"People who risk smashing their heads into the floor for a living can have noticeable differences in their brains"
Not really surprising, is it? All the padding in the world doesn't absorb the shock of decelerations like that and your brain is a squidy thing inside a bit hard thing, with a bit of leeway and fluid.
No matter how hard the eggshell, you can still break the yolk inside.
But does it work if you have an ounce of common sense? I was quite interested in Prime day - I give Amazon a LOT of business and Prime is worth it just on postage costs alone, let alone the freebies thrown in.
However, everything I looked at on Prime day didn't look... anything near amazing. A bit Meh, if I'm honest. I didn't buy a single thing, even the things already on my wishlist. Because nothing made me say "Oh, that's a good deal" or "That's come down in price" or "I better get that while it's cheap". It was all just... comparable pricing to what I would expect from anywhere else.
Are people really that gullible that just because you say it's 10,000% off they fall for it and pay even normal retail price when they didn't really know they wanted the item anyway? It's a sad state of affairs if people haven't educated themselves by now. I can sort of understand some old granny who's not all there falling for it, but people buying shit from Amazon on a special advertised day, with a Prime account? It doesn't make any sense.
I treat Steam the same way. The first Summer Sales were amazing, I picked up SO MANY games, and bonus things that I was *excited* for the next sale. And then it has been Meh ever since. I look at a game that's 50p off and think "50p extra yesterday or tomorrow, or wait until it really comes down in price" and it's just not worth it. If it was $5 off, maybe, especially if it's a really cheap game. But even there, if I ask "am I going to be annoyed that I didn't get this discount?" pretty much the answer is no. And that's on a site where I spend mostly "fake" money - marketplace money earned from selling off cards that I don't do anything to get except run a game and then Alt-Tab back to my browser.
But spending real money on a deal that, give it a week, and you could probably price-match on anyway? Are people really that stupid?
Maybe all that talk about learning a skill, a trade, getting an education, etc. wasn't all bullshit after all? Seriously, nobody is entitled to free money, so you get a skill and then use that skill to prove your worth and get to the point where people will pay you to utilise that skill.
Sure, if your job can be replaced by a robot after decades of doing it, that's annoying. So you re-train, no? Get another job doing something else. Hopefully something not so dull and mindless that a little bit of metal and a motor can do it for you and always could have?
I'm being facetious, but people who whine about jobs not being available for them are often the people who are not suitable for, or interested in, the jobs that do exist.
And, yes, I have worked stacking shelves. I did it when I was in my 30's on a night-shift, while also working as an IT Manager for an exclusive private school during the day. I was the only one hired who stuck it out for any length of time, the others who were all hired with me all dropped out because it was hard work, were moonlighting, or plain quit. One of them said the job was "beneath her" because it meant moving boxes and putting them on the shelves (she was otherwise unemployed on benefits for her entire adult life).
And the benefits system had number of weeks after which they class you as "obviously trying to get a job" and will then start to pay your benefits if you lose it. People knew the rules inside out, and would work for PRECISELY the number of days necessary to have their benefits reinstated and not a second more.
Maybe if they'd put that effort into learning a trade that people would find useful, they could figure in the official statistics more.
If anything, in my country, the politics covers up quite how little people need to do to be given free money, quite how much of my tax is paying for that, and quite how well known the scams are, and how easy they would be to crack down on. There are literally enough people doing it that it would affect voting if they proposed changes, so they don't dare mention it for fear they'll be made to do something about it.
Hold on the notification. Block all notifications. Never hear from that program again.
I haven't yet allowed one app except those that actually NEED to inform me (e.g. a mail app) and even there, I paid for TouchDown so I could put on working-hours to turn off work-email notifications when I just don't care about them (i.e. outside of work days/hours) - maybe the default mail app does it now, but it didn't years ago when I bought TouchDown.
And if a program doesn't allow me to fine-tune notifications so I get spammed with "product updates" when all I want is the message my friend sent me? I just uninstall the app and - usually - use their website instead.
In the same way that the telephone is the rudest device known to man (ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, I'M GOING TO KEEP RINGING, ANSWER ME NOW), notifications are the spam of the modern era.
Turn them off. How to do so on an iPhone/iPad? Don't ask me but surely there's a was as simple as the above.
"UNWANTED NOTIFICATION!" - hold finger on it, say "Fuck off" (purely for frustration venting), turn off app's permission to ever post a notification again.
Oh, and stop installing dozens of apps for unnecessary shit that you could just use the website (again - same thing, never allowed a "desktop notification" in my life on a browser).
Moreso than the organisation of an event (which is hard), I am much more disappointed in tens of thousands of people turning up to chase virtual characters around a park on their phones AND PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE.
Honestly, that's much more in the "what the fuck has the world come to" area than someone who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.
I also remember using ZIPSLACK, which booted it via SYSLINUX from a DOS prompt, saved in a normal FAT partition, if I remember correctly. It was the first real "how to use Linux without trashing your partitions or using a boot disk" version.
I remember spending a lot of time on Slack 3.9 which contained just the right versions of GCC and kernel to compile for Freesco (a single floppy router distro that's still around).
For many years, I ran it as my only desktop (8.0 - 13.0 or thereabouts) and - when hardware has failed and I've been forced onto older machines - I've installed Slackware in preference to get as much done as I can on the creaky hardware.
I ran servers on it for all kinds of purposes and in all sorts of places.
Then, I admit, I had to move to Ubuntu when deploying desktops, just for the ease of use. And now, in the virtual machine era, I have a weird switch where - instead of Slack on servers and Ubuntu LTS on clients - I do the reverse. Which gives me one-command app installation with dependencies on servers (who cares what GUI is used), but Slack lets me choose how my personal system works and exactly when and makes it predictable and configurable.
Slackware gave me a lot. From my first glimpses at a real OS that I'd heard only in myth and legend, to the knowledge that you could run machines within machines even before virtualisation was readily available, to my first real exposure to serious programming and working on open-source projects, to a career in deploying boxes equivalent to the more expensive commercial offerings, to running all the backends of my professional setups, to providing me with a free and powerful desktop when I had no money, to giving me control over my server estate and running inside Windows servers to do the things they just can't do as efficiently.
At one point or another, Slackware has shown me everything about a computer that I find interesting and intriguing, which Windows has never managed. DOS and Windows were always a case of spending time trying to get the best out them through guesswork and hope and closed tools (see the EMM386, etc. conversation in the Reddit thread!). Slackware showed me that you can look into the system and change anything you like, because that's exactly how it got made, and everything became understandable, predictable, and Slackware was chosen on merit out of THOUSANDS of other distros that all used the same code (which to me, shows just how good it is - anyone could copy Slackware's entire codebase, and many have, but Slackware is still going).
And then some fuckhead made systemd and all the other modern shite. And still Slackware is out there, competing without even trying.
If I was sent on a mission out of the solar system, where it was just me and a bunch of machines around me to keep me alive, I'd be insisting it all ran Slackware. And taking a bunch of Slackware CDs with me.
Yeah, Apollo didn't have requirements. And they just fired people at the moon and hoped they wouldn't crash too fast to get out and survive. P.S. "not been done before"? Only to a particular planet, not "in history". In fact, NASA are pretty famous as being the only people in history to have ever done it, and then brought them back safely, ever.
Bollocks does NASA not have requirements, or not make them generally known if people need their authorisation. They probably had people spending years on NOTHING MORE THAN THAT.
Cheap, routine, safe. Pick any two.
US launches stagnated because the money wasn't available, despite being asked for. NASA does just a tiny bit more than just look for new toys. What I claim is that if Musk's investment had been put into NASA *specifically* for research in that exact area, they'd have done a better job of it. But also, that if the money had been available, they could have done something much more interesting with it.
Tesla - we disagree. It's a low-volume, barely mass-market vehicle propped up by a zero-profit venture selling basically at a loss. The technological innovations are absolutely minimal and have been replicated and surpassed by every car manufacturer on the planet in the space of a couple of years. Maybe credit for "prompting" that, certainly not for having done anything that couldn't have been achieved with an "we must have electric vehicles" impetus from government, industry or investors.
A decade is a LONG time in industry. Technologies can come and go in that time. I honestly don't believe Tesla have done anything amazing beyond pouring money into existing techs (that historically didn't exist or weren't viable in their state, but Tesla didn't *change* or *invent* the batteries, motors, etc. they just used things that came onto the market which were viable).
Tesla, ten years down the line: Quarter Total production Model X sales Q1 2016 15,510 2,400 Q2 2016 18,345 4,638 Q3 2016 25,185 8,774 Q4 2016 24,882 9,500
Smart Cars (niche, tiny automobiles) have sold 1.7m units of one single model of theirs.
Tesla are a drop in the damn ocean in industry, incredibly overvalued, by comparison.
Sorry, but Musk isn't anything more than a guy with lots of money to burn, and people willing to take it away from him. Sure, it's easy to give away cars and space rockets at losses and never make it to continued viability, and generate a lot of press along the way. It doesn't mean he's a good businessman or should hold any weight in industry whatsoever.
He's an eccentric, throwing money at sci-fi toys. Of course things "work". But he gets bored quick, never really gets much done, and certainly doesn't make any decent profit doing so. Investors wouldn't do what he did, precisely because of what's happened to most of the money he puts in. He's hoping each venture will not only create a new market but THAT HE WILL OWN THAT MARKET, and thus pay himself back. Which is ridiculous. And not how it's going.
Let the moron spend all the R&D money and find out what people "like", then the multi-billion dollar companies who have to make profit will cherry-pick anything that's successful and take over in a year leaving him with nothing. There's a reason that electric cars are still an incredibly niche market, because they aren't selling. Even Tesla's.
There's a reason people don't just start up space companies, because they are relatively unprofitable and hugely risky. There's a reason even NASA don't do much manned spaceflight any more. There's a reason train companies aren't investing billions in sci-fi trains.
He's an idealist, sure. But he's not going to ever find something so fantabulously amazing that other people couldn't have found quicker and easier if they decided to burn the same amount of money in the same areas.
So.... he didn't read the requirements before he started, didn't look at previous NASA designs used successfully, thought he could just throw money at the problem rather than have to actually comply with safety rules?
That's now scrapped in favour of a tested, successful and working design, compliant with NASA's regulations.
It's not like people sprung this on him suddenly. Normal, well-adjusted business people, before launching billions into a project, look at the requirements and design accordingly. Not throw money at it and hope you're made the exception.
I can't say that I disagree with the OP or that your clarification provides any argument against him.
"We made something that nobody would ever approve, so we have to go back to doing it in the way they would approve it" is about the politest way you could word it.
Let's be honest, Mr Musk thinks that the sun shines out of his arse and "everyone else is wrong". Fact is, he's REALLY not proved that one bit yet. Even his cars are low-sales, have the same reported problems as everyone else, and don't really do anything amazing - they are just electric cars with bog-standard batteries.
He's a kid with a lot of money that's read too many sci-fi novels. Sure, it's nice that he's throwing his money away so others don't have to, but as yet he hasn't really achieved much that couldn't have been done better, faster and more usefully than just giving that same money to NASA, a car manufacturer for a prototype, a battery company, a train company, or whatever other pet projects he's started up.
To be honest, I'm sick of hearing about him, and I'm really into tech, space travel, sci-fi, etc. I'm sure you could get a lot more for the money he's spending by just doing "normal" things without having to have his name in a news article every 10 seconds.
Never been mugged. Other people I know have. Never lost my wallet. Other people I know have.
If I'm forced to use cash, I draw out as little as possible.
It's not because "Oh, no, someone might mug me". Cancelling cards and trying to remember what else you had in there is a pain in the arse no matter what, even if they don't have the PIN.
It's because... I don't need cash. And it's easily lost / forgotten. And it takes up space. And inevitably the second I use that note, I end up with a bunch of coins and have nowhere to put them (no coin pocket on wallet = MUCH smaller wallet). And if I want a bunch of coins, I would have to get a note, then go find change.
I work on the principle that this is 2017. I haven't *needed* cash since at last 2000. Sure, I've used it. Sure, it's come in handy. Sure, some things are easier with cash (e.g. paying for parking). But in general, it's not necessary.
And if a place doesn't take card but only takes cash - that's their business decision. If I happen to have some, I'll use that service if I want it. If not, I'll go elsewhere. I can buy everything from a loaf of bread to a house with a card. But cash is just a pain in the arse. Even if people take cash, it changes often, and they might not take notes, or coins, or certain denominations (50 GBP notes are notorious for refusal, let's not even get into Bank of Scotland notes).
Rather than faff about carrying around heavy little tokens to represent small parts of the number of what was in my bank account, I can just... use a card that does the same, is reusable, usable online, usable offline, smaller, lighter, easier to deal with, recorded (comes in handy when someone says "how much did that cost" or "did that get paid"), doesn't take up my entire pocket, and works in pretty much the same places.
Remember when we used to read sci-fi stories about "credits" stored on tokens that worked anywhere in the world/galaxy? I've got one in my pocket. In fact, I've got a couple of different ones. And they can only be used by myself.
If I go into London, I don't give a second thought to how I'm going to pay. I don't need to plan, or take money out, or guess at how much I'll need. If I go into the middle of nowhere and need a sandwich, it works just the same too. There are few exceptions nowadays, and all of them - I've found - can be got around. I mean, in the absolute extreme, you go and use this mysterious token card to go get... cash. I hate having to do it, and haven't done it in years (I'm much more likely to just go elsewhere), but it's always possible.
Plus, if I go abroad, I don't even need to know what the local currency is. Who cares? Just use the same card in the same way in the same kinds of places.
I don't understand people who use or carry cash, not because "they might get mugged" (your most valuable asset in a robbery is not your cash unless you're carrying hundreds and hundreds - it's your phone, your designer sunglasses, your car keys, your ID, etc.) but because it's just not necessary.
About the only argument "for" cash is the anonymity, but that's destroyed by all the other things for any normal person: cameras about shop counters, ATM withdrawal records, etc. It's not something I particularly care about either. All the dodgiest fuckers I know, the ones not paying tax, screwing the benefits system, and selling off nicked items are the ones that deal in cash. I'm not saying cash can only be used that way, but it's a way that cash can be abused that a card makes much harder.
And I think I'd rather make people doing that have their lives made harder.
Cash has almost no advantages for the average person. And tons of disadvantages compared to using a card. And if I lose my card, I get a new one just the same. If I lose my cash... well, that's gone forever.
Going from, say, zero atmospheres of pressure to one atmosphere of pressure, is no different from going from two to one.
One atmosphere = 14.7 psi. That's not even a fucking half-flat car tyre. A bicycle road tyre can have 10 times that. Are cyclists blown into oblivion when their tyre pops? No.
It would be comparable to me stabbing your car tire that already looked a little flat and half-deflated. Sure.. PFFSFSFFSFSYSFST. Done. No explosion. No horrendous decompression throwing people around like some poor plane disaster B-movie (which is also all bollocks). You probably wouldn't want your ear right next to it, but it'd be like someone spraying a can of air in your ears (in fact, probably a lot better, if there's anything at all in the way of obstacles, like a fucking metal train surrounding you).
Never done the air-horn thing to people? Sure, it might burst an eardrum, but it ain't going to kill you before you've had a couple of seconds to get your head together, whether you're going from 14psi to 0psi or vice versa.
In case you don't know, 14psi isn't a lot. Sure, it SOUNDS a lot. It's a lot if you tried to make it (you'd have to balance 14lbs of equipment on a square inch!). But you're sitting in it now and the difference between 28 and 14 is EXACTLY the same as the difference between 14 and 0.
And as people have said, EXPLOSIVE compression/decompression is incredibly rare and hard to make happen - in might happen in space, where there's literally nothing but billions of square miles of vacuum and nothing of any pressure but the box you're in, but even a train in a vacuumed tunnel isn't going to suck you out into space (Aliens is also bollocks, by the way - the place would have vented of air in seconds and then no force would be acting on you to push you out unless someone was pushing metric tons of industrial-pressure oxygen into the ship from some humongously high pressure store / fan).
You'd go "Oh fuck", your eyes would pop, you'd feel it, and - so long as you weren't holding your breath deliberately at the time - that would be it and then you'd have to find yourself some oxygen.
Vacuum rarely kills people. I mean, it'll fucking hurt, but you don't go pop like in a Bond movie or something.
And if it is closed system, you would be able to detect loss of vacuum quite quickly, I imagine, and do something about it (e.g. open a bunch of small emergency valves to flood the tube with natural air quite quickly, also slowly the train in the process).
That said, it's still a stupid idea that nobody really wants or needs.
Learning is acquiring a skill. Even the skill of memorising useless lists of historical facts, that's a skill. Learning how to do that (no matter what you choose to use it for - pokemon or random selective dates from history) is valuable.
I have a degree. It's in Maths and Computer Science. I do not use maths in my daily life, or profession, beyond the mundane that everyone else does (e.g. adding up a budget). I do not apply advanced computer science principles to my job either.
But the degree proves that I have the ability to learn skills, not memorise boring shit that nobody cares about. I would even argue that BEING ABLE TO LOOK IT UP (i.e. research methods) is much more important than actually knowing what it is.
And much, much more important to be able to know the underlying political background, the knock-on effects, draw analogies to current world news, etc. That's a skill. And it's a skill that most people will not have, in the same way that most people can't perform the calculus necessary to integrate the area under a 4D curve.
That said, I work in schools - always have, since graduation - and laptops do not somehow magically make kids smarter or dumber. Like all tools, it's about how they are used If they are misused, they will distract from the lesson. If they are used "because the teachers have to", they won't contribute to the lesson. If they are used as a tool to aid learning, including independent learning, they will add to someone's education. I taught myself entire swathes of computer science by straying off-lecture (seriously, 2 years of "Introduction to Programming" in Java courses alongside my maths and real computer science, starting at Hello World and ending at writing minimax algorithms) and even not attending and researching things myself.
Back in those days, people generally didn't have laptops (only the show-offs) or smartphones. But I would much rather skip the lectures, go to the IT labs and do my own thing. (P.S. I used to email in the Java coursework from home after doing it in the 20 minute train journey back home each night - floppies and ZIP disks, but I used to do it on paper and then type it direct into an file, FTP it to the lecturer's areas, and passed with flying colours.)
Laptops are a tool. Smartphones are a tool. Touchscreens are a tool. Whiteboards are a tool. Chalk is a tool.
Misuse the tool (i.e. pissing about throwing chalk in a lecture) and you learn nothing from your use of it. Use the tool effectively (e.g. a group of students chalking equations in their spare time to try to solve a coursework problem) and it enhances learning.
A laptop is no different. But it has nothing to do with the education system. I would argue that ANYTHING taught-by-rote is a con. History especially seems to suffer from this more than anything else (and is incredibly selective, but that's besides the point).
And how would I have an opinion on that? I have atrocious, terrible, awful memory. I can't tell you what I had for breakfast. But I still got a degree. Hell, I never even revised for an exam in my entire life. Not once. Not even briefly. No study groups. Nothing. If you only know it because you revised it, you didn't know it. If you know it, and can apply it, and can derive it, and have the skills in it, and can research it, you don't need to memorise it.
Yes, I graduated. I have an honours degree in maths & computer science. Without memorising a single fact, studying for a single exam, or failing anything. And people employ me because that proves that I have a brain that works, solves problems, learns independently, can find sources and research, and understands the answer rather than just provides it by rote. They've actually even TOLD ME THAT, as being the reason they hire people with degrees over anyone else.
I never had a laptop. But having one - with even the tiniest amount of willpower - wouldn't make me a lazy bum who
I would not want any budding programmer to learn from commercial, especially website, source code.
Cases in point on this very website:
Inside its own javascript tag for one line:
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
Further down:
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
inside a larger tag.
Literally... wtf? From variable naming to why are you doing that, to why is it in twice and re-using the same name, to why is it wrapped in a tag for ONE line, and not in a header/js file rather than THIS page's (i.e. the submit form's) source?
Not only that, literally 95%+ of this page is similar nonsense related to ad-blockers and Google Analytics. I wouldn't want to learn from that at all.
I could confidently program any program you could suggest. I'm not saying it would be any good, or perfect source, but I can program, and in a number of languages. Not once have I ever used a commercial store of source code, or someone's live production code to do that, because it's often just a mess.
You learn from nicely-made libraries, where the structure is amazingly well thought-out and clean. You learn from code snippets. You quickly learn from your own mess becoming unmanageable. But you rarely learn from just random code on random websites built for the purpose of obfuscation, easy compression, and automated generation that literally nobody ever sees. And, no, having more eyes on the code won't shame people, bad code propagates, it doesn't get shamed. "Even Slashdot has a mess of shit in its source, so why am I bothering to keep my tiny 1-page website clean, nobody will care"
Photon Composition - Elementary particle Statistics - Bosonic Interactions - Electromagnetic Symbol - Î Theorized - Albert Einstein Mass - 0
Mass is a very different thing to being a particle.
And it's NOT a particle either. Or it wouldn't act like a wave. It acts LIKE a particle in some instances, and like a wave in other instances, but DOESN'T have mass. It's called the wave-particle duality, which still isn't fully explained but certainly doesn't require mass to act like a particle does.
It is affected by gravity, but that's nothing to do with mass either (gravity is a bend in spacetime, spacetime is bent BY mass, the spacetime doesn't BEND the mass).
If it had ANY significant mass, it would never make it out of the solar system, and you wouldn't be able to see the sun. P.S. NO, black holes don't prove that a photon has mass either. Black holes are so massive THEMSELVES that they warp spacetime such that nothing travelling in it can escape, including light or any number of zero-mass fields (including things like space and time themselves! Does time have a mass?).
The entirety of your stupid comment falls apart once you LEARN this basic principle of physics for the first time.
P.S. solar sails do not get "pushed" by mass of a photon, because it has none. But it has a shit-load of energy that can heat up the desert, illuminate the sun, melt ice and blind astronauts. It doesn't mean the photon has any mass, however.
P.P.S. wanna really blow your mind? Electromagnetic waves have momentum, but no mass. Go learn physics.
My problem is not price but value-for-money. It's not there in Apple products, reflected in their ludicrously high margins. They aren't giving you anywhere near the value that the devices and associated services cost.
But Samsung aren't much better. I wouldn't touch any of their top-range smart phones either. And I can't see why my S5 mini is basically an S5 WITHOUT USB host functionality. Basically everything else is identical, but a software / TINY hardware change, makes things not work on the Mini for no real discernible reason.
But I factored that into my value analysis when I bought it. It's not worth paying extra, for a screen that I think is too big, just to get USB host. In similar terms of what I actually want to do on the phone, Apple doesn't even get a look-in. Never has.
But I'm sure there are people out there with money to burn, because EVERY new model of smartphone has people who buy it by the truckload, which is just unfathomable to me. Most of them don't use it for anything more than a quick snap, checking Facebook, and texting their friends. Hell, I've met people who barely use 5% of the functions / apps on their phone, or even know what they do (e.g. introducing people to using Map apps as a satnav etc.).
Why you'd pay that money for a device you don't even understand the basic capabilities of, I can't work out. It's like buying a Ferrari sports car when you can't even drive a Fiat Panda or have never heard of air-conditioning. You do it entirely for the show.
As someone who owns some ridiculously expensive gaming-only hardware.... isn't the Vive the one to have, not the Rift?
And until they standardise such that I don't need to worry what I buy, I would only be able to go with the market-leader in terms of features and what *other people* would buy. Which is the Vive.
It's not that nobody is buying either. It's that the market hasn't decided because of the expense, and until it does, I'm not falling for a Betamax/HD-DVD farce (I didn't fall for either of those, either, to be honest).
Is there an "open" VR standard, that works no matter the headset / controller? It doesn't look like it. Is there a clear leader? Not quite yet, but it's certainly not the Rift. Is it an impulse buy when it need so much investment and supporting hardware? Not really. It's a Christmas treat, at best. And given that NO CONSOLE has been pushed as a VR console yet, it looks like games-programmers aren't really targetting such things.
I was actually hoping the Switch would be a basic "cut-down" VR, they would have had a gimmick to push like the Wiimote of the original Wii, even if it wasn't "professional gamer" status.
But all I see on the market are literal toys (bits of cardboard and plastic lenses), or stupendously expensive and powerful kit.
Like OpenGL cards back in the days of the first 3D games, we all just stare in envy, and they do exist, but we can't justify it for a handful of games on the top-end of hardware. We need a 3DFX. A middle ground. Good but affordable. Something just on the edge of the "wife-budget", enough to piss her off, not enough to make her leave.
And it's not there yet.
But certainly it's not the Oculus that I see myself buying when they come down in price. And I have two Logitech G27's. Technically, at one point, my real car cost less than the two gaming car setups I had (I've bought a new car since them, because - to be honest - gaming kit bores me nowadays and I'm quite happy with just a gaming laptop and Steam).
If I can't justify it, I'm sure as hell most other people can't either. Those people buy PC's that can't even run Age of Empires 2 HD at a decent speed.
Annual subscription, pays for both Windows and Office (EDUDESKTOP), stop paying and both go away.
The only difference is that schools pay per full-time-equivalent staff numbers (e.g. each full-time teaching employee) and then get to install Windows/Office on as much as they like, and remote desktop licences, and Office 365 stuff too.
Unfortunately, complicated by having to have separate annual licences for Server, Exchange, SQL, etc. still. Why they can't just break those out into a server bundle, I can't fathom.
Yeah, because nobody who wants to commit a terrorist act has ever been in the military...
And all the people with military ID and uniform are sane, level-headed, non-discharged, not suffering from PTSD, etc.
It's exactly that kind of profiling that lets people slip these things onto aircraft.
"Oh, I didn't bother to search him because..." is just admission of failing to search a passenger. Whatever privilege such people are assigned would be easily turned into access for a terrorist in seconds.
and then breaks the law by using force other than in self-defence, and then breaks another law by pulling a gun when his life is not in immediate danger.
No matter how much you might dislike it, a gun is literally the last resort and you don't pull it unless you fully intend to shoot to kill. If you pull it and don't shoot, it's because of a major change in the situation, but - like an airbag going off - is something that should automatically involve the police if things have got this far.
Either way, you want the police coming at that point. And your correct response would not have been to pull the gun unless you genuinely thought that you needed to use it as a lethal weapon (rather than just showing it off to shut people up), or - if you didn't intend to use it - using reasonable force to restrain - AND - having called the police.
Responsibility comes with it the ability to know the legal limits. Even "fighting back" is a grey area unless the safety of yourself or others is in question if you don't. And there you want police to come too.
Sorry, in this case, penis means "I'm going to pull out a weapon when it's unjustified and threaten people with it". The exact thing that the rest of the world is always pointing at when the US doesn't punish its own police force for doing that. Let alone a private citizen.
Much scarier than that people tolerate devices listening all the time is that they can call emergency services just by hearing certain phrases. Much scarier than that is idiots pulling guns because of a domestic. Much scarier than that is idiots like that being able to source and carry guns, legally.
If you had restraint, nothing would have been able to get to that kind of position anyway.
Forcing passengers through worthless security procedures that inherently fail worse than just removing every tenth person from the flight at random.
And then trying to hush up the results.
In the height of 9/11's aftermath, an American friend of mine came to London, and then we all flew to Europe for a holiday. It was only in the queue towards security at a London airport that her husband spotted she still has a CS canister in her hand luggage from her previous flight. Literally, she'd forgot to take it out of her handbag, it had came all the way into the UK (where it's illegal to possess, let alone take it on a plane) via a standard flight, and it was only when we were heading out again that - by chance - he spotted it.
He had to discretely drop it in one of those bins they have for bottles that are too large, etc. on the way into security.
Sure, it's not a grenade or something, but it's not the sort of thing people should be carrying onto a plane without even realising, and nobody spotting it, and it's not the sort of thing that should be in the UK at all as it's illegal to own, sell or possess the damn thing. But it came right through security at least once (we think it might have been on another flight earlier too, but nobody was quite sure) and was about to go through it again.
And it was in hand luggage, not just the hold.
The irony hit home hard. The bottle of water I'd bought 10 minutes earlier in the airport shop outside of check-in was taken from us. The CS spray was larger than that and had already been through security successfully once.
We need to radically re-think airport security. And especially its impact on the majority of people who just want to get on a damn plane, have a comfortable journey, get off as quickly as possible, and carry on with their lives.
To be honest, I now can't be bothered to fly, even to Europe. Too much pissing about waiting, hassle going through security (taking off shoes, putting laptops in other bags, being patted down, having drinks taken from me, being forced to "test" baby's milk if I want to take it with me, endless fucking queueing and people yelling instructions at you), and then an uncomfortable and unpleasant flight and the same shit the other end.
I'd rather have a motorway drive, onto a train or ferry, not have to do with any of that shite, and then poodle through Europe. Giving my money to petrol stations instead of airlines, small towns instead of massive airports, and taking whatever I like to drink or eat or watch TV on.
The tax that we must be pissing away by putting people off flying with this shit just isn't worth it. You can get a flight for a pittance now, granted, but there's a reason for that. I just cannot imagine it's going to be profitable for much longer, and I don't even believe we're paying the wages of people who do all the security shit, let alone the pilots and crew, and fuel.
At some point the bubble will burst and people will say "too much" and use alternative means. And it won't hinder a terrorist one bit.
I'm sure the satellites are constantly being updated for one reason or another. If your $20 tablet gets firmware updates, you can be sure a multi-million-dollar satellite used for worldwide communication does too. Just of a higher quality.
Phones might be trickier, but not because of firmware, because they may just not have the oomph to encrypt things betters in real-time.
To be honest, anyone using them and expecting a real sense of security (because, after all, the satellite company and any number of ground stations, repeaters, and the PSTN endpoint could listen in all they like) should have been wrapping their comms with their own encryption before sending it to a satellite.
People will eventually learn - use a transport stream that's potentially vulnerable, assume that's the case anyway, and then put upgradeable encryption on the endpoints under your own control that's nothing to do with the people supplying the transport stream.
I always used to VPN over my own wireless network, back in the early days of WEP, WPA, etc. It paid dividends in giving me security, layering, time to upgrade, the ability to change intermediate equipment without affecting the entire setup, etc. And there was basically zero downside, I used to game CS over that VPN and it added less than 1ms even with old ropey computers acting as the VPN server.
Trust. And then encrypt your own traffic anyway. Whether it's wireless, point-to-point, satellite, WhatsApp or anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
"People who risk smashing their heads into the floor for a living can have noticeable differences in their brains"
Not really surprising, is it? All the padding in the world doesn't absorb the shock of decelerations like that and your brain is a squidy thing inside a bit hard thing, with a bit of leeway and fluid.
No matter how hard the eggshell, you can still break the yolk inside.
Old trick, yes.
But does it work if you have an ounce of common sense? I was quite interested in Prime day - I give Amazon a LOT of business and Prime is worth it just on postage costs alone, let alone the freebies thrown in.
However, everything I looked at on Prime day didn't look... anything near amazing. A bit Meh, if I'm honest. I didn't buy a single thing, even the things already on my wishlist. Because nothing made me say "Oh, that's a good deal" or "That's come down in price" or "I better get that while it's cheap". It was all just... comparable pricing to what I would expect from anywhere else.
Are people really that gullible that just because you say it's 10,000% off they fall for it and pay even normal retail price when they didn't really know they wanted the item anyway? It's a sad state of affairs if people haven't educated themselves by now. I can sort of understand some old granny who's not all there falling for it, but people buying shit from Amazon on a special advertised day, with a Prime account? It doesn't make any sense.
I treat Steam the same way. The first Summer Sales were amazing, I picked up SO MANY games, and bonus things that I was *excited* for the next sale. And then it has been Meh ever since. I look at a game that's 50p off and think "50p extra yesterday or tomorrow, or wait until it really comes down in price" and it's just not worth it. If it was $5 off, maybe, especially if it's a really cheap game. But even there, if I ask "am I going to be annoyed that I didn't get this discount?" pretty much the answer is no. And that's on a site where I spend mostly "fake" money - marketplace money earned from selling off cards that I don't do anything to get except run a game and then Alt-Tab back to my browser.
But spending real money on a deal that, give it a week, and you could probably price-match on anyway? Are people really that stupid?
Gosh.
Maybe all that talk about learning a skill, a trade, getting an education, etc. wasn't all bullshit after all? Seriously, nobody is entitled to free money, so you get a skill and then use that skill to prove your worth and get to the point where people will pay you to utilise that skill.
Sure, if your job can be replaced by a robot after decades of doing it, that's annoying. So you re-train, no? Get another job doing something else. Hopefully something not so dull and mindless that a little bit of metal and a motor can do it for you and always could have?
I'm being facetious, but people who whine about jobs not being available for them are often the people who are not suitable for, or interested in, the jobs that do exist.
And, yes, I have worked stacking shelves. I did it when I was in my 30's on a night-shift, while also working as an IT Manager for an exclusive private school during the day. I was the only one hired who stuck it out for any length of time, the others who were all hired with me all dropped out because it was hard work, were moonlighting, or plain quit. One of them said the job was "beneath her" because it meant moving boxes and putting them on the shelves (she was otherwise unemployed on benefits for her entire adult life).
And the benefits system had number of weeks after which they class you as "obviously trying to get a job" and will then start to pay your benefits if you lose it. People knew the rules inside out, and would work for PRECISELY the number of days necessary to have their benefits reinstated and not a second more.
Maybe if they'd put that effort into learning a trade that people would find useful, they could figure in the official statistics more.
If anything, in my country, the politics covers up quite how little people need to do to be given free money, quite how much of my tax is paying for that, and quite how well known the scams are, and how easy they would be to crack down on. There are literally enough people doing it that it would affect voting if they proposed changes, so they don't dare mention it for fear they'll be made to do something about it.
Android phone.
Hold on the notification.
Block all notifications.
Never hear from that program again.
I haven't yet allowed one app except those that actually NEED to inform me (e.g. a mail app) and even there, I paid for TouchDown so I could put on working-hours to turn off work-email notifications when I just don't care about them (i.e. outside of work days/hours) - maybe the default mail app does it now, but it didn't years ago when I bought TouchDown.
And if a program doesn't allow me to fine-tune notifications so I get spammed with "product updates" when all I want is the message my friend sent me? I just uninstall the app and - usually - use their website instead.
In the same way that the telephone is the rudest device known to man (ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, I'M GOING TO KEEP RINGING, ANSWER ME NOW), notifications are the spam of the modern era.
Turn them off. How to do so on an iPhone/iPad? Don't ask me but surely there's a was as simple as the above.
"UNWANTED NOTIFICATION!" - hold finger on it, say "Fuck off" (purely for frustration venting), turn off app's permission to ever post a notification again.
Oh, and stop installing dozens of apps for unnecessary shit that you could just use the website (again - same thing, never allowed a "desktop notification" in my life on a browser).
Moreso than the organisation of an event (which is hard), I am much more disappointed in tens of thousands of people turning up to chase virtual characters around a park on their phones AND PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE.
Honestly, that's much more in the "what the fuck has the world come to" area than someone who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.
Slackware was the first serious distro for me.
I also remember using ZIPSLACK, which booted it via SYSLINUX from a DOS prompt, saved in a normal FAT partition, if I remember correctly. It was the first real "how to use Linux without trashing your partitions or using a boot disk" version.
I remember spending a lot of time on Slack 3.9 which contained just the right versions of GCC and kernel to compile for Freesco (a single floppy router distro that's still around).
For many years, I ran it as my only desktop (8.0 - 13.0 or thereabouts) and - when hardware has failed and I've been forced onto older machines - I've installed Slackware in preference to get as much done as I can on the creaky hardware.
I ran servers on it for all kinds of purposes and in all sorts of places.
Then, I admit, I had to move to Ubuntu when deploying desktops, just for the ease of use. And now, in the virtual machine era, I have a weird switch where - instead of Slack on servers and Ubuntu LTS on clients - I do the reverse. Which gives me one-command app installation with dependencies on servers (who cares what GUI is used), but Slack lets me choose how my personal system works and exactly when and makes it predictable and configurable.
Slackware gave me a lot. From my first glimpses at a real OS that I'd heard only in myth and legend, to the knowledge that you could run machines within machines even before virtualisation was readily available, to my first real exposure to serious programming and working on open-source projects, to a career in deploying boxes equivalent to the more expensive commercial offerings, to running all the backends of my professional setups, to providing me with a free and powerful desktop when I had no money, to giving me control over my server estate and running inside Windows servers to do the things they just can't do as efficiently.
At one point or another, Slackware has shown me everything about a computer that I find interesting and intriguing, which Windows has never managed. DOS and Windows were always a case of spending time trying to get the best out them through guesswork and hope and closed tools (see the EMM386, etc. conversation in the Reddit thread!). Slackware showed me that you can look into the system and change anything you like, because that's exactly how it got made, and everything became understandable, predictable, and Slackware was chosen on merit out of THOUSANDS of other distros that all used the same code (which to me, shows just how good it is - anyone could copy Slackware's entire codebase, and many have, but Slackware is still going).
And then some fuckhead made systemd and all the other modern shite. And still Slackware is out there, competing without even trying.
If I was sent on a mission out of the solar system, where it was just me and a bunch of machines around me to keep me alive, I'd be insisting it all ran Slackware. And taking a bunch of Slackware CDs with me.
Yeah, Apollo didn't have requirements. And they just fired people at the moon and hoped they wouldn't crash too fast to get out and survive. P.S. "not been done before"? Only to a particular planet, not "in history". In fact, NASA are pretty famous as being the only people in history to have ever done it, and then brought them back safely, ever.
Bollocks does NASA not have requirements, or not make them generally known if people need their authorisation. They probably had people spending years on NOTHING MORE THAN THAT.
Cheap, routine, safe. Pick any two.
US launches stagnated because the money wasn't available, despite being asked for. NASA does just a tiny bit more than just look for new toys. What I claim is that if Musk's investment had been put into NASA *specifically* for research in that exact area, they'd have done a better job of it. But also, that if the money had been available, they could have done something much more interesting with it.
Tesla - we disagree. It's a low-volume, barely mass-market vehicle propped up by a zero-profit venture selling basically at a loss. The technological innovations are absolutely minimal and have been replicated and surpassed by every car manufacturer on the planet in the space of a couple of years. Maybe credit for "prompting" that, certainly not for having done anything that couldn't have been achieved with an "we must have electric vehicles" impetus from government, industry or investors.
A decade is a LONG time in industry. Technologies can come and go in that time. I honestly don't believe Tesla have done anything amazing beyond pouring money into existing techs (that historically didn't exist or weren't viable in their state, but Tesla didn't *change* or *invent* the batteries, motors, etc. they just used things that came onto the market which were viable).
Tesla, ten years down the line:
Quarter Total production Model X sales
Q1 2016 15,510 2,400
Q2 2016 18,345 4,638
Q3 2016 25,185 8,774
Q4 2016 24,882 9,500
Smart Cars (niche, tiny automobiles) have sold 1.7m units of one single model of theirs.
Tesla are a drop in the damn ocean in industry, incredibly overvalued, by comparison.
Sorry, but Musk isn't anything more than a guy with lots of money to burn, and people willing to take it away from him. Sure, it's easy to give away cars and space rockets at losses and never make it to continued viability, and generate a lot of press along the way. It doesn't mean he's a good businessman or should hold any weight in industry whatsoever.
He's an eccentric, throwing money at sci-fi toys. Of course things "work". But he gets bored quick, never really gets much done, and certainly doesn't make any decent profit doing so. Investors wouldn't do what he did, precisely because of what's happened to most of the money he puts in. He's hoping each venture will not only create a new market but THAT HE WILL OWN THAT MARKET, and thus pay himself back. Which is ridiculous. And not how it's going.
Let the moron spend all the R&D money and find out what people "like", then the multi-billion dollar companies who have to make profit will cherry-pick anything that's successful and take over in a year leaving him with nothing. There's a reason that electric cars are still an incredibly niche market, because they aren't selling. Even Tesla's.
There's a reason people don't just start up space companies, because they are relatively unprofitable and hugely risky. There's a reason even NASA don't do much manned spaceflight any more. There's a reason train companies aren't investing billions in sci-fi trains.
He's an idealist, sure. But he's not going to ever find something so fantabulously amazing that other people couldn't have found quicker and easier if they decided to burn the same amount of money in the same areas.
So.... he didn't read the requirements before he started, didn't look at previous NASA designs used successfully, thought he could just throw money at the problem rather than have to actually comply with safety rules?
That's now scrapped in favour of a tested, successful and working design, compliant with NASA's regulations.
It's not like people sprung this on him suddenly. Normal, well-adjusted business people, before launching billions into a project, look at the requirements and design accordingly. Not throw money at it and hope you're made the exception.
I can't say that I disagree with the OP or that your clarification provides any argument against him.
"We made something that nobody would ever approve, so we have to go back to doing it in the way they would approve it" is about the politest way you could word it.
Let's be honest, Mr Musk thinks that the sun shines out of his arse and "everyone else is wrong". Fact is, he's REALLY not proved that one bit yet. Even his cars are low-sales, have the same reported problems as everyone else, and don't really do anything amazing - they are just electric cars with bog-standard batteries.
He's a kid with a lot of money that's read too many sci-fi novels. Sure, it's nice that he's throwing his money away so others don't have to, but as yet he hasn't really achieved much that couldn't have been done better, faster and more usefully than just giving that same money to NASA, a car manufacturer for a prototype, a battery company, a train company, or whatever other pet projects he's started up.
To be honest, I'm sick of hearing about him, and I'm really into tech, space travel, sci-fi, etc. I'm sure you could get a lot more for the money he's spending by just doing "normal" things without having to have his name in a news article every 10 seconds.
Cell-tower triangulation. Who pays the bill for the phone. "They" probably aren't at all hindered by your smart-arsery.
But, to be honest, it's nice that you think you're that important that literally anybody would bother to track you.
Says the website giving me all kinds of shitty ads, since selling out, despite paying years ago for the "Disable Advertising" button.
I Ghostery'd the fucker years ago, but just checked and - yep - ads over all the fucking Slashdot pages.
I don't carry cash. Never really have.
Never been mugged. Other people I know have.
Never lost my wallet. Other people I know have.
If I'm forced to use cash, I draw out as little as possible.
It's not because "Oh, no, someone might mug me". Cancelling cards and trying to remember what else you had in there is a pain in the arse no matter what, even if they don't have the PIN.
It's because... I don't need cash. And it's easily lost / forgotten. And it takes up space. And inevitably the second I use that note, I end up with a bunch of coins and have nowhere to put them (no coin pocket on wallet = MUCH smaller wallet). And if I want a bunch of coins, I would have to get a note, then go find change.
I work on the principle that this is 2017. I haven't *needed* cash since at last 2000. Sure, I've used it. Sure, it's come in handy. Sure, some things are easier with cash (e.g. paying for parking). But in general, it's not necessary.
And if a place doesn't take card but only takes cash - that's their business decision. If I happen to have some, I'll use that service if I want it. If not, I'll go elsewhere. I can buy everything from a loaf of bread to a house with a card. But cash is just a pain in the arse. Even if people take cash, it changes often, and they might not take notes, or coins, or certain denominations (50 GBP notes are notorious for refusal, let's not even get into Bank of Scotland notes).
Rather than faff about carrying around heavy little tokens to represent small parts of the number of what was in my bank account, I can just... use a card that does the same, is reusable, usable online, usable offline, smaller, lighter, easier to deal with, recorded (comes in handy when someone says "how much did that cost" or "did that get paid"), doesn't take up my entire pocket, and works in pretty much the same places.
Remember when we used to read sci-fi stories about "credits" stored on tokens that worked anywhere in the world/galaxy? I've got one in my pocket. In fact, I've got a couple of different ones. And they can only be used by myself.
If I go into London, I don't give a second thought to how I'm going to pay. I don't need to plan, or take money out, or guess at how much I'll need. If I go into the middle of nowhere and need a sandwich, it works just the same too. There are few exceptions nowadays, and all of them - I've found - can be got around. I mean, in the absolute extreme, you go and use this mysterious token card to go get... cash. I hate having to do it, and haven't done it in years (I'm much more likely to just go elsewhere), but it's always possible.
Plus, if I go abroad, I don't even need to know what the local currency is. Who cares? Just use the same card in the same way in the same kinds of places.
I don't understand people who use or carry cash, not because "they might get mugged" (your most valuable asset in a robbery is not your cash unless you're carrying hundreds and hundreds - it's your phone, your designer sunglasses, your car keys, your ID, etc.) but because it's just not necessary.
About the only argument "for" cash is the anonymity, but that's destroyed by all the other things for any normal person: cameras about shop counters, ATM withdrawal records, etc. It's not something I particularly care about either. All the dodgiest fuckers I know, the ones not paying tax, screwing the benefits system, and selling off nicked items are the ones that deal in cash. I'm not saying cash can only be used that way, but it's a way that cash can be abused that a card makes much harder.
And I think I'd rather make people doing that have their lives made harder.
Cash has almost no advantages for the average person. And tons of disadvantages compared to using a card. And if I lose my card, I get a new one just the same. If I lose my cash... well, that's gone forever.
Oh, ffs, people what kind of idiots are you.
Going from, say, zero atmospheres of pressure to one atmosphere of pressure, is no different from going from two to one.
One atmosphere = 14.7 psi. That's not even a fucking half-flat car tyre. A bicycle road tyre can have 10 times that. Are cyclists blown into oblivion when their tyre pops? No.
It would be comparable to me stabbing your car tire that already looked a little flat and half-deflated. Sure.. PFFSFSFFSFSYSFST. Done. No explosion. No horrendous decompression throwing people around like some poor plane disaster B-movie (which is also all bollocks). You probably wouldn't want your ear right next to it, but it'd be like someone spraying a can of air in your ears (in fact, probably a lot better, if there's anything at all in the way of obstacles, like a fucking metal train surrounding you).
Never done the air-horn thing to people? Sure, it might burst an eardrum, but it ain't going to kill you before you've had a couple of seconds to get your head together, whether you're going from 14psi to 0psi or vice versa.
In case you don't know, 14psi isn't a lot. Sure, it SOUNDS a lot. It's a lot if you tried to make it (you'd have to balance 14lbs of equipment on a square inch!). But you're sitting in it now and the difference between 28 and 14 is EXACTLY the same as the difference between 14 and 0.
And as people have said, EXPLOSIVE compression/decompression is incredibly rare and hard to make happen - in might happen in space, where there's literally nothing but billions of square miles of vacuum and nothing of any pressure but the box you're in, but even a train in a vacuumed tunnel isn't going to suck you out into space (Aliens is also bollocks, by the way - the place would have vented of air in seconds and then no force would be acting on you to push you out unless someone was pushing metric tons of industrial-pressure oxygen into the ship from some humongously high pressure store / fan).
You'd go "Oh fuck", your eyes would pop, you'd feel it, and - so long as you weren't holding your breath deliberately at the time - that would be it and then you'd have to find yourself some oxygen.
Vacuum rarely kills people. I mean, it'll fucking hurt, but you don't go pop like in a Bond movie or something.
And if it is closed system, you would be able to detect loss of vacuum quite quickly, I imagine, and do something about it (e.g. open a bunch of small emergency valves to flood the tube with natural air quite quickly, also slowly the train in the process).
That said, it's still a stupid idea that nobody really wants or needs.
Trivia is not learning. That's memorisation.
Learning is acquiring a skill. Even the skill of memorising useless lists of historical facts, that's a skill. Learning how to do that (no matter what you choose to use it for - pokemon or random selective dates from history) is valuable.
I have a degree. It's in Maths and Computer Science. I do not use maths in my daily life, or profession, beyond the mundane that everyone else does (e.g. adding up a budget). I do not apply advanced computer science principles to my job either.
But the degree proves that I have the ability to learn skills, not memorise boring shit that nobody cares about. I would even argue that BEING ABLE TO LOOK IT UP (i.e. research methods) is much more important than actually knowing what it is.
And much, much more important to be able to know the underlying political background, the knock-on effects, draw analogies to current world news, etc. That's a skill. And it's a skill that most people will not have, in the same way that most people can't perform the calculus necessary to integrate the area under a 4D curve.
That said, I work in schools - always have, since graduation - and laptops do not somehow magically make kids smarter or dumber. Like all tools, it's about how they are used If they are misused, they will distract from the lesson. If they are used "because the teachers have to", they won't contribute to the lesson. If they are used as a tool to aid learning, including independent learning, they will add to someone's education. I taught myself entire swathes of computer science by straying off-lecture (seriously, 2 years of "Introduction to Programming" in Java courses alongside my maths and real computer science, starting at Hello World and ending at writing minimax algorithms) and even not attending and researching things myself.
Back in those days, people generally didn't have laptops (only the show-offs) or smartphones. But I would much rather skip the lectures, go to the IT labs and do my own thing. (P.S. I used to email in the Java coursework from home after doing it in the 20 minute train journey back home each night - floppies and ZIP disks, but I used to do it on paper and then type it direct into an file, FTP it to the lecturer's areas, and passed with flying colours.)
Laptops are a tool.
Smartphones are a tool.
Touchscreens are a tool.
Whiteboards are a tool.
Chalk is a tool.
Misuse the tool (i.e. pissing about throwing chalk in a lecture) and you learn nothing from your use of it. Use the tool effectively (e.g. a group of students chalking equations in their spare time to try to solve a coursework problem) and it enhances learning.
A laptop is no different. But it has nothing to do with the education system. I would argue that ANYTHING taught-by-rote is a con. History especially seems to suffer from this more than anything else (and is incredibly selective, but that's besides the point).
And how would I have an opinion on that? I have atrocious, terrible, awful memory. I can't tell you what I had for breakfast. But I still got a degree. Hell, I never even revised for an exam in my entire life. Not once. Not even briefly. No study groups. Nothing. If you only know it because you revised it, you didn't know it. If you know it, and can apply it, and can derive it, and have the skills in it, and can research it, you don't need to memorise it.
Yes, I graduated. I have an honours degree in maths & computer science. Without memorising a single fact, studying for a single exam, or failing anything. And people employ me because that proves that I have a brain that works, solves problems, learns independently, can find sources and research, and understands the answer rather than just provides it by rote. They've actually even TOLD ME THAT, as being the reason they hire people with degrees over anyone else.
I never had a laptop. But having one - with even the tiniest amount of willpower - wouldn't make me a lazy bum who
I would not want any budding programmer to learn from commercial, especially website, source code.
Cases in point on this very website:
Inside its own javascript tag for one line:
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
Further down:
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
inside a larger tag.
Literally... wtf? From variable naming to why are you doing that, to why is it in twice and re-using the same name, to why is it wrapped in a tag for ONE line, and not in a header/js file rather than THIS page's (i.e. the submit form's) source?
Not only that, literally 95%+ of this page is similar nonsense related to ad-blockers and Google Analytics. I wouldn't want to learn from that at all.
I could confidently program any program you could suggest. I'm not saying it would be any good, or perfect source, but I can program, and in a number of languages. Not once have I ever used a commercial store of source code, or someone's live production code to do that, because it's often just a mess.
You learn from nicely-made libraries, where the structure is amazingly well thought-out and clean. You learn from code snippets. You quickly learn from your own mess becoming unmanageable. But you rarely learn from just random code on random websites built for the purpose of obfuscation, easy compression, and automated generation that literally nobody ever sees. And, no, having more eyes on the code won't shame people, bad code propagates, it doesn't get shamed. "Even Slashdot has a mess of shit in its source, so why am I bothering to keep my tiny 1-page website clean, nobody will care"
Shit, genius.
Someone should really tell Einstein:
Photon
Composition - Elementary particle
Statistics - Bosonic
Interactions - Electromagnetic
Symbol - Î
Theorized - Albert Einstein
Mass - 0
Mass is a very different thing to being a particle.
And it's NOT a particle either. Or it wouldn't act like a wave. It acts LIKE a particle in some instances, and like a wave in other instances, but DOESN'T have mass. It's called the wave-particle duality, which still isn't fully explained but certainly doesn't require mass to act like a particle does.
It is affected by gravity, but that's nothing to do with mass either (gravity is a bend in spacetime, spacetime is bent BY mass, the spacetime doesn't BEND the mass).
If it had ANY significant mass, it would never make it out of the solar system, and you wouldn't be able to see the sun. P.S. NO, black holes don't prove that a photon has mass either. Black holes are so massive THEMSELVES that they warp spacetime such that nothing travelling in it can escape, including light or any number of zero-mass fields (including things like space and time themselves! Does time have a mass?).
The entirety of your stupid comment falls apart once you LEARN this basic principle of physics for the first time.
P.S. solar sails do not get "pushed" by mass of a photon, because it has none. But it has a shit-load of energy that can heat up the desert, illuminate the sun, melt ice and blind astronauts. It doesn't mean the photon has any mass, however.
P.P.S. wanna really blow your mind? Electromagnetic waves have momentum, but no mass. Go learn physics.
No, but I'm sure some idiot would.
My problem is not price but value-for-money. It's not there in Apple products, reflected in their ludicrously high margins. They aren't giving you anywhere near the value that the devices and associated services cost.
But Samsung aren't much better. I wouldn't touch any of their top-range smart phones either. And I can't see why my S5 mini is basically an S5 WITHOUT USB host functionality. Basically everything else is identical, but a software / TINY hardware change, makes things not work on the Mini for no real discernible reason.
But I factored that into my value analysis when I bought it. It's not worth paying extra, for a screen that I think is too big, just to get USB host. In similar terms of what I actually want to do on the phone, Apple doesn't even get a look-in. Never has.
But I'm sure there are people out there with money to burn, because EVERY new model of smartphone has people who buy it by the truckload, which is just unfathomable to me. Most of them don't use it for anything more than a quick snap, checking Facebook, and texting their friends. Hell, I've met people who barely use 5% of the functions / apps on their phone, or even know what they do (e.g. introducing people to using Map apps as a satnav etc.).
Why you'd pay that money for a device you don't even understand the basic capabilities of, I can't work out. It's like buying a Ferrari sports car when you can't even drive a Fiat Panda or have never heard of air-conditioning. You do it entirely for the show.
As someone who owns some ridiculously expensive gaming-only hardware.... isn't the Vive the one to have, not the Rift?
And until they standardise such that I don't need to worry what I buy, I would only be able to go with the market-leader in terms of features and what *other people* would buy. Which is the Vive.
It's not that nobody is buying either. It's that the market hasn't decided because of the expense, and until it does, I'm not falling for a Betamax/HD-DVD farce (I didn't fall for either of those, either, to be honest).
Is there an "open" VR standard, that works no matter the headset / controller? It doesn't look like it. Is there a clear leader? Not quite yet, but it's certainly not the Rift. Is it an impulse buy when it need so much investment and supporting hardware? Not really. It's a Christmas treat, at best. And given that NO CONSOLE has been pushed as a VR console yet, it looks like games-programmers aren't really targetting such things.
I was actually hoping the Switch would be a basic "cut-down" VR, they would have had a gimmick to push like the Wiimote of the original Wii, even if it wasn't "professional gamer" status.
But all I see on the market are literal toys (bits of cardboard and plastic lenses), or stupendously expensive and powerful kit.
Like OpenGL cards back in the days of the first 3D games, we all just stare in envy, and they do exist, but we can't justify it for a handful of games on the top-end of hardware. We need a 3DFX. A middle ground. Good but affordable. Something just on the edge of the "wife-budget", enough to piss her off, not enough to make her leave.
And it's not there yet.
But certainly it's not the Oculus that I see myself buying when they come down in price. And I have two Logitech G27's. Technically, at one point, my real car cost less than the two gaming car setups I had (I've bought a new car since them, because - to be honest - gaming kit bores me nowadays and I'm quite happy with just a gaming laptop and Steam).
If I can't justify it, I'm sure as hell most other people can't either. Those people buy PC's that can't even run Age of Empires 2 HD at a decent speed.
Schools have had this for nearly a decade now.
Annual subscription, pays for both Windows and Office (EDUDESKTOP), stop paying and both go away.
The only difference is that schools pay per full-time-equivalent staff numbers (e.g. each full-time teaching employee) and then get to install Windows/Office on as much as they like, and remote desktop licences, and Office 365 stuff too.
Unfortunately, complicated by having to have separate annual licences for Server, Exchange, SQL, etc. still. Why they can't just break those out into a server bundle, I can't fathom.
Win10 isn't subscription.
Office is.
And you get a free* copy of Windows 10 with it!
And no other way to buy Windows 10 separately without huge expense.
*(while your subscription is still active)
Yeah, because nobody who wants to commit a terrorist act has ever been in the military...
And all the people with military ID and uniform are sane, level-headed, non-discharged, not suffering from PTSD, etc.
It's exactly that kind of profiling that lets people slip these things onto aircraft.
"Oh, I didn't bother to search him because..." is just admission of failing to search a passenger. Whatever privilege such people are assigned would be easily turned into access for a terrorist in seconds.
"Guy intervenes, gets hurt, ,..."
and then breaks the law by using force other than in self-defence, and then breaks another law by pulling a gun when his life is not in immediate danger.
No matter how much you might dislike it, a gun is literally the last resort and you don't pull it unless you fully intend to shoot to kill. If you pull it and don't shoot, it's because of a major change in the situation, but - like an airbag going off - is something that should automatically involve the police if things have got this far.
Either way, you want the police coming at that point. And your correct response would not have been to pull the gun unless you genuinely thought that you needed to use it as a lethal weapon (rather than just showing it off to shut people up), or - if you didn't intend to use it - using reasonable force to restrain - AND - having called the police.
Responsibility comes with it the ability to know the legal limits. Even "fighting back" is a grey area unless the safety of yourself or others is in question if you don't. And there you want police to come too.
Sorry, in this case, penis means "I'm going to pull out a weapon when it's unjustified and threaten people with it". The exact thing that the rest of the world is always pointing at when the US doesn't punish its own police force for doing that. Let alone a private citizen.
Much scarier than that people tolerate devices listening all the time is that they can call emergency services just by hearing certain phrases. Much scarier than that is idiots pulling guns because of a domestic. Much scarier than that is idiots like that being able to source and carry guns, legally.
If you had restraint, nothing would have been able to get to that kind of position anyway.
There's been a few articles on this already.
It's an external patch-set that adds security features to the Linux kernel.
And now the guy who runs it wants to charge for it, and stop people distributing it, even though it is inherently a GPL-based work.
He's also a pain in the arse, but that's besides the point.
You know what affects national security?
Forcing passengers through worthless security procedures that inherently fail worse than just removing every tenth person from the flight at random.
And then trying to hush up the results.
In the height of 9/11's aftermath, an American friend of mine came to London, and then we all flew to Europe for a holiday. It was only in the queue towards security at a London airport that her husband spotted she still has a CS canister in her hand luggage from her previous flight. Literally, she'd forgot to take it out of her handbag, it had came all the way into the UK (where it's illegal to possess, let alone take it on a plane) via a standard flight, and it was only when we were heading out again that - by chance - he spotted it.
He had to discretely drop it in one of those bins they have for bottles that are too large, etc. on the way into security.
Sure, it's not a grenade or something, but it's not the sort of thing people should be carrying onto a plane without even realising, and nobody spotting it, and it's not the sort of thing that should be in the UK at all as it's illegal to own, sell or possess the damn thing. But it came right through security at least once (we think it might have been on another flight earlier too, but nobody was quite sure) and was about to go through it again.
And it was in hand luggage, not just the hold.
The irony hit home hard. The bottle of water I'd bought 10 minutes earlier in the airport shop outside of check-in was taken from us. The CS spray was larger than that and had already been through security successfully once.
We need to radically re-think airport security. And especially its impact on the majority of people who just want to get on a damn plane, have a comfortable journey, get off as quickly as possible, and carry on with their lives.
To be honest, I now can't be bothered to fly, even to Europe. Too much pissing about waiting, hassle going through security (taking off shoes, putting laptops in other bags, being patted down, having drinks taken from me, being forced to "test" baby's milk if I want to take it with me, endless fucking queueing and people yelling instructions at you), and then an uncomfortable and unpleasant flight and the same shit the other end.
I'd rather have a motorway drive, onto a train or ferry, not have to do with any of that shite, and then poodle through Europe. Giving my money to petrol stations instead of airlines, small towns instead of massive airports, and taking whatever I like to drink or eat or watch TV on.
The tax that we must be pissing away by putting people off flying with this shit just isn't worth it. You can get a flight for a pittance now, granted, but there's a reason for that. I just cannot imagine it's going to be profitable for much longer, and I don't even believe we're paying the wages of people who do all the security shit, let alone the pilots and crew, and fuel.
At some point the bubble will burst and people will say "too much" and use alternative means. And it won't hinder a terrorist one bit.
Not really.
I'm sure the satellites are constantly being updated for one reason or another. If your $20 tablet gets firmware updates, you can be sure a multi-million-dollar satellite used for worldwide communication does too. Just of a higher quality.
Phones might be trickier, but not because of firmware, because they may just not have the oomph to encrypt things betters in real-time.
To be honest, anyone using them and expecting a real sense of security (because, after all, the satellite company and any number of ground stations, repeaters, and the PSTN endpoint could listen in all they like) should have been wrapping their comms with their own encryption before sending it to a satellite.
People will eventually learn - use a transport stream that's potentially vulnerable, assume that's the case anyway, and then put upgradeable encryption on the endpoints under your own control that's nothing to do with the people supplying the transport stream.
I always used to VPN over my own wireless network, back in the early days of WEP, WPA, etc. It paid dividends in giving me security, layering, time to upgrade, the ability to change intermediate equipment without affecting the entire setup, etc. And there was basically zero downside, I used to game CS over that VPN and it added less than 1ms even with old ropey computers acting as the VPN server.
Trust. And then encrypt your own traffic anyway. Whether it's wireless, point-to-point, satellite, WhatsApp or anything else.