If being poor genuinely seems great to you (didjaknow you don't pay income taxes either? Lucky Duckies right?), why not simply quit your job and become poor yourself?
Perhaps you don't because you realize, deep down, that being poor sucks?
They're not exactly expensive these days if you're not looking for, say, a gaming rig. $200 buys you something perfectly serviceable new, and obviously used PCs are widely available too.
Plus Wifi tablets with a large enough screen for web browsing are available in the sub-$100 range.
Not that it's a small amount for someone on a low income, but the cost of Internet provision was always going to be the bigger deal breaker than the one-off cost of obtaining a box that'll generally cost less than two months ISP subscription ($60-80) + installation ($50-100)
Always found the idea that the sender pays a little awkward as a peering funding mechanism, given the receiver almost always initiates the transaction, and ideally should (that is, they wouldn't be initiating it if they didn't) be benefiting from the transaction as much as the sender.
I believe the arrangement is more of a compromise, based on an understanding that the sender probably has more control over how compact the message they send is, and so an attempt to discourage over-use of bandwidth rather than an attempt to get one party to pay the full costs of the other.
To that end, if Netflix has no benefit whatsoever to needlessly transmitting content at sizes larger than strictly necessary (and it doesn't - each additional megabyte has very real costs for most businesses transmitting it, not to mention the problems the end user has if their network is saturated with redundant data), then there's no good reason to charge them anything at all.
I swear the more I hear about how bad Monsanto is because they dabble in GM (which they use to create products that apparently farmers want badly, which suggests that the modifications actually help with efficiency and thus total world food output), the more I want to buy shares in them.
Opponents argue Monsanto is "Playing God". If they're making it cheaper to make plentiful food, then I say they're doing God's work.
(And yeah, I know, Agent Orange and whatnot, but if a bad company becomes good, what's the problem?)
That quote is essentially a restatement (or is it a prestatement) of what I thought I read when I read TFS. He's concerned about sound quality, and wants his listeners to hear it at what he perceives to be a better quality than "streaming".
Personally, I find that hard to believe. Does he allow his music to be sold as non-streaming MP3s? Does he allow it to be played on FM radio? What about AM radio?
But, be that as it may, I thought TFS got the gist fine. Or maybe there's something I'm missing I'm not seeing in the full quote either?
If the super big advantage of Hyperloop is that it goes through a near vacuum, and if Mars's atmosphere is a fraction of Earth's, why bother with the tunnel at all? Will it really save that much energy compared to the additional construction costs of a tube vs one or two thin metal strips?
The latter has the additional advantage that it can be used, using existing technologies and existing standards, to carry large amounts of cargo, and that cargo can be in units up to ten and a half feet wide. Which is fairly important, if you remember that the most probable reason for having locations several hundred or thousand miles away on Mars, would be to access differing resources.
This would be amusing if there wasn't so much awfulness in what people are doing.
So... a virtual lynchmob went after Pao because they decided she must be an "SJW" because she once sued a former employer for sexual harassment. They interpreted a closure of a subreddit that was harassing people in real life as being content based, and by Pao, because they assumed that was what a straw-SJW would do. When a popular employee was subsequently fired, Pao's attackers assumed it must have been her that did it, because the previous day there'd been a not-terrible-pleasant IAMA with Jesse Jackson, and as a straw-SJW, Pao would be very upset that Reddit might have possibly offended Jackson. This theory made no sense whatsoever, but the virtual lynchings got worse anyway.
And it turns out that Pao was supporting them all along - that is, arguing against a board that did actively want to remove the more offensive subreddits, and not actually the person who pushed out the fired employee.
I'm seeing a hell of a lot of people who:
1. Label someone who says something that makes them slightly uncomfortable an "SJW".
2. Assume that because their victim is an SJW (because they labelled them one), they must be a straw-SJW
3. Ascribing positions and acts to their victims, misinterpreting the words they say, and creating the most absurd conspiracy theories about their victims, simply because that's what a straw-SJW would do.
Maybe the outrageous way Pao was dealt with will make a few people stop and think about the wisdom of that. Unfortunately, I suspect many will just dig further, unable or at least reluctant to question their assumptions, for fear that their behaviour might have been wrong.
I don't like being called an asshole, but I'm under no illusions about it, I am fully aware I am one - at least, online. I'm trying not to be mind you. But I'm not altogether successful.
Both countries are mostly our "enemy" because we've mutually decided to hate each other, rather than because we have any legitimate current grievance. I say mostly, because obviously neither has a terribly good human rights record, but, by way of an example, if I were a woman, I'd rather live in Iran than Saudi Arabia. Infinitely rather.
Iran is considerably closer to being a democracy than many of our allies in that region (if not most of them actually.) Unfortunately, constitutionally they still have an unelected religious body with real power, which needs to be resolved. In the past, our relationship with Iran has actually made that religious body stronger, as every political conflict we've had with them has increased popular support for the hardline anti-democratic elements.
Turning Iran into a friend will take decades. But that's no excuse not to try. It does us no good whatsoever to discourage a country that's more progressive than most of its peers to move forward and closer to our values. To get there, we have to overcome distrust - much of which is entirely legitimate - by both sides.
So while you're right that neither are resolved, Obama has actually taken positive steps towards resolving them which are entirely necessary and which, if we and Iran and Cuba don't fuck things up, are the start of a long journey towards peace.
I'm glad to see it. It's the Obama I supported in 2008, not the Obama we've had as President from 2009 onwards. Perhaps, politically, it would have been better if it were some 2015 equivalent of Nixon (President Buchanan?) who'd done it, but it's still very, very, positive.
I'm with you on GG and even agree with you that GG is fundamentally a movement of a-holes (how bad do you have to be to think that smearing victims of harassment as "professional victims" and, indeed, using a psychotic ex-boyfriend's hatchet job on a depression sufferer, as an excuse to harass his former girlfriend.)
But... this is a really bad argument and you shouldn't use it. Even with GG. People can and do have to defend themselves against false allegations, if you doubt that for a second just look at some of the highest rated questions here and the woman they're addressed to.
The proof GG are a-holes isn't that they say they're not. It's the pattern of behavior, of bullying, gaslighting, that the origins of their movement are in an attempt to drive a woman to suicide, and so on. It's enough to highlight that. We don't need to play silly rhetorical games to make that point.
What do you mean "there's no question"? I was under the impression that incomes across the board have risen. There's some disparity in rises, those with the highest salaries have seen their salaries rise fastest of all, but the lowest paid are certainly seeing incomes rise too.
Well, making life better doesn't necessarily imply not working as much.
If a robot could drive me to work in the morning (and back at night), I could spent half of each trip working. I'd technically be working "more", but also have just as much extra free time. Not a great example, but I'm sure others can think of a better one.
As someone who lived in Reading, 30 miles from London and right under Concorde's flight path, I can honestly tell you the noise issue was NOT a red herring.
That plane, tens of miles away from LHR, drowned out the TV when it flew over daily. It sucked. I think those States that banned it did so entirely reasonably.
Personally I find articles like TFA useful, and it's hard to see them being written outside of the context of that "debate".
Right now I'm running a Frankengnome at home, and Unity at work. It sounds like GNOME though may be getting much closer to being that ideal system I'd like. I didn't see enough to convince me here, but I'll follow it a little more closely from here on.
Technically I believe the pedestrians have the right of way in that instance, but yes, it's dumb, and largely reflects the fact that local authorities don't have a lot of money, don't like spending it, and don't want to do things that might impede cars.
This is obviously a nanny state act by the same government that forced everyone to drink less soda and is run by the SJWs that are ruining video games like Ellen Pao and Obama.
Holy crap, I just hit submit and it's already at +5 Insightful. And you've been modded to -1 Troll already. It's an AI! There are no moderators really modding these things!
Well, yeah, Oracle hate is totally justified, so let's do it! (Besides, who wrote the plugin?)
But yes, Java hate is OTT. It's a decent language/concept. Microsoft did it better with.NET/C#, but beyond the painful programming patterns Java's frameworks enforce on everyone, it's not a bad system.
Thankfully that's not really the case outside of Brazil. I haven't had to use Java to access my bank or credit accounts ever, in the 15 or so years of using the web to access them here in the US.
I have no idea why Brazil's banks would be different, but they seriously need to update. I can't think of a single legitimate reason to consider using Java as more secure than HTML+JavaScript - the obvious are all "security by obscurity".
And just to be clear: I, myself, had never even heard of Google Photos until this story broke, and GUESS WHERE MY OLD SMARTPHONE'S CAMERA HAS BEEN UPLOADING PHOTOS TO all this time. So not only has this been done to people who removed Google Photos, but also to people who have never intentionally set Google Photos up.
Urgh. Google, knock it off with the "We know better than you do" bullshit. At least make me aware of what Android is actually doing with my stuff. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is making me want my next smartphone to run something else. I just don't know what yet.
Nah, that doesn't work, because you have a reasonable expectation that the engine is the thing making the car move. Likewise you have a reasonable expectation that Google Photos the App is responsible for putting your photos on Google Photos the Website not some operating system service that has nothing whatsoever to do with Google Photos. The idea that Android itself, behind the scenes, has said "Oh, I'm going to arbitrarily sync with Google Photos the Website" is unexpected behavior.
You'd be pretty damned confused if Google Sync, an OS service, decided to upload your photos to Instagram or imgur too. The fact Google runs both Google Photos and Android wouldn't make a person automatically assume that whenever they take a photo, it'll be automatically uploaded to a service they may well have never heard of.
So yes, I stand by "taking the engine out and the car still runs" as the analogy. Sure, your car's manufacturer might have put in a hidden engine responsible for the vehicle's motion, but most people would be a little surprised that the car would still drive (and steer!) if they took out the main engine and the steering wheel it was attached to.
I think it's like removing the engine and steering wheel from a car, and then finding it still drives you to work every morning and back.
It's not what you expect, and the part you missed was your manufacturer, in an attempt to "help" you, had automated most of the functionality and put in multiple engines. The one you removed was just the thing that helped with the power steering.
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If being poor genuinely seems great to you (didjaknow you don't pay income taxes either? Lucky Duckies right?), why not simply quit your job and become poor yourself?
Perhaps you don't because you realize, deep down, that being poor sucks?
They're not exactly expensive these days if you're not looking for, say, a gaming rig. $200 buys you something perfectly serviceable new, and obviously used PCs are widely available too.
Plus Wifi tablets with a large enough screen for web browsing are available in the sub-$100 range.
Not that it's a small amount for someone on a low income, but the cost of Internet provision was always going to be the bigger deal breaker than the one-off cost of obtaining a box that'll generally cost less than two months ISP subscription ($60-80) + installation ($50-100)
Always found the idea that the sender pays a little awkward as a peering funding mechanism, given the receiver almost always initiates the transaction, and ideally should (that is, they wouldn't be initiating it if they didn't) be benefiting from the transaction as much as the sender.
I believe the arrangement is more of a compromise, based on an understanding that the sender probably has more control over how compact the message they send is, and so an attempt to discourage over-use of bandwidth rather than an attempt to get one party to pay the full costs of the other.
To that end, if Netflix has no benefit whatsoever to needlessly transmitting content at sizes larger than strictly necessary (and it doesn't - each additional megabyte has very real costs for most businesses transmitting it, not to mention the problems the end user has if their network is saturated with redundant data), then there's no good reason to charge them anything at all.
I swear the more I hear about how bad Monsanto is because they dabble in GM (which they use to create products that apparently farmers want badly, which suggests that the modifications actually help with efficiency and thus total world food output), the more I want to buy shares in them.
Opponents argue Monsanto is "Playing God". If they're making it cheaper to make plentiful food, then I say they're doing God's work.
(And yeah, I know, Agent Orange and whatnot, but if a bad company becomes good, what's the problem?)
That quote is essentially a restatement (or is it a prestatement) of what I thought I read when I read TFS. He's concerned about sound quality, and wants his listeners to hear it at what he perceives to be a better quality than "streaming".
Personally, I find that hard to believe. Does he allow his music to be sold as non-streaming MP3s? Does he allow it to be played on FM radio? What about AM radio?
But, be that as it may, I thought TFS got the gist fine. Or maybe there's something I'm missing I'm not seeing in the full quote either?
If the super big advantage of Hyperloop is that it goes through a near vacuum, and if Mars's atmosphere is a fraction of Earth's, why bother with the tunnel at all? Will it really save that much energy compared to the additional construction costs of a tube vs one or two thin metal strips?
The latter has the additional advantage that it can be used, using existing technologies and existing standards, to carry large amounts of cargo, and that cargo can be in units up to ten and a half feet wide. Which is fairly important, if you remember that the most probable reason for having locations several hundred or thousand miles away on Mars, would be to access differing resources.
This would be amusing if there wasn't so much awfulness in what people are doing.
So... a virtual lynchmob went after Pao because they decided she must be an "SJW" because she once sued a former employer for sexual harassment. They interpreted a closure of a subreddit that was harassing people in real life as being content based, and by Pao, because they assumed that was what a straw-SJW would do. When a popular employee was subsequently fired, Pao's attackers assumed it must have been her that did it, because the previous day there'd been a not-terrible-pleasant IAMA with Jesse Jackson, and as a straw-SJW, Pao would be very upset that Reddit might have possibly offended Jackson. This theory made no sense whatsoever, but the virtual lynchings got worse anyway.
And it turns out that Pao was supporting them all along - that is, arguing against a board that did actively want to remove the more offensive subreddits, and not actually the person who pushed out the fired employee.
I'm seeing a hell of a lot of people who:
1. Label someone who says something that makes them slightly uncomfortable an "SJW".
2. Assume that because their victim is an SJW (because they labelled them one), they must be a straw-SJW
3. Ascribing positions and acts to their victims, misinterpreting the words they say, and creating the most absurd conspiracy theories about their victims, simply because that's what a straw-SJW would do.
Maybe the outrageous way Pao was dealt with will make a few people stop and think about the wisdom of that. Unfortunately, I suspect many will just dig further, unable or at least reluctant to question their assumptions, for fear that their behaviour might have been wrong.
I don't like being called an asshole, but I'm under no illusions about it, I am fully aware I am one - at least, online. I'm trying not to be mind you. But I'm not altogether successful.
Both countries are mostly our "enemy" because we've mutually decided to hate each other, rather than because we have any legitimate current grievance. I say mostly, because obviously neither has a terribly good human rights record, but, by way of an example, if I were a woman, I'd rather live in Iran than Saudi Arabia. Infinitely rather.
Iran is considerably closer to being a democracy than many of our allies in that region (if not most of them actually.) Unfortunately, constitutionally they still have an unelected religious body with real power, which needs to be resolved. In the past, our relationship with Iran has actually made that religious body stronger, as every political conflict we've had with them has increased popular support for the hardline anti-democratic elements.
Turning Iran into a friend will take decades. But that's no excuse not to try. It does us no good whatsoever to discourage a country that's more progressive than most of its peers to move forward and closer to our values. To get there, we have to overcome distrust - much of which is entirely legitimate - by both sides.
So while you're right that neither are resolved, Obama has actually taken positive steps towards resolving them which are entirely necessary and which, if we and Iran and Cuba don't fuck things up, are the start of a long journey towards peace.
I'm glad to see it. It's the Obama I supported in 2008, not the Obama we've had as President from 2009 onwards. Perhaps, politically, it would have been better if it were some 2015 equivalent of Nixon (President Buchanan?) who'd done it, but it's still very, very, positive.
I'm with you on GG and even agree with you that GG is fundamentally a movement of a-holes (how bad do you have to be to think that smearing victims of harassment as "professional victims" and, indeed, using a psychotic ex-boyfriend's hatchet job on a depression sufferer, as an excuse to harass his former girlfriend.)
But... this is a really bad argument and you shouldn't use it. Even with GG. People can and do have to defend themselves against false allegations, if you doubt that for a second just look at some of the highest rated questions here and the woman they're addressed to.
The proof GG are a-holes isn't that they say they're not. It's the pattern of behavior, of bullying, gaslighting, that the origins of their movement are in an attempt to drive a woman to suicide, and so on. It's enough to highlight that. We don't need to play silly rhetorical games to make that point.
What do you mean "there's no question"? I was under the impression that incomes across the board have risen. There's some disparity in rises, those with the highest salaries have seen their salaries rise fastest of all, but the lowest paid are certainly seeing incomes rise too.
Well, making life better doesn't necessarily imply not working as much.
If a robot could drive me to work in the morning (and back at night), I could spent half of each trip working. I'd technically be working "more", but also have just as much extra free time. Not a great example, but I'm sure others can think of a better one.
As someone who lived in Reading, 30 miles from London and right under Concorde's flight path, I can honestly tell you the noise issue was NOT a red herring.
That plane, tens of miles away from LHR, drowned out the TV when it flew over daily. It sucked. I think those States that banned it did so entirely reasonably.
Yeah, I know. It was a spoof. Poe's law strikes again!
Personally I find articles like TFA useful, and it's hard to see them being written outside of the context of that "debate".
Right now I'm running a Frankengnome at home, and Unity at work. It sounds like GNOME though may be getting much closer to being that ideal system I'd like. I didn't see enough to convince me here, but I'll follow it a little more closely from here on.
Technically I believe the pedestrians have the right of way in that instance, but yes, it's dumb, and largely reflects the fact that local authorities don't have a lot of money, don't like spending it, and don't want to do things that might impede cars.
It's Political Correctness gone mad!
BTW, did you notice this story is literally NYC asking Google Maps to have a leftward bias?
This is obviously a nanny state act by the same government that forced everyone to drink less soda and is run by the SJWs that are ruining video games like Ellen Pao and Obama.
Holy crap, I just hit submit and it's already at +5 Insightful. And you've been modded to -1 Troll already. It's an AI! There are no moderators really modding these things!
Well, yeah, Oracle hate is totally justified, so let's do it! (Besides, who wrote the plugin?)
But yes, Java hate is OTT. It's a decent language/concept. Microsoft did it better with .NET/C#, but beyond the painful programming patterns Java's frameworks enforce on everyone, it's not a bad system.
The plugin needs to go though.
Thankfully that's not really the case outside of Brazil. I haven't had to use Java to access my bank or credit accounts ever, in the 15 or so years of using the web to access them here in the US.
I have no idea why Brazil's banks would be different, but they seriously need to update. I can't think of a single legitimate reason to consider using Java as more secure than HTML+JavaScript - the obvious are all "security by obscurity".
Adblock does nothing on Twitter. Twitter disguises ads as tweets.
And just to be clear: I, myself, had never even heard of Google Photos until this story broke, and GUESS WHERE MY OLD SMARTPHONE'S CAMERA HAS BEEN UPLOADING PHOTOS TO all this time. So not only has this been done to people who removed Google Photos, but also to people who have never intentionally set Google Photos up.
Urgh. Google, knock it off with the "We know better than you do" bullshit. At least make me aware of what Android is actually doing with my stuff. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is making me want my next smartphone to run something else. I just don't know what yet.
.
Nah, that doesn't work, because you have a reasonable expectation that the engine is the thing making the car move. Likewise you have a reasonable expectation that Google Photos the App is responsible for putting your photos on Google Photos the Website not some operating system service that has nothing whatsoever to do with Google Photos. The idea that Android itself, behind the scenes, has said "Oh, I'm going to arbitrarily sync with Google Photos the Website" is unexpected behavior.
You'd be pretty damned confused if Google Sync, an OS service, decided to upload your photos to Instagram or imgur too. The fact Google runs both Google Photos and Android wouldn't make a person automatically assume that whenever they take a photo, it'll be automatically uploaded to a service they may well have never heard of.
So yes, I stand by "taking the engine out and the car still runs" as the analogy. Sure, your car's manufacturer might have put in a hidden engine responsible for the vehicle's motion, but most people would be a little surprised that the car would still drive (and steer!) if they took out the main engine and the steering wheel it was attached to.
I think it's like removing the engine and steering wheel from a car, and then finding it still drives you to work every morning and back.
It's not what you expect, and the part you missed was your manufacturer, in an attempt to "help" you, had automated most of the functionality and put in multiple engines. The one you removed was just the thing that helped with the power steering.
This comment reminded me a little of this Wondermark comic.