I have to disagree entirely. It's a small difference, granted, but when I'm setting my house thermostat, I can tell a difference between 71F and 72F, and my utility bills reflect it too.
And with the rest of the metric system, I mostly prefer it to the English/imperial units; it's only Fahrenheit where I really prefer the imperial unit. There's definitely no way I could live without volts and amps (both SI units), and meters (and cm, mm, nm, etc) are usually easier to work with than imperial units (except when things are already based on inches). I wouldn't miss miles too much if everyone switched to km (except for cities where the streets are built on a 1-mile grid; that'd be a pain). And I would be really, really happy if I never saw idiotic "fluid ounces" (different from various other "ounces") again in my life, and only saw liters and mL. But since I literally never do unit conversions using ambient temperatures I look up for the local weather, I do prefer Fahrenheit.
Yes, and when do you ever see outdoor temperatures over 50 or 60 on the Celcius scale? (never) And when do you see negative temperatures on the Celsius scale (all the time unless you live in a hot area)?
Fahrenheit has better resolution and scale for human temperatures. If it's over 100 or under 0, the weather is "extreme". Not so with Celsius. And it has roughly double the resolution.
Why not? It works for horses and other prey animals. The big difference between them and us is that human babies start out really stupid, and get much smarter as they reach adulthood (well, most of us anyway...); horses don't get much smarter than they are when they're born. Of course, the other big difference is probably hip size; humans would probably need bigger hips and a larger birth canal to allow infants to grow larger while still gestating.
Same goes for cats. You're probably confusing the horse's ankle/heel with its knee. On animals like horses and cats, there is no "heel" like on a human; that part on the rear leg is raised far off the ground, and only their toes (or toe, in the case of a horse) actually rest on the ground.
I'd just like to add that, if you plan on doing something like this that is likely to piss off a big corporation, you have to keep it anonymous, completely separate from your personal identity and accounts, so they can't make life miserable for you by suing you or going after your other activities/accounts.
Legal threats won't work in this case. The threats work against Social Fixer because of the reason the developer pointed out on his blog: they can close his Facebook account (which he actually uses), they can sue him for violating TOS, and they mark socialfixer.com as being a "spam" site.
If the code (or something like it) is open source and out on github or something, there's really nothing FB can do about it, as it's just code for a browser extension. They can try to go after the person who owns the github account, but that person could keep themselves anonymous in various ways (the SocialFixer guy didn't; this is his big mistake). They can't sue github, since it's just code protected by copyright. And they can't very well mark github as "spam". Of course, the downside is that, if the extension isn't made really easy for Joe Blow-type users to download and install, then very few people other than power users will bother with it, and SocialFixer having their own website and all does this.
>You've got it backwards. "Proprietary companies" typically have the budget to do whatever. Open source and small players need the common platform to have reach.
1) If they have a big budget, then why don't they just make their own player, use a plug-in, etc.? Obviously, Netflix doesn't have that big a budget because they had to use MS's Silverlight, and Silverlight appears to be close to deprecation for various reasons.
2) A "common platform" isn't very helpful if you need proprietary DRM modules, which aren't available on your platform/OS, to view media. So this is no better than just having proprietary plug-ins, from the point-of-view of someone using Linux or FreeBSD.
I'd rather see the latter. Making things easier for proprietary companies is just going to encourage them. It's not going to help interoperability, because those DRM modules will all still be tied to specific platforms. It'll be sorta like IE6 all over again: you can run stuff in your browser, but only on a certain OS or platform; the only difference is that you won't be tied to a specific browser.
I honestly don't see why it's so desirable to "keep the Netflix stream in the browser". If Netflix refuses to use non-DRM video, then they can just make a separate application to view video if they want (the application can even be invoked by the browser). Yes, plug-ins suck, and yes, a separate application would be tied to specific platforms, which sucks, but that's no different from what this idiotic standard is proposing: to view DRMed video in-browser, you'll need a proprietary DRMed codec which is tied to specific platforms, and basically acts just like a plug-in. So this proposal isn't really helping anyone except the DRM users.
4G is decent when it's working, the problem is that it's frequently not available indoors: many buildings are "dead zones". I frequently see this on my TMo phone; the 4G will drop off inside large buildings (such as a big-box store), even though regular voice service still works. The in-store WiFi, inside Target for instance, makes up for this since I can use that instead when I'm comparing prices.
This would be fine if there were coffee shops other than Starbucks around.
At most of the places I've been, there's at best two alternatives to SBUX, frequently only one, and not that conveniently located or having poor hours. Panera Bread seems to be their biggest competitor these days in fact, and that isn't really supposed to be a "coffee shop".
You do need to be more adaptable, which cops notoriously are NOT. I can hear right now the complaint of every (L)user getting a new Linux desktop, "It doesn't look right. The icons are in the wrong place. I can't use this. Give me my Windows machine back."
What do you think is going to happen when you switch them to Windows 8? Put a Win8 machine next to a Linux machine and they'll chose the Linux machine, surely.
I tried headphones at the last place where I had to work in a bullpen; it made things worse, because people constantly came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, which was extremely startling.
Would you mind if I asked you how you broke into that business? Do you work for some kind of agency that finds you positions, or are you independent, and if so, how do you find jobs?
Women who do development are few and far between. I think I've worked with 4 women developers over the past 15 years or so, at best they were average but I haven't really seen a rockstar coder among them. And out of all of them I would have never wanted to sleep with any of them... Same with black coders or IT people. Some are average but never seen any rise to rock star level. Sorry might be racist but just my own observation.
It's not racist or sexist to point out demographic trends.
These things are all easily explained. Women in America have historically been discouraged from pursuing any field related to science or math or computers, because they're supposed to play with Barbie dolls and be prepared to be good little housewives and mothers, so of course they aren't going to be interested in computer-related jobs. Couple this with America's anti-intellectualism and hatred of smart people and especially its hatred of introverts and this explains why, historically, only introverted men went into these jobs, so they could be bossed around by a bunch of big-mouthed assholes who take most of the money. This only changed some during the dot-com boom because of the huge paychecks involved.
As for blacks, it's similar: they come from much lower-class backgrounds usually, and unlike little white boys, they never got computers as christmas gifts and were never encouraged this way, just as they were never encouraged to go into scientific fields; their parents weren't in such fields, they never had any mentors or role models in these fields (since white people didn't generally associate with black people and vice versa), so computer-related jobs never were on their radar growing up. Hollywood may have tried to change this with Richard Pryor in Superman III, but it didn't have much effect.
That can't be changed, because it's part of America's culture and Americans' hatred of intellectualism. Culture can be changed, but only when there's a strong push to do so, like with gay rights where a minority shames the majority into changing its ways by pointing out their immorality. That's not going to happen with geeks, because they're generally well-paid and they're not forced into that profession by birth, so they're not seen as an oppressed group. A bunch of geeks having "geek pride" parades and complaining loudly that they don't get laid enough isn't going to be taken seriously. It'd be better for geeks to simply move to places where they're more accepted, and let the places they left suffer.
Unfortunately, if you do that a couple too many times, then no one wants to hire you because you're not "loyal" or "committed", at least on the east coast.
I enjoy the company of people sometimes and I can go to parties and events, but after a few hours I have to be alone to recharge. I also happen to be a reasonably successful software engineer.
So do you have a cubicle or do you work in an "open work area" or bullpen, which is all the rage now in companies? And if the latter, how do you stand it?
I for one would be perfectly happy if Apple stopped selling iPhones and iPads, or better yet shut down the company altogether.
Similarly, it'd be better if the US government stayed shut down indefinitely, and eventually the States all seceded and formed new, smaller countries. The presence of the US is not good for the world at large, nor is a single country effective for its own citizens with so much infighting going on. Splitting up the country would solve these problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree entirely. It's a small difference, granted, but when I'm setting my house thermostat, I can tell a difference between 71F and 72F, and my utility bills reflect it too.
And with the rest of the metric system, I mostly prefer it to the English/imperial units; it's only Fahrenheit where I really prefer the imperial unit. There's definitely no way I could live without volts and amps (both SI units), and meters (and cm, mm, nm, etc) are usually easier to work with than imperial units (except when things are already based on inches). I wouldn't miss miles too much if everyone switched to km (except for cities where the streets are built on a 1-mile grid; that'd be a pain). And I would be really, really happy if I never saw idiotic "fluid ounces" (different from various other "ounces") again in my life, and only saw liters and mL. But since I literally never do unit conversions using ambient temperatures I look up for the local weather, I do prefer Fahrenheit.
Yes, and when do you ever see outdoor temperatures over 50 or 60 on the Celcius scale? (never) And when do you see negative temperatures on the Celsius scale (all the time unless you live in a hot area)?
Fahrenheit has better resolution and scale for human temperatures. If it's over 100 or under 0, the weather is "extreme". Not so with Celsius. And it has roughly double the resolution.
Except there's nothing "better" about Celcius, it's just a different arbitrary standard.
Why not? It works for horses and other prey animals. The big difference between them and us is that human babies start out really stupid, and get much smarter as they reach adulthood (well, most of us anyway...); horses don't get much smarter than they are when they're born. Of course, the other big difference is probably hip size; humans would probably need bigger hips and a larger birth canal to allow infants to grow larger while still gestating.
No we didn't. We evolved to be long-distance runners.
The knees all face forward, which is the same as most animals I know of. The knees on a horse all face forward too. Here's an image:
http://www.horses-healthy-balance.com/1_31_3_patella-problems-in-horses-and-dogs.html
Same goes for cats. You're probably confusing the horse's ankle/heel with its knee. On animals like horses and cats, there is no "heel" like on a human; that part on the rear leg is raised far off the ground, and only their toes (or toe, in the case of a horse) actually rest on the ground.
Normal animals learn to walk on day one of their life. robotic ones are dumber than that.
And humans are dumbest of all: it takes a human about 1.5 years to learn to walk decently.
I'd just like to add that, if you plan on doing something like this that is likely to piss off a big corporation, you have to keep it anonymous, completely separate from your personal identity and accounts, so they can't make life miserable for you by suing you or going after your other activities/accounts.
Legal threats won't work in this case. The threats work against Social Fixer because of the reason the developer pointed out on his blog: they can close his Facebook account (which he actually uses), they can sue him for violating TOS, and they mark socialfixer.com as being a "spam" site.
If the code (or something like it) is open source and out on github or something, there's really nothing FB can do about it, as it's just code for a browser extension. They can try to go after the person who owns the github account, but that person could keep themselves anonymous in various ways (the SocialFixer guy didn't; this is his big mistake). They can't sue github, since it's just code protected by copyright. And they can't very well mark github as "spam". Of course, the downside is that, if the extension isn't made really easy for Joe Blow-type users to download and install, then very few people other than power users will bother with it, and SocialFixer having their own website and all does this.
>You've got it backwards. "Proprietary companies" typically have the budget to do whatever. Open source and small players need the common platform to have reach.
1) If they have a big budget, then why don't they just make their own player, use a plug-in, etc.? Obviously, Netflix doesn't have that big a budget because they had to use MS's Silverlight, and Silverlight appears to be close to deprecation for various reasons.
2) A "common platform" isn't very helpful if you need proprietary DRM modules, which aren't available on your platform/OS, to view media. So this is no better than just having proprietary plug-ins, from the point-of-view of someone using Linux or FreeBSD.
I'd rather see the latter. Making things easier for proprietary companies is just going to encourage them. It's not going to help interoperability, because those DRM modules will all still be tied to specific platforms. It'll be sorta like IE6 all over again: you can run stuff in your browser, but only on a certain OS or platform; the only difference is that you won't be tied to a specific browser.
I honestly don't see why it's so desirable to "keep the Netflix stream in the browser". If Netflix refuses to use non-DRM video, then they can just make a separate application to view video if they want (the application can even be invoked by the browser). Yes, plug-ins suck, and yes, a separate application would be tied to specific platforms, which sucks, but that's no different from what this idiotic standard is proposing: to view DRMed video in-browser, you'll need a proprietary DRMed codec which is tied to specific platforms, and basically acts just like a plug-in. So this proposal isn't really helping anyone except the DRM users.
4G is decent when it's working, the problem is that it's frequently not available indoors: many buildings are "dead zones". I frequently see this on my TMo phone; the 4G will drop off inside large buildings (such as a big-box store), even though regular voice service still works. The in-store WiFi, inside Target for instance, makes up for this since I can use that instead when I'm comparing prices.
When you share the check-in, change the privacy settings on the post to "Only Me".
You really think Facebook is going to continue to allow this? FB is famous for screwing with privacy settings and not honoring them.
If a big chain does this,
There's only one big chain in existence: Starbucks.
This would be fine if there were coffee shops other than Starbucks around.
At most of the places I've been, there's at best two alternatives to SBUX, frequently only one, and not that conveniently located or having poor hours. Panera Bread seems to be their biggest competitor these days in fact, and that isn't really supposed to be a "coffee shop".
You do need to be more adaptable, which cops notoriously are NOT. I can hear right now the complaint of every (L)user getting a new Linux desktop, "It doesn't look right. The icons are in the wrong place. I can't use this. Give me my Windows machine back."
What do you think is going to happen when you switch them to Windows 8? Put a Win8 machine next to a Linux machine and they'll chose the Linux machine, surely.
I tried headphones at the last place where I had to work in a bullpen; it made things worse, because people constantly came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, which was extremely startling.
Would you mind if I asked you how you broke into that business? Do you work for some kind of agency that finds you positions, or are you independent, and if so, how do you find jobs?
Women who do development are few and far between. I think I've worked with 4 women developers over the past 15 years or so, at best they were average but I haven't really seen a rockstar coder among them. And out of all of them I would have never wanted to sleep with any of them...
Same with black coders or IT people. Some are average but never seen any rise to rock star level. Sorry might be racist but just my own observation.
It's not racist or sexist to point out demographic trends.
These things are all easily explained. Women in America have historically been discouraged from pursuing any field related to science or math or computers, because they're supposed to play with Barbie dolls and be prepared to be good little housewives and mothers, so of course they aren't going to be interested in computer-related jobs. Couple this with America's anti-intellectualism and hatred of smart people and especially its hatred of introverts and this explains why, historically, only introverted men went into these jobs, so they could be bossed around by a bunch of big-mouthed assholes who take most of the money. This only changed some during the dot-com boom because of the huge paychecks involved.
As for blacks, it's similar: they come from much lower-class backgrounds usually, and unlike little white boys, they never got computers as christmas gifts and were never encouraged this way, just as they were never encouraged to go into scientific fields; their parents weren't in such fields, they never had any mentors or role models in these fields (since white people didn't generally associate with black people and vice versa), so computer-related jobs never were on their radar growing up. Hollywood may have tried to change this with Richard Pryor in Superman III, but it didn't have much effect.
That can't be changed, because it's part of America's culture and Americans' hatred of intellectualism. Culture can be changed, but only when there's a strong push to do so, like with gay rights where a minority shames the majority into changing its ways by pointing out their immorality. That's not going to happen with geeks, because they're generally well-paid and they're not forced into that profession by birth, so they're not seen as an oppressed group. A bunch of geeks having "geek pride" parades and complaining loudly that they don't get laid enough isn't going to be taken seriously. It'd be better for geeks to simply move to places where they're more accepted, and let the places they left suffer.
Unfortunately, if you do that a couple too many times, then no one wants to hire you because you're not "loyal" or "committed", at least on the east coast.
To be fair, I don't know of many office jobs which aren't a lot like this. It's not just programming, it's anything in a corporate office.
I enjoy the company of people sometimes and I can go to parties and events, but after a few hours I have to be alone to recharge. I also happen to be a reasonably successful software engineer.
So do you have a cubicle or do you work in an "open work area" or bullpen, which is all the rage now in companies? And if the latter, how do you stand it?
I for one would be perfectly happy if Apple stopped selling iPhones and iPads, or better yet shut down the company altogether.
Similarly, it'd be better if the US government stayed shut down indefinitely, and eventually the States all seceded and formed new, smaller countries. The presence of the US is not good for the world at large, nor is a single country effective for its own citizens with so much infighting going on. Splitting up the country would solve these problems.