So if you are using Firefox and they stick to their announced release schedule, you will have to change to a new version of Firefox every 6 months.
Incorrect. You will have to change to a new version of Firefox every time Google Apps starts depending on a feature of the latest two Firefox versions that is not in your version which they don't test on anymore. This is very, very unlikely to be every six months. Probably not even every two years...
One wonders at the depths of abject stupidity required to have even typed that thought up. Yes, I'm sure Google will cut their own throats tomorrow. It's not like they actually want people to use their services or anything...
... but generally users think of features as noteworthy updates.
Indeed. It's by that logic that one continues to run XP. There haven't been any noteworthy features added to Windows since that version of it, except perhaps the ability to run stuff Microsoft gimps to try to force upgrades (e.g. newer DirectX versions that would run perfectly fine on XP if MS wanted them to).
As for the canon of Star Trek, they just made it up as they went. Take Trills for instance. In TNG, they couldn't use the Transporters or it would kill them. In DS9, that was too inconvenient. So they gave them spots and took away their limitations. Whenever inconvenient (or convenient) they would change their own canon!
Indeed. Often your first idea for something is not the best. Being constrained to it is a great way to make sure your story never rises to the level it could have. If you have a better idea, change the premise to match. Certain fans will nerd-rage about retcons, and how they're an example of "lousy writing" -- well, yes, it would have been wonderful if we'd thought of all that in advance and didn't have to retcon it, but it's better to retcon it in than go without. A perfect god-author would never have to do it. Humans, on the other hand, make better authors when they're not afraid to do it, albeit better still when their need to do it is less frequent. But no one has perfect foresight, particular not in an ongoing series without a predetermined end-point.
Eventually canon just established that the Federation had been founded entirely... upon American ideals.
And by "eventually", you mean right from the original series onward. Frankly, if you ever watched the original series, many episodes (for example, The Omega Glory from season 2) make that point abundantly clear. If anything, the various subsequent series have evolved away from the most obvious and pronounced Americentric jingoism that was part of Trek's founding DNA. It's gone in the opposite direction as you suggest over the years, but never entirely shed it, which is why you still find examples all along the way.
I don't get it. Why would this be open to doubt? If I've understood correctly, Gamestop offered it for sale and these people paid for it... so now it's available Gamestop are going to honour the contract. Is that not what they would normally do?
If you strip away from the description everything that makes it unique, yes, it sounds unremarkable. Let's not to do and try again. Gamestop is fulfilling preorders that are over a decade old. Isn't that what they normally do? No, in fact they normally fulfill preorders that are only a few months or at most a year or two old. What makes this news is not that their fulfilling preorders, it's that they're fulfilling ancient ones. It isn't news because there was some doubt that they would, it's news because it's something happening that has never happened before. When something happens that has never happened before, it's often considered news, even if everyone in the situation reacts exactly as you would expect they would in the situation, despite it never happening before.
Pilots have more skin in the game. Software doesn't really care if it crashes or not.
This is probably the biggest reason software is far more reliable. Without skin in the game or a care in the world, it's far, far less likely to panic, leap to conclusions, or due any of the other things that have led to thousands of pilots killing themselves since the dawn of aviation.
Just FYI, 10,000 ft/min is only about 113 miles per hour. Typical cruising speed for a long-distance large jet aircraft is about 550 mph, so the pilots had slowed the plane quite a bit. The plane didn't go screaming into the ocean.
That was their final vertical speed, not their final speed.
How can the seat you're sitting in start descending at 11000 ft/min and you not feel it? You'd feel pulled towards the ceiling.
No, you wouldn't. At that *speed*, you'd feel pulled towards the floor with exactly the same force you normally feel. Now, if we were talking *acceleration*, that'd be entirely different.
People think Google's business model for everything (except their search engine, which is supported by advertising) should be to run huge expensive server farms for the purpose of giving away stuff for free so that... um... money will rain from the skies or something. Now, granted, to all outward appearances this seems to be their business plan 95% of the time... XD
... He thinks there is something special going on in microtubules.
If what you just wrote is true, he's clearly gone off the deep end. If he posits this is a hypothesis worth testing, that's one thing, but if he actually thinks what you said he thinks, that's clearly irrational. You would have to have already observed the empirical results of the test, and found something convincing in them, to rationally think what you said he does.
...so quantum effects can't be ruled out (or in) yet...
Which is more or less the point. A lot of people seem convinced that quantum effects are behind it, but it's not rational to believe that they are (or that they aren't, for that matter).
Penrose is a smart guy (black holes and tiling and all that) but he does like to propose some rather outlandish things in his free time. Might be a correlation between the two, who knows.
Yeah, I think there's another commonly believed fallacy that extremely intelligent people only think extremely intelligent things. But counter-examples abound. Just because someone can reason extremely well doesn't mean they always do...
I don't miss the control key being where God intended, but that's because I always change my keymap so that the otherwise utterly pointless "Caps Lock" key functions as the left control key.:)
Nope. One of the features of the English language is that many words mean many different things in different contexts. A competent speaker of the language has no difficulty determining which meaning is the intended one in the context of the discussion. A desire to contest definitions and abhor his overloading is born out of a need for simplistic minds to have a context-free lexicon, but that isn't how any human language works, nor is there any benefit to this for fluent speakers of one, although granted it would be a help to people still learning the language.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you are using Firefox and they stick to their announced release schedule, you will have to change to a new version of Firefox every 6 months.
Incorrect. You will have to change to a new version of Firefox every time Google Apps starts depending on a feature of the latest two Firefox versions that is not in your version which they don't test on anymore. This is very, very unlikely to be every six months. Probably not even every two years...
But I've seen stuff like this before where the server will only accept specific user agents.
Only when the people running the server are brain-damaged morons. Google has better hiring practices and management than that...
One wonders at the depths of abject stupidity required to have even typed that thought up. Yes, I'm sure Google will cut their own throats tomorrow. It's not like they actually want people to use their services or anything...
... but generally users think of features as noteworthy updates.
Indeed. It's by that logic that one continues to run XP. There haven't been any noteworthy features added to Windows since that version of it, except perhaps the ability to run stuff Microsoft gimps to try to force upgrades (e.g. newer DirectX versions that would run perfectly fine on XP if MS wanted them to).
A rather silly and inappropriate car analogy, if you ask me.
Are you trying to be redundant deliberately, or absurdly suggesting that there is some other type of car analogy?
I fail to see a problem there, apart from Google, none of those other sites are ones which should be used at work anyways.
Not every job is like your job, and not every workplace is like your workplace.
As for the canon of Star Trek, they just made it up as they went. Take Trills for instance. In TNG, they couldn't use the Transporters or it would kill them. In DS9, that was too inconvenient. So they gave them spots and took away their limitations. Whenever inconvenient (or convenient) they would change their own canon!
Indeed. Often your first idea for something is not the best. Being constrained to it is a great way to make sure your story never rises to the level it could have. If you have a better idea, change the premise to match. Certain fans will nerd-rage about retcons, and how they're an example of "lousy writing" -- well, yes, it would have been wonderful if we'd thought of all that in advance and didn't have to retcon it, but it's better to retcon it in than go without. A perfect god-author would never have to do it. Humans, on the other hand, make better authors when they're not afraid to do it, albeit better still when their need to do it is less frequent. But no one has perfect foresight, particular not in an ongoing series without a predetermined end-point.
Eventually canon just established that the Federation had been founded entirely ... upon American ideals.
And by "eventually", you mean right from the original series onward. Frankly, if you ever watched the original series, many episodes (for example, The Omega Glory from season 2) make that point abundantly clear. If anything, the various subsequent series have evolved away from the most obvious and pronounced Americentric jingoism that was part of Trek's founding DNA. It's gone in the opposite direction as you suggest over the years, but never entirely shed it, which is why you still find examples all along the way.
I don't get it. Why would this be open to doubt? If I've understood correctly, Gamestop offered it for sale and these people paid for it... so now it's available Gamestop are going to honour the contract. Is that not what they would normally do?
If you strip away from the description everything that makes it unique, yes, it sounds unremarkable. Let's not to do and try again. Gamestop is fulfilling preorders that are over a decade old. Isn't that what they normally do? No, in fact they normally fulfill preorders that are only a few months or at most a year or two old. What makes this news is not that their fulfilling preorders, it's that they're fulfilling ancient ones. It isn't news because there was some doubt that they would, it's news because it's something happening that has never happened before. When something happens that has never happened before, it's often considered news, even if everyone in the situation reacts exactly as you would expect they would in the situation, despite it never happening before.
Of course they would. The situation isn't surprising so much as amusing.
Pilots have more skin in the game. Software doesn't really care if it crashes or not.
This is probably the biggest reason software is far more reliable. Without skin in the game or a care in the world, it's far, far less likely to panic, leap to conclusions, or due any of the other things that have led to thousands of pilots killing themselves since the dawn of aviation.
Just FYI, 10,000 ft/min is only about 113 miles per hour. Typical cruising speed for a long-distance large jet aircraft is about 550 mph, so the pilots had slowed the plane quite a bit. The plane didn't go screaming into the ocean.
That was their final vertical speed, not their final speed.
How can the seat you're sitting in start descending at 11000 ft/min and you not feel it? You'd feel pulled towards the ceiling.
No, you wouldn't. At that *speed*, you'd feel pulled towards the floor with exactly the same force you normally feel. Now, if we were talking *acceleration*, that'd be entirely different.
The problem for your description, of course, is that the plane wasn't flying directly downwards, or anywhere close to that.
People think Google's business model for everything (except their search engine, which is supported by advertising) should be to run huge expensive server farms for the purpose of giving away stuff for free so that... um... money will rain from the skies or something. Now, granted, to all outward appearances this seems to be their business plan 95% of the time... XD
Schrödinger? Is that you?
If it is, please tell us where you are, but for God's sake don't tell us how fast you're moving!
... but a jump from 4 or so qubits to 128 is a quantum leap ...
Sorry, but a jump from 4 or so qubits to 128 is a very large leap, not an incredibly tiny one like you just said.
There is no free will.
I choose to believe otherwise.
I always wonder about people who are certain there is no free will. It seems a silly thing to believe, but then maybe they can't help it... ;)
... He thinks there is something special going on in microtubules.
If what you just wrote is true, he's clearly gone off the deep end. If he posits this is a hypothesis worth testing, that's one thing, but if he actually thinks what you said he thinks, that's clearly irrational. You would have to have already observed the empirical results of the test, and found something convincing in them, to rationally think what you said he does.
...so quantum effects can't be ruled out (or in) yet...
Which is more or less the point. A lot of people seem convinced that quantum effects are behind it, but it's not rational to believe that they are (or that they aren't, for that matter).
Penrose is a smart guy (black holes and tiling and all that) but he does like to propose some rather outlandish things in his free time. Might be a correlation between the two, who knows.
Yeah, I think there's another commonly believed fallacy that extremely intelligent people only think extremely intelligent things. But counter-examples abound. Just because someone can reason extremely well doesn't mean they always do...
I don't miss the control key being where God intended, but that's because I always change my keymap so that the otherwise utterly pointless "Caps Lock" key functions as the left control key. :)
...dating back almost 500 years...
More, really, when you consider it's a loanword.
Nope. One of the features of the English language is that many words mean many different things in different contexts. A competent speaker of the language has no difficulty determining which meaning is the intended one in the context of the discussion. A desire to contest definitions and abhor his overloading is born out of a need for simplistic minds to have a context-free lexicon, but that isn't how any human language works, nor is there any benefit to this for fluent speakers of one, although granted it would be a help to people still learning the language.
I bet most of Doom is a disaster too.
Wasn't the picture in the original article where they show how it fails on those kinds of graphics, in fact, from Doom?