Any businessman who's in business for a long time is going to have failures. I haven't researched Donald personally, but that's a pretty lame point really. Are you saying that you've never failed at anything in life, or ever had any kind of setback? Business is all about risk; you win some, you lose some. The whole reason our country has the bankruptcy laws it does is to encourage riskier business ventures; countries without such laws have very little risk-taking in business and little entrepreneurialism, because the risk isn't worth it as you'll wind up in debt for the rest of your life. Here, you just have the business go bankrupt, the creditors and investors lose out (too bad... that's what you get for taking a risk sometimes; if you don't like it, don't invest or don't lend money), and you get to walk away and try something new.
You've got to be kidding. Donald is many things, but 1) he's not religious, and 2) he seems quite pragmatic. The regular Republicans have all been clamoring for another war, this time with Iran. Donald, being a businessman, will want to run the country like a business, meaning he'll want to cut unnecessary expenditures, and certainly not spend another trillion dollars on a stupid war like Bush.
Honestly, it puzzles me why so many people try to demonize this guy so much, mainly because of his stance on illegal immigration I think, and just plain being boorish and non-diplomatic-speaking. Would I prefer him as Pres? No, I'd like Sanders. But compared to **all the other Republicans**, I'll take The Donald in a heartbeat. All the others are either religious wackos (Santorum, Huckabee) or libertarian loons (Paul). Maybe Carly is an exception, but after the way she ran HP into the ground I certainly wouldn't want her either.
I don't know where you got that; his point in that regard was that the Native Americans (what we call them now, and what used to be called "Indians") were a bunch of different tribes at that time, which frequently did not get along. He never said they called themselves "Indians" as they certainly did not, they each had different names for their tribes. However, they call themselves "Native Americans" now not to "get free stuff" as he says, but because it's the most sensible term for referring to them collectively (rather than by their specific tribe, since there's so many), and to differentiate them from the rest of us whose ancestors migrated here much more recently than theirs (0-500 years vs. 20,000 years (or however long ago it was they came over the land bridge from Asia)).
Also there's no such place as Germany; the proper name is "Deutschland". And no such place as Spain; the proper name is "Espana" (sorry, can't type a tilde-n). No such place as China either; I don't know what they call it, but I'm sure I can't type on this keyboard.
The Pilgrims were a very small number of people; they were basically rejects from Europe that no one liked because they were a bunch of religious nuts. If the Natives had eliminated them somehow (either actively or passively by not helping them in the winter), it wouldn't have made much difference with the rate of colonization by the rest of Europe. Lots of other Native tribes were not so friendly: remember the Roanoke Colony? A bunch of settlements *were* wiped out by Native attacks. It didn't stop the European invasion.
The earth isn't going to "come apart" because of any stress on its plates. Even if you did stress them to ridiculous amounts, you'd wipe out everything on the surface, but the planet will stay together simply because of its gravity.
As for the Moon, that would require a ridiculous amount of energy to move as well.
The simplest, most energy-efficient way of exterminating beings on a world is to simply wreck the surface somehow, making the planet uninhabitable. It would require orders of magnitude less energy than these other fantastical ideas. Some wouldn't take much energy at all, such as dumping engineered microbes or toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to basically poison the inhabitants.
That doesn't make sense. What'll happen is the people who care about cyclists will ride their bikes a lot more, and the people who hate cyclists will the ones still driving everywhere. Just look at all the comments right here from countless people who actually despise cyclists and obviously wish them harm. Those are the type of people who intentionally run cyclists off the road when there's no one looking.
This is why we need separate, well-planned bike lanes. Things would be a lot better if people had the option of riding a bike: not only would there be less pollution and less need for oil importation, there'd also be less need for parking, less traffic on the (car) roads, and people would be healthier. But this can only be done safely by doing good planning and building separated bike lanes. It shouldn't be that hard, or expensive; bikes don't need the kind of road construction cars do (since they don't weigh anything), and they really only need about the width of a sidewalk, or maybe two sidewalks if it's a higher-traffic bike road. Lots of cities have already put in bikeways in various places, it's just not enough to make it feasible to get around for most people (they'll put in one single bikeway, and it's great if you live near it and want to go in that direction, otherwise it's useless), but it does prove the concept. They just need to do more. Bikeways can even replace existing sidewalks in many places; it's not like people ever use sidewalks much anyway, and bikers can go around the walkers when they do encounter them. I used to ride on a long bikeway in Scottsdale AZ and it worked quite well.
Right, and as soon as one motorist comes along who doesn't act like the others, you get hit.
Or, if you take a different route one day (like through your 3-way stop), then you get hit because the road is horribly designed and you're not familiar with it. You can't get familiar with places like that without risking your life in them first.
This is all why we need separate (separated from the road entirely) bike lanes.
And your house could be hit by a meteor and crush you instantly at any moment.
Yes, but it's a question of odds and acceptable risk. The odds of being hit by a meteor are literally astronomical (bad pun), but your odds of being maimed by a bad driver while cycling are definitely not. Lots of cyclists get hit by cars, it's not uncommon. It'd be interesting to see what the statistics are for odds of being hurt by miles cycled. Your odds in a car aren't that great either (tens of thousands of people die in the US alone in auto accidents), but at least there you have a steel safety cage protecting you, and modern crash-resistant designs and other safety devices (including loads of airbags) have really made a big difference in the casualty rates compared to a few decades ago. But cyclists don't get any of that.
I do agree that it's reasonably safe in certain places: small college towns like where I went to school are one such place, because 1) there's a bunch of other cyclists with the high student population, and 2) the low overall population and the low speed limits in the town mean there's less traffic and it isn't moving very fast. I used to ride every day when I was in college, and didn't feel unsafe; that all changed when I moved to a large sprawling city with 3-lane boulevards with everyone driving 60 on them. Some downtowns are probably good too for similar reasons (lots of residents who don't drive/own cars, layout keeps speed limits low). Porland in particular is supposed to be extremely cycling-friendly. But most metro areas just aren't anything like this.
Sorry, I'm not going to risk my life driving alongside assholes driving giant pickup trucks that take up the whole lane, and who can't even be bothered to stay within their lanes.
All it takes is one small mistake by a car/truck driver and you're dead. Having more cyclists out there does not change the laws of physics. You're risking your life every time you ride with traffic.
If there's no cycling routes, that means getting killed when some idiot driver runs into you. You can't have cyclists and drivers occupying the same roads; it's just too dangerous for cyclists. There's a reason cars now have government regulations dealing with how they deal with pedestrial impacts: drivers are just too fucking stupid to not hit pedestrians in crosswalks. Cycling in traffic is suicidal.
Autonomous cars can't come soon enough, and when then happens, human-driven cars need to all be banned.
but with the Republican party lost to religious extremists, I'll take anyone but them.
You've forgotten Trump, who seems to have completely surprised the rest of the Republican party with his popularity. I wouldn't be surprised to see him get the nomination, despite his party and the MSM doing everything they can to derail him.
Texting on a touch screen keypad is idiotic. Yes, it's an improvement over a 10-key, but just barely, i.e. it still sucks compared to more useful input devices.
Wrong. Yes, it sucks compared to a real keyboard, but I can't fit my Model M into my pocket. When you're away from your desk, what alternative is there? In its time, 10-key texting was useful for some cases, since it was better than nothing at all. But now it's obsolete just like floppy drives, so it's dumb to continue using it when superior alternatives exist and are commonplace.
the platform has a long way to go before it can supplant telephony.
Yes, you probably can talk a lot faster than you can text, but the problem with telephony is that it requires both parties to be available to talk at the same time. When they aren't, you wind up playing telephone tag, or exchanging voice mails. Of course, Google Voice (and other speech-to-text enabled voicemail systems) make this a lot better. But still, if you want to get a short message to someone immediately, with a high probability they'll see it right away, nothing beats texting. With a phone call, you have to hope they'll pick up, and if they do, you're interrupting them. With voice mail, there's a good chance they won't bother to read/listen to it for a while. But with a text, it shows up right away on their phone and is nearly impossible to miss. This doesn't mean it's great for having long conversations however; I have no idea why a lot of people do that instead of just calling.
No, it's not. I'm talking about a work-alike to the thing on the other side of the interface. For an example, think about a USB thumb drive. They all have the same interface: a USB connector (the physical interface), plus the USB protocol (the software interface). You plug it into your computer, it communicates via USB and identifies itself, your computer mounts it, and you can now read and write data to it. You can get different USB drives from different vendors, and while they all look the same (except for USB vendor:device ID numbers, but these don't matter because they follow the Mass Storage spec so they don't need a special device driver, and of course how much capacity is has), how the drive is implemented internally can vary greatly. These days, they're all implemented with NAND flash chips, but they can be configured differently or have different grades of NAND (resulting in wildly different r/w speeds). But there's nothing stopping them from using other types of memory; USB hard drives do this, but if someone wanted to, they could make the drives out of NOR flash, PCM, or memristors. The implementation details don't matter because the *interface* is the same. And luckily, the USB protocol and the Mass Storage spec are all open, or else we wouldn't have all these nice, cheap thumb drives.
You've got to be kidding. The API headers are nothing more than an interface description. If you put more effort and money into the API headers than the actual product, then you have a really shitty product. Someone cloning it from the API still has to go through all the effort of actually implementing all the functionality.
Copyrighting interfaces is indeed a really bad idea, however I'm not so sure it's quite the bane you're thinking.
In Google's case, their problem was that they had already settled on using Java long before the troubles with Oracle came up, so it wasn't exactly feasible for them to switch to something else. They had already invested in Android, Dalvik, etc., so changing course midstream just wasn't worth it. However, suppose Google knew this was going to happen; instead of basing Dalvik on Java, interfaces and all, perhaps they would have simply come up with a Java work-alike but with different interfaces.
And now that Oracle's taken this path, what kind of moron would select Java as a business platform, knowing that Oracle will want to lock them in, and lock out any competing Java platforms using this perversion of copyright law?
If other companies pull this, it seems like it'd end up increasing adoption of open-source programming platforms and making customers avoid anything where the interfaces are copyrighted and proprietary. It's not like there's a shortage of programming languages out there to choose from.
That's why you need to upgrade to CyanogenMod. It's all the bloatware and adware that's eating up the battery life.
Switching to Windows Phone is a terrible solution, because then you have to use the shitty butt-ugly new Metro UI. There's no way in hell I would ever get a Windows Phone, just because of that. I don't care if they paid me to use it, and the battery lasted a month. It's just too fucking ugly. Having to occasionally use Windows 8.1 at work is already bad enough, there's no way in hell I'm going to subject myself to that on my phone.
Yeah, and what good is your phone? The only thing you can do on it well is talk. That's one of the rarest things I do on my phone, and I avoid it whenever possible. For texting, navigation, web browsing, dating apps, voice mail, etc., your phone is useless. You need all those sensors and a big touchscreen to do those things (yes, including texting; texting on a 0-9 keypad is idiotic and unusable) (and yes, including voice mail too; listening to voice mail is so 1990s, these days I read my voice mail with Google Voice).
You've got your decades confused. There were no ads online in the late 80s or early 90s, unless you're talking about Prodigy, because no one outside of academia used the internet then, and the WWW and the Mosaic browser didn't even exist until 1994. Looking at a.gif (JPEG didn't even come out until 1992, and didn't see real usage on regular people's computers until later) meant manually downloading it first (perhaps from alt.binaries.pictures.*), then opening up an image viewer to look at it. The internet didn't really get commercialized with ads until the late 90s.
This is total bullshit. Yes, Uber DOES pay for the Mercedes and the nice driver. These people aren't using their time and putting mileage on their vehicles for free; they're doing it because Uber is paying them. Obviously, Uber is paying them well enough for them to do this (and afford a Mercedes) rather than something else.
And I refuse to believe that Uber's *entire* fleet of drivers is upper-middle-class people who are bored enough to do this as a side job and who don't need the money. That's completely ridiculous; no business can have this many drivers nationwide and be causing this much of a fuss with a business model depending on that kind of supply of workers.
RTOSes don't all compete with each other. QNX, for instance, has preemptive multitasking, which is something you would not ever use in many "CAN'T FAIL" use cases such as avionics. For those, you usually use a very small, simple RTOS with cooperative multitasking and predefined time-slices for each task. Something with preemptive multitasking is not deterministic, so it's not allowed.
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Any businessman who's in business for a long time is going to have failures. I haven't researched Donald personally, but that's a pretty lame point really. Are you saying that you've never failed at anything in life, or ever had any kind of setback? Business is all about risk; you win some, you lose some. The whole reason our country has the bankruptcy laws it does is to encourage riskier business ventures; countries without such laws have very little risk-taking in business and little entrepreneurialism, because the risk isn't worth it as you'll wind up in debt for the rest of your life. Here, you just have the business go bankrupt, the creditors and investors lose out (too bad... that's what you get for taking a risk sometimes; if you don't like it, don't invest or don't lend money), and you get to walk away and try something new.
You've got to be kidding. Donald is many things, but 1) he's not religious, and 2) he seems quite pragmatic. The regular Republicans have all been clamoring for another war, this time with Iran. Donald, being a businessman, will want to run the country like a business, meaning he'll want to cut unnecessary expenditures, and certainly not spend another trillion dollars on a stupid war like Bush.
Honestly, it puzzles me why so many people try to demonize this guy so much, mainly because of his stance on illegal immigration I think, and just plain being boorish and non-diplomatic-speaking. Would I prefer him as Pres? No, I'd like Sanders. But compared to **all the other Republicans**, I'll take The Donald in a heartbeat. All the others are either religious wackos (Santorum, Huckabee) or libertarian loons (Paul). Maybe Carly is an exception, but after the way she ran HP into the ground I certainly wouldn't want her either.
I don't know where you got that; his point in that regard was that the Native Americans (what we call them now, and what used to be called "Indians") were a bunch of different tribes at that time, which frequently did not get along. He never said they called themselves "Indians" as they certainly did not, they each had different names for their tribes. However, they call themselves "Native Americans" now not to "get free stuff" as he says, but because it's the most sensible term for referring to them collectively (rather than by their specific tribe, since there's so many), and to differentiate them from the rest of us whose ancestors migrated here much more recently than theirs (0-500 years vs. 20,000 years (or however long ago it was they came over the land bridge from Asia)).
Also there's no such place as Germany; the proper name is "Deutschland". And no such place as Spain; the proper name is "Espana" (sorry, can't type a tilde-n). No such place as China either; I don't know what they call it, but I'm sure I can't type on this keyboard.
The Pilgrims were a very small number of people; they were basically rejects from Europe that no one liked because they were a bunch of religious nuts. If the Natives had eliminated them somehow (either actively or passively by not helping them in the winter), it wouldn't have made much difference with the rate of colonization by the rest of Europe. Lots of other Native tribes were not so friendly: remember the Roanoke Colony? A bunch of settlements *were* wiped out by Native attacks. It didn't stop the European invasion.
The earth isn't going to "come apart" because of any stress on its plates. Even if you did stress them to ridiculous amounts, you'd wipe out everything on the surface, but the planet will stay together simply because of its gravity.
As for the Moon, that would require a ridiculous amount of energy to move as well.
The simplest, most energy-efficient way of exterminating beings on a world is to simply wreck the surface somehow, making the planet uninhabitable. It would require orders of magnitude less energy than these other fantastical ideas. Some wouldn't take much energy at all, such as dumping engineered microbes or toxic chemicals into the atmosphere to basically poison the inhabitants.
That doesn't make sense. What'll happen is the people who care about cyclists will ride their bikes a lot more, and the people who hate cyclists will the ones still driving everywhere. Just look at all the comments right here from countless people who actually despise cyclists and obviously wish them harm. Those are the type of people who intentionally run cyclists off the road when there's no one looking.
This is why we need separate, well-planned bike lanes. Things would be a lot better if people had the option of riding a bike: not only would there be less pollution and less need for oil importation, there'd also be less need for parking, less traffic on the (car) roads, and people would be healthier. But this can only be done safely by doing good planning and building separated bike lanes. It shouldn't be that hard, or expensive; bikes don't need the kind of road construction cars do (since they don't weigh anything), and they really only need about the width of a sidewalk, or maybe two sidewalks if it's a higher-traffic bike road. Lots of cities have already put in bikeways in various places, it's just not enough to make it feasible to get around for most people (they'll put in one single bikeway, and it's great if you live near it and want to go in that direction, otherwise it's useless), but it does prove the concept. They just need to do more. Bikeways can even replace existing sidewalks in many places; it's not like people ever use sidewalks much anyway, and bikers can go around the walkers when they do encounter them. I used to ride on a long bikeway in Scottsdale AZ and it worked quite well.
Right, and as soon as one motorist comes along who doesn't act like the others, you get hit.
Or, if you take a different route one day (like through your 3-way stop), then you get hit because the road is horribly designed and you're not familiar with it. You can't get familiar with places like that without risking your life in them first.
This is all why we need separate (separated from the road entirely) bike lanes.
And your house could be hit by a meteor and crush you instantly at any moment.
Yes, but it's a question of odds and acceptable risk. The odds of being hit by a meteor are literally astronomical (bad pun), but your odds of being maimed by a bad driver while cycling are definitely not. Lots of cyclists get hit by cars, it's not uncommon. It'd be interesting to see what the statistics are for odds of being hurt by miles cycled. Your odds in a car aren't that great either (tens of thousands of people die in the US alone in auto accidents), but at least there you have a steel safety cage protecting you, and modern crash-resistant designs and other safety devices (including loads of airbags) have really made a big difference in the casualty rates compared to a few decades ago. But cyclists don't get any of that.
I do agree that it's reasonably safe in certain places: small college towns like where I went to school are one such place, because 1) there's a bunch of other cyclists with the high student population, and 2) the low overall population and the low speed limits in the town mean there's less traffic and it isn't moving very fast. I used to ride every day when I was in college, and didn't feel unsafe; that all changed when I moved to a large sprawling city with 3-lane boulevards with everyone driving 60 on them. Some downtowns are probably good too for similar reasons (lots of residents who don't drive/own cars, layout keeps speed limits low). Porland in particular is supposed to be extremely cycling-friendly. But most metro areas just aren't anything like this.
Sorry, I'm not going to risk my life driving alongside assholes driving giant pickup trucks that take up the whole lane, and who can't even be bothered to stay within their lanes.
All it takes is one small mistake by a car/truck driver and you're dead. Having more cyclists out there does not change the laws of physics. You're risking your life every time you ride with traffic.
If there's no cycling routes, that means getting killed when some idiot driver runs into you. You can't have cyclists and drivers occupying the same roads; it's just too dangerous for cyclists. There's a reason cars now have government regulations dealing with how they deal with pedestrial impacts: drivers are just too fucking stupid to not hit pedestrians in crosswalks. Cycling in traffic is suicidal.
Autonomous cars can't come soon enough, and when then happens, human-driven cars need to all be banned.
but with the Republican party lost to religious extremists, I'll take anyone but them.
You've forgotten Trump, who seems to have completely surprised the rest of the Republican party with his popularity. I wouldn't be surprised to see him get the nomination, despite his party and the MSM doing everything they can to derail him.
Texting on a touch screen keypad is idiotic. Yes, it's an improvement over a 10-key, but just barely, i.e. it still sucks compared to more useful input devices.
Wrong. Yes, it sucks compared to a real keyboard, but I can't fit my Model M into my pocket. When you're away from your desk, what alternative is there? In its time, 10-key texting was useful for some cases, since it was better than nothing at all. But now it's obsolete just like floppy drives, so it's dumb to continue using it when superior alternatives exist and are commonplace.
the platform has a long way to go before it can supplant telephony.
Yes, you probably can talk a lot faster than you can text, but the problem with telephony is that it requires both parties to be available to talk at the same time. When they aren't, you wind up playing telephone tag, or exchanging voice mails. Of course, Google Voice (and other speech-to-text enabled voicemail systems) make this a lot better. But still, if you want to get a short message to someone immediately, with a high probability they'll see it right away, nothing beats texting. With a phone call, you have to hope they'll pick up, and if they do, you're interrupting them. With voice mail, there's a good chance they won't bother to read/listen to it for a while. But with a text, it shows up right away on their phone and is nearly impossible to miss. This doesn't mean it's great for having long conversations however; I have no idea why a lot of people do that instead of just calling.
No, it's not. I'm talking about a work-alike to the thing on the other side of the interface. For an example, think about a USB thumb drive. They all have the same interface: a USB connector (the physical interface), plus the USB protocol (the software interface). You plug it into your computer, it communicates via USB and identifies itself, your computer mounts it, and you can now read and write data to it. You can get different USB drives from different vendors, and while they all look the same (except for USB vendor:device ID numbers, but these don't matter because they follow the Mass Storage spec so they don't need a special device driver, and of course how much capacity is has), how the drive is implemented internally can vary greatly. These days, they're all implemented with NAND flash chips, but they can be configured differently or have different grades of NAND (resulting in wildly different r/w speeds). But there's nothing stopping them from using other types of memory; USB hard drives do this, but if someone wanted to, they could make the drives out of NOR flash, PCM, or memristors. The implementation details don't matter because the *interface* is the same. And luckily, the USB protocol and the Mass Storage spec are all open, or else we wouldn't have all these nice, cheap thumb drives.
That doesn't help them with C++. Unix is intertwined with C, but definitely not C++.
You've got to be kidding. The API headers are nothing more than an interface description. If you put more effort and money into the API headers than the actual product, then you have a really shitty product. Someone cloning it from the API still has to go through all the effort of actually implementing all the functionality.
Copyrighting interfaces is indeed a really bad idea, however I'm not so sure it's quite the bane you're thinking.
In Google's case, their problem was that they had already settled on using Java long before the troubles with Oracle came up, so it wasn't exactly feasible for them to switch to something else. They had already invested in Android, Dalvik, etc., so changing course midstream just wasn't worth it. However, suppose Google knew this was going to happen; instead of basing Dalvik on Java, interfaces and all, perhaps they would have simply come up with a Java work-alike but with different interfaces.
And now that Oracle's taken this path, what kind of moron would select Java as a business platform, knowing that Oracle will want to lock them in, and lock out any competing Java platforms using this perversion of copyright law?
If other companies pull this, it seems like it'd end up increasing adoption of open-source programming platforms and making customers avoid anything where the interfaces are copyrighted and proprietary. It's not like there's a shortage of programming languages out there to choose from.
Or you could just get a Galaxy S4 or S5. They're pretty cheap these days, they're an upgrade from the S3, and they're well supported by CM.
That's why you need to upgrade to CyanogenMod. It's all the bloatware and adware that's eating up the battery life.
Switching to Windows Phone is a terrible solution, because then you have to use the shitty butt-ugly new Metro UI. There's no way in hell I would ever get a Windows Phone, just because of that. I don't care if they paid me to use it, and the battery lasted a month. It's just too fucking ugly. Having to occasionally use Windows 8.1 at work is already bad enough, there's no way in hell I'm going to subject myself to that on my phone.
Yeah, and what good is your phone? The only thing you can do on it well is talk. That's one of the rarest things I do on my phone, and I avoid it whenever possible. For texting, navigation, web browsing, dating apps, voice mail, etc., your phone is useless. You need all those sensors and a big touchscreen to do those things (yes, including texting; texting on a 0-9 keypad is idiotic and unusable) (and yes, including voice mail too; listening to voice mail is so 1990s, these days I read my voice mail with Google Voice).
You've got your decades confused. There were no ads online in the late 80s or early 90s, unless you're talking about Prodigy, because no one outside of academia used the internet then, and the WWW and the Mosaic browser didn't even exist until 1994. Looking at a .gif (JPEG didn't even come out until 1992, and didn't see real usage on regular people's computers until later) meant manually downloading it first (perhaps from alt.binaries.pictures.*), then opening up an image viewer to look at it. The internet didn't really get commercialized with ads until the late 90s.
This is total bullshit. Yes, Uber DOES pay for the Mercedes and the nice driver. These people aren't using their time and putting mileage on their vehicles for free; they're doing it because Uber is paying them. Obviously, Uber is paying them well enough for them to do this (and afford a Mercedes) rather than something else.
And I refuse to believe that Uber's *entire* fleet of drivers is upper-middle-class people who are bored enough to do this as a side job and who don't need the money. That's completely ridiculous; no business can have this many drivers nationwide and be causing this much of a fuss with a business model depending on that kind of supply of workers.
RTOSes don't all compete with each other. QNX, for instance, has preemptive multitasking, which is something you would not ever use in many "CAN'T FAIL" use cases such as avionics. For those, you usually use a very small, simple RTOS with cooperative multitasking and predefined time-slices for each task. Something with preemptive multitasking is not deterministic, so it's not allowed.
But I'm _personally_ doing quite well with free software and open source software:
So how does your business work, in general terms? Are you running a small FOSS-based business, or something larger?