While a lot of these names just are idiotic, finding an appropriate name for a new product or technique is essential for adoption. Do you still say "Tele-Vision" or do you say "TV"? Do you say "html-interpreter&-renderer" oder "web-browser"? The word "podcast" is here to stay, because nobody except us nerds memorizes "RSS-Feed with audio enclosures played on a generic audio playback device". The invention of a catching phrase / word for a phenomenon is an invention, too. Get used to it, Even to "AJAX":-)
Why do you call users of video podcast "sheep"? I'm into the networking-yaddayadda since 19 years and I have seen a few good things come and quite a few good things go, but being able to download e.g. daily news effortlessly and to watching them on the train is something I hope will stay and expect to change TV and radio broadcast as we know it.
> I'm italian and we have the exact same problem here with > FIAT, rescaled appropriately.
At least Italian cars are perceived as beautiful even if broken. American cars tend to be more like WMD.
Well, I'm German, we have the idiotic Volkswagen "Phaeton" now which is exactly not what the name "Volkswagen" says but what the Volkswagen-Management wanted to drive themselves.
The French built quite good, technically advanced cars.
I have never seen more really fat (as in obese) people than in the USA. Actually I have seen people in Florida being way fatter than I'd ever imagined.
I found it VERY difficult to buy proper, natural food I use to buy over here. Of course it's there but it's buried under all the processed artificial stuff and hard to find in all those monstrous malls.
It felt as if a malign food industry had brainwashed a whole country and taken as hostage. Eg: Repeat after me: "Frosted cereals != breakfast. Whole grain Bread == breakfast"
On the other hand people in Europe are growing fatter, too - about as fast as they stop preparing their food themselves. Just wait (weight?) 10 years and we can start looking for the mighty evil virus together.
I don't know about you or "the people" but I'd guess that convenience is a big point that you missed. If the studios had provided us with a convenient way to download the content we are interested in years ago, they would not play catch up now.
Or how would you explain iTunes' success? ITMS isn't exactly cheap, but it's convenient enough even for your parents to use. And the Apple-DRM seems to be tolerable for most people, too.
> measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most > of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files
I might be wrong, but I'd consider the measured behavior of an MP3-Player is more important than the one of a plain CD-Player. The psychoaccoustical model that is used to compress the audio makes some guesses about what an average person is able to hear/recognize. At playback time additional distortion does spoil this efforts and might make the lossy compression way more recognicable by the listener.
Same goes with hearing problems by the listener - if your hearing is bad, you might recognize more of the compression.
It's like this boy/girl you picked up at the bar the evening - just don't change the lightning conditions when you take him/her home and you'll have a fine night !-)
k2r (waiting for my 4GB ipod nano, my Rio broke finally)
Funny, how strong criticism of the US foreign policy always makes you a > PATHETIC WHINER DESPERATE TO SEEM CORRECT
and killing thousands and destabilizing a whole region of the planet is just > A POLITICIAN'S ERROR.
Besides that, I've already been at this part of the planet - before the war. Have you? Some friends even have relatives down there, do yours?
> but which would be being cheered globally if it hadn't been done under false pretenses. "false pretenses" and "A POLITICIAN'S ERROR", your the head of the ministry of understatement?
Do you really believe that you installed democracy there? In a country that tortures it's people now as it did it under Hussein? D'Oh, I forgot, that's just special interrogation technics, it's the American Way (tm).
You've lost all credibility and your reaction usually is "We don't care, the force is strong in us, shut up!".
However, the Americans I know usually are different, but they are over here in Europe then. (where our governments are kicking our constitutions to pieces. But that's another sad story.)
Most people I know have been really shocked when the planes hit your WTC and we really felt for you and wondered what could be done. Now that your country acted like an idiot and lied to us for the last couple of years, you just can't imagine how much of the standing you had especially with the younger people is lost.
>Right now, everyone is saying there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
Not RIGHT NOW but WAY BEFORE the US decided to bomb a totalitarian country and it's inhabitants back into stoneage NEARLY EVERYBODY EXEPT THE US/UK AND FOX NEWS said that it wasn't at least likely that the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it was a very stupid and illegal idea to fight a war with the Iraq.
Yes, they had an evil dictator over there, who was supported by the US (and Europe) for years, but yes, they had electricity and water and hospitals and christian churches and whatever, too. But not Al-Quaeda (it was a saecular country, Hussein made publically fun at Bin Laden) nor WMD.
The evidence the US-Government made up to support it's war was never accepted internationally.
And now it's like "oops, sorry, we didn't know, SOMEBODY GAVE US WRONG INFORMATION."
You (your government) fucked it up completely, the region is fundamentally destabilized now and there is absolutely no way to fix it. Every other fascist regime now feels as if it had the right to own nuclear weapons, because that seems to be the only way to be safe from the US. And you will not be able to get out of the iraq for a loooooong time and a few more hundreds of young men who joined the forces to keep their country safe will lose their life downthere. For less than nothing except from profit for a few companies with close ties to the US government..
And yes, as a friend from Minnesota said: "Don't blame me, I voted with the majority!":-)
> Where would us poor clueless American citizens be without foreign Slashdot commenters to fill us in?
Yes, there they are again, those america-bashing foreigners. This will be the only thing you'll be able to think, until your country is completely ruined, and then it will still be our fault.
It's not so much that I'm annoyed how fucked up your "land of the free" is by now, I wouldn't care about it too much if you not managed to export all of this and get everybody else down the drain with you.
Nope, it should not be the purpose of a security pass the make it technically feasible to automatically track who spends which amount of time together when with whom in which place.
IF this was not intended to know, then why AREN'T these passes built in a different way?
> She can't smile, she can't do the job > What it does mean is she can't fill the job description.
I can't find the exact job description in the article, but even if "flex your mouth for at least 30 degrees" was in - this woman was not APPLYING for a job at Sam's but worked there since 1984. She did - whatever she did - quite good, because she earned full benefits until 2003.
Sam's Club bought the shop in 1993 - 10 years before she was fired, 9 years after she started working there and AFTER the medical treatment caused her physical condition.
Sam's Club didn't fire her then - instead she reached full benefits at least in 2003, maybe before (we don't know).
So it looks as if she did her job well for many years after she lost her smile. Either suddenly the job requirements changed and they are trying to get rid of employees that don't fit anymore - bad sam. Or they fired her because "Her demonstration cart and microwave oven toppled over on her[...].[She] filed a workers' compensation claim.[...]" - very bad sam.
Your points (fat flight attendent, huge AF-pilots) do not work because she was already employed there and her condition was basically the same since >10 years.
Well, I'm sorry bothering you, but what you do is exactly what discrimination is.
You have absolutely no clue how she did her job. The fact that she worked as a food presenter having this medical condition for many years MIGHT be a hint that she did a good job.
You conclude from her physical status that she did a bad job because she isn't a blonde 1.80m high 20yo girl who smiles like an idiot.
On an even more subjective note: I'd personally alway prefer somebody competent and friendly telling me something about her products than a beautiful drone trying to distract me of them.
And "friendly" is as much in voice and habitus as in grinning until your face hurts. This may be a cultural difference.
Well, there is this bi-annual conference I'd like to attend. It's in California next year, and I'd really like to attend and meet some of the people I only had contact to by email within the last years. I was really tempted to trade in my dignity for this, I have to decide on it till the end of next week. And I'm not going because it's going to be in the US. I'd feel much better if it was in China - I personally haven't been there but people I work together with have been, lately. Although chinese people - especially those with low education living outside the big boomtowns - are suppressed by the government badly, I'd feel way more safe than in Orwells North-America.
This is really sad - when I was younger I often dreamed of living in the US:-(
You are boring. I did point out that the on the original postings list of American Innovations was wrong because some were attributed to American scientists wrongfully.
Your point is now what? "We still have more, so this don't matter?" That's sooooo scientific, "dude". But at least it's very USAian, nowadays.
> while the US came out with nuclear power, computers, [...] > the last one was, I believe, the radio
Well, yes, that's exactly the point. You "believe".
k2r.
P.S: Yes, it's sooo hard to use a encyclopedia instead of "believing": German chemicists Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner found out about nuclear fission, German engineer Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computer - the concept is actually older, read about Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace (both british IIRC) somewhere.
> he has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and > accept a three-year suspension of his national > security clearance.
Wow, if I got it right this guy intentionally DESTROYED DOCUMENTS TAKEN FROM YOUR COUNTRYS ARCHIVE and he will GET BACK his security clearance after a while?
The cool thing is that ANY application on OSX that uses some form of NSTextView "has it" - system wide live spellchecking. "It" comes for free, builtin in Cocoa, you don't have to do additional development.
Unfortunately that's one of the points where your can spot non native applications (yet) like OpenOffice or Firefox - they don't have "it".
Slashdot Mirror
While a lot of these names just are idiotic, finding an appropriate name for a new product or technique is essential for adoption. :-)
Do you still say "Tele-Vision" or do you say "TV"?
Do you say "html-interpreter&-renderer" oder "web-browser"?
The word "podcast" is here to stay, because nobody except us nerds memorizes "RSS-Feed with audio enclosures played on a generic audio playback device".
The invention of a catching phrase / word for a phenomenon is an invention, too.
Get used to it, Even to "AJAX"
k2r
> vod-casts (or whatever the sheep call them)
Why do you call users of video podcast "sheep"?
I'm into the networking-yaddayadda since 19 years and I have seen a few good things come and quite a few good things go, but being able to download e.g. daily news effortlessly and to watching them on the train is something I hope will stay and expect to change TV and radio broadcast as we know it.
Meeeh,
k2r
> I'm italian and we have the exact same problem here with
> FIAT, rescaled appropriately.
At least Italian cars are perceived as beautiful even if broken.
American cars tend to be more like WMD.
Well, I'm German, we have the idiotic Volkswagen "Phaeton" now which is exactly not what the name "Volkswagen" says but what the Volkswagen-Management wanted to drive themselves.
The French built quite good, technically advanced cars.
k2r
I have never seen more really fat (as in obese) people than in the USA. Actually I have seen people in Florida being way fatter than I'd ever imagined.
I found it VERY difficult to buy proper, natural food I use to buy over here.
Of course it's there but it's buried under all the processed artificial stuff and hard to find in all those monstrous malls.
It felt as if a malign food industry had brainwashed a whole country and taken as hostage.
Eg: Repeat after me: "Frosted cereals != breakfast. Whole grain Bread == breakfast"
On the other hand people in Europe are growing fatter, too - about as fast as they stop preparing their food themselves. Just wait (weight?) 10 years and we can start looking for the mighty evil virus together.
k2r
I don't know about you or "the people" but I'd guess that convenience is a big point that you missed.
If the studios had provided us with a convenient way to download the content we are interested in years ago, they would not play catch up now.
Or how would you explain iTunes' success? ITMS isn't exactly cheap, but it's convenient enough even for your parents to use.
And the Apple-DRM seems to be tolerable for most people, too.
k2r
> also a blackhat who enjoys developing cheats for World of Warcraft.
So cheating in a computer game makes you a blackhead nowadays? I'm getting old.
k2r
> measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most
> of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files
I might be wrong, but I'd consider the measured behavior of an MP3-Player is more important than the one of a plain CD-Player.
The psychoaccoustical model that is used to compress the audio makes some guesses about what an average person is able to hear/recognize.
At playback time additional distortion does spoil this efforts and might make the lossy compression way more recognicable by the listener.
Same goes with hearing problems by the listener - if your hearing is bad, you might recognize more of the compression.
It's like this boy/girl you picked up at the bar the evening - just don't change the lightning conditions when you take him/her home and you'll have a fine night !-)
k2r
(waiting for my 4GB ipod nano, my Rio broke finally)
Funny, how strong criticism of the US foreign policy always makes you a
> PATHETIC WHINER DESPERATE TO SEEM CORRECT
and killing thousands and destabilizing a whole region of the planet is just
> A POLITICIAN'S ERROR.
Besides that, I've already been at this part of the planet - before the war. Have you? Some friends even have relatives down there, do yours?
> but which would be being cheered globally if it hadn't been done under false pretenses.
"false pretenses" and "A POLITICIAN'S ERROR", your the head of the ministry of understatement?
Do you really believe that you installed democracy there? In a country that tortures it's people now as it did it under Hussein? D'Oh, I forgot, that's just special interrogation technics, it's the American Way (tm).
You've lost all credibility and your reaction usually is "We don't care, the force is strong in us, shut up!".
However, the Americans I know usually are different, but they are over here in Europe then.
(where our governments are kicking our constitutions to pieces. But that's another sad story.)
Most people I know have been really shocked when the planes hit your WTC and we really felt for you and wondered what could be done.
Now that your country acted like an idiot and lied to us for the last couple of years, you just can't imagine how much of the standing you had especially with the younger people is lost.
k2r
> "poor inferior people" who can't be held to the same standards of decency as everyone else?
So talking about some action that seems as idiotic as can be is "indecent" because it includes talking about a mans genital?
> "adolescent and juvenile"
I see.
k2r
>Right now, everyone is saying there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
:-)
Not RIGHT NOW but WAY BEFORE the US decided to bomb a totalitarian country and it's inhabitants back into stoneage NEARLY EVERYBODY EXEPT THE US/UK AND FOX NEWS said that it wasn't at least likely that the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it was a very stupid and illegal idea to fight a war with the Iraq.
Yes, they had an evil dictator over there, who was supported by the US (and Europe) for years, but yes, they had electricity and water and hospitals and christian churches and whatever, too.
But not Al-Quaeda (it was a saecular country, Hussein made publically fun at Bin Laden) nor WMD.
The evidence the US-Government made up to support it's war was never accepted internationally.
And now it's like "oops, sorry, we didn't know, SOMEBODY GAVE US WRONG INFORMATION."
You (your government) fucked it up completely, the region is fundamentally destabilized now and there is absolutely no way to fix it. Every other fascist regime now feels as if it had the right to own nuclear weapons, because that seems to be the only way to be safe from the US.
And you will not be able to get out of the iraq for a loooooong time and a few more hundreds of young men who joined the forces to keep their country safe will lose their life downthere.
For less than nothing except from profit for a few companies with close ties to the US government..
And yes, as a friend from Minnesota said: "Don't blame me, I voted with the majority!"
k2r
> But it's clear the editors think men with big penises running around in tights is "stuff that matters."
... what?
And if that'd be the case, it would be a problem for you because of
> Where would us poor clueless American citizens be without foreign Slashdot commenters to fill us in?
Yes, there they are again, those america-bashing foreigners.
This will be the only thing you'll be able to think, until your country is completely ruined, and then it will still be our fault.
It's not so much that I'm annoyed how fucked up your "land of the free" is by now, I wouldn't care about it too much if you not managed to export all of this and get everybody else down the drain with you.
k2r
> Checking email is ok, telling other people you're on the train is not.
Why? Because you say so? Could you please make somt points?
k2r
> It's whole PURPOSE is to identify the wearer.
Nope, it should not be the purpose of a security pass the make it technically
feasible to automatically track who spends which amount of time together when with whom in which place.
IF this was not intended to know, then why AREN'T these passes built in a different way?
k2r
Thanks for answering.
> She can't smile, she can't do the job
> What it does mean is she can't fill the job description.
I can't find the exact job description in the article, but even if "flex your mouth for at least 30 degrees" was in - this woman was not APPLYING for a job at Sam's but worked there since 1984.
She did - whatever she did - quite good, because she earned full benefits until 2003.
Sam's Club bought the shop in 1993 - 10 years before she was fired, 9 years after she started working there and AFTER the medical treatment caused her physical condition.
Sam's Club didn't fire her then - instead she reached full benefits at least in 2003, maybe before (we don't know).
So it looks as if she did her job well for many years after she lost her smile.
Either suddenly the job requirements changed and they are trying to get rid of employees that don't fit anymore - bad sam.
Or they fired her because "Her demonstration cart and microwave oven toppled over on her[...].[She] filed a workers' compensation claim.[...]" - very bad sam.
Your points (fat flight attendent, huge AF-pilots) do not work because she was already employed there and her condition was basically the same since >10 years.
k2r
>But she isn't capable of doing this one.
Well, I'm sorry bothering you, but what you do is exactly what discrimination is.
You have absolutely no clue how she did her job.
The fact that she worked as a food presenter having this medical condition for many years MIGHT be a hint that she did a good job.
You conclude from her physical status that she did a bad job because she isn't a blonde 1.80m high 20yo girl who smiles like an idiot.
On an even more subjective note: I'd personally alway prefer somebody competent and friendly telling me something about her products than a beautiful drone trying to distract me of them.
And "friendly" is as much in voice and habitus as in grinning until your face hurts.
This may be a cultural difference.
k2r
Well, there is this bi-annual conference I'd like to attend.
:-(
It's in California next year, and I'd really like to attend and meet some of the people I only had
contact to by email within the last years.
I was really tempted to trade in my dignity for this, I have to decide on it till the end of next week.
And I'm not going because it's going to be in the US. I'd feel much better if it was in China - I personally haven't been there but people I work together with have been, lately.
Although chinese people - especially those with low education living outside the big boomtowns - are suppressed by the government badly, I'd feel way more safe than in Orwells North-America.
This is really sad - when I was younger I often dreamed of living in the US
k2r
I do.
Where I come from (Germany) people have been executed because their anonymous printings could be traced back to them.
Eg: Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rose
Now imagine how easy this would have been if they used one of these laser-printers for the leaflets and for their homework.
If you give away your personal freedom to this regime a future fascist regime isn't likely to give it back to you.
k2r
> It's not like they cod have seen this
Well, there seems to be a lot of stuff that "could not have been seen" in the US nowadays.
k2r
AFAIK the biggest wind turbine by now is the "5M" by (German company) Repower. It has a rotor of 126m diameter and does 5MW.
And it's in use already.
http://www.repower.de/index.php?id=66&L=1
k2r
You are boring.
I did point out that the on the original postings list of American Innovations was wrong because some were attributed to American scientists wrongfully.
Your point is now what?
"We still have more, so this don't matter?"
That's sooooo scientific, "dude".
But at least it's very USAian, nowadays.
k2r
> while the US came out with nuclear power, computers, [...]
> the last one was, I believe, the radio
Well, yes, that's exactly the point. You "believe".
k2r.
P.S:
Yes, it's sooo hard to use a encyclopedia instead of "believing":
German chemicists Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner found out about nuclear fission,
German engineer Konrad Zuse built the first programmable computer - the concept is actually older, read about Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace (both british IIRC) somewhere.
> he has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and
> accept a three-year suspension of his national
> security clearance.
Wow, if I got it right this guy intentionally DESTROYED DOCUMENTS TAKEN FROM YOUR COUNTRYS ARCHIVE and he will GET BACK his security clearance after a while?
Looks like you're fucked, basically.
k2r
> but Safari (under OSX) actually has it
The cool thing is that ANY application on OSX that uses some form of NSTextView "has it" - system wide live spellchecking.
"It" comes for free, builtin in Cocoa, you don't have to do additional development.
Unfortunately that's one of the points where your can spot non native applications (yet) like OpenOffice or Firefox - they don't have "it".
k2r
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
killall Dock
Any widget you hold with the mouse while switching from dashboard to desktop will end up as a normal window.
And vice versa.
k2r
Or install the devMove widget.