Facebook is starting with no discernible principles to act as a rudder.
Based on the history of the company, I wouldn't say that's true at all. They've got lots of principles, just not very many decent ones. Certainly not as regards those poor saps using the service.
Working in investment industry, I would seriously suggest buying Facebook shares
When people in the "investment industry" start talking about buying shares in anything publicly, that's usually about the time the general public should run, screaming, in the opposite direction.
You go ahead and buy yourself a few thousand shares, 'Mr. Investment Industry.' Good luck with your pumping and dumping.
Because to do it differently would be to make the code worse. Go to your local hardware store, and look at the hammers. Despite many different manufacturers, they all look and function basically the same. The reason why is because mankind worked out the most efficient hammer design a long time ago and there is nothing left to innovate there.
Imagine how retarded competitor's hammers would have to be designed to get around a patent like the one Oracle is asserting here. This is why there is so much folly in patenting something so elementary, like 'slide to unlock', or a range check.
Exactly. Most people buying SSDs are using them to store OS and regularly opened programs, but have standard HDDs to store the stuff that doesn't "need" the added performance. Media is a perfect example of something that is silly to put on a SSD (unless you're actually editing said media, not merely consuming it).
The bulk of the data being generated by most people today does not need to be stored on SSDs, really, nor should it be. It's the equivalent of buying a Ferrari to use as your daily driver.
Regular hard drives were just as expensive (if not more so) when they were at a comparable point in their development and life-cycle
Here is an awful-colored chart showing price per MB over the years. It's not so much that SSDs are really that expensive, it's that traditional HDDs have gotten ridiculously cheap, and capacities have grown beyond the storage needs of most average people. I remember actually filling up hard drives and having to buy larger and larger disks to hold my shit every couple years, but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there.
I mean this as an even-handed question: with public funding of research, where would the incentive come from to find stuff that was actually useful, as opposed to just interesting for the researcher?
Many of the compounds and technologies we use today came out of the government funded labs during and after World War II; superglue to the internet itself was borne out of publicly funded research.
Pure research has led to just as many important discoveries, some completely by accident, as corporate-directed research with a total focus on profitability. Also, the quest for profits in itself is not always beneficial when it comes to research...consider the "research" done by Big Tobacco to make cigarettes as addictive as possible. I honestly think that Big Pharma pumps a lot of money into prolonging treatment as opposed to curing disease, which to me is another example of where the drive for profits could steer research into areas that are completely harmful to society as a whole.
Personally, I'll take a bunch of scientists "interested" in something over a bunch of bean counters trying to figure out how to best monetize (and in some cases, hold back improvements) their discoveries any day.
And what if the monarchs of the old world felt the same way about the new world?
To be fair, after Columbus' initial voyage to the new world, it wasn't any sense of exploration that was driving those expeditions, it was the promise of immense reward due to the reports of those "streets lined with gold". Even Columbus' first voyage wasn't bankrolled just for the sake of exploration, but to find that shorter route to the East.
I bet if Columbus had discovered the New World and found a lunar landscape, it would have been hundreds of years before anyone bothered to return.
Don't misunderstand and think I am critical of pure research, nor am I one of those people that think all scientific research should be driven solely by profitability, but the age of exploration was driven by profit motive just as much as anything else over history. Many of us have grown beyond that short-sighted attitude, but unfortunately we're back in a "if it's not profitable, it's not worth spending money on at all" cycle as far as the people running our government go. The funny thing is, if we'd have had that attitude during WWII and the Cold War, half of the compounds we use today would have likely never been discovered, having come out of labs that were generously funded by taxpayer dollars. Would the internet even exist today if it had been judged solely on it's "profitability" back when it was ARPANET?
I don't know what kind of fucked up employer you work for, but literally every place I've ever worked that had separate containers for recycling did indeed recycle the material. I know this for a fact because I worked 3rd shift a lot of the time and actually interacted with the cleaning crews that came through.
I know that there is a lot of scammers out there as regards green technology and earth-conscious materials, but the fact that there is a lot of scammers does not entitle people to throw their hands up and say "fuck it" when they could make a difference. You turning your air conditioner down a little while you're out of the house not only saves you money on your bill, but it's that much less oil or coal being burned (unless you happen to be one of the few people receiving power from wind/hydro/solar). Yeah, individually that's a miniscule amount, but if everyone did that shit, the impact would be amazing. Just the same as if everyone went out and bought a couple canvas shopping bags and stopped using disposable plastic ones. Or using reusable containers with lids instead of saran wrap or tin foil.
Very few people I've ever met have expected people to completely upend their lives to become "green", but there are hundreds of millions of people in this damn country, and the benefits due to scale have the potential to be enormous with just a little effort. Most people I know have absolutely no fucking problem with recycling, and even those that are too lazy to do it themselves realize that there is a legitimate reason to do it, but the people that deliberately do not recycle, just because "fuck you hippies!!!!!11!!!1!1" should be beaten severely. I've seen assholes see the receptacle for aluminum cans right next to the regular trash and still toss their empty soda can in the trash, usually laughing while they do it. I can only imagine they're thinking "sure showed them assholes" to themselves..."sure showed" who? Their kids? Who do they think they're sticking it to with that kind of behavior? Do they not live on this planet, too? (come to think of it...)
Sorry that your employer is a fucking asshole (either that or your cleaning crew), but what I don't get is, even if they're not, can you not at least try? You know, in the off chance that they are actually going to recycle the material? Or will you "stick it to" everyone else by deliberately not, you know, cuz "fuck you"?
Given the fact that most of the world's currency is based on the faith it's users have in it's value, I wouldn't be too sure that other people's money is going to be worth anything once society rolls over and refuses to play their game, and forcing austerity measures on a class of people that had little to do with the shit in the first place is one of the best ways you can make that happen.
Atlas may be shrugging, but Atlas ain't "job creators" and capitalists, Atlas is the mob, and at the end of the day, the mob rules.
I think the fact that the latter could be combated with just a modicum of giving a shit adds more insult to injury.
There wasn't a fucking thing Joe Blow could do about The Bomb back during the height of the Cold-War, but something as simple as not generating extraneous waste gets the most ridiculous resistance out of people these days. I have known people that chose not to recycle because "fuck it." Until gas prices got insane, I knew people that would drive 2 blocks away to the corner store to get a candy bar rather than walk. Even something as simple as turning the thermostat up during the summer and down during the winter by a few degrees would result in enormous savings in fossil fuels, but again, there is an insane number of people out there that don't give a single fuck about the environment and a fair amount of people that, it seems, are hostile towards green initiatives solely because "fuck you", like the aforementioned people that refuse to recycle.
It's funny, but 70 years ago American society embraced rationing to support the war effort and beat the Axis, but trying to get society as a whole to embrace green technology is an exercise in futility, and many of these people are the children of those that grew up in that time period in the first place. Did all those lessons not get passed on from the WWII generation or what?
I think it's deliberate obfuscation, myself. If it's easy to get right at the information you're seeking, then you're not spending all your time on Facebook, and we can't fucking have that, can we?
I never understood how people can stand shit like that. I admit, maybe it's my own low-level OCD when it comes to organization (you should see my media folder on my computer...impeccably tagged and sorted) but I cannot fucking stand the clusterfuck of crap that is the average Facebook wall these days. I haven't logged in myself in literally years now, but I see family members surfing FB all the time and it's just such a cluttered-up mess of crap that I don't know how people use it without going crazy. Even back when I was using it in the late 00's, I needed to have programmer friends of mine write me greasemonkey scripts to get rid of all the shit all over the place. The signal-to-noise ratio was through the fucking roof then, and once they start letting people pay to get their shit moved to the top it's going to turn into even more of a spam-tastic piece of garbage then it is already.
It really is liberating. I realized that the frequency of a person's posts on Facebook was inversely proportional to whether they were actually worth reading long ago.
Although, in the interests of full disclosure, I've always thought social networking was fucking retarded. I never join them of my own volition, it's always after a ton of family and friends harasses the shit out of me about my lack of an account, and then when I finally do sign up, I lose interest within days. Funny considering I can lurk here on slashdot everyday and not (usually) get bored with it, though. Must be the anonymity...
Oh man, but that's so much work, logging into your email account and, uh....look, fuck you buddy. We need to use Facebook! We must use it for everything!!!!! I don't even remember how to dial a phone anymore it's been so long! What are these numbers, and how do you dial someone's Facebook account?!?!! DURRRRRRRRRRR
Remember AOL, Myspace, ICQ, MSN etc, they all had a huge userbase, were seen as invincible and they all more or less crashed when they tried to cash in in a market where they were no longer the leaders in innovation.
The mob is fickle, brother. Ten years ago Myspace didn't even exist yet, and it hasn't been relevant in years now. C'est la vie...
Anyone that expects different with Facebook is delusional. I would honestly not be surprised if a full third of the user accounts on Facebook are either abandoned completely or aren't accessed but a few times a month at the most. I don't know what's going to be the dominant social network in 5 years...but I seriously doubt it's going to be Facebook.
I get the point you're making, but nothing lasts forever. If you really sit back and think about the internet as it was for us a decade ago it's mindblowing how far we've come. I mean, Myspace is a joke now, but 10 years ago they didn't even exist. How long has it been since Myspace has been relevant? 4 years? 5? From nothing to the juggernaut they became in the mid-00's to nothing again. Facebook is going to suffer the same fate, and I'm betting it's not going to be nearly as far off as we think. If you told someone in 2005 that Myspace was going to end up the shadow of it's formal self it is today, most people probably would have thought you were out of your mind, yet just 3 years later everyone and their sister was on that newfangled Facebook, their Myspace pages abandoned long before. For all we know, Facebook could be just as irrelevant in 2015.
It's funny, but as we keep hearing these stories about how large Facebook is becoming, in my own personal life, I know more and more people that are eschewing it completely because it's become just as cluttered up with bullshit and fake "friends" as their Myspace pages were before they just stopped logging in. It's funny, but rather than unfriending people, they just abandon their accounts completely. I actually know people that are on their 2nd or 3rd account, having abandoned the old ones so they could create new ones and friend the people they actually want to be social with without worrying about the hurt feelings of dozens of "friends". Or so I'm told, anyway...I abandoned my own Facebook account long ago.
I'm really curious as to how many unique, regular users (regular meaning people that log in at least every couple days) they actually have. Obviously nobody on the outside would ever know, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 of their 'users' are inactive accounts that haven't been touched in ages...
Yeah, I still have my $5 unlimited texting and my unlimited data, but my original Droid is really starting to feel it's age as newer apps become more and more processor intensive (not to mention the joy that is a battery that goes from full to almost dead at the drop of a hat) so I'm thinking I've got another 6 months or so before I end up having to get a new phone and thus fall under the new caps.
I'm seriously leaning towards dumping the plan and going back to a pay as you go dumbphone, though, as they are getting pretty fucking ridiculous with the monthly charges plus with the throttling bullshit that they imposed on me as a punishment for being a long-time Verizon customer that doesn't upgrade constantly (going on almost 10 years with them...thanks a lot for the appreciation of my business, you fuckheads at Verizon) I'm just getting closer and closer to saying fuck it all. As it is now I barely even actually talk on the phone (only to geriatric relatives), everything is email, SMS or IM, and I don't need a $500 phone and a $80/month plan to do those things, especially not once I pick up a tablet.
Last time I checked, using Google services was still a choice. I certainly don't remember being asked if I wanted to be tracked by my government, nor the existence of any competing products to choose from as alternatives.
It bothers me when a fifth grader knows more about some subject than I do. But the problem isn't that I feel dumb... it's that I know that the fifth grader will one day be in my shoes, and ask, "Why was I put through years of this? I can't remember any of this because I never need it... and I want those years of my life back."
Well, I suppose one could apply that to anything we learn in schools today, but personally, I abhor the idea of only teaching what is directly useful to everyone in their day-to-day lives. I certainly don't use all the history I was taught in day-to-day life, but I cannot even imagine how much more dull my life would be had I never been exposed to it in the first place.
That kind of attitude, the "we must only teach what can be used in a potential career" idea, is going to result in generations of kids growing up to be George Jetson, taught only how to push a bunch of buttons but having nothing outside of that to keep the mind occupied outside of empty-headed, non-participatory entertainment such as television. It's going to stunt the imagination of anyone that comes out of that system. Just because a skill isn't easily "monetized" does not mean it's not worth knowing. I taught myself how to play guitar and bass, and I've been in bands off and on throughout my life...but I'm not ever going to have a career in music. The thing is, that doesn't bother me at all. I don't find the skill a waste because I'll never make money off of it or never "use it" for anything more than giving me something to do when I've got an hour to kill and feel like putting on a CD and playing along.
It scares me when people start really trying to parse everything kids learn these days into what is going to be 'useful' when they're an adult...especially younger kids who are really still learning how to learn in the first place. A well-rounded education is necessary to truly know what it is that sparks the passion for learning in a person. Some kids find that spark in math or science. Some find it in English literature or renaissance artwork. If we ever get to the point where we're eschewing the latter in order to only teach the former, because the former is more "useful", we might as well stop calling our kids human beings and start calling them biological robots, because that's all they will be mentally.
That's what I was thinking when I first read that myself. Driving in the city requires a lot more focus on what's going on, not only on the road but with pedestrians, cyclists...you don't have to worry about that shit on the highway.
Highway hypnosis, for example, seems to point to highway driving being a lot less taxing on the brain. I know that I've never had any sort of road hypnosis while trying to get around town, but on long road-trips, there's definitely been stretches where I 'zoned out' and drove dozens of miles without even really being consciously aware of it until I look at the exit number and the time and realize that I lost 20 or 30 minutes and an equal number of miles.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook is starting with no discernible principles to act as a rudder.
Based on the history of the company, I wouldn't say that's true at all. They've got lots of principles, just not very many decent ones. Certainly not as regards those poor saps using the service.
Working in investment industry, I would seriously suggest buying Facebook shares
When people in the "investment industry" start talking about buying shares in anything publicly, that's usually about the time the general public should run, screaming, in the opposite direction.
You go ahead and buy yourself a few thousand shares, 'Mr. Investment Industry.' Good luck with your pumping and dumping.
Funny, I searched that exact thing and got a bunch of reviews for everything from I.E. to Mozilla to Opera.
Because to do it differently would be to make the code worse. Go to your local hardware store, and look at the hammers. Despite many different manufacturers, they all look and function basically the same. The reason why is because mankind worked out the most efficient hammer design a long time ago and there is nothing left to innovate there.
Imagine how retarded competitor's hammers would have to be designed to get around a patent like the one Oracle is asserting here. This is why there is so much folly in patenting something so elementary, like 'slide to unlock', or a range check.
If slide to unlock is patentable, I damn sure bet range checking will be...
Exactly. Most people buying SSDs are using them to store OS and regularly opened programs, but have standard HDDs to store the stuff that doesn't "need" the added performance. Media is a perfect example of something that is silly to put on a SSD (unless you're actually editing said media, not merely consuming it).
The bulk of the data being generated by most people today does not need to be stored on SSDs, really, nor should it be. It's the equivalent of buying a Ferrari to use as your daily driver.
SSD's too expensive
Regular hard drives were just as expensive (if not more so) when they were at a comparable point in their development and life-cycle
Here is an awful-colored chart showing price per MB over the years. It's not so much that SSDs are really that expensive, it's that traditional HDDs have gotten ridiculously cheap, and capacities have grown beyond the storage needs of most average people. I remember actually filling up hard drives and having to buy larger and larger disks to hold my shit every couple years, but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there.
I mean this as an even-handed question: with public funding of research, where would the incentive come from to find stuff that was actually useful, as opposed to just interesting for the researcher?
Many of the compounds and technologies we use today came out of the government funded labs during and after World War II; superglue to the internet itself was borne out of publicly funded research.
Pure research has led to just as many important discoveries, some completely by accident, as corporate-directed research with a total focus on profitability. Also, the quest for profits in itself is not always beneficial when it comes to research...consider the "research" done by Big Tobacco to make cigarettes as addictive as possible. I honestly think that Big Pharma pumps a lot of money into prolonging treatment as opposed to curing disease, which to me is another example of where the drive for profits could steer research into areas that are completely harmful to society as a whole.
Personally, I'll take a bunch of scientists "interested" in something over a bunch of bean counters trying to figure out how to best monetize (and in some cases, hold back improvements) their discoveries any day.
And what if the monarchs of the old world felt the same way about the new world?
To be fair, after Columbus' initial voyage to the new world, it wasn't any sense of exploration that was driving those expeditions, it was the promise of immense reward due to the reports of those "streets lined with gold". Even Columbus' first voyage wasn't bankrolled just for the sake of exploration, but to find that shorter route to the East.
I bet if Columbus had discovered the New World and found a lunar landscape, it would have been hundreds of years before anyone bothered to return.
Don't misunderstand and think I am critical of pure research, nor am I one of those people that think all scientific research should be driven solely by profitability, but the age of exploration was driven by profit motive just as much as anything else over history. Many of us have grown beyond that short-sighted attitude, but unfortunately we're back in a "if it's not profitable, it's not worth spending money on at all" cycle as far as the people running our government go. The funny thing is, if we'd have had that attitude during WWII and the Cold War, half of the compounds we use today would have likely never been discovered, having come out of labs that were generously funded by taxpayer dollars. Would the internet even exist today if it had been judged solely on it's "profitability" back when it was ARPANET?
I don't know what kind of fucked up employer you work for, but literally every place I've ever worked that had separate containers for recycling did indeed recycle the material. I know this for a fact because I worked 3rd shift a lot of the time and actually interacted with the cleaning crews that came through.
I know that there is a lot of scammers out there as regards green technology and earth-conscious materials, but the fact that there is a lot of scammers does not entitle people to throw their hands up and say "fuck it" when they could make a difference. You turning your air conditioner down a little while you're out of the house not only saves you money on your bill, but it's that much less oil or coal being burned (unless you happen to be one of the few people receiving power from wind/hydro/solar). Yeah, individually that's a miniscule amount, but if everyone did that shit, the impact would be amazing. Just the same as if everyone went out and bought a couple canvas shopping bags and stopped using disposable plastic ones. Or using reusable containers with lids instead of saran wrap or tin foil.
Very few people I've ever met have expected people to completely upend their lives to become "green", but there are hundreds of millions of people in this damn country, and the benefits due to scale have the potential to be enormous with just a little effort. Most people I know have absolutely no fucking problem with recycling, and even those that are too lazy to do it themselves realize that there is a legitimate reason to do it, but the people that deliberately do not recycle, just because "fuck you hippies!!!!!11!!!1!1" should be beaten severely. I've seen assholes see the receptacle for aluminum cans right next to the regular trash and still toss their empty soda can in the trash, usually laughing while they do it. I can only imagine they're thinking "sure showed them assholes" to themselves..."sure showed" who? Their kids? Who do they think they're sticking it to with that kind of behavior? Do they not live on this planet, too? (come to think of it...)
Sorry that your employer is a fucking asshole (either that or your cleaning crew), but what I don't get is, even if they're not, can you not at least try? You know, in the off chance that they are actually going to recycle the material? Or will you "stick it to" everyone else by deliberately not, you know, cuz "fuck you"?
Given the fact that most of the world's currency is based on the faith it's users have in it's value, I wouldn't be too sure that other people's money is going to be worth anything once society rolls over and refuses to play their game, and forcing austerity measures on a class of people that had little to do with the shit in the first place is one of the best ways you can make that happen.
Atlas may be shrugging, but Atlas ain't "job creators" and capitalists, Atlas is the mob, and at the end of the day, the mob rules.
I think the fact that the latter could be combated with just a modicum of giving a shit adds more insult to injury.
There wasn't a fucking thing Joe Blow could do about The Bomb back during the height of the Cold-War, but something as simple as not generating extraneous waste gets the most ridiculous resistance out of people these days. I have known people that chose not to recycle because "fuck it." Until gas prices got insane, I knew people that would drive 2 blocks away to the corner store to get a candy bar rather than walk. Even something as simple as turning the thermostat up during the summer and down during the winter by a few degrees would result in enormous savings in fossil fuels, but again, there is an insane number of people out there that don't give a single fuck about the environment and a fair amount of people that, it seems, are hostile towards green initiatives solely because "fuck you", like the aforementioned people that refuse to recycle.
It's funny, but 70 years ago American society embraced rationing to support the war effort and beat the Axis, but trying to get society as a whole to embrace green technology is an exercise in futility, and many of these people are the children of those that grew up in that time period in the first place. Did all those lessons not get passed on from the WWII generation or what?
I think it's deliberate obfuscation, myself. If it's easy to get right at the information you're seeking, then you're not spending all your time on Facebook, and we can't fucking have that, can we?
I never understood how people can stand shit like that. I admit, maybe it's my own low-level OCD when it comes to organization (you should see my media folder on my computer...impeccably tagged and sorted) but I cannot fucking stand the clusterfuck of crap that is the average Facebook wall these days. I haven't logged in myself in literally years now, but I see family members surfing FB all the time and it's just such a cluttered-up mess of crap that I don't know how people use it without going crazy. Even back when I was using it in the late 00's, I needed to have programmer friends of mine write me greasemonkey scripts to get rid of all the shit all over the place. The signal-to-noise ratio was through the fucking roof then, and once they start letting people pay to get their shit moved to the top it's going to turn into even more of a spam-tastic piece of garbage then it is already.
Facebook is the new Myspace.
It really is liberating. I realized that the frequency of a person's posts on Facebook was inversely proportional to whether they were actually worth reading long ago.
Although, in the interests of full disclosure, I've always thought social networking was fucking retarded. I never join them of my own volition, it's always after a ton of family and friends harasses the shit out of me about my lack of an account, and then when I finally do sign up, I lose interest within days. Funny considering I can lurk here on slashdot everyday and not (usually) get bored with it, though. Must be the anonymity...
Oh man, but that's so much work, logging into your email account and, uh....look, fuck you buddy. We need to use Facebook! We must use it for everything!!!!! I don't even remember how to dial a phone anymore it's been so long! What are these numbers, and how do you dial someone's Facebook account?!?!! DURRRRRRRRRRR
Remember AOL, Myspace, ICQ, MSN etc, they all had a huge userbase, were seen as invincible and they all more or less crashed when they tried to cash in in a market where they were no longer the leaders in innovation.
The mob is fickle, brother. Ten years ago Myspace didn't even exist yet, and it hasn't been relevant in years now. C'est la vie...
Anyone that expects different with Facebook is delusional. I would honestly not be surprised if a full third of the user accounts on Facebook are either abandoned completely or aren't accessed but a few times a month at the most. I don't know what's going to be the dominant social network in 5 years...but I seriously doubt it's going to be Facebook.
Or MMORPGs and WoW for example.
WoW has been losing subscribers steadily for a while now.
I get the point you're making, but nothing lasts forever. If you really sit back and think about the internet as it was for us a decade ago it's mindblowing how far we've come. I mean, Myspace is a joke now, but 10 years ago they didn't even exist. How long has it been since Myspace has been relevant? 4 years? 5? From nothing to the juggernaut they became in the mid-00's to nothing again. Facebook is going to suffer the same fate, and I'm betting it's not going to be nearly as far off as we think. If you told someone in 2005 that Myspace was going to end up the shadow of it's formal self it is today, most people probably would have thought you were out of your mind, yet just 3 years later everyone and their sister was on that newfangled Facebook, their Myspace pages abandoned long before. For all we know, Facebook could be just as irrelevant in 2015.
It's funny, but as we keep hearing these stories about how large Facebook is becoming, in my own personal life, I know more and more people that are eschewing it completely because it's become just as cluttered up with bullshit and fake "friends" as their Myspace pages were before they just stopped logging in. It's funny, but rather than unfriending people, they just abandon their accounts completely. I actually know people that are on their 2nd or 3rd account, having abandoned the old ones so they could create new ones and friend the people they actually want to be social with without worrying about the hurt feelings of dozens of "friends". Or so I'm told, anyway...I abandoned my own Facebook account long ago.
I'm really curious as to how many unique, regular users (regular meaning people that log in at least every couple days) they actually have. Obviously nobody on the outside would ever know, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 of their 'users' are inactive accounts that haven't been touched in ages...
Yeah, I still have my $5 unlimited texting and my unlimited data, but my original Droid is really starting to feel it's age as newer apps become more and more processor intensive (not to mention the joy that is a battery that goes from full to almost dead at the drop of a hat) so I'm thinking I've got another 6 months or so before I end up having to get a new phone and thus fall under the new caps.
I'm seriously leaning towards dumping the plan and going back to a pay as you go dumbphone, though, as they are getting pretty fucking ridiculous with the monthly charges plus with the throttling bullshit that they imposed on me as a punishment for being a long-time Verizon customer that doesn't upgrade constantly (going on almost 10 years with them...thanks a lot for the appreciation of my business, you fuckheads at Verizon) I'm just getting closer and closer to saying fuck it all. As it is now I barely even actually talk on the phone (only to geriatric relatives), everything is email, SMS or IM, and I don't need a $500 phone and a $80/month plan to do those things, especially not once I pick up a tablet.
My father had a remote when I was growing up: me.
My mother's told me the same thing many times, although it can't have been too bad, what with 4 channels to choose from and all.
2 is the new 12.
Frame of reference.
Last time I checked, using Google services was still a choice. I certainly don't remember being asked if I wanted to be tracked by my government, nor the existence of any competing products to choose from as alternatives.
It bothers me when a fifth grader knows more about some subject than I do. But the problem isn't that I feel dumb... it's that I know that the fifth grader will one day be in my shoes, and ask, "Why was I put through years of this? I can't remember any of this because I never need it... and I want those years of my life back."
Well, I suppose one could apply that to anything we learn in schools today, but personally, I abhor the idea of only teaching what is directly useful to everyone in their day-to-day lives. I certainly don't use all the history I was taught in day-to-day life, but I cannot even imagine how much more dull my life would be had I never been exposed to it in the first place.
That kind of attitude, the "we must only teach what can be used in a potential career" idea, is going to result in generations of kids growing up to be George Jetson, taught only how to push a bunch of buttons but having nothing outside of that to keep the mind occupied outside of empty-headed, non-participatory entertainment such as television. It's going to stunt the imagination of anyone that comes out of that system. Just because a skill isn't easily "monetized" does not mean it's not worth knowing. I taught myself how to play guitar and bass, and I've been in bands off and on throughout my life...but I'm not ever going to have a career in music. The thing is, that doesn't bother me at all. I don't find the skill a waste because I'll never make money off of it or never "use it" for anything more than giving me something to do when I've got an hour to kill and feel like putting on a CD and playing along.
It scares me when people start really trying to parse everything kids learn these days into what is going to be 'useful' when they're an adult...especially younger kids who are really still learning how to learn in the first place. A well-rounded education is necessary to truly know what it is that sparks the passion for learning in a person. Some kids find that spark in math or science. Some find it in English literature or renaissance artwork. If we ever get to the point where we're eschewing the latter in order to only teach the former, because the former is more "useful", we might as well stop calling our kids human beings and start calling them biological robots, because that's all they will be mentally.
That's what I was thinking when I first read that myself. Driving in the city requires a lot more focus on what's going on, not only on the road but with pedestrians, cyclists...you don't have to worry about that shit on the highway.
Highway hypnosis, for example, seems to point to highway driving being a lot less taxing on the brain. I know that I've never had any sort of road hypnosis while trying to get around town, but on long road-trips, there's definitely been stretches where I 'zoned out' and drove dozens of miles without even really being consciously aware of it until I look at the exit number and the time and realize that I lost 20 or 30 minutes and an equal number of miles.
They were first used at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, but thanks for trying.
As if that invalidates any point I made...