ahead when you need it to turn, or it will go sideways or worse when you need it to stay straight. Neither is a good situation.
You will also lose at least one or two car lengths in stopping ability with only two winter tires. That could mean the difference between you or someone else living or dying in a lot of driving situations. Getting T-boned by a garbage truck or having it whiz by six inches from your front end.
Here is a great YouTube video that demonstrates a couple of these issues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzB7hpWhqIA
Having said all that, yes it is shocking how effective a set of good winter tires are at improving the ability to get around safely in the winter. It's scary watching all the people who still drive around with "all-season" tires in snow and ice, slipping and sliding all over the road. I think winter tires are even required by law in parts of Europe. Unfortunately, I'd estimate another 30-45 years before the US catches on to the fact that thousands of vehicular deaths and accidents and probably tens of millions in property damages could be avoided each year just by making winter tires mandatory in cold areas.
P.S. For those too lazy to do their own research, just get a set of the latest Bridgestone Blizzaks that fit your vehicle. They seem to be best overall performers in the tests I found while doing my own research.
You know, I recently finally read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki, and it really helped crystallize some things that I've long understood only intuitively. Namely, that spending several decades of my life navigating an increasingly unstable, career-antagonistic world economy while attempting to save up enough on an average salary to buy houses, cars, send kids to college and live on during an all-too-brief retirement period far off in the unknown future... is a really fucked up way to live.
The way most of us live our lives is called the Rat Race for a reason, and it's even more of a dead end proposition today than it was when Kiyosaki first published the book a decade ago. The days of stable life-long careers and pleasant retirement on guaranteed company retirement accounts are long gone (if they ever really existed). Many of the new generation of workers, the so-called Millennials, have already realized that if you can't enjoy life along the way, there isn't much point wasting most of your life helping someone at the top of the pyramid get obscenely rich while you and everyone around you struggle to make ends meet. So companies are already learning to make concessions in terms of flexibility about time off, quality of work facilities and many other things, in order to attract and retain enough employees to stay in business. Sooner or later I think the whole human race will begin to wise up in a similar fashion. Human beings are not just born to be money-making machines.
How does this apply to longer lifespans? Well, right now this situation really only applies to a few areas of business where the main workforce required are young, creative people. But I think the end result of continued worldwide industrial automation, increased Internet access, increased personal health and increased human longevity will mean that eventually, if you want a human being to work for you, then you'll need to do whatever it takes to provide an environment where that human being feels like they aren't wasting their lives by giving you their time. For many people that will mean more vacation time. Eventually, a _lot_ more vacation time. Maybe flexible schedules like two weeks on, two weeks off, or six months on, six months off, instead of today's typical 50 weeks on, 2 weeks off(!). A lot of people already live like this in various ways today. They take temporary or seasonal jobs and then enjoy life for a few months out of each year. For other people it may mean that they will demand to be part-owner of whatever company they work for. Either way the whole landscape of economies and employment will have to change over the next century or two until some kind of equilibrium is reached between the need to produce things and the desire to simply enjoy being alive.
Already there are a great many people in this world who can easily work for a few years, then buy themselves a small boat or an RV or build a small house and then basically live off the land and spend most of the rest of their lives doing nothing that pure capitalistic society would ever consider "productive". Yet, are they a burden on anyone simply by virtue of not having a 9-to-5 job for 50 weeks a year? Not really. This will only become more and more true in the future as the cost of producing things like solar panels and other technology decreases. In the future, either hundreds of millions of people will starve for lack of work as everything becomes automated, or we will have to come up with a new way of living life that doesn't place such a ridiculous emphasis on the necessity of having "gainful employment" during the best part of our lives. The only possible way to continue living our lives as employees the way we are now will require completely outlawing most forms of automation, and I don't see that ever happening.
In four years I'll be starting a company based on the idea of having a device that stores all your photos, emails, and applications locally so you aren't tied to the cloud.
You're a little late. You have to hand it to Apple yet again, their new iCloud service is mainly used not to _store_ but to _sync_ your apps, music, photos, contacts, calendar events and documents between your devices, where almost everything is then stored locally on each device or computer. Gee whiz, how about that. What a concept, huh? An iCloud outage will just mean you temporarily won't be able to sync things between devices. Most people probably won't even notice if it doesn't last more than a day.
I don't know if their iMessage service requires iCloud, but even if it does it would fall back to SMS if iCloud is down. So all in all they seem to have really thought things through with their implementation of cloud services.
Wow. I am rather disturbed by the amount of ignorance being displayed over this article simply because the word "magnet" was mentioned. These are not refrigerator magnets or Q-Ray bracelets we're talking about here. With TMS we're talking something like a one TESLA electromagnetic coil placed right next to your skull that goes snap-snap-snap every time it goes off, momentarily creating an intensely powerful magnetic field that can either stimulate or supress the electrical activity in the targeted part of the brain. The effects are mild and temporary, but very real.
It's one thing to be skeptical of a product someone is trying to sell you, and quite another to ignorantly dismiss perfectly sound basic scientific research just because they used a word that has been misappropriated by snake oil salesmen.
The idea that stimulating or supressing a certain part of the brain can induce behavior modification is not new either. Any sort of damage to the left temporal prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain right under your left temple) is strongly correlated with having dark, intensely homicidal and/or suicidal thoughts. Many doctors have noted immediate positive post-operation personality shifts in patients who have had large tumors or cysts removed that were pressing on this area of the brain. It should not be much of a stretch to imagine that other behaviors can be modified by manipulating other parts of the brain.
I also find it bizarre that people keep commenting that they don't believe the brain can be "forced" to lie. I think a number of pathological liars who have had their lives ruined by having the constant overpowering urge to lie all the time would beg to differ.
I think the main thing we are learning these days is that the human brain is both more complex than we ever imagined and, in some very disturbing ways, far LESS complex than we would like it to be. But if we freely embrace the new knowledge we are gaining we may be close to learning how to actually repair many of the "broken" human beings that we now just keep in cages because we don't know what else to do with them. Not lobotomize or brainwash, but actually repair, back to what the rest of us consider "normal". To me, what is going on in neuroscience these days is very exciting. Ripe for abuse, of course, but still exciting because of the positive possibilities.
I live in a small town (pop. about 9,000) where they recently replaced a busy round-robin type of four-way stop with a small roundabout. Before the change it was a rather nasty affair getting through the center of town, even in low traffic times. People were constantly losing their place in the queue and there were many near-accidents every day. Morning and evening there were cars lined up for a block or more and it would take several minutes to get through the queue, and then once you got to the intersection you'd have to decide whether you or the other cars stopped first. It was unpleasant.
The new roundabout was hotly debated for a long time. Many people did not want it. I think in the end the state DoT just basically said "we're building it whether you like it or not". I was unsure myself whether it would actually be an improvement. The circle is quite small, so there isn't much room to get in before cars enter the circle from your left. Each entrance is only a couple of car lengths apart. Nevertheless, it was built, and it works surprisingly well. Even at busy times of day the lines are much smaller and move much faster. When there are no lines there are some asshats who can't be bothered to slow down to the posted 15mph when they zip through, but even so it ends up being pretty easy to get through, and even if someone is close behind you or jumps into the circle in front of you the traffic is at least flowing in the same direction, so it is relatively easy to avoid collisions by just slowing down a bit. Much safer than when one person at the four-way is driving straight through and somebody across from them decides to come out and turn left into their path at the same time. There were a lot of almost head-on collisions when it was a four-way.
All-in-all, a vast improvement, and as soon as American drivers see roundabouts more often I'm sure they will work even better. As long as they are properly implemented, I think they should be welcomed.
What the hell do they put into that package to make it 4 GB? Isn't XCode just an IDE and a compiler bundled together?
There are tons of libraries and frameworks for the current version of OS X as well as for past versions of OS X (for cross-compiling projects) and now for different versions of iOS, since the iOS SDK is included. There are also sample projects and an interface builder and debuggers and probably lots of other neat things that I'm not even aware of.
What you install to your hard drive may not end up being that big since there is a lot of optional stuff included in the main XCode download. So no, it's not just an IDE and a compiler. And it would be quite silly of Apple to include something so huge and unnecessary with every download of Lion. Anyone who wants it can just download it separately.
XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.
10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL.
Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Otherwise, what's going to magically read your DVD or USB Flash Key? And I rashly assume that you can't run the installer if your machine has booted into 10.5.x...
Umm, no. You are very confused. Unless that was meant as a joke. How could anyone ever install an operating system if you needed an operating system installed to install an operating system? Google "BIOS" and "bootable DVD".
Every OS X intall disc has been a bootable image (already containing a fully bootable copy of OS X) that allows installation onto a clean hard drive. The Lion installer contains the same standard bootable disc image. The only difference is that the computer can apparently be booted from that disc image while it is still just sitting on the hard drive (if you are running Snow Leopard 10.6.8). That is, Lion REQUIRES no external boot media, but it can still be used from external boot media if you so choose, and if you have the very simple knowledge to open Disk Utility on ANY Mac and "restore" the DMG file onto a DVD or USB flash drive or external USB or FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive. Anyone who "administrates" Macs should already know how to do this, so I'm really not sure why so many Mac admins are freaking out about the no-media policy. Some "Real" Mac admins are probably out there somewhere NetInstalling the new Lion install image on hundreds of machines at the same time as we speak.
If you are running anything prior to Snow Leopard 10.6.8, you will of course have to either upgrade your machine to Snow Leopard first or or use external install media just as you would with a clean machine. Either way, not really a big deal. Seriously.
The Doctor's Wife episode was one of the very worst, in my opinion. The show managed to go for decades prior to that episode WITHOUT stooping to explicitly stating exactly why the TARDIS never seemed to go where it was told. Now apparently the answer to everything is that the Doctor has to be in a pseudo-sexual relationship with every woman on the show, including the "female" TARDIS consciousness. That was never what the show was about. It's been turned into a soap opera in space apparently in an attempt to make the Doctor more "human" so he'll appeal to a wider audience. The problem is, the Doctor ISN'T human, and was never meant to be. It just doesn't work for me anymore. The show seems like something that's being dumbed down to try and appeal to a lowest common denominator audience.
Of course, that's all just my subjective opinion. But I think it says something that I can repeatedly watch hundreds of older episodes of a show and then suddenly I can't stand watching new episodes. I'm certainly not the only one strongly disliking the new stuff.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
Last season was terrible about this, and it's carried over into this season despite the new Doctor and change of show runner. The cocky Doctor needs to go.
That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. He seems to think he's a cross between Superman and Jesus Christ now, like he's both invincible and can do no wrong even while people are getting killed all around him. In the real world (where the Doctor used to live) that kind of crap would have gotten his ass atomized a dozen times over by now.
I don't want to watch the Superchrist Spacey Soap Opera Show, I want to watch Doctor Who, where a clever guy encounters strange alien mysteries and narrowly avoids getting killed by being clever, not by being stupidly arrogant and self-absorbed and melodramatic.
You're reply is quite amusing, probably unintentionally. You like the show except for all the boring, predictable, nonsensical and annoying parts? Perhaps you just haven't reached your saturation point yet for those elements like I did from the very first episode this season. I gave it a couple more tries hoping it would get better, but it didn't. I didn't even bother watching the second part of the episode you're referring to, because I was thoroughly disgusted by the time the first half was over.
I have noticed the clues to some over-arcing theme that will certainly be wrapped up at the end of the season, but a grand finale won't save save something for me that has such awful individual episodes.
To each their own. By all means, enjoy the show as long as you are able.
Unfortunately the Daleks aren't the only thing that needs a break. So does the Doctor. He has become a bad charicature of himself.
This new season is sort of like being forced to watch a Jerry Bruckheimer film every weekend, with all of the ludicrously over-dramatic theme music and gag-me-with-a-spoon melodramatic themes. Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season. And the ridiculous "mysterious" River Song character that keeps being forced into every episode for some unknown reason just makes me want to vomit. Every time she smugly says her signature line I want someone to punch her in the mouth.
The plots, and the Doctor himself, are so incoherent that even I barely know what the hell just happened at the end of an episode, and I'm normally the guy in the room who is explaining the plot twists to others. The new episodes make almost zero sense, like they're using some random plot element generator to write the stories for them. The behavior of the characters no longer rings true, so the stories fall flat. The new Doctor comes across as a gibbering moron who doesn't pay attention to anyone or anything besides himself and yet magically finds his way out of every possible situation without seeming to have the slightest clue what he's doing.
I've managed to find and watch nearly every episode of the old series (thanks Pirate Bay!) and thoroughly enjoyed almost every single episode, from the first Doctor right up through all the David Tennant seasons. But this newest stuff has pretty much made me stop wanting to watch the show, at least until they get new writers. It takes some real talent to screw up a show that has been pretty entertaining for decades already using a very simple formula. They should really just rename the show to "The Something Horribly Bad Happens to the Tardis Every Week Show" which seems to be the common theme now.
... aaaand congratulations on proving my point yet again. Your reply is simply replete with the arrogance of the standard doctor vs. patient relationship that is held up by far too many medical professionals as being the correct way to treat people who are coming to them for help. Human beings are not statistics and they really don't appreciate being treated as such. If my kid has a runny nose and you tell me it's just a cold, fine. I'll go home. If my kid hasn't been able to ingest food or water for five fucking DAYS I don't give a rusty fuck how fucking superior you think you are, you better do something more than just look at the kid or I will happily "fuck off" and find a new doctor, or the hospital administrator, until _I_ am satisfied that my kid isn't going to die.
You may not consider it the doctor's job to treat the parents as well as the patient, but my job for damn sure is to keep my kid alive, not to just take your fucking word that everything will be fine. Because in the real world, a funny thing happens: Sometimes doctors are wrong, sometimes they miss something, and people die even when all the doctors said they were going to be fine. In fact, it seems to happen quite often. Doctors sometimes screw up. Nurses sometimes screw up. I know this from experience. They are people and people make mistakes. Doctors are not gods.
I know doing more involved testing on every patient is infeasible. I know it's really hard as a medical professional to avoid developing the attitude that everyone who doesn't listen to you is a moron. Most of them probably are, which doesn't help. I'm just saying you need to look at things from their perspective as well as your own, if you want to actually help people rather than just "see patients". Having the attitude that everyone who isn't a doctor is a moron who should just do what they're told without question is not a helpful attitude in any way.
Lose the elitist attitude and you're sure to have a better relationship with the rest of humanity. Doctors too often seem to forget that no doctor knows everything. In short, cut regular people some fucking slack, asshole. Or find a different profession. Like repairing copiers instead of repairing people. Copiers won't talk back or question your diagnosis.