Worse. They own the kitchen. They own the house. They own the land on which it stands. They even own you. (Well, not entirely, yet, that last one, but they're working on it.)
Jeez, hey, just when I thought it was only bad and getting worse with each new piece of horse puckey from Congress, you had to lay that wonderful analysis out there. Thanks heaps, Strat.
What's the color for "not dead yet, but it's looking like a better idea every day that I read more about how much worse it's getting"?
When I was a lad flight attendants (even if that, later on, became the official companies' designation for same) were almost entirely female. (And the males were called stewards, which made perfect sense.
Since those were also the days when it seemed a commonplace to speak of actors and actresses, it was no more striking to call a female flight attendant a stewardess than it was to call a male flight attendant a steward - it was, then and now, simply a useful descriptive term. That some harbor disparaging thoughts of stewardesses being called stewardesses seems almost suspicious to me. Yet I have no problem calling all humans engaged in that job 'flight attendants', except to the extent it makes identification of gender more difficult or cumbersome when the distinction is needful.
That slowly over time the preferred term is becoming 'flight attendant' is given; that someone who is either old, and possibly forgetful of the newer term, or for whom it is a personal commonplace to refer to certain people by a still-used and useful, and not-incorrect older term is not, I submit, being deliberately offensive to anyone.
That being hair-triggered to taking offence at such a simple when none is unambiguously intended, _is_ rather offensive to me. It's like a bad mind odor, rather like a rank fart. No offence intended, it's just the way it strikes me, is all.
But then, I confess to being still taken aback every time I see or hear a female thespian refer to herself as an actor. To me it seems technically correct yet awkward. Perhaps I'd feel differently if instead of taking a term which once denoted a male thespian and applying it to both genders a neutral term such as "portrayer" or thespian was used - it wouldn't strike the discord in my mind that "actor" does. But that's just me. And I don't see how that foible might in anyone's mind be grounds for accurately portraying me as a misogynist, unless you had beaucoup examples that were unmistakeable. If anyone does, well, feel free.
All the poster wrote was:
This'll be fun for stewardesses.
"Sir, please turn off your magazine."
How anyone of moderate mind can find offense in it, where none is obvious, is by my lights rather odd. But I've had bad days, and there are things I find offensive that others don't, so... YMMV.
Given the large amount of statistical analysis from testing results and the large amount of theoretical analysis, I'd be mightily surprised to find that computers were not used for this.
For much of the testing and engineering fixes, it was largely slipsticks and blackboards, per some of the anecdotal personal remembrances found by search, and a lot of brain-box "sweat" from the wealth of practical engineers who worked on them.
Sure, we used punch cards for the two Fortran-for-engineers classes I took in '66-67. We coded Fortran IV and Fast Fortran using "official Fortran coding forms."
Thing is, though, I really like your sig. I'd read something on compression-only CPR, but the linked story was a good refresher and reminder both. The dramatic increase in survival is even more so when one stops to think each percentage increase is that many more real live humans walking out of hospital.
I think it's a good idea to try to spread the word.
No, what's needed are literate people. People who read, read widely and with occasional depth. If one reads, one acquires the ability to see sarcasm and satire fairly readily. Sometimes an author will deliberately write on such a fine line that it becomes almost in in-joke to differentiate. Rather like a higher-level pun or something. (I ain't smart enough to figure that part out.)
I recall the stat circa '77 or earlier that less than half the adults in the U.S. read books. I can't imagine that has improved since then. Right now, among my acquaintances, less than 1 in 20 seem to read anything beyond the odd newspaper or magazine.
Maybe it's the unsophisticated humor displayed but it also seems to me that there's quite a few teenagers here. How many of them do you know that can read at all?
Well, yes, there is that.
Although I am curious how some things turn out, bits of research, some projects, families of relatives and friends, at 65 I take the cowards' way by figuring I'll likely die (given health probs) before the slide to wherever hits. My largest current regret is that there's nothing I can do to help other than leave them a few books to read.
I've read enough about various crunches and whatnot that I don't relish people I care about trying to survive any of them. "C'est la vie" seems.... jejune.
I'm still naive enough to get pissed off that it comes to that stance. I can see it coming, and would prefer to avoid it. So I'll likely muddle through the middle, slogging through a day, or somesuch.
You've got good snark ability and you're thoughtful enough to devise or steal a nifty sig.
If you could spare a moment or two, can you offer some helpful suggestions or views about how any of us might could better deal with our little portion of the human condition, other than, perhaps, "I got mine and screw everybody else" or "you can't change the present situation because ~1600 people own everything so it's no use, don't beat your head against the wall, go with the flow"? What?
Obviously some of us are not as smart or wise or clear-headed as you. Would it offend your sense of rightness to drop a crumb of enlightenment from your table?
I'm sufficiently impressed by the under-the-hood improvements in Windows 8, continuing on from 7, that IF I could avoid the Metro/Morden stuff, and if I could afford it, I'd seriously consider putting it on one of my current machines instead of Linux.
Yeah, and it's a lot easier to change your IP than your voice....
even if they eventually remove all personally-identifying info from a query, getting a voice match on all your searches will last as long as they keep them.
here's another one to use; I've been using it for about a month and like it. Combines ixquick with Google results, and offers additional goodness, such as SSL, no cookies, proxy. (One search engine I miss is Kartoo - if it was still around it would be great along with this kind of anonymized, trackless search.) It also avoids handing over referrer info - which can be used to track you regardless of IP, depending on your settings.
There aren't that many companies in the field who have the money to devote to blue-sky research, not just R&D, and for a few decades Microsoft has been one of them. Off top of head, there's Google, IBM, and...Intel, to some extent. Facebook does some stuff, but I don't know enough to evaluate that. Who else? Got to be a few more, yes?
Time and again, it's just that blue-sky research that leads to big advances and major shifts in how we do stuff. Bell Labs is dead. PARC is dead. IBM, DARPA (yeah, it's government, but still), increasingly shifting more from research to development, many short-term projects. A few universities have small research efforts. But long term, without that blue-sky research there won't be anything new, there won't be anything to develop, only extend or copy.
An interesting tit-bit - Gates' involvement with MS is down to around $2.5B - the rest of his personal wealth is from traditional, if highly diverse, investments. I figure he essentially wrote off the company he co-founded quite some years ago.
And that eventual slide downward is going to be a shame because they won't be able to keep funding their research people - where a whole raft of interesting things are worked on.
IF DRM is needful, with Netflix as the example, I'd far prefer to have it done in software. Then it is a simple choice for me to make to buy their, or similar, service. If I buy in, then later stop, the software with the DRM is uninstalled and no longer on my system.
If DRM is done on hardware it's always on, or has that capability built in. I thus have no control over my own machinery. No thanks. Bad enough with what's already baked in.
For many current price is accepted as reasonable based on a relatively high disposable income.
Leaving that relative income bit aside for the moment, if I blue sky, wander back in memory a bit regarding the telcos, what telecommunication is, what a public service is, that bit about common carrier, if I had to make a wild-ass-guess about a fair rate and price, I'd look at something like one down and half up for $20/mo. as fair; $25 would get you 7 down 2 up, and for $30 you'd get the 10 down 5 up. For instance. And if you paid $50/mo. you be in a pool from which every Wednesday at high noon on Main Street the CEO of Time Warner or you favorite local cable/ISP provider would kiss your ass.
Content and Internet connection should be entirely separate. The former would bid to allowed over the pipes, not the other way round (if that means a voice actor can't get a million per episode or a ball player $20 million a year, so be it); the latter would be regulated similar to electric and other public utilities.
It's been way too many years, so in the public interest for niche stories spurred by proponents and detractors alike: it was reported that Natalie Portman suffered a wardrobe malfunction yesterday while walking down a sidewalk. One of her socks 'accidentally' slipped, exposing an ankle. Since the other ankle remained covered, the question "Is one larger than the other?" is as yet un-answered. No pics yet, so it didn't happen.
Raspberry and rhubarb pie, now that is something that matters. De gustibus....
Amen. Too much is lost behind licence restrictions, locked up by companies who don't do anything with it. This infuriates me - good stuff is sitting on a shelf, earning for no one, and the companies could either release it openly or even sell it for a few bucks. The bullshit (even if true) reason given that some game designer/publisher's distant relative won't sign a release is a sign that the situation is fubar.
I like the way you handle the bulk of your media; it seems one of the more simple and useful ways of going about it.
I don't have all that much, mostly music and an assortment of movies and a few TV series, so I figure to dupe a few drives and hand 'em out to family and friends, let them do with 'em as they will. While I use a few cloudy things for temporary convenience I will not rely on them for anything - all my stuff is local or off-site backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse. They own the kitchen. They own the house. They own the land on which it stands. They even own you. (Well, not entirely, yet, that last one, but they're working on it.)
Jeez, hey, just when I thought it was only bad and getting worse with each new piece of horse puckey from Congress, you had to lay that wonderful analysis out there. Thanks heaps, Strat.
What's the color for "not dead yet, but it's looking like a better idea every day that I read more about how much worse it's getting"?
When I was a lad flight attendants (even if that, later on, became the official companies' designation for same) were almost entirely female. (And the males were called stewards, which made perfect sense.
Since those were also the days when it seemed a commonplace to speak of actors and actresses, it was no more striking to call a female flight attendant a stewardess than it was to call a male flight attendant a steward - it was, then and now, simply a useful descriptive term. That some harbor disparaging thoughts of stewardesses being called stewardesses seems almost suspicious to me. Yet I have no problem calling all humans engaged in that job 'flight attendants', except to the extent it makes identification of gender more difficult or cumbersome when the distinction is needful.
That slowly over time the preferred term is becoming 'flight attendant' is given; that someone who is either old, and possibly forgetful of the newer term, or for whom it is a personal commonplace to refer to certain people by a still-used and useful, and not-incorrect older term is not, I submit, being deliberately offensive to anyone.
That being hair-triggered to taking offence at such a simple when none is unambiguously intended, _is_ rather offensive to me. It's like a bad mind odor, rather like a rank fart. No offence intended, it's just the way it strikes me, is all.
But then, I confess to being still taken aback every time I see or hear a female thespian refer to herself as an actor. To me it seems technically correct yet awkward. Perhaps I'd feel differently if instead of taking a term which once denoted a male thespian and applying it to both genders a neutral term such as "portrayer" or thespian was used - it wouldn't strike the discord in my mind that "actor" does. But that's just me. And I don't see how that foible might in anyone's mind be grounds for accurately portraying me as a misogynist, unless you had beaucoup examples that were unmistakeable. If anyone does, well, feel free.
All the poster wrote was:
This'll be fun for stewardesses.
"Sir, please turn off your magazine."
How anyone of moderate mind can find offense in it, where none is obvious, is by my lights rather odd. But I've had bad days, and there are things I find offensive that others don't, so... YMMV.
That's not the computer's label - that's the name of the job being run.
Given the large amount of statistical analysis from testing results and the large amount of theoretical analysis, I'd be mightily surprised to find that computers were not used for this.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/ch4.htm#110
provides a bit of background.
For much of the testing and engineering fixes, it was largely slipsticks and blackboards, per some of the anecdotal personal remembrances found by search, and a lot of brain-box "sweat" from the wealth of practical engineers who worked on them.
Sure, we used punch cards for the two Fortran-for-engineers classes I took in '66-67. We coded Fortran IV and Fast Fortran using "official Fortran coding forms."
Good story, Bill, I liked reading it.
Thing is, though, I really like your sig. I'd read something on compression-only CPR, but the linked story was a good refresher and reminder both. The dramatic increase in survival is even more so when one stops to think each percentage increase is that many more real live humans walking out of hospital.
I think it's a good idea to try to spread the word.
A tube? That's modern. My first radio used a germanium crystal, came as a kit, circa 1957.
But building a single-tube radio from scrounged material? For class? Yowsah!
I tip my hat to you, greyparrot; may you live long and prosper.
They're whence assholes come.
"Blaming reality for the failure of a process is the wrong way around."
Chisel that into stone. Except for those bits of reality that we collectively build.
Yes, we need to leveragize the forwardly of the resourcerons.
Give it five years, you'll see it. Even better, /. didn't mind the spelling of the middle term. Ouch.
It's happening sooner than I thought, but it's the only maxful way to methoderate ownerage through synergation.
No, what's needed are literate people. People who read, read widely and with occasional depth. If one reads, one acquires the ability to see sarcasm and satire fairly readily. Sometimes an author will deliberately write on such a fine line that it becomes almost in in-joke to differentiate. Rather like a higher-level pun or something. (I ain't smart enough to figure that part out.)
I recall the stat circa '77 or earlier that less than half the adults in the U.S. read books. I can't imagine that has improved since then. Right now, among my acquaintances, less than 1 in 20 seem to read anything beyond the odd newspaper or magazine.
Maybe it's the unsophisticated humor displayed but it also seems to me that there's quite a few teenagers here. How many of them do you know that can read at all?
Well, yes, there is that.
Although I am curious how some things turn out, bits of research, some projects, families of relatives and friends, at 65 I take the cowards' way by figuring I'll likely die (given health probs) before the slide to wherever hits. My largest current regret is that there's nothing I can do to help other than leave them a few books to read.
I've read enough about various crunches and whatnot that I don't relish people I care about trying to survive any of them. "C'est la vie" seems.... jejune.
cheers [burp]
Outstanding. Thank you.
I'm still naive enough to get pissed off that it comes to that stance. I can see it coming, and would prefer to avoid it. So I'll likely muddle through the middle, slogging through a day, or somesuch.
Cheers, mate.
So how do you handle it?
You've got good snark ability and you're thoughtful enough to devise or steal a nifty sig.
If you could spare a moment or two, can you offer some helpful suggestions or views about how any of us might could better deal with our little portion of the human condition, other than, perhaps, "I got mine and screw everybody else" or "you can't change the present situation because ~1600 people own everything so it's no use, don't beat your head against the wall, go with the flow"? What?
Obviously some of us are not as smart or wise or clear-headed as you. Would it offend your sense of rightness to drop a crumb of enlightenment from your table?
I'm sufficiently impressed by the under-the-hood improvements in Windows 8, continuing on from 7, that IF I could avoid the Metro/Morden stuff, and if I could afford it, I'd seriously consider putting it on one of my current machines instead of Linux.
Yeah, and it's a lot easier to change your IP than your voice....
even if they eventually remove all personally-identifying info from a query, getting a voice match on all your searches will last as long as they keep them.
"or use Duckduckgo"
here's another one to use; I've been using it for about a month and like it. Combines ixquick with Google results, and offers additional goodness, such as SSL, no cookies, proxy. (One search engine I miss is Kartoo - if it was still around it would be great along with this kind of anonymized, trackless search.) It also avoids handing over referrer info - which can be used to track you regardless of IP, depending on your settings.
https://startpage.com/
And it works so well.
Halfway through the comments as I post and, shill or not, the 'topic' has been wonderfully sidetracked.
Anyone look at or use XBL?
Sorry, left out a few bits - got interrupted.
There aren't that many companies in the field who have the money to devote to blue-sky research, not just R&D, and for a few decades Microsoft has been one of them. Off top of head, there's Google, IBM, and...Intel, to some extent. Facebook does some stuff, but I don't know enough to evaluate that. Who else? Got to be a few more, yes?
Time and again, it's just that blue-sky research that leads to big advances and major shifts in how we do stuff. Bell Labs is dead. PARC is dead. IBM, DARPA (yeah, it's government, but still), increasingly shifting more from research to development, many short-term projects. A few universities have small research efforts. But long term, without that blue-sky research there won't be anything new, there won't be anything to develop, only extend or copy.
An interesting tit-bit - Gates' involvement with MS is down to around $2.5B - the rest of his personal wealth is from traditional, if highly diverse, investments. I figure he essentially wrote off the company he co-founded quite some years ago.
And that eventual slide downward is going to be a shame because they won't be able to keep funding their research people - where a whole raft of interesting things are worked on.
IF DRM is needful, with Netflix as the example, I'd far prefer to have it done in software. Then it is a simple choice for me to make to buy their, or similar, service. If I buy in, then later stop, the software with the DRM is uninstalled and no longer on my system.
If DRM is done on hardware it's always on, or has that capability built in. I thus have no control over my own machinery. No thanks. Bad enough with what's already baked in.
For many current price is accepted as reasonable based on a relatively high disposable income.
Leaving that relative income bit aside for the moment, if I blue sky, wander back in memory a bit regarding the telcos, what telecommunication is, what a public service is, that bit about common carrier, if I had to make a wild-ass-guess about a fair rate and price, I'd look at something like one down and half up for $20/mo. as fair; $25 would get you 7 down 2 up, and for $30 you'd get the 10 down 5 up. For instance. And if you paid $50/mo. you be in a pool from which every Wednesday at high noon on Main Street the CEO of Time Warner or you favorite local cable/ISP provider would kiss your ass.
Content and Internet connection should be entirely separate. The former would bid to allowed over the pipes, not the other way round (if that means a voice actor can't get a million per episode or a ball player $20 million a year, so be it); the latter would be regulated similar to electric and other public utilities.
Agreed.
It's been way too many years, so in the public interest for niche stories spurred by proponents and detractors alike: it was reported that Natalie Portman suffered a wardrobe malfunction yesterday while walking down a sidewalk. One of her socks 'accidentally' slipped, exposing an ankle. Since the other ankle remained covered, the question "Is one larger than the other?" is as yet un-answered. No pics yet, so it didn't happen.
Raspberry and rhubarb pie, now that is something that matters. De gustibus....
Amen. Too much is lost behind licence restrictions, locked up by companies who don't do anything with it. This infuriates me - good stuff is sitting on a shelf, earning for no one, and the companies could either release it openly or even sell it for a few bucks. The bullshit (even if true) reason given that some game designer/publisher's distant relative won't sign a release is a sign that the situation is fubar.
I like the way you handle the bulk of your media; it seems one of the more simple and useful ways of going about it.
I don't have all that much, mostly music and an assortment of movies and a few TV series, so I figure to dupe a few drives and hand 'em out to family and friends, let them do with 'em as they will. While I use a few cloudy things for temporary convenience I will not rely on them for anything - all my stuff is local or off-site backup.