Tough shit. Just like a tourist doesn't have to ask permission of thousands of people on the sidewalk when he takes a photo of a street in Manhattan, no one needs your permission to take a photo of you (or of the much more interesting thing behind you) when you're in public. Don't like it? Stay home. Inside your home is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy, and also perhaps inside restrooms. Anywhere else, you're fair game for photos.
What's really bad about this is that a fast-food restaurant like McDonald's should, in theory, be the last place you might get food poisoning. The whole way FF restaurants work is by turning the preparation of food into an industrial process, and eliminating all the art from it (and all the variables), so they can maximize speed and profit. It's like an assembly line back there. Contrast this to a regular kitchen at a sit-down restaurant, where it's really all about human skill, and especially the head chef's skill in managing everyone. At a FF restaurant, everything's supposed to be dumbed-down so much that any moron can just follow the instructions and churn out Big Macs at breakneck speeds, in combination with the specialized equipment they use, so eliminating methods for contaminating foods should be part of the process. Of course, one main vector is by employees not washing their hands, but even so they usually wear gloves, so who knows what the problem is, probably a management failure in making sure employees wash hands and also wear gloves when handling anything.
Well it's not like no one's ever successfully docked craft in orbit; that's been done many, many times with the various space stations and their resupply ships. Now, how well that experience translates to subsequently launching the assembled craft from orbit towards the moon or Mars, I don't know.
It probably depends on your definition of "spacecraft". To launch a probe anywhere in the system, sure, the Saturn V is sufficient. But look at the size of the craft that the Saturn V sent to the Moon; it wasn't all that large. 3 men in a capsule plus a lander, plus a rover on one or two missions. If you want to launch a larger craft with 6 or 10 astronauts, and some more heavy cargo for them to set up at the destination, you'll need a bigger rocket most likely. Or if you want to launch a craft big enough for 3-4 people to live somewhat comfortably on a mission to Mars (which would take months, not days like the Moon mission, requiring much more supplies and living space), again you'll need a bigger rocket than the Saturn V.
Of course, you can also get away with smaller rockets by splitting things up and launching them on separate rockets, and then joining them together in orbit before continuing the mission.
You might as well argue with the wall. The overwhelming mentality on Slashdot, as seen by the poster here, is that space travel is a total waste of money and that we need to invest in wars and occupations instead. If you're looking for a haven for space geeks and sci-fi fans, this isn't it.
KDE is good, I use it myself. And yes, the interface is indeed a no-brainer for (pre-Metro) Windows users.
The problem with KDE is that none of the leading distros feature it in a leading role. Linux is utterly dominated by Ubuntu and Fedora; act like a Windows-only person who knows nothing about Linux and google for "linux" and you'll probably find all kinds of stuff about Ubuntu, with Fedora a distant #2. There are distros that feature KDE, such as Chakra, Linux Mint KDE edition, Kubuntu, and of course SUSE, but someone new to Linux isn't going to see any of those; they'll be lucky if they stumble across SUSE somehow, amid all the Ubuntu stuff everywhere, but the others are hopeless. So, to someone new to Linux, all they're going to see is Unity, and maybe Gnome3, and that's it, and they're going to equate one or both of those with "desktop Linux". They're about as likely to learn about KDE at this point as they are LXDE or Enlightenment.
Heck, I work in a job doing embedded Linux and Android development, and my fellow Linux/Android developers all use Unity, and complain about it, but they use it because "that's what Ubuntu uses" and they want to stick with "the standard". I'm the lone weirdo for using Linux Mint KDE. If professional software engineers working with low-level Linux aren't using KDE, then not many regular users are going to either, and newbies certainly aren't going to. If they even hear about it at all, they'll just consider it "one of those odd things that a small number of highly-skilled people use, and not worth the bother for little ol' me", just like Enlightenment or WindowMaker.
I hate to say it, but I think this is going to be a very profitable and successful time for Apple. People are going to look at Metro and barf, and start looking for alternatives. Then they'll think, "maybe I'll try out that Linux thing everyone's been talking about", and of course look for the most popular distro which is, of course, Ubuntu. They'll go to the trouble of trying that out somehow, see how awful Unity is, and realize that it's no great alternative to Metro. Then they'll say "screw it, I'll just buy a Mac" and go to the local Apple store and buy an overpriced computer there.
They might also try out Fedora with Gnome3 instead, but the result will be exactly the same.
This could have been a great opportunity for Linux on the desktop, but between Mark Shuttleworth and the Gnome devs, the cause for Linux on the desktop is pretty much lost.
Better yet, offer the Win8 models at an inflated price so that the regular-price Win7 models look like a bargain. The inflated price will offset your support costs for the few morons who do buy Win8 and then call to complain.
They were really ratty back in the days of the NES to anyone who wanted to produce 3rd-party games for their system without paying them insane licensing fees.
Free wi-fi? Where? I certainly haven't seen any. 10 years ago this may have been the case, but not any more. Wi-Fi networks are all password-protected with WPA2 these days, and ones open to the public usually require you to purchase access by the hour at extremely steep prices. Even airports frequently have pay-only wi-fi. Maybe Starbucks still has free wi-fi, but when I need data access I'm never near one of those.
You bring up another good point about men dying younger. In statistics I've seen, men start outnumbering women in Western society (probably even more so in the US because of its wars) after the age of 30. So by not allowing polygyny, this is forcing women to stay unmarried as there simply aren't enough men to go around. Then, add in the fact that tons of men either are in prison or were in prison (which makes them unsuitable for many women; since almost no women go to prison, I think they're justified in discriminating against ex-cons), and that adds to the problem.
Well we're certainly not talking about marriage in Indonesia or Saudi Arabia here, we're talking about the US since almost everyone here is in the US, and this is an American site.
You make a good argument, but the numbers simply aren't in your favor. Statistics clearly show that the divorce rate is over 50% in the US. Even if I'm mistaken and it's slightly under 50%, it would be foolish to argue that 100% of un-divorced couples are happy in their relationships (indeed, many of them just haven't gotten divorced yet, while others just put up with it for the kids or because of finances). So obviously, a majority of married people are unhappy. If anyone here only knows couples who are happy, then you're just lucky.
Remember, we're all raised in multi-person families. Even if you have a single parent and no siblings, you shared a home with someone when you were growing up. Most people probably had more family members than that (either a second parent, or sibling(s), or both). So you're raised from birth to think that living with other people is normal (plus, every psychologist will tell you that humans are inherently social animals).
Now, fast-forward ~20 years to adulthood; you leave your parents' house (at least in Western countries), and live on your own for a while. Pretty soon, you find that living as a single person can be pretty dull. When you're young (esp. in college), you don't notice too much because you have a bunch of single friends you hang out with a lot. But as you get older, these friends all get married, and now married, they don't have much time to hang out with single friends any more, and it gets worse when they have their own kids. (Plus, many married couples stop hanging out with single people because it feels awkward to them.)
All this adds up to an extreme social pressure to get married, usually some time in your 20s or 30s at the very latest.
For society to change to some other model where two-person marriage was no longer the overwhelming norm would be really revolutionary.
Of course, there are other societies that are slightly different, such as Asian cultures where kids usually live with their parents for their whole lives (more specifically, the boys live with their parents and grandparents, the girls, when they get an arranged marriage, move in with their husbands and step-parents). But even here, while single males might not feel the loneliness problem as much as western single males who live in efficiency apartments by themselves, there's enormous social pressure by their families to get married, because the parents want grandchildren.
Things don't really have to be this way; Robert Heinlein wrote a lot about alternative family structures such as "line marriages". But to say that people can be happy living by themselves brewing beer is rather shortsighted IMO and definitely not true of most humans.
No, but it does confirm that a majority of people are unhappy with their marriages. Obviously ~50% of people are so unhappy that they get a divorce. Then, out of the other ~50%, some percentage is unhappy (as noted by the poster above referencing backstabbing comments) yet stays married for some reason (kids, finances, loneliness, etc.).
Obviously, marriage is not a very good way to seek happiness, since the odds are heavily against you. You're more likely to be unhappy with marriage than happy.
Two points: 1) You're talking about polygynous societies (where one man has several wives). There's also societies (at least in theory, maybe in history) where one woman has several husbands, called "polyamorous". This obviously wouldn't have the same problem of single males with too much time on their hands. 2) Restricting men to marrying only one wife also ends up forcing a lot of women to stay single, because they can't find a good enough man (they don't want to settle for some ex-con, for instance), and because women are almost always the one stuck with any kids in the case of divorce or children born out-of-wedlock, this causes a lot of children to be raised by single working mothers, which in the case of boys is extremely harmful to their development.
Microsoft pulled an Osbourne with WinPhone, by announcing WinPhone8 while they're still trying to sell WP7, on devices that everyone knows will not be upgradable to the new OS. Why on earth would anyone buy WP7 now that WP8 is supposedly right around the corner, and fixes all the glaring problems with WP7? (And why would WP8 be needed if WP7 didn't have glaring problems?) This is exactly what put Osbourne computer out of business: Mr. Osbourne announced the next version too early, people stopped buying the current version, and the company didn't have enough money to survive not having any sales until the next version was ready, so it folded.
So that's why we jumped right into Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide from happening there, right? Oh yeah, we didn't, we just let them be slaughtered because there's no oil there.
And that's why we're in Somalia now, helping to set up a new government, right? Oh yeah, we're not, we're just letting anarchy reign, because there's no oil there.
No, he'll need it not only to work 3000 feet underground, but also in those water-filled caves in Mexico, as in, the phone needs to work for voice calls while underwater. Such is the mentality of many Slashdotters.
I don't know if she was a "token woman" or just a good bullshitter (as most people high in organizations seem to be), but when I worked at Freescale we had a female VP who did not impress me at all as being competent. Then again, the entire executive team at the time was pretty incompetent, so she fit in well there.
Except that there's plenty of fat in our diets anyway; it's not like salmon and bison are fat-free, they just have less of it than beef, and there's lots of other things we eat that have fat in them. Saying we need fattier meat seems to me like saying we need more salt in our food because salt is necessary to our diet, even though we already get tons of salt in all the foods we eat and Americans generally eat way too much of it (and way too much fat too).
Slashdot Mirror
Tough shit. Just like a tourist doesn't have to ask permission of thousands of people on the sidewalk when he takes a photo of a street in Manhattan, no one needs your permission to take a photo of you (or of the much more interesting thing behind you) when you're in public. Don't like it? Stay home. Inside your home is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy, and also perhaps inside restrooms. Anywhere else, you're fair game for photos.
What's really bad about this is that a fast-food restaurant like McDonald's should, in theory, be the last place you might get food poisoning. The whole way FF restaurants work is by turning the preparation of food into an industrial process, and eliminating all the art from it (and all the variables), so they can maximize speed and profit. It's like an assembly line back there. Contrast this to a regular kitchen at a sit-down restaurant, where it's really all about human skill, and especially the head chef's skill in managing everyone. At a FF restaurant, everything's supposed to be dumbed-down so much that any moron can just follow the instructions and churn out Big Macs at breakneck speeds, in combination with the specialized equipment they use, so eliminating methods for contaminating foods should be part of the process. Of course, one main vector is by employees not washing their hands, but even so they usually wear gloves, so who knows what the problem is, probably a management failure in making sure employees wash hands and also wear gloves when handling anything.
Well it's not like no one's ever successfully docked craft in orbit; that's been done many, many times with the various space stations and their resupply ships. Now, how well that experience translates to subsequently launching the assembled craft from orbit towards the moon or Mars, I don't know.
It probably depends on your definition of "spacecraft". To launch a probe anywhere in the system, sure, the Saturn V is sufficient. But look at the size of the craft that the Saturn V sent to the Moon; it wasn't all that large. 3 men in a capsule plus a lander, plus a rover on one or two missions. If you want to launch a larger craft with 6 or 10 astronauts, and some more heavy cargo for them to set up at the destination, you'll need a bigger rocket most likely. Or if you want to launch a craft big enough for 3-4 people to live somewhat comfortably on a mission to Mars (which would take months, not days like the Moon mission, requiring much more supplies and living space), again you'll need a bigger rocket than the Saturn V.
Of course, you can also get away with smaller rockets by splitting things up and launching them on separate rockets, and then joining them together in orbit before continuing the mission.
You might as well argue with the wall. The overwhelming mentality on Slashdot, as seen by the poster here, is that space travel is a total waste of money and that we need to invest in wars and occupations instead. If you're looking for a haven for space geeks and sci-fi fans, this isn't it.
KDE is good, I use it myself. And yes, the interface is indeed a no-brainer for (pre-Metro) Windows users.
The problem with KDE is that none of the leading distros feature it in a leading role. Linux is utterly dominated by Ubuntu and Fedora; act like a Windows-only person who knows nothing about Linux and google for "linux" and you'll probably find all kinds of stuff about Ubuntu, with Fedora a distant #2. There are distros that feature KDE, such as Chakra, Linux Mint KDE edition, Kubuntu, and of course SUSE, but someone new to Linux isn't going to see any of those; they'll be lucky if they stumble across SUSE somehow, amid all the Ubuntu stuff everywhere, but the others are hopeless. So, to someone new to Linux, all they're going to see is Unity, and maybe Gnome3, and that's it, and they're going to equate one or both of those with "desktop Linux". They're about as likely to learn about KDE at this point as they are LXDE or Enlightenment.
Heck, I work in a job doing embedded Linux and Android development, and my fellow Linux/Android developers all use Unity, and complain about it, but they use it because "that's what Ubuntu uses" and they want to stick with "the standard". I'm the lone weirdo for using Linux Mint KDE. If professional software engineers working with low-level Linux aren't using KDE, then not many regular users are going to either, and newbies certainly aren't going to. If they even hear about it at all, they'll just consider it "one of those odd things that a small number of highly-skilled people use, and not worth the bother for little ol' me", just like Enlightenment or WindowMaker.
I hate to say it, but I think this is going to be a very profitable and successful time for Apple. People are going to look at Metro and barf, and start looking for alternatives. Then they'll think, "maybe I'll try out that Linux thing everyone's been talking about", and of course look for the most popular distro which is, of course, Ubuntu. They'll go to the trouble of trying that out somehow, see how awful Unity is, and realize that it's no great alternative to Metro. Then they'll say "screw it, I'll just buy a Mac" and go to the local Apple store and buy an overpriced computer there.
They might also try out Fedora with Gnome3 instead, but the result will be exactly the same.
This could have been a great opportunity for Linux on the desktop, but between Mark Shuttleworth and the Gnome devs, the cause for Linux on the desktop is pretty much lost.
Better yet, offer the Win8 models at an inflated price so that the regular-price Win7 models look like a bargain. The inflated price will offset your support costs for the few morons who do buy Win8 and then call to complain.
They were really ratty back in the days of the NES to anyone who wanted to produce 3rd-party games for their system without paying them insane licensing fees.
Free wi-fi? Where? I certainly haven't seen any. 10 years ago this may have been the case, but not any more. Wi-Fi networks are all password-protected with WPA2 these days, and ones open to the public usually require you to purchase access by the hour at extremely steep prices. Even airports frequently have pay-only wi-fi. Maybe Starbucks still has free wi-fi, but when I need data access I'm never near one of those.
You bring up another good point about men dying younger. In statistics I've seen, men start outnumbering women in Western society (probably even more so in the US because of its wars) after the age of 30. So by not allowing polygyny, this is forcing women to stay unmarried as there simply aren't enough men to go around. Then, add in the fact that tons of men either are in prison or were in prison (which makes them unsuitable for many women; since almost no women go to prison, I think they're justified in discriminating against ex-cons), and that adds to the problem.
Oh right, sorry.
Well we're certainly not talking about marriage in Indonesia or Saudi Arabia here, we're talking about the US since almost everyone here is in the US, and this is an American site.
You make a good argument, but the numbers simply aren't in your favor. Statistics clearly show that the divorce rate is over 50% in the US. Even if I'm mistaken and it's slightly under 50%, it would be foolish to argue that 100% of un-divorced couples are happy in their relationships (indeed, many of them just haven't gotten divorced yet, while others just put up with it for the kids or because of finances). So obviously, a majority of married people are unhappy. If anyone here only knows couples who are happy, then you're just lucky.
I think loneliness plays a pretty big part.
Remember, we're all raised in multi-person families. Even if you have a single parent and no siblings, you shared a home with someone when you were growing up. Most people probably had more family members than that (either a second parent, or sibling(s), or both). So you're raised from birth to think that living with other people is normal (plus, every psychologist will tell you that humans are inherently social animals).
Now, fast-forward ~20 years to adulthood; you leave your parents' house (at least in Western countries), and live on your own for a while. Pretty soon, you find that living as a single person can be pretty dull. When you're young (esp. in college), you don't notice too much because you have a bunch of single friends you hang out with a lot. But as you get older, these friends all get married, and now married, they don't have much time to hang out with single friends any more, and it gets worse when they have their own kids. (Plus, many married couples stop hanging out with single people because it feels awkward to them.)
All this adds up to an extreme social pressure to get married, usually some time in your 20s or 30s at the very latest.
For society to change to some other model where two-person marriage was no longer the overwhelming norm would be really revolutionary.
Of course, there are other societies that are slightly different, such as Asian cultures where kids usually live with their parents for their whole lives (more specifically, the boys live with their parents and grandparents, the girls, when they get an arranged marriage, move in with their husbands and step-parents). But even here, while single males might not feel the loneliness problem as much as western single males who live in efficiency apartments by themselves, there's enormous social pressure by their families to get married, because the parents want grandchildren.
Things don't really have to be this way; Robert Heinlein wrote a lot about alternative family structures such as "line marriages". But to say that people can be happy living by themselves brewing beer is rather shortsighted IMO and definitely not true of most humans.
No, but it does confirm that a majority of people are unhappy with their marriages. Obviously ~50% of people are so unhappy that they get a divorce. Then, out of the other ~50%, some percentage is unhappy (as noted by the poster above referencing backstabbing comments) yet stays married for some reason (kids, finances, loneliness, etc.).
Obviously, marriage is not a very good way to seek happiness, since the odds are heavily against you. You're more likely to be unhappy with marriage than happy.
Two points:
1) You're talking about polygynous societies (where one man has several wives). There's also societies (at least in theory, maybe in history) where one woman has several husbands, called "polyamorous". This obviously wouldn't have the same problem of single males with too much time on their hands.
2) Restricting men to marrying only one wife also ends up forcing a lot of women to stay single, because they can't find a good enough man (they don't want to settle for some ex-con, for instance), and because women are almost always the one stuck with any kids in the case of divorce or children born out-of-wedlock, this causes a lot of children to be raised by single working mothers, which in the case of boys is extremely harmful to their development.
Microsoft pulled an Osbourne with WinPhone, by announcing WinPhone8 while they're still trying to sell WP7, on devices that everyone knows will not be upgradable to the new OS. Why on earth would anyone buy WP7 now that WP8 is supposedly right around the corner, and fixes all the glaring problems with WP7? (And why would WP8 be needed if WP7 didn't have glaring problems?) This is exactly what put Osbourne computer out of business: Mr. Osbourne announced the next version too early, people stopped buying the current version, and the company didn't have enough money to survive not having any sales until the next version was ready, so it folded.
Larger than what?
So that's why we jumped right into Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide from happening there, right? Oh yeah, we didn't, we just let them be slaughtered because there's no oil there.
And that's why we're in Somalia now, helping to set up a new government, right? Oh yeah, we're not, we're just letting anarchy reign, because there's no oil there.
I think it depends on your definition of "douchebag", whether you're tying it to company performance, or how nice a person one is. Jobs was frequently cited as being a terrible boss. Just a small sample of a google seach for "steve jobs bad boss":
http://freefeast.info/general-it-articles/steve-jobs-as-a-boss-an-employees-worst-nightmare/
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/steve-jobs-was-not-warm-and-fuzzy-biographer/articleshow/10469476.cms
No, he'll need it not only to work 3000 feet underground, but also in those water-filled caves in Mexico, as in, the phone needs to work for voice calls while underwater.
Such is the mentality of many Slashdotters.
Elop is still very busy driving Nokia into the ground.
I don't know if she was a "token woman" or just a good bullshitter (as most people high in organizations seem to be), but when I worked at Freescale we had a female VP who did not impress me at all as being competent. Then again, the entire executive team at the time was pretty incompetent, so she fit in well there.
Except that there's plenty of fat in our diets anyway; it's not like salmon and bison are fat-free, they just have less of it than beef, and there's lots of other things we eat that have fat in them. Saying we need fattier meat seems to me like saying we need more salt in our food because salt is necessary to our diet, even though we already get tons of salt in all the foods we eat and Americans generally eat way too much of it (and way too much fat too).