quibble, but true, and makes more sense: form _follows_ function. Put another way, from a correct function, an optimal envelope of form will emerge to express it; some see it in math, I learned it in engineering, some of it later in coding. Don't know if it's quite original with him, but the principle is oft ascribed to Frank Lloyd Wright. (Were I not lazy I'd look that up.)
Not sure I can phrase this well, but as I read the blog post, pandering to carrier was not what came to mind.
Ubuntu brings the OS - it's of a piece and stays that way. Carriers have already advanced the phones they'll initially offer Ubuntu on; and various devs have been playing around with stuff, the drivers have been written. Carriers will speechify about what they want (look, feel, apps) and Ubuntu will nod and agree (and not change the OS). Devs will do the accommodating of the carriers' preferences. Everyone feels to be on the same page.
No idea if that's how it is, just the mental snapshot I saw when reading the submission.
Giving useful infos would require having useful info, giving a shit, and having a mind to do it with. This way, the author gets web views, gets rep, gives a company name or two to establish bona fides, without really having to do anything. I might presume that asking the people who did the study might get you useful infos - perhaps even at a discount. Or maybe the relevant info is only for those in the know, not just casually anyone with a Word-Press powered site.
Further if one is getting these plugins from "a reputable source" then why can't one have some assurance that said plugins have already been tested and vetted?
Zedrick had some good points above about end-users. Expecting everyone on the bloddy web who puts up a site to be some elite webby pro is simply arrogant and unsupportable.
This isn't so much about the Moon and Mars as it is keeping some monies flowing into the hands of the several major aerospace consortiums. On the plus side, a number of talented, skilled people will be kept on the payroll, else all their expertise essentially vanish without handover. NASA itself will not see worthwhile funding to do little more than continual studies and reviews. Meanwhile it plays well to the constituencies and lets a few of more deluded stroke their egos.
"...the coup will ultimately succeed." I'd maybe put that in the past tense.
There is not, nor will there be, some great public outcry. Beyond a few vague mutterings to pollsters, the almighty public already doesn't give a shit. They've already moved on to their daily troubles, sports pages, soaps, diva doings, FB, that makes up their mental processes. Despite the noise in the '70s, it was already too late during Ike's terms. Something might theoretically have been possible then, but not since.
Your only real decisions from here will be in finding sufficiently dull things to do to avoid scrutiny along the way to your grave.
Didn't read the article, I take it. Insider trading rap based on claims he used knowledge of government contracts to enhance his bank account after he refused to hand over customer data to government. I don't know what the truth of the matter is or was. The timing is still interesting.
The first time I got mod points was a bit like graduation - yippee! and all that. Then I read the docs because I realized that it was more than about what I thought or felt; it was about considering what I read and realizing that for me it was required that I try to be responsible to the ideas and their expression rather than my druthers. It was, and remains, a sobering thing for me to use them. Mod points are a way that I can try to be useful however small that is, in partial payback for an interesting place to visit.
Funny you should bring this up. Read an ebook a few weeks back, a decent sci-fi novel (novella, morelike, given word count) and had run into enough typos that it had in some places seriously disrupted the reading flow. (Often the mind will correct or elide over the error while in hot pursuit of a scene, other times it's like tripping over a pebble on the path, and some few times it's more a full stop and restart.)
I wrote the author, asking if he'd maybe like some free help to catch the stupidly simple stuff. He wrote back that he didn't see a problem. Which left me with a big case of WTF.
Apparently I've been spoiled by several generations and more of real writers, real proofreaders and real editors. Real = take their jobs seriously and give a shit about what they do. Now we've a publication landscape populated by semi-literates who routinely get paid for being lazy. It's gotten bad enough that I recently wrote a blogger who had explained something in clear, well-written prose to thank her for a pleasant reading experience.
What is discussed in the submission is at best lame.
Amen. And to think, it was but a few generations from Jefferson's 'the future of the Republic requires a literate electorate' (paraphrase) to where we are now. And a relatively short time from shared readings and discussions over ale and coffee down the local after work to passive zone-out in front of the boob tube; I still recall some of Murrow's comments before he retired, and Minow's "wasteland." Three cheers for us all.
Well. First, it may help to read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote. Second, and it's my fault, I ended up mixing in a heapin' heppin' of whimsical sarcasm, and just maybe you missed it. Fair enough.
I took no, nor espoused, any position, certainly not missionary. I was gonna make some popcorn and see what if anything developed from your post and the AC who responded to you, but couldn't resist sticking my oar in. My bad. But I still have a bit of difficulty seeing how you were able to read anything into what I wrote. But, hey, feel free - which apparently you do. [grin]
Was it not clear, I find much in the way of personal and societal views on sex to be rather schizophrenic or somesuch. I think since it's a fundamental aspect of life, perhaps but a step removed from breathing, that the way of it is to relax and enjoy the sharing - not taking, that way lie power trips.
For the rest, well, yes, I tend to draw the drapes for the simple reason that I prefer a bit of privacy (if someone wants to psycho-analyze from such a remove my supposed super-duper fanatically-inspired religious upbringing, I'd suggest getting a life.) Besides, I don't wish to scare the horses. [yet another grin]
You might want to include startpage.com to search engines. Their set up and privacy policy looks pretty good, best I can figure. Can people more knowledgeable than I show me to be wrong, I'd be obliged.
I've long thought it funny, in a perverse way, that one can get arrested for speaking the truth but never elected for doing so. Screwy system - our hypocrisy of demanding honesty of our elected yet refusing to vote for truth-tellers. We vote for a daddy who'll kiss the boo-boo and make it better, but woe betide the adult who tries to tell us the facts of life. Just as scary, we vote for people who want the job - which by rights ought to disqualify them.
Am I really the only one who read "que" in Spanish? And take a beat or two to realize writer likely meant "cue"? Or am I simply the only one oafish enough to mention it? Never mind, I can guess.
I have trouble imaging a bacterium that'll use perchlorates magically deciding it likes human flesh.
Oh, dear, it seems there is a divergence of view on sex. The matter at hand, however, is porn. So first, one must define porn, and then, albeit rather a straw man, to define sex addict. Let the games begin, or something.
But all that is not at issue here. What is, is prejudicial pre-filtering of web content according to someone's or some group of someones idea of "what is porn" and resorting to the power of the state via licenced ISPs to do that filtering. It also use the power of the state to lift one more burden from parents, that of teaching their children about the birds and the bees and the need for clenched knees and aspirin. I confess being at a loss here, where the normal rubrics of "follow the money" and "cui bono?" yield no ready answers.
Also, I'm hard pressed to think of any examples where opt-out is preferable to opt-in.
Yup, I'm old enough to remember riding in Grandfather's car into town to send a telegram and watch the operator key it. I'm generally in favour of mod cons but do not subscribe to throwing something useful away because it's not modern.
So, the government is wholesale Hoovering the electronic communications of the populace, and by you it's only mildly odiferous. One has to wonder, what would it take for you to sense a stink? As it stands, I can't help but consider you'd fit right in with the "Arbeit macht frei" people.
Yeah, nine of ten posts would have been unnecessary (to say it politely) had its author read the article - even just the press release - although there's been some fun discussion anyway. And for all the talk of geography and ancient stupidity, it's the pozzolan, not a particular volcano, that's key; the Romans found out, experimented, and perfected what they did.
Use of pozzolan itself has long been known and used, although it adds cost and a bit more care in mixing. The worth of the current discovery is the particular combination of pozzolan with a particular technique for lime, and the exact chemical composition and behaviour that leads to the uniqueness of this form of Roman concrete.
(I have wee prior knowledge; when I helped a friend build his boat circa 1975 we incorporated 15% fly ash by volume into the mix.)
Yeah, understood. Sometimes the "big picture" looks bleak enough to just give up, other times hope holds out for the transformative stuff - and what we need right now is a big shift in how we (our rulers, in particular; the masses, as part of media doing its public service function through information, and the way we educate ourselves and our young) see the situation and ourselves, let alone whatever tech we can put together now for improving our lot. In a way it's like the situation with hunger: we've enough food now to feed everyone but the main obstacles are historically lack of political will, corruption, and transportation, in that order. For a side note, democracy never stems from an empty belly.
Thanks for links, much appreciated. Just walking right now is problematical, still on crutches after eight months. Gotta heal foot, then can resume at the point I entered rehab. Then find out extent of nerve damage and if I can walk again. And I expect I'll be taking warfarin for some time yet. Meanwhile, recovering from removal of a lung cancer. Been a fun year, so far. Onward. Meanwhile, I move around as I can, do chores; since I live on second floor, get a bit of exercise just taking out the trash and such.
Dream world? Nah. Simple cooperation amongst agreeable people. The kind of thing adults used to do. That a few might refuse a particular task is not a show-stopper, simply something that's worked around. It's just not that difficult; I've seen enough examples in my life to know it works if people decide to make it work. And where the fuck did I mention anything even remotely smacking of force? That's something you pulled into it. Some folks just enjoy being sand in the gears.
I envisioned no compulsory utopia but rather a voluntary mutual grouping of spread effort only for whatever-sized group decided to do so. In my life I've seen some things done by groups as small as a handful of adults sharing a house to as large as a residential block - voluntary association for spreading the load, as it were. Heck, whole cities have gotten themselves together for recycling even before it became popular. Doesn't even require a majority, only a critical mass of like-minded folks. Old man Grundy and his kin become irrelevant.
Thanks for the references, Paul. Following the pleasure center wiki link, I'm guessing the story was based off the 1956 paper. Although it may have been an early Niven short in Analog or similar. Might also have been something from The Good Doctor.
Some thorny issues indeed and they won't go away so we have to figure things out as we go, I think. Reasonable use of the electro-stim tech is interesting, for self-defined values of reasonable and interesting, of course. (I could almost see trying it help with chronic severe depression and the past year's worth of anxiety/panic attacks stemming from DVT and complications. That shit gets old right quickly.)
Same here. We don't know what we don't know, only that we're beginning to find out some of what we don't know and maybe start asking better questions and may soon have some tech approaches that let us start making attempts to answer a few things as we go. Hugely non-trivial as we start, unknown where it leads, and I think eminently worth working on. I'm also a big fan of exploring just what and how the mind-body thing is.
Years ago I had fond hopes as well that working on seeing what if any kind of communication might be had with critters close in some kind of consciousness might help us puzzle a few things out, but haven't seen where that has gone anywhere.
For some possibly really useless musing, one wonders if there are others, and if they have similar thoughts, questions, questings. And what they may have found out. For the nonce it suffices that some humans ask some questions and some have the money to try for the wherewithal to try for answers.
Slashdot Mirror
quibble, but true, and makes more sense: form _follows_ function. Put another way, from a correct function, an optimal envelope of form will emerge to express it; some see it in math, I learned it in engineering, some of it later in coding. Don't know if it's quite original with him, but the principle is oft ascribed to Frank Lloyd Wright. (Were I not lazy I'd look that up.)
Not sure I can phrase this well, but as I read the blog post, pandering to carrier was not what came to mind.
Ubuntu brings the OS - it's of a piece and stays that way. Carriers have already advanced the phones they'll initially offer Ubuntu on; and various devs have been playing around with stuff, the drivers have been written. Carriers will speechify about what they want (look, feel, apps) and Ubuntu will nod and agree (and not change the OS). Devs will do the accommodating of the carriers' preferences. Everyone feels to be on the same page.
No idea if that's how it is, just the mental snapshot I saw when reading the submission.
Giving useful infos would require having useful info, giving a shit, and having a mind to do it with. This way, the author gets web views, gets rep, gives a company name or two to establish bona fides, without really having to do anything. I might presume that asking the people who did the study might get you useful infos - perhaps even at a discount. Or maybe the relevant info is only for those in the know, not just casually anyone with a Word-Press powered site.
Further if one is getting these plugins from "a reputable source" then why can't one have some assurance that said plugins have already been tested and vetted?
Zedrick had some good points above about end-users. Expecting everyone on the bloddy web who puts up a site to be some elite webby pro is simply arrogant and unsupportable.
This isn't so much about the Moon and Mars as it is keeping some monies flowing into the hands of the several major aerospace consortiums. On the plus side, a number of talented, skilled people will be kept on the payroll, else all their expertise essentially vanish without handover. NASA itself will not see worthwhile funding to do little more than continual studies and reviews. Meanwhile it plays well to the constituencies and lets a few of more deluded stroke their egos.
"...the coup will ultimately succeed." I'd maybe put that in the past tense.
There is not, nor will there be, some great public outcry. Beyond a few vague mutterings to pollsters, the almighty public already doesn't give a shit. They've already moved on to their daily troubles, sports pages, soaps, diva doings, FB, that makes up their mental processes. Despite the noise in the '70s, it was already too late during Ike's terms. Something might theoretically have been possible then, but not since.
Your only real decisions from here will be in finding sufficiently dull things to do to avoid scrutiny along the way to your grave.
Didn't read the article, I take it. Insider trading rap based on claims he used knowledge of government contracts to enhance his bank account after he refused to hand over customer data to government. I don't know what the truth of the matter is or was. The timing is still interesting.
The first time I got mod points was a bit like graduation - yippee! and all that. Then I read the docs because I realized that it was more than about what I thought or felt; it was about considering what I read and realizing that for me it was required that I try to be responsible to the ideas and their expression rather than my druthers. It was, and remains, a sobering thing for me to use them. Mod points are a way that I can try to be useful however small that is, in partial payback for an interesting place to visit.
Funny you should bring this up. Read an ebook a few weeks back, a decent sci-fi novel (novella, morelike, given word count) and had run into enough typos that it had in some places seriously disrupted the reading flow. (Often the mind will correct or elide over the error while in hot pursuit of a scene, other times it's like tripping over a pebble on the path, and some few times it's more a full stop and restart.)
I wrote the author, asking if he'd maybe like some free help to catch the stupidly simple stuff. He wrote back that he didn't see a problem. Which left me with a big case of WTF.
Apparently I've been spoiled by several generations and more of real writers, real proofreaders and real editors. Real = take their jobs seriously and give a shit about what they do. Now we've a publication landscape populated by semi-literates who routinely get paid for being lazy. It's gotten bad enough that I recently wrote a blogger who had explained something in clear, well-written prose to thank her for a pleasant reading experience.
What is discussed in the submission is at best lame.
Amen. And to think, it was but a few generations from Jefferson's 'the future of the Republic requires a literate electorate' (paraphrase) to where we are now. And a relatively short time from shared readings and discussions over ale and coffee down the local after work to passive zone-out in front of the boob tube; I still recall some of Murrow's comments before he retired, and Minow's "wasteland." Three cheers for us all.
Ah, thanks! That'll teach me to read all the fine print. I've used ixquick for a while, and DDG as well, and like both.
Well. First, it may help to read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote. Second, and it's my fault, I ended up mixing in a heapin' heppin' of whimsical sarcasm, and just maybe you missed it. Fair enough.
I took no, nor espoused, any position, certainly not missionary. I was gonna make some popcorn and see what if anything developed from your post and the AC who responded to you, but couldn't resist sticking my oar in. My bad. But I still have a bit of difficulty seeing how you were able to read anything into what I wrote. But, hey, feel free - which apparently you do. [grin]
Was it not clear, I find much in the way of personal and societal views on sex to be rather schizophrenic or somesuch. I think since it's a fundamental aspect of life, perhaps but a step removed from breathing, that the way of it is to relax and enjoy the sharing - not taking, that way lie power trips.
For the rest, well, yes, I tend to draw the drapes for the simple reason that I prefer a bit of privacy (if someone wants to psycho-analyze from such a remove my supposed super-duper fanatically-inspired religious upbringing, I'd suggest getting a life.) Besides, I don't wish to scare the horses. [yet another grin]
You might want to include startpage.com to search engines. Their set up and privacy policy looks pretty good, best I can figure. Can people more knowledgeable than I show me to be wrong, I'd be obliged.
Most of the people I run across seem oblivious; the rest, unencumbered by fact or understanding, thus unconcerned.
I've long thought it funny, in a perverse way, that one can get arrested for speaking the truth but never elected for doing so. Screwy system - our hypocrisy of demanding honesty of our elected yet refusing to vote for truth-tellers. We vote for a daddy who'll kiss the boo-boo and make it better, but woe betide the adult who tries to tell us the facts of life. Just as scary, we vote for people who want the job - which by rights ought to disqualify them.
Am I really the only one who read "que" in Spanish? And take a beat or two to realize writer likely meant "cue"? Or am I simply the only one oafish enough to mention it? Never mind, I can guess.
I have trouble imaging a bacterium that'll use perchlorates magically deciding it likes human flesh.
Oh, dear, it seems there is a divergence of view on sex. The matter at hand, however, is porn. So first, one must define porn, and then, albeit rather a straw man, to define sex addict. Let the games begin, or something.
But all that is not at issue here. What is, is prejudicial pre-filtering of web content according to someone's or some group of someones idea of "what is porn" and resorting to the power of the state via licenced ISPs to do that filtering. It also use the power of the state to lift one more burden from parents, that of teaching their children about the birds and the bees and the need for clenched knees and aspirin. I confess being at a loss here, where the normal rubrics of "follow the money" and "cui bono?" yield no ready answers.
Also, I'm hard pressed to think of any examples where opt-out is preferable to opt-in.
Yup, I'm old enough to remember riding in Grandfather's car into town to send a telegram and watch the operator key it. I'm generally in favour of mod cons but do not subscribe to throwing something useful away because it's not modern.
"I think this program smells a bit..."
So, the government is wholesale Hoovering the electronic communications of the populace, and by you it's only mildly odiferous. One has to wonder, what would it take for you to sense a stink? As it stands, I can't help but consider you'd fit right in with the "Arbeit macht frei" people.
Not necessarily.
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron." - Spider Robinson 1977
Yeah, nine of ten posts would have been unnecessary (to say it politely) had its author read the article - even just the press release - although there's been some fun discussion anyway. And for all the talk of geography and ancient stupidity, it's the pozzolan, not a particular volcano, that's key; the Romans found out, experimented, and perfected what they did.
Use of pozzolan itself has long been known and used, although it adds cost and a bit more care in mixing. The worth of the current discovery is the particular combination of pozzolan with a particular technique for lime, and the exact chemical composition and behaviour that leads to the uniqueness of this form of Roman concrete.
(I have wee prior knowledge; when I helped a friend build his boat circa 1975 we incorporated 15% fly ash by volume into the mix.)
Yeah, understood. Sometimes the "big picture" looks bleak enough to just give up, other times hope holds out for the transformative stuff - and what we need right now is a big shift in how we (our rulers, in particular; the masses, as part of media doing its public service function through information, and the way we educate ourselves and our young) see the situation and ourselves, let alone whatever tech we can put together now for improving our lot. In a way it's like the situation with hunger: we've enough food now to feed everyone but the main obstacles are historically lack of political will, corruption, and transportation, in that order. For a side note, democracy never stems from an empty belly.
Thanks for links, much appreciated. Just walking right now is problematical, still on crutches after eight months. Gotta heal foot, then can resume at the point I entered rehab. Then find out extent of nerve damage and if I can walk again. And I expect I'll be taking warfarin for some time yet. Meanwhile, recovering from removal of a lung cancer. Been a fun year, so far. Onward. Meanwhile, I move around as I can, do chores; since I live on second floor, get a bit of exercise just taking out the trash and such.
Dream world? Nah. Simple cooperation amongst agreeable people. The kind of thing adults used to do. That a few might refuse a particular task is not a show-stopper, simply something that's worked around. It's just not that difficult; I've seen enough examples in my life to know it works if people decide to make it work. And where the fuck did I mention anything even remotely smacking of force? That's something you pulled into it. Some folks just enjoy being sand in the gears.
I envisioned no compulsory utopia but rather a voluntary mutual grouping of spread effort only for whatever-sized group decided to do so. In my life I've seen some things done by groups as small as a handful of adults sharing a house to as large as a residential block - voluntary association for spreading the load, as it were. Heck, whole cities have gotten themselves together for recycling even before it became popular. Doesn't even require a majority, only a critical mass of like-minded folks. Old man Grundy and his kin become irrelevant.
Thanks for the references, Paul. Following the pleasure center wiki link, I'm guessing the story was based off the 1956 paper. Although it may have been an early Niven short in Analog or similar. Might also have been something from The Good Doctor.
Some thorny issues indeed and they won't go away so we have to figure things out as we go, I think. Reasonable use of the electro-stim tech is interesting, for self-defined values of reasonable and interesting, of course. (I could almost see trying it help with chronic severe depression and the past year's worth of anxiety/panic attacks stemming from DVT and complications. That shit gets old right quickly.)
Same here. We don't know what we don't know, only that we're beginning to find out some of what we don't know and maybe start asking better questions and may soon have some tech approaches that let us start making attempts to answer a few things as we go. Hugely non-trivial as we start, unknown where it leads, and I think eminently worth working on. I'm also a big fan of exploring just what and how the mind-body thing is.
Years ago I had fond hopes as well that working on seeing what if any kind of communication might be had with critters close in some kind of consciousness might help us puzzle a few things out, but haven't seen where that has gone anywhere.
For some possibly really useless musing, one wonders if there are others, and if they have similar thoughts, questions, questings. And what they may have found out. For the nonce it suffices that some humans ask some questions and some have the money to try for the wherewithal to try for answers.