with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job, or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube. YouTube doesn't owe them anything.
I'd call it poor customer service, but of course we know we're not Google's customers - only their ad buyers are their customers. Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
Sure, and if you don't like it, don't use it. No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
Not our problem that no predominately non-white nation outside of Japan is considered a first world industrial nation.
You forgot South Korea, and probably China too. There's a lot more industry in China now that probably any other country in the world. Your smartphone was most likely made there, and there's pretty much no technology more cutting-edge than that.
Compare the age of these white established nations to the ages of those in Africa or Asia or the Middle East. It wasn't privilege that advanced them as fast as it did, it was hard work and ingenuity.
You need to read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. There's good reasons Africa is so far behind. As for the Middle East, personally I'd lay the blame for that entirely on religion. The Muslim cultures used to lead the world in math and science, until one day they decided that anything that wasn't in the Qu'ran was crap, and it's been downhill since then. That should be a good lesson to the religionists here in the US and other western nations, but they're not learning it. Back in the times the Muslims were in the lead, the white Europeans were living in mud huts as serfs, and had no education and were largely illiterate. It wasn't until the Renaissance much later that Europe really turned things around (and simultaneously, the Muslims had abandoned all progress in the name of religion). In short, if the Muslims hadn't turned fundamentalist back then, things would be very, very different now. The Europeans "won" because the Muslims turned stupid. Also, during much of that time, China, while having a large and old civilization, intentionally turned inwards and didn't interact much with the outside world. It's not that hard to come out ahead when your biggest competitors intentionally shoot themselves in the foot.
Finally, I wouldn't really call the success of Europeans the result of just "hard work". People in other cultures were working hard too. The Europeans just did several things right for a change, which led to some great successes, though they also did some awful things to take advantage of others. The things they did right were adopting rule of law rather than theocracy, adopting rational thought (science), and adopting an economic system that allowed greater prosperity across the population (instead of feudalism where a few lords had all the money and resources and everyone else had squat; you're not going to get much innovation when everyone's dirt poor). The awful things they did were colonizing the "new world", and brutally subjugating the people there (the Spanish were the ones most guilty of this brutality, and Spain still celebrates this today by having military parades on Columbus Day to honor his brutality toward the natives; the English weren't nearly as bad, and generally tried to use treaties to take land from people who didn't have a concept of land ownership). This paid off hugely for the Europeans, but at the expense of the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, and various indigenous tribes. I wouldn't call stealing from people and murdering them to be "just rewards for hard work".
They sure acted like they were eligible but in the end it was confirmed that they never were.
Not exactly true. In the end, they lost a war so they weren't allowed to secede. If they had won the war, they would have been allowed. The legality was entirely decided by war, not by any judicial system.
It's not that much different from the American Revolution. Did the colonies have the right to declare independence from England? One side says yes, the other no, and a war decided the question, but differently in that case.
So I think your comparison to this Dreamer issue is completely invalid: there's pretty much no possibility that this legal question will be decided by a war. It'll be decided in court, by a judge or judges.
What kind of "musicians" need computers to run their instruments? Sounds like they're not actually playing anything themselves, they're just standing there while the computers actually do the work.
There was a story of band trying to tour the mid-East with their gear, which included iPads and laptops that drive their instruments and display their sheet music.
What kind of "band" on tour doesn't have their set list completely memorized?
That's not the only reason: checked luggage is handled worse than UPS packages. Why would you put your $500-3000 laptop in your checked baggage where the gorillas will toss it around and abuse it? That's even more likely to cause a problem leading to a battery fire, but why would someone be stupid enough to trust their expensive laptop to the baggage handlers?
In the late fifties, Buick experimented with a joystick controlled automobile. It worked fine, but the test customers didn't like it, as they felt more comfortable and in control with a wheel.. so Buick decided not to reinvent the wheel, and dropped the experiment.
I'd be interested in reading about this, because I'm very dubious.
First, I have read about some experiment like this by one of the American makes, using something called a "side stick", but that was back in the 90s or 00s. I have serious doubts that something like that could possibly be made to work using 1950s technology, at least that available on automobiles which are very price-sensitive (you can't use cutting-edge military aircraft tech on a car, it's just too expensive). A joystick on a car would require a pretty complex electronic control system and electric steering, I would think. These days, that'd actually be pretty simple to implement because any decent car these days uses electrically-assisted steering, which is why "automatic lane keeping" is now a common feature in midl-level and below cars: the only extra hardware needed is a camera, and a RPi-like computer. In the 50s, the age of recirculating-ball steering (or even completely non-power-assisted steering still in many cars) I have no idea how you'd implement joystick steering without it being some kind of rube goldberg contraption.
Secondly, the joystick is simply a poor UI for a car. It doesn't offer the granularity that a steering wheel does, for small, precise movements. A modern computer-driven system can work around this by making it non-linear, and not allowing you to turn the wheels all the way to one lock when at speed, but that's far harder or impossible with 50s consumer-level tech. Also think about it this way: if joysticks were better than steering wheels, then why are Formula 1 racing cars still using wheels? That's a racing series where almost anything goes technologically (unlike NASCAR), so if they really were better, they would have switched over ages ago. And F1 drivers don't have the problem of being uncomfortable with new tech that old-fart Buick drivers (or any consumer car brand) do; they'll use anything that gives them an edge, which is why they were the first to adopt paddle shifters.
I don't know about your mouse, and I don't know if Edge supports this, but on Linux on my personal laptop, I use one of the typical many-button mice that are available today, so to go back I just click the button that's on the left side of the mouse.
Edge isn't all that great, even if you could run it on Linux or other OSes. Unless I'm missing something, it lacks all the extensions that the other browsers have, and of course one of the big, big ones is Ublock Origin. Whatever ad-blocking Edge has built-in surely pales in comparison. Or, if you're even more paranoid, and use stuff like NoScript etc., that stuff just doesn't exist on Edge.
Protecting you from simple phishing attacks that target non-tech-savvy users really isn't all that useful when the browser still shows you zillions of annoying ads.
However, you have a point; if they ported Edge to all the major platforms, then we'd probably see a lot more extensions available for it.
I have had a job application where a programming challenge was emailed to me with a three day deadline for completion, and sent back well structured working code, compilation instructions, a build script and working unit tests
My problem with this is that many employers have been found to be using interviews like this as a way of getting free work done. May sure the programming challenge isn't something specific to their business, and something they can just drop into their system. Honestly, this sounds like way too much work to expect of a job candidate. On-the-spot coding tests are fine with me (though I understand not everyone performs well under the pressure, so that is a factor); I think it'd be better if the company saved that until your on-site interview, and then gave you an hour or two by yourself to do a coding exercise, with clear requirements about what they wanted to see, and then a follow-up session where you go over your work with the interviewer, explaining everything you did and why, so they can see that you actually did the work and understand it, instead of just getting it from StackOverflow or something.
Why would he post a link to a great job on Slashdot? So he can get inundated with inquiries from bitter jackoff Anonymous Cowards like you?
Who needs a bunch of resumes from GNAA, APK, neo-Nazis, 4chan trolls, MRAs and griefers?
At first, when I read the OP's post, I thought the AC was making a good point: if that guy supposedly hires people and has a hard time finding good people, why does he never post a link here for those alleged jobs?
But you're exactly right. This place is absolutely full of toxic personalities and actual psychotics (you listed at least one in particular there), and he's doing the right thing by avoiding getting submissions from them by not posting any links.
Yeah, I thought this was obvious: you can't just share your company's code without permission like that. Are companies actually asking candidates for samples of code they wrote for other companies? Do they not even know this? All that code is proprietary, and sharing it without permission is a copyright violation or worse. Would these companies want their own employees sharing company code like this?
If they need code samples, you just have to give them code that's all yours, meaning anything open-source, or code you wrote for some personal project that never was released, etc.
Polygamy in practice is actually "polygyny", and it's bad because men have all the power and women are chattel, so of course it leads to a huge imbalance with men hording the women. But polyamory isn't bad, because it's equal: women have as much ability to have multiple partners as men, so you don't get an imbalance.
The best guidance, with rare exceptions, comes from the parents.
That's bullshit. A huge number of parents in the US are in poverty, 1 in 6 last I heard, precisely because of the bad choices they made which you list (not getting an education, getting pregnant very early, etc.), These parents are not going to provide "the best guidance" for their kids, nor are many other parents who are basically idiots who get their "news" from Alex Jones and the like.
Families relying on daycare and babysitters is likely quite dangerous to society.
Right, but there's no way around it unless you want to relegate women to second-class citizen status like they had before, unless you dump the idea of monogamy. Two people, each with a job, just don't have time to watch over young kids all day: you can't be in two places at once.
Did you ever think why monogamy was not the norm in pre-industrial societies? Perhaps it was this lack of family structure that kept them from advancing.
They weren't "held back" from advancing. They had a better quality of life. They only adopted agriculture because they were forced to, by a lack of resources. Archeological evidence proves this: pre-agriculture humans were as tall as people are now, but when they adopted agriculture, they lost a full foot in height. It's taken this long to get it back, thanks to better medicine, nutrition standards and knowledge, and food availability. They didn't have monogamy because they didn't need it. They adopted it mainly because of the concept of land ownership and inheritance: men wanted to pass their property to their own progeny, not some other guy's. In a society where people live communally, there's no such concern and if your woman gets pregnant with another guy, it's not a big deal because the kids are raised by the village anyway. That's how it was in Hawaii just a few hundred years ago, before Europeans made contact with them. It probably helped a lot that they didn't have any STDs.
Having multiple sexual partners messes with people's minds. We have a need to pair up.
Citation needed. Lots of pre-industrial societies did not have monogamous relationships as the norm. Lots of people today do just fine without restricting themselves to a single partner. The only real reason to push monogamy and marriage is as an attempt to create a stable environment for children to grow up in, and even that doesn't work well because raising kids is a lot of work; it worked out better for parents when they had help from extended family, something you don't see so much now which is why we have "day care" and babysitters. People who aren't having kids, or have gotten past that age (e.g. their kids have grown up and moved out) really have no good reason to stay in monogamous relationships. It's just something society pushes on us because of old-fashioned and obsolete morality and religion.
Thank you, this is exactly correct. I've always liked that I can read Wikipedia articles on scientific things like this and not get the dumbed-down version. I might not understand it all, and I might quit partway through, but that's OK because the first paragraph usually tells me the high points at a layman's level.
Wikipedia just needs to make sure the first part of the article (and also maybe first paragraphs in major sections) is readable by laymen, and then people who want more detail can continue reading.
Yeah, but the problem is that you're simply wrong about those being better routes: according to Google's statistical data, you will get there faster if you take their route. The only metric that matters is time, and Google is surely correct about that. So when you pick an alternate route that's "slightly longer", you're choosing a less optimal route. Of course, the reason for this is that you aren't looking to optimize based solely on time, you're willing to trade off a few minutes of time for a less stressful drive, and perhaps a lower risk of an unexpected slowdown (or even getting in a crash).
Google Maps does usually present you with several routes before you start a trip. This usually happens when I start a longer trip, and the #2 or even #3 route might make more sense. Now, for your Albany-Orlando example, I just tried this in Google Maps, both in the desktop and Android versions, and it gives me 3 choices on the desktop, and 2 on the mobile. On mobile, the 2 choices are the I-95 route, and the exact route you describe. (On desktop, they add flying.) So it is giving you that other choice. However, it doesn't look so great to me: it adds an extra 1.5 hours! You might hit some traffic, but 1.5 hours' worth? Doubtful. Google Maps does also take traffic patterns into account, which is why you get different routes depending on when you plan the trip (that's why they have a selection so you can set the departure time to some other day and time than "now"). (Interestingly, I just tried this and it took away that other route, and replaced it with a Megabus option.)
Anyway, the problem is that you're expecting too much. You might be willing to spend an extra hour on another route in exchange for less stress. Someone else might not. Or they might not want to put 100 extra miles on their car for that route. How exactly do you program a navigation application to not optimize solely on travel time anyway? The best they can do is present a few options.
Anyway, my point to all this is that GPS with Google Maps is far, far better than what we had before, which was paper maps and stopping and asking strangers for directions. Your alternate route might be a better choice for you usually, but today the road might be closed because of a huge wreck. Without a system like Google Maps, you probably won't find out about that until it's too late (unless you listen to the radio constantly, with its awful music selection and annoying commercials, and happen to hear a warning in time, or you get yourself a CB radio and listen to truckers--yay). In the days before GPS, all this stuff was a serious chore; now it's much easier. You can still take the alternate route, and it'll guide you that way and warn you of traffic problems ahead.
I guess you don't realize that Google Maps will continuously update your route based on the latest traffic conditions. No, it's not that great at predicting things like some NFL game ending, but it sounds like that was quite some time before you would have gotten near it; if you had gone that way, it would have likely seen the stopped traffic before you got there, and attempted to reroute you around it. You seem to be assuming that whatever route you pick at the beginning is the route you're stuck with, which simply isn't the case. Anyway, as for your NFL example, what exactly do you suggest as an alternative? If I'm visiting that city, there's no way I'm going to know about such a thing because I don't follow football (even if it was in my city I probably wouldn't know, and certainly wouldn't have any idea of what time the game ends). So you're not being helpful here: for me, the choice is to use GM and hope it routes me around the game traffic in time, or go back to paper maps and probably get stuck in traffic because that's the most direct route. In short, you're expecting too much.
Exactly. That's why I like to see other news sources besides American mainstream ones, so BBC, Al Jazeera, and Hindu Times are interesting to read for this reason. But Breitbart and Infowars are just a complete waste of time, as is Fox News. Fox is so obviously slanted, and the other two are just tabloid trash making up bullshit (like Infowars continuing with the 9/11 "truther" conspiracy-theory nonsense after all these years).
You must be thinking of the Christian Science Monitor. That's something else altogether. CSM has been around for decades, long before the WWW.
I'd never even heard of ChristianityToday.com until I noticed Google News pushing it in the last few months. AFAICT, it's just "news" for Christians. That's OK, I guess, but it's not "general interest", any more than "IslamToday.com" or "ScientologyToday.com" would be, and a general-interest news aggregator has no business putting their stories in the default feed. Allowing users to select it is another matter.
Yeah, once in a while it gets confused, but it's usually pretty obvious. That's a lot better than the "old days" where I had to drive around in circles looking for some little road to turn onto, or figure out what someone meant by the "3rd right turn", or try to find some street address.
What better way to educate and teach unborn humans about ethics, human history, writing, and science than to run them through a full life simulation before birth?
Or what if experiencing a full life in this simulator is really a form of punishment?
There was an "Outer Limits" episode about that back in the 90s.
They don't like having meetings, they don't like getting people around a table to hammer out the issues and make sure the task is clear, because on the one hand they don't really like socialising (and meetings are social activities) and, on the other hand, they feel like time spent away from the keyboard is wasted time.
How are you supposed to have meetings when companies won't approve employee travel any more? Sure, you could try Skype, but I'm sorry, that just isn't very effective for a meeting with more than 2 or possibly 3 people. You need to get everyone in the same room together, and that's simply impossible to do: companies won't pay for it. Instead, they might send some manager or salesperson to talk over the requirements with the customer, and make a bunch of impossible promises, and then they'll come back and tell the programmers, who'll then tell them it's impossible.
Ultimately, all problems in companies are the fault of management. Don't blame the programmers. If programmers don't like meetings, that's too bad: management can order them to go to the meeting anyway. If the programmers do a lousy job getting the requirements straight, that's what project managers are for. If the PMs are doing a lousy job, that's the fault of their managers. Everything is the fault of management: their whole job is managing people, and working around their deficits while enabling them to succeed based on their strengths. If they aren't succeeding at that task, then they're failures at management.
Finally, the other problem with requirements is the constant change in requirements. A significant change in requirements can mean re-engineering the whole system, but customers almost always want to change the requirements after the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job, or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube. YouTube doesn't owe them anything.
I'd call it poor customer service, but of course we know we're not Google's customers - only their ad buyers are their customers. Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
Sure, and if you don't like it, don't use it. No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
Not our problem that no predominately non-white nation outside of Japan is considered a first world industrial nation.
You forgot South Korea, and probably China too. There's a lot more industry in China now that probably any other country in the world. Your smartphone was most likely made there, and there's pretty much no technology more cutting-edge than that.
Compare the age of these white established nations to the ages of those in Africa or Asia or the Middle East. It wasn't privilege that advanced them as fast as it did, it was hard work and ingenuity.
You need to read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. There's good reasons Africa is so far behind. As for the Middle East, personally I'd lay the blame for that entirely on religion. The Muslim cultures used to lead the world in math and science, until one day they decided that anything that wasn't in the Qu'ran was crap, and it's been downhill since then. That should be a good lesson to the religionists here in the US and other western nations, but they're not learning it. Back in the times the Muslims were in the lead, the white Europeans were living in mud huts as serfs, and had no education and were largely illiterate. It wasn't until the Renaissance much later that Europe really turned things around (and simultaneously, the Muslims had abandoned all progress in the name of religion). In short, if the Muslims hadn't turned fundamentalist back then, things would be very, very different now. The Europeans "won" because the Muslims turned stupid. Also, during much of that time, China, while having a large and old civilization, intentionally turned inwards and didn't interact much with the outside world. It's not that hard to come out ahead when your biggest competitors intentionally shoot themselves in the foot.
Finally, I wouldn't really call the success of Europeans the result of just "hard work". People in other cultures were working hard too. The Europeans just did several things right for a change, which led to some great successes, though they also did some awful things to take advantage of others. The things they did right were adopting rule of law rather than theocracy, adopting rational thought (science), and adopting an economic system that allowed greater prosperity across the population (instead of feudalism where a few lords had all the money and resources and everyone else had squat; you're not going to get much innovation when everyone's dirt poor). The awful things they did were colonizing the "new world", and brutally subjugating the people there (the Spanish were the ones most guilty of this brutality, and Spain still celebrates this today by having military parades on Columbus Day to honor his brutality toward the natives; the English weren't nearly as bad, and generally tried to use treaties to take land from people who didn't have a concept of land ownership). This paid off hugely for the Europeans, but at the expense of the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, and various indigenous tribes. I wouldn't call stealing from people and murdering them to be "just rewards for hard work".
They sure acted like they were eligible but in the end it was confirmed that they never were.
Not exactly true. In the end, they lost a war so they weren't allowed to secede. If they had won the war, they would have been allowed. The legality was entirely decided by war, not by any judicial system.
It's not that much different from the American Revolution. Did the colonies have the right to declare independence from England? One side says yes, the other no, and a war decided the question, but differently in that case.
So I think your comparison to this Dreamer issue is completely invalid: there's pretty much no possibility that this legal question will be decided by a war. It'll be decided in court, by a judge or judges.
What kind of "musicians" need computers to run their instruments? Sounds like they're not actually playing anything themselves, they're just standing there while the computers actually do the work.
These losers aren't musicians at all.
There was a story of band trying to tour the mid-East with their gear, which included iPads and laptops that drive their instruments and display their sheet music.
What kind of "band" on tour doesn't have their set list completely memorized?
That's not the only reason: checked luggage is handled worse than UPS packages. Why would you put your $500-3000 laptop in your checked baggage where the gorillas will toss it around and abuse it? That's even more likely to cause a problem leading to a battery fire, but why would someone be stupid enough to trust their expensive laptop to the baggage handlers?
According to this article, there's very good reasons this joystick idea never took off, the same reasons I iterated before.
In the late fifties, Buick experimented with a joystick controlled automobile. It worked fine, but the test customers didn't like it, as they felt more comfortable and in control with a wheel .. so Buick decided not to reinvent the wheel, and dropped the experiment.
I'd be interested in reading about this, because I'm very dubious.
First, I have read about some experiment like this by one of the American makes, using something called a "side stick", but that was back in the 90s or 00s. I have serious doubts that something like that could possibly be made to work using 1950s technology, at least that available on automobiles which are very price-sensitive (you can't use cutting-edge military aircraft tech on a car, it's just too expensive). A joystick on a car would require a pretty complex electronic control system and electric steering, I would think. These days, that'd actually be pretty simple to implement because any decent car these days uses electrically-assisted steering, which is why "automatic lane keeping" is now a common feature in midl-level and below cars: the only extra hardware needed is a camera, and a RPi-like computer. In the 50s, the age of recirculating-ball steering (or even completely non-power-assisted steering still in many cars) I have no idea how you'd implement joystick steering without it being some kind of rube goldberg contraption.
Secondly, the joystick is simply a poor UI for a car. It doesn't offer the granularity that a steering wheel does, for small, precise movements. A modern computer-driven system can work around this by making it non-linear, and not allowing you to turn the wheels all the way to one lock when at speed, but that's far harder or impossible with 50s consumer-level tech. Also think about it this way: if joysticks were better than steering wheels, then why are Formula 1 racing cars still using wheels? That's a racing series where almost anything goes technologically (unlike NASCAR), so if they really were better, they would have switched over ages ago. And F1 drivers don't have the problem of being uncomfortable with new tech that old-fart Buick drivers (or any consumer car brand) do; they'll use anything that gives them an edge, which is why they were the first to adopt paddle shifters.
I don't know about your mouse, and I don't know if Edge supports this, but on Linux on my personal laptop, I use one of the typical many-button mice that are available today, so to go back I just click the button that's on the left side of the mouse.
Edge isn't all that great, even if you could run it on Linux or other OSes. Unless I'm missing something, it lacks all the extensions that the other browsers have, and of course one of the big, big ones is Ublock Origin. Whatever ad-blocking Edge has built-in surely pales in comparison. Or, if you're even more paranoid, and use stuff like NoScript etc., that stuff just doesn't exist on Edge.
Protecting you from simple phishing attacks that target non-tech-savvy users really isn't all that useful when the browser still shows you zillions of annoying ads.
However, you have a point; if they ported Edge to all the major platforms, then we'd probably see a lot more extensions available for it.
I have had a job application where a programming challenge was emailed to me with a three day deadline for completion, and sent back well structured working code, compilation instructions, a build script and working unit tests
My problem with this is that many employers have been found to be using interviews like this as a way of getting free work done. May sure the programming challenge isn't something specific to their business, and something they can just drop into their system. Honestly, this sounds like way too much work to expect of a job candidate. On-the-spot coding tests are fine with me (though I understand not everyone performs well under the pressure, so that is a factor); I think it'd be better if the company saved that until your on-site interview, and then gave you an hour or two by yourself to do a coding exercise, with clear requirements about what they wanted to see, and then a follow-up session where you go over your work with the interviewer, explaining everything you did and why, so they can see that you actually did the work and understand it, instead of just getting it from StackOverflow or something.
Why would he post a link to a great job on Slashdot? So he can get inundated with inquiries from bitter jackoff Anonymous Cowards like you?
Who needs a bunch of resumes from GNAA, APK, neo-Nazis, 4chan trolls, MRAs and griefers?
At first, when I read the OP's post, I thought the AC was making a good point: if that guy supposedly hires people and has a hard time finding good people, why does he never post a link here for those alleged jobs?
But you're exactly right. This place is absolutely full of toxic personalities and actual psychotics (you listed at least one in particular there), and he's doing the right thing by avoiding getting submissions from them by not posting any links.
Yeah, I thought this was obvious: you can't just share your company's code without permission like that. Are companies actually asking candidates for samples of code they wrote for other companies? Do they not even know this? All that code is proprietary, and sharing it without permission is a copyright violation or worse. Would these companies want their own employees sharing company code like this?
If they need code samples, you just have to give them code that's all yours, meaning anything open-source, or code you wrote for some personal project that never was released, etc.
Polygamy in practice is actually "polygyny", and it's bad because men have all the power and women are chattel, so of course it leads to a huge imbalance with men hording the women. But polyamory isn't bad, because it's equal: women have as much ability to have multiple partners as men, so you don't get an imbalance.
The best guidance, with rare exceptions, comes from the parents.
That's bullshit. A huge number of parents in the US are in poverty, 1 in 6 last I heard, precisely because of the bad choices they made which you list (not getting an education, getting pregnant very early, etc.), These parents are not going to provide "the best guidance" for their kids, nor are many other parents who are basically idiots who get their "news" from Alex Jones and the like.
Families relying on daycare and babysitters is likely quite dangerous to society.
Right, but there's no way around it unless you want to relegate women to second-class citizen status like they had before, unless you dump the idea of monogamy. Two people, each with a job, just don't have time to watch over young kids all day: you can't be in two places at once.
Did you ever think why monogamy was not the norm in pre-industrial societies? Perhaps it was this lack of family structure that kept them from advancing.
They weren't "held back" from advancing. They had a better quality of life. They only adopted agriculture because they were forced to, by a lack of resources. Archeological evidence proves this: pre-agriculture humans were as tall as people are now, but when they adopted agriculture, they lost a full foot in height. It's taken this long to get it back, thanks to better medicine, nutrition standards and knowledge, and food availability. They didn't have monogamy because they didn't need it. They adopted it mainly because of the concept of land ownership and inheritance: men wanted to pass their property to their own progeny, not some other guy's. In a society where people live communally, there's no such concern and if your woman gets pregnant with another guy, it's not a big deal because the kids are raised by the village anyway. That's how it was in Hawaii just a few hundred years ago, before Europeans made contact with them. It probably helped a lot that they didn't have any STDs.
Having multiple sexual partners messes with people's minds. We have a need to pair up.
Citation needed. Lots of pre-industrial societies did not have monogamous relationships as the norm. Lots of people today do just fine without restricting themselves to a single partner. The only real reason to push monogamy and marriage is as an attempt to create a stable environment for children to grow up in, and even that doesn't work well because raising kids is a lot of work; it worked out better for parents when they had help from extended family, something you don't see so much now which is why we have "day care" and babysitters. People who aren't having kids, or have gotten past that age (e.g. their kids have grown up and moved out) really have no good reason to stay in monogamous relationships. It's just something society pushes on us because of old-fashioned and obsolete morality and religion.
Thank you, this is exactly correct. I've always liked that I can read Wikipedia articles on scientific things like this and not get the dumbed-down version. I might not understand it all, and I might quit partway through, but that's OK because the first paragraph usually tells me the high points at a layman's level.
Wikipedia just needs to make sure the first part of the article (and also maybe first paragraphs in major sections) is readable by laymen, and then people who want more detail can continue reading.
Yeah, but the problem is that you're simply wrong about those being better routes: according to Google's statistical data, you will get there faster if you take their route. The only metric that matters is time, and Google is surely correct about that. So when you pick an alternate route that's "slightly longer", you're choosing a less optimal route. Of course, the reason for this is that you aren't looking to optimize based solely on time, you're willing to trade off a few minutes of time for a less stressful drive, and perhaps a lower risk of an unexpected slowdown (or even getting in a crash).
Google Maps does usually present you with several routes before you start a trip. This usually happens when I start a longer trip, and the #2 or even #3 route might make more sense. Now, for your Albany-Orlando example, I just tried this in Google Maps, both in the desktop and Android versions, and it gives me 3 choices on the desktop, and 2 on the mobile. On mobile, the 2 choices are the I-95 route, and the exact route you describe. (On desktop, they add flying.) So it is giving you that other choice. However, it doesn't look so great to me: it adds an extra 1.5 hours! You might hit some traffic, but 1.5 hours' worth? Doubtful. Google Maps does also take traffic patterns into account, which is why you get different routes depending on when you plan the trip (that's why they have a selection so you can set the departure time to some other day and time than "now"). (Interestingly, I just tried this and it took away that other route, and replaced it with a Megabus option.)
Anyway, the problem is that you're expecting too much. You might be willing to spend an extra hour on another route in exchange for less stress. Someone else might not. Or they might not want to put 100 extra miles on their car for that route. How exactly do you program a navigation application to not optimize solely on travel time anyway? The best they can do is present a few options.
Anyway, my point to all this is that GPS with Google Maps is far, far better than what we had before, which was paper maps and stopping and asking strangers for directions. Your alternate route might be a better choice for you usually, but today the road might be closed because of a huge wreck. Without a system like Google Maps, you probably won't find out about that until it's too late (unless you listen to the radio constantly, with its awful music selection and annoying commercials, and happen to hear a warning in time, or you get yourself a CB radio and listen to truckers--yay). In the days before GPS, all this stuff was a serious chore; now it's much easier. You can still take the alternate route, and it'll guide you that way and warn you of traffic problems ahead.
I guess you don't realize that Google Maps will continuously update your route based on the latest traffic conditions. No, it's not that great at predicting things like some NFL game ending, but it sounds like that was quite some time before you would have gotten near it; if you had gone that way, it would have likely seen the stopped traffic before you got there, and attempted to reroute you around it. You seem to be assuming that whatever route you pick at the beginning is the route you're stuck with, which simply isn't the case. Anyway, as for your NFL example, what exactly do you suggest as an alternative? If I'm visiting that city, there's no way I'm going to know about such a thing because I don't follow football (even if it was in my city I probably wouldn't know, and certainly wouldn't have any idea of what time the game ends). So you're not being helpful here: for me, the choice is to use GM and hope it routes me around the game traffic in time, or go back to paper maps and probably get stuck in traffic because that's the most direct route. In short, you're expecting too much.
Exactly. That's why I like to see other news sources besides American mainstream ones, so BBC, Al Jazeera, and Hindu Times are interesting to read for this reason. But Breitbart and Infowars are just a complete waste of time, as is Fox News. Fox is so obviously slanted, and the other two are just tabloid trash making up bullshit (like Infowars continuing with the 9/11 "truther" conspiracy-theory nonsense after all these years).
You must be thinking of the Christian Science Monitor. That's something else altogether. CSM has been around for decades, long before the WWW.
I'd never even heard of ChristianityToday.com until I noticed Google News pushing it in the last few months. AFAICT, it's just "news" for Christians. That's OK, I guess, but it's not "general interest", any more than "IslamToday.com" or "ScientologyToday.com" would be, and a general-interest news aggregator has no business putting their stories in the default feed. Allowing users to select it is another matter.
Yeah, once in a while it gets confused, but it's usually pretty obvious. That's a lot better than the "old days" where I had to drive around in circles looking for some little road to turn onto, or figure out what someone meant by the "3rd right turn", or try to find some street address.
What better way to educate and teach unborn humans about ethics, human history, writing, and science than to run them through a full life simulation before birth?
Or what if experiencing a full life in this simulator is really a form of punishment?
There was an "Outer Limits" episode about that back in the 90s.
They don't like having meetings, they don't like getting people around a table to hammer out the issues and make sure the task is clear, because on the one hand they don't really like socialising (and meetings are social activities) and, on the other hand, they feel like time spent away from the keyboard is wasted time.
How are you supposed to have meetings when companies won't approve employee travel any more? Sure, you could try Skype, but I'm sorry, that just isn't very effective for a meeting with more than 2 or possibly 3 people. You need to get everyone in the same room together, and that's simply impossible to do: companies won't pay for it. Instead, they might send some manager or salesperson to talk over the requirements with the customer, and make a bunch of impossible promises, and then they'll come back and tell the programmers, who'll then tell them it's impossible.
Ultimately, all problems in companies are the fault of management. Don't blame the programmers. If programmers don't like meetings, that's too bad: management can order them to go to the meeting anyway. If the programmers do a lousy job getting the requirements straight, that's what project managers are for. If the PMs are doing a lousy job, that's the fault of their managers. Everything is the fault of management: their whole job is managing people, and working around their deficits while enabling them to succeed based on their strengths. If they aren't succeeding at that task, then they're failures at management.
Finally, the other problem with requirements is the constant change in requirements. A significant change in requirements can mean re-engineering the whole system, but customers almost always want to change the requirements after the fact.
What if the authors of this paper aren't actual people, and this paper is really made by whoever's running the simulation, to try to fool us?
What if none of you are real, and I'm the only person in this simulation?