True, it is the texture. But let's be honest here. It's not just the texture. It's the whole look of the application. Delicious Library has a VERY distinctive look. Books and DVD boxes sitting on wooden shelves. It's unmistakable, yet these applications completely aped it. More importantly, it is confusingly similar.
Really? The DRM is being installed at the music industry's behest? You mean end consumers aren't clamoring for this? But the media industry keeps telling me how DRM is better for customers!
Come, now, it was only one other performer (Ben Folds, if you're curious, doing a sweet solo gig).
The irony of course is, that I don't even care about any of the bands they had. But it was the lack of the invite, and the cavalier attitude University Relations had about it that upset me.
I'll grant you that MSR interns sound like they get a pretty different summer than the rest of us, but on the flip side you also work in much nicer buildings
I am somewhat surprised you didn't do the Intern Summer Celebration thing, though - they flew interns in from other campuses for that one.
Don't get me wrong. I liked my time at MSR. Cool people. Interesting problems. Foosball. It was great a experience all the way, and I would recommend it to anyone without reservation. I can't stress that more. It's the double standard that University Relations has that I can't stand. The only conclusion you can draw is that they consider Research interns second class. MSR is great, but MSUR can suck it.
Yeah. Tell me about it. I was a MSR intern last year. Non-Research interns got the red carpet, while Research's got the shaft. On day one, HR told us, "We have several intern events planned this year, but not every group will go to each event. So if you hear that some interns are going rock climbing and you're not, don't worry. It will be made up with some hiking or wine tasting event. Same thing with baseball tickets. Different groups go on different days, so don't worry."
That police escort was to a private concert with Vampire Weekend, and like three other bands. Every attendees received a free Zune. (Granted, it's a Zune, but it's home electronics rather than a damn sweatshirt. and at the very least you can sell it on eBay.) The Research interns were pissed. HR's response "We told you not everyone will go to the same event. You have a boat cruise." My response: "They better be passing out free XBoxes at the dock."
On the bright side, I used my corporate discount and corporate debit card to buy this sweet 17" MacBook Pro. (Right back at you BillG and SteveB!)
We, in the US, can't do it. Money alone isn't enough. We don't have the technical expertise anymore
We're not any dumber now than we were 40 years ago. The fact is, that the Space Age is over. It ended sometime in the early 70s. There isn't a country in the world with a surplus of young aerospace engineers, since aerospace just isn't cool anymore.
, and brainpower is getting more difficult to import/adapt, as we are no longer the leader of the free world,
While I might agree that brainpower is becoming more difficult to import, it's certainly not because "we are no longer the leader of the free world." Who is the current leader of the free world? Austria? The loss of appeal of staying in the US has much more to do with the rising economic standards of the developing world, and the current state of the US economy.
but possibly have one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations.
Obviously, the US is as oppressive as China.
Creative minds are attracted to freedom.
People are attracted to money. Creative or otherwise.
Every penny is ultra important anymore. We no longer have things like Bell Labs, we can't justify Bell Labs anymore on mere financial terms. What's money got to do with it? Unfortunately, everything. We can no longer afford space programs, because we can't afford taxes, car, life, health insurance and credit card fees. And regulation requiring even more mandatory insurance fees is imminent.
US taxes are among the lowest in the industrialized world. Leaving health insurance to the "free market" has resulted in such cost savings, that we spend 15.3% of GDP on healthcare (second in the world), and is estimated to reach 19.5 percent of GDP by 2017.
It's gonna be Japanese(expertise, freedom of creativity)
JAXA? That agency that doesn't even have any capability, nor plans, for manned space flight; let alone "massive space stations". Given the culture is biased towards conformity in Japan, your "freedom of creativity" seems to be based solely on flickr photos of Harajuku.
and Chinese(resources, chinese-wall-building-like stamina, centrally focused government of the ancient Egyptian type) only in space
Wow. Right out of the Onion's Our Dumb Century's headline, "Will the Steam Engine Replace the China-Man?"
Nice to see that you left out the Indians.
But do we really care these days for space stations?
No. We stopped caring after the international pissing contest that was the Cold War ended.
The energy problem is more crucial.
Bingo. So why waste time with "massive space stations?" That was soooo last century.
But we no longer have backyards of Oberlin to figure it out,
Your fetish of the lone amateur scientist, toiling away in his garage, until he alone solves the world's Great Problem is -- to put it delicately -- absurd. You are describing the world of the 19th century. A world where advances in basic science were done with an optical microscope. A world where we knew almost nothing of how the basic laws of the universe worked. Those days are thankfully long gone. You might as well be lamenting the fact that an uneducated goat herder can't make advances in modern math with only two rocks and a compass.
and even if we do, people are too busy working too jobs to make ends meet and don't have the time anymore for it. Look at houses built in the US in the 1890-1920 period, and the decorations on them. Compare ones built in 1960-2000. Who had free time on their hands, and extra
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did.
Probably? So you don't actually know, but instead are just going to rely on the old saw of "Well they didn't ask me! I don't know anyone they asked! Those muckity muck scientists aren't so smart!"
The population of the UK is approximately 60,943,912. Assuming your draws (i.e. choosing who to ask and who answered) are uniformly random, and independent and identically distributed (i.e. the answers of any one person does not effect the answers of anyone else, nor who you ask) the size of your sample for being 95% sure (i.e. your "confidence level") that your results are within 4 percentage points (i.e. the "confidence interval" (i.e. the +- number seen at the bottom of polls)), then you need to a mere 600 random individuals. If you want to be 99% sure that number of file sharers are within 4 percentage points of you counted, then you need to ask 1,040.
Assuming the sample is unbiased, asking 1,176 individuals from a population of 60,943,912 with a confidence level of 95% in your 11.6% result gives you an error bar (i.e. confidence interval) of 1.83%. Going up to 99%, your error bar increases to 2.41%.
2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported
This is known as controlling for sampling bias. Not only is it an long established and mathematically proven method, but to not control for sampling bias is sign of shoddy work. Work so shoddy, that you would fail an undergrad statistics course.
3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
Same can be said about your unsupported allegations of bias, especially given your lack understanding of long established statistical sampling techniques.
N. real statistics researchers know that this study has numerable crippling flaws and should not be held as gospel by anyone. Even a first year stats student can see it. The reason this story is important is that it may influence governmental policy and it's flawed... That's danger
At least the irony of you making this statement isn't lost on one of us.
Also the bit where your data is locked into whatever file formats the cloud provider has and you will have difficulty maintaining your own back ups and migrating to a different provider if the current one is inadequate or fails.
Yup. It's just another variation of a walled garden.
While not about software-as-a-service, JCDL 09 had an insightful paper "What Happens When Facebook is Gone?", about the lack of control, specifically archivability, of the content on facebook. The key quote:
Archiving oneâ(TM)s personal Facebook data is also not currently possible. Facebook does not provide a mechanism to locally archive oneâ(TM)s profile, activities, or messages or to export oneâ(TM)s profile to other social networking sites. This is despite efforts like the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web [23], a manifesto espousing the opinion that all data from social networks should be transportable, and public statements made by Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) in 2007 supporting that opinion [21].
Let us all remember Lawrence Lessig's observation "code is law."
"Suicide" makes it sound like he was depressed. Sounds like this guy wasn't. He decided to go out on his own terms. He chose euthanasia. If only we all had such bravery when facing such a long debilitating decline.
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense. Congress decided they wanted to tax high salaried people. Therefore companies found ways around those laws. In comes stock bonuses and stock options. The problem with that is that a highly paid employee (most likely a decision maker) will do what is best for them, which is kick up the stock price so that they get higher effective pay. Easy way to do that, kill long term R&D. In addition with companies hiring people with business BS degrees who then get an MBA to manage, instead of the engineers, everything is looked at on the current P&L statement, not the 10+ year roadmap.
Well actually, it wasn't to "tax high salaried people", that would be income tax. This is a change in the corporate tax structure. (After all, how can one deduct his/her income as an expense?) Stock options are taxed differently from normal compensation. Namely, options are recorded as an expense for the value of the option at time of issuance, but when exercised, a tax deduction is made for the new (read: "higher") value of the option. That is deduction is more than the expense claimed. Back in 2007, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced legislation to eliminate this loophole. It stalled in committee.
Ironically, stock option based compensation was touted at the time as ensuring long-term profitability and performance of the company, since the employees were now "co-owners." Instead, it encouraged maximizing short term rewards, at the expense of the long term.
If you need to think that everything even vaguely related to computing needs to be done in powers of two, you're doing something wrong.
I didn't say that everything had to be done in powers of two. I'm saying that capacities should be in powers of two, because that's the natural base. I'm also saying that this being perceived as a source of error simply doesn't exist. I'm also saying that in 50 years, this simply hasn't been a problem until hdd manufacturers wanted a reason to inflate their capacities to entice the average Best Buy customer. I'm also saying that you're introducing a legacy problem where now you have no idea if 1MB is 2^20 bytes or 1^6 bytes. I'm also saying that expressing storage capacities in power of 10 doesn't make any sense, because at no point are they a "round number" in base 10.
Your example is bad because its the default one. 1 terabyte to 1024 gigabytes is easy. How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB? Or for more better example, 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB than start calculating it, while its kinda close anyway.
4 TB = 4096 GB. The other ones, I don't know off the top of my head. Figuring out that 15 TB = 16285 GB - 1024 GB = 15061 GB took too long in my head. And you know what? You never do these conversions in real life. If you want to know how much space is left, you simply think in terms of the largest unit you have. Same thing when you're deterring what disk to upgrade to.
Case in point. How many megabytes are in 405 gigabytes? My answer: Who cares? If you need to think about storing that much data in 1024 separate storage units, you're doing something wrong.
And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible. Obviously they are going to use terms and units that non-geeky people understand.
That's funny. I know several research labs that use macs as their desktops. Your chauvinism and jealousy is showing.
What many people don't understand is that companies don't want to compete. Ideally, they want to form a monopoly and then stop innovating (because that's a cost) and raise prices (because that's profit). If they can't form a monopoly, they want to form a cartel with their main rivals. Murdoch and Son realize they can't buy the BBC, so they're taking the cartel approach whining about how they "can't compete". Actually what they're saying is, "Our plan to raise prices won't work, as long as someone doesn't. Join the news cartel, and we'll all profit."
1. Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
You know, that's the main reason why I don't like to use someone else's account, or have someone else use my account. We've all had something autocomplete, that we rather wouldn't. I'm a private person. I don't go through your medicine cabinet, don't go through my browsing history.
True story. I was over a friend's place and wanted to check my mail or something, so he gave me his roommate's laptop to use. I started typing in some url, and it autocompleted to manhunt.net. I told my friend, "You know, I don't like using someone else's account, because I don't want to stumble across their porn and hookh-up sites accidently." Without looking up from his own laptop he said, "Yup. That's why I created a guest account, and insist on people using it."
I'd add to make sure the company's in house lawyer signs off on it, because one thing you want to avoid is future discovery requirements. You really need the in house lawyer to check to see if this is strong enough firewall between work and home.
Clearly you don't know what the Christian Science Monitor is. The CSM is not only widely regarded, winning numerous (ironically) Pulitzer Prizes, but given it's awesome "Fuck you, you lying douche bag, Joseph Pulitzer!" origin, it's positively punk rock.
Anyone want to explain why I should believe someone who would say such a thing? If that isn't the AGW argument, perhaps someone can explain what part is inconsistent with the AGW argument.
And now the government and politicians wants to grab the helm of this out of control religion (after all it does require a degree of faith) and start telling people what they can and can't do "because of global warming" while they (the politicians) make millions of dollars by robbing us blind. This whole thing stinks!
You live in a strange world conspiracies and secret societies don't you? You also must not live in a working democracy, but rather some sub-Saharan African kleptocracy, because the money raised by the government through taxes and fines are not distributed to the personal accounts of government officials, as you apparently believe. In a democracy, "government" is what we call it, when we, the population, decided to do something together.
And if that really is the AGW argument, why on earth would anyone, without some ulterior motive, believe such a thing.
Wikipedia is not a forum where everyone can post his opinion and let the user decide which one's right. It's an encyclopedia. If someone defaces it or uses it as a means to alter someone's reputation (for good or ill), it will lose credibility.
Wait! Until now it was both. It wasn't that long ago that the fact that anyone can edit it, and that the community comes to a consensus through editing and discussing the edits, was the strength of Wikipedia. It was what enabled Wikipedia to not only react to new events and information, but to quickly correct errors when found. It was what allowed for rapid improvement. It was quality control. In fact, this feature was the key feature of Wikipedia. It was what enabled Wikipedia to thrive, after the failed of experiment of Nupedia, with its "expert" editors, fail.
For one, this "control freak" measure can be used, for example, to prevent mad scientologists from removing negative remarks on their current leaders, or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
No. It enables those in control to dictate the article. If you've got some right-wing zealot controlling the article, good luck in getting any negative aspects added to the entry. Without an authoritarian censor, the information will be added, and perhaps in the worst case, a brief edit war breaks out, but they inevitably always burn out, and what is left is some reasonable approximation of the truth.
If your contribution is indeed impartial (remember we're only talking about living people entries), it WILL get accepted. Just not as fast as you'd want to, but it will.
No. Not "impartial," but "acceptable" to the article's "owner."
I fear your faith in an unelected and controlling authority, instead of the wisdom of the crowd, will be sadly dashed.
I don't know if this idea is good or not, but at least put forward a proper debate rather than claims about creating "two classes" or whining that people no longer have an "equal right" (hey, do I have an equal right to edit the NYTimes article?)
The Grey Lady doesn't say it's a "newspaper that anyone can edit." Wikipedia does. Now that's not true, which makes Jimbo and the rest of the Wikipedia cabal, liars. Yes, there's been protection, and semi-protection in the past, but always on a per article basis. This is on an entire class of articles, which is fundamentally different. Also, semi-protection just required you to be logged in, now you have to be someone blessed by the Cabal. And how do you do it? By sucking up to whoever decided that they "own" a page. No one "owns" the pages. They exist for everyone. (See this comment about Wikipedia level grinding.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's distinctive from other software apps, but it's not in general a distinctive interface.
That's all that matters though.
True, it is the texture. But let's be honest here. It's not just the texture. It's the whole look of the application. Delicious Library has a VERY distinctive look. Books and DVD boxes sitting on wooden shelves. It's unmistakable, yet these applications completely aped it. More importantly, it is confusingly similar.
Really? The DRM is being installed at the music industry's behest? You mean end consumers aren't clamoring for this? But the media industry keeps telling me how DRM is better for customers!
Come, now, it was only one other performer (Ben Folds, if you're curious, doing a sweet solo gig).
The irony of course is, that I don't even care about any of the bands they had. But it was the lack of the invite, and the cavalier attitude University Relations had about it that upset me.
I'll grant you that MSR interns sound like they get a pretty different summer than the rest of us, but on the flip side you also work in much nicer buildings
Building 99 is pretty damn awesome.
I am somewhat surprised you didn't do the Intern Summer Celebration thing, though - they flew interns in from other campuses for that one.
Don't get me wrong. I liked my time at MSR. Cool people. Interesting problems. Foosball. It was great a experience all the way, and I would recommend it to anyone without reservation. I can't stress that more. It's the double standard that University Relations has that I can't stand. The only conclusion you can draw is that they consider Research interns second class. MSR is great, but MSUR can suck it.
That was my only negative experience with them.
Yeah. Tell me about it. I was a MSR intern last year. Non-Research interns got the red carpet, while Research's got the shaft. On day one, HR told us, "We have several intern events planned this year, but not every group will go to each event. So if you hear that some interns are going rock climbing and you're not, don't worry. It will be made up with some hiking or wine tasting event. Same thing with baseball tickets. Different groups go on different days, so don't worry."
That police escort was to a private concert with Vampire Weekend, and like three other bands. Every attendees received a free Zune. (Granted, it's a Zune, but it's home electronics rather than a damn sweatshirt. and at the very least you can sell it on eBay.) The Research interns were pissed. HR's response "We told you not everyone will go to the same event. You have a boat cruise." My response: "They better be passing out free XBoxes at the dock."
On the bright side, I used my corporate discount and corporate debit card to buy this sweet 17" MacBook Pro. (Right back at you BillG and SteveB!)
We, in the US, can't do it. Money alone isn't enough. We don't have the technical expertise anymore
We're not any dumber now than we were 40 years ago. The fact is, that the Space Age is over. It ended sometime in the early 70s. There isn't a country in the world with a surplus of young aerospace engineers, since aerospace just isn't cool anymore.
, and brainpower is getting more difficult to import/adapt, as we are no longer the leader of the free world,
While I might agree that brainpower is becoming more difficult to import, it's certainly not because "we are no longer the leader of the free world." Who is the current leader of the free world? Austria? The loss of appeal of staying in the US has much more to do with the rising economic standards of the developing world, and the current state of the US economy.
but possibly have one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations.
Obviously, the US is as oppressive as China.
Creative minds are attracted to freedom.
People are attracted to money. Creative or otherwise.
Every penny is ultra important anymore. We no longer have things like Bell Labs, we can't justify Bell Labs anymore on mere financial terms. What's money got to do with it? Unfortunately, everything. We can no longer afford space programs, because we can't afford taxes, car, life, health insurance and credit card fees. And regulation requiring even more mandatory insurance fees is imminent.
US taxes are among the lowest in the industrialized world. Leaving health insurance to the "free market" has resulted in such cost savings, that we spend 15.3% of GDP on healthcare (second in the world), and is estimated to reach 19.5 percent of GDP by 2017.
It's gonna be Japanese(expertise, freedom of creativity)
JAXA? That agency that doesn't even have any capability, nor plans, for manned space flight; let alone "massive space stations". Given the culture is biased towards conformity in Japan, your "freedom of creativity" seems to be based solely on flickr photos of Harajuku.
and Chinese(resources, chinese-wall-building-like stamina, centrally focused government of the ancient Egyptian type) only in space
Wow. Right out of the Onion's Our Dumb Century's headline, "Will the Steam Engine Replace the China-Man?"
Nice to see that you left out the Indians.
But do we really care these days for space stations?
No. We stopped caring after the international pissing contest that was the Cold War ended.
The energy problem is more crucial.
Bingo. So why waste time with "massive space stations?" That was soooo last century.
But we no longer have backyards of Oberlin to figure it out,
Your fetish of the lone amateur scientist, toiling away in his garage, until he alone solves the world's Great Problem is -- to put it delicately -- absurd. You are describing the world of the 19th century. A world where advances in basic science were done with an optical microscope. A world where we knew almost nothing of how the basic laws of the universe worked. Those days are thankfully long gone. You might as well be lamenting the fact that an uneducated goat herder can't make advances in modern math with only two rocks and a compass.
and even if we do, people are too busy working too jobs to make ends meet and don't have the time anymore for it. Look at houses built in the US in the 1890-1920 period, and the decorations on them. Compare ones built in 1960-2000. Who had free time on their hands, and extra
1. the same size is small.. probably too small to make the claims they did.
Probably? So you don't actually know, but instead are just going to rely on the old saw of "Well they didn't ask me! I don't know anyone they asked! Those muckity muck scientists aren't so smart!"
The population of the UK is approximately 60,943,912. Assuming your draws (i.e. choosing who to ask and who answered) are uniformly random, and independent and identically distributed (i.e. the answers of any one person does not effect the answers of anyone else, nor who you ask) the size of your sample for being 95% sure (i.e. your "confidence level") that your results are within 4 percentage points (i.e. the "confidence interval" (i.e. the +- number seen at the bottom of polls)), then you need to a mere 600 random individuals. If you want to be 99% sure that number of file sharers are within 4 percentage points of you counted, then you need to ask 1,040.
Assuming the sample is unbiased, asking 1,176 individuals from a population of 60,943,912 with a confidence level of 95% in your 11.6% result gives you an error bar (i.e. confidence interval) of 1.83%. Going up to 99%, your error bar increases to 2.41%.
2. they altered the numbers on an estimate of how many people fileshare on the assumption that the number was under-reported
This is known as controlling for sampling bias. Not only is it an long established and mathematically proven method, but to not control for sampling bias is sign of shoddy work. Work so shoddy, that you would fail an undergrad statistics course.
3. conflict of interest... it's like the tobacco industry sponsoring studies claiming that smoking doesn't have anything to do with lung cancer... there is significant reason to believe that the study carries significant bias in favor of their conclusion and must at the least be repeated by other sources.
Same can be said about your unsupported allegations of bias, especially given your lack understanding of long established statistical sampling techniques.
N. real statistics researchers know that this study has numerable crippling flaws and should not be held as gospel by anyone. Even a first year stats student can see it. The reason this story is important is that it may influence governmental policy and it's flawed... That's danger
At least the irony of you making this statement isn't lost on one of us.
In short. Go to school and take a stats class.
While perhaps useful for export, a crappy 3rd party app isn't the same as having in the API as Zuck says he's committed to.
Also the bit where your data is locked into whatever file formats the cloud provider has and you will have difficulty maintaining your own back ups and migrating to a different provider if the current one is inadequate or fails.
Yup. It's just another variation of a walled garden.
While not about software-as-a-service, JCDL 09 had an insightful paper "What Happens When Facebook is Gone?", about the lack of control, specifically archivability, of the content on facebook. The key quote:
Let us all remember Lawrence Lessig's observation "code is law."
I realized that right after I posted it. :(
And it's a great place for a rumble!
"Suicide" makes it sound like he was depressed. Sounds like this guy wasn't. He decided to go out on his own terms. He chose euthanasia. If only we all had such bravery when facing such a long debilitating decline.
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense. Congress decided they wanted to tax high salaried people. Therefore companies found ways around those laws. In comes stock bonuses and stock options. The problem with that is that a highly paid employee (most likely a decision maker) will do what is best for them, which is kick up the stock price so that they get higher effective pay. Easy way to do that, kill long term R&D. In addition with companies hiring people with business BS degrees who then get an MBA to manage, instead of the engineers, everything is looked at on the current P&L statement, not the 10+ year roadmap.
Well actually, it wasn't to "tax high salaried people", that would be income tax. This is a change in the corporate tax structure. (After all, how can one deduct his/her income as an expense?) Stock options are taxed differently from normal compensation. Namely, options are recorded as an expense for the value of the option at time of issuance, but when exercised, a tax deduction is made for the new (read: "higher") value of the option. That is deduction is more than the expense claimed. Back in 2007, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) introduced legislation to eliminate this loophole. It stalled in committee.
Ironically, stock option based compensation was touted at the time as ensuring long-term profitability and performance of the company, since the employees were now "co-owners." Instead, it encouraged maximizing short term rewards, at the expense of the long term.
If you need to think that everything even vaguely related to computing needs to be done in powers of two, you're doing something wrong.
I didn't say that everything had to be done in powers of two. I'm saying that capacities should be in powers of two, because that's the natural base. I'm also saying that this being perceived as a source of error simply doesn't exist. I'm also saying that in 50 years, this simply hasn't been a problem until hdd manufacturers wanted a reason to inflate their capacities to entice the average Best Buy customer. I'm also saying that you're introducing a legacy problem where now you have no idea if 1MB is 2^20 bytes or 1^6 bytes. I'm also saying that expressing storage capacities in power of 10 doesn't make any sense, because at no point are they a "round number" in base 10.
In short: It's a manufactured controversy.
Your example is bad because its the default one. 1 terabyte to 1024 gigabytes is easy. How quickly you calculate that to 4TB? 15TB? 492TB? Or for more better example, 405GB to MB's? Its just a lot easier to think 405GB = 405 000MB than start calculating it, while its kinda close anyway.
4 TB = 4096 GB. The other ones, I don't know off the top of my head. Figuring out that 15 TB = 16285 GB - 1024 GB = 15061 GB took too long in my head. And you know what? You never do these conversions in real life. If you want to know how much space is left, you simply think in terms of the largest unit you have. Same thing when you're deterring what disk to upgrade to.
Case in point. How many megabytes are in 405 gigabytes? My answer: Who cares? If you need to think about storing that much data in 1024 separate storage units, you're doing something wrong.
And its a mac. What did you think? It's as far from a nerdy computer as possible. Obviously they are going to use terms and units that non-geeky people understand.
That's funny. I know several research labs that use macs as their desktops. Your chauvinism and jealousy is showing.
What many people don't understand is that companies don't want to compete. Ideally, they want to form a monopoly and then stop innovating (because that's a cost) and raise prices (because that's profit). If they can't form a monopoly, they want to form a cartel with their main rivals. Murdoch and Son realize they can't buy the BBC, so they're taking the cartel approach whining about how they "can't compete". Actually what they're saying is, "Our plan to raise prices won't work, as long as someone doesn't. Join the news cartel, and we'll all profit."
Yes, because Linux has put Microsoft out of business.
No, but Google Apps will.
1. Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
You know, that's the main reason why I don't like to use someone else's account, or have someone else use my account. We've all had something autocomplete, that we rather wouldn't. I'm a private person. I don't go through your medicine cabinet, don't go through my browsing history.
True story. I was over a friend's place and wanted to check my mail or something, so he gave me his roommate's laptop to use. I started typing in some url, and it autocompleted to manhunt.net. I told my friend, "You know, I don't like using someone else's account, because I don't want to stumble across their porn and hookh-up sites accidently." Without looking up from his own laptop he said, "Yup. That's why I created a guest account, and insist on people using it."
Good idea.
I'd add to make sure the company's in house lawyer signs off on it, because one thing you want to avoid is future discovery requirements. You really need the in house lawyer to check to see if this is strong enough firewall between work and home.
Clearly you don't know what the Christian Science Monitor is. The CSM is not only widely regarded, winning numerous (ironically) Pulitzer Prizes, but given it's awesome "Fuck you, you lying douche bag, Joseph Pulitzer!" origin, it's positively punk rock.
Anyone want to explain why I should believe someone who would say such a thing? If that isn't the AGW argument, perhaps someone can explain what part is inconsistent with the AGW argument.
May I suggest you read up on "confidence intervals?"
And now the government and politicians wants to grab the helm of this out of control religion (after all it does require a degree of faith) and start telling people what they can and can't do "because of global warming" while they (the politicians) make millions of dollars by robbing us blind. This whole thing stinks!
You live in a strange world conspiracies and secret societies don't you? You also must not live in a working democracy, but rather some sub-Saharan African kleptocracy, because the money raised by the government through taxes and fines are not distributed to the personal accounts of government officials, as you apparently believe. In a democracy, "government" is what we call it, when we, the population, decided to do something together.
And if that really is the AGW argument, why on earth would anyone, without some ulterior motive, believe such a thing.
You could read "How to Think Like a Scientist: Answering Questions by the Scientific Method
by Stephen P. Kramer," "A Beginner's Guide to Scientific Method by Stephen S. Carey," or An Introduction To Logic And Scientific Method by Morris F. Cohen."
You can find these, and many more books about science, at your local library!
Google has the iPhone.
Wikipedia is not a forum where everyone can post his opinion and let the user decide which one's right. It's an encyclopedia. If someone defaces it or uses it as a means to alter someone's reputation (for good or ill), it will lose credibility.
Wait! Until now it was both. It wasn't that long ago that the fact that anyone can edit it, and that the community comes to a consensus through editing and discussing the edits, was the strength of Wikipedia. It was what enabled Wikipedia to not only react to new events and information, but to quickly correct errors when found. It was what allowed for rapid improvement. It was quality control. In fact, this feature was the key feature of Wikipedia. It was what enabled Wikipedia to thrive, after the failed of experiment of Nupedia, with its "expert" editors, fail.
For one, this "control freak" measure can be used, for example, to prevent mad scientologists from removing negative remarks on their current leaders, or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
No. It enables those in control to dictate the article. If you've got some right-wing zealot controlling the article, good luck in getting any negative aspects added to the entry. Without an authoritarian censor, the information will be added, and perhaps in the worst case, a brief edit war breaks out, but they inevitably always burn out, and what is left is some reasonable approximation of the truth.
If your contribution is indeed impartial (remember we're only talking about living people entries), it WILL get accepted. Just not as fast as you'd want to, but it will.
No. Not "impartial," but "acceptable" to the article's "owner."
I fear your faith in an unelected and controlling authority, instead of the wisdom of the crowd, will be sadly dashed.
I don't know if this idea is good or not, but at least put forward a proper debate rather than claims about creating "two classes" or whining that people no longer have an "equal right" (hey, do I have an equal right to edit the NYTimes article?)
The Grey Lady doesn't say it's a "newspaper that anyone can edit." Wikipedia does. Now that's not true, which makes Jimbo and the rest of the Wikipedia cabal, liars. Yes, there's been protection, and semi-protection in the past, but always on a per article basis. This is on an entire class of articles, which is fundamentally different. Also, semi-protection just required you to be logged in, now you have to be someone blessed by the Cabal. And how do you do it? By sucking up to whoever decided that they "own" a page. No one "owns" the pages. They exist for everyone. (See this comment about Wikipedia level grinding.)