And for convenience sake it only affects OLDER devices. Seriously, Troll? OS is software, Apple could patch it to a similar level of encryption, or better for the stock price - advise you to upgrade the hardware.
There is a military axiom about not defending indefensible positions. What would you have Apple do? Patch ancient 2nd and 3rd gen iPhones. Should Microsoft still be patching Windows 2000? Should Fedora still be patching FD12? And don't tell me that old phones being obsoleted because they are unable to run a new OS is some sinister plan by Apple to force users to buy new phones. I have a small pile of old Android phones and tablets that were orphaned (as in: Your device is incompatible with this version of Android) long before the end of their useful life because they could not handle the bloat of the new Android OS. Operating systems get upgraded, hardware becomes obsolete and some people do not bother to upgrade and that is a platform independent fact so if you want to rag on Apple try finding something better to complain about.
How does it compare to a well-made crossbow or normal bow?
That depends on draw weight, draw length and projectile weight of the bow but as a general rule of thumb a medieval longbow would fire an arrow at between 50 m/s for a hunting bow to perhaps a bit more than 100 m/s for a monster of a warbow. This is comparable to modern high-tech recurve bows. Crossbows are a different story. They have shorter limbs in order to make the weapon more compact which shortens the draw length and they made up for that by making the draw weight much greater than that of a longbow. Relatively manageable crossbows for one man field use could have a draw weight that ranged from 200-300 of KG But because of the slower draw weight the speed of a run-of-the-mill crossbow quarrel was about the same as that of a longbow arrow despite the higher draw weight. Crossbow quarrels and longbow arrows weighed about the same. However crossbows existed in much greater sizes than longbows. There were man portable windlass bows (well, theoretically man portable, in practice they seem to have had a two man crew) with draw weights of 500kg or more which would probably have had projectile velocities well above 100 m/s. There were also wheeled/tripod mounted ones with much higher draw weights that also fired stones as well as what amounted to heavy spears. In those cases projectile velocity obviously depended on projectile weight. During the siege of Jerusalem the Romans used a giant Ballista (technically torsion artillery not a crossbow) that flung stones that were so big they could rip the merlon off of the city wall or one occasion a ballista ball ripped the head clean off of a guard standing on the wall (Roman ballista crews were apparently very, very good) but the projectiles of the giant ballista were so heavy and therefore so slow that they could be seen in flight and warnings could be shouted to the target until the Romans got wind of this and camouflaged the stones. These Ballistas were also used quite aggressively by the Romans as field artillery. There are accounts dating back to the 12th-13th century of ranks of crossbowmen firing in relays like musket armed infantry of the 17th-19th centuries.
And as a gesture of goodwill, they've also left him a large wooden horse with a bow tied around it outside the embassy.
At least the British still have a degree of respect for the diplomatic status of embassies even if they have a hard time being civilised about it. If Edward Snowden had sought shelter in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Washington it would probably have stood an excellent chance of been stormed by delta forces inside of 24 hours. I thought that the US Govt. showed uncharacteristic restraint when they made do with convincing France and Spain into refusing Evo Morales' jet entry and thus forced it to land in Austria. I was expecting them to simply send fighters to intercept the plane over the Atlantic and forcing it to land on some US airbase. I'd like to know just how close Obama and his administration came to actually going ahead and doing that.
The star trek fantasy is exactly that - a fantasy. For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources, which we don't, there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own.
Why would an economy without money not work? Just because we and our economic elite are so entrenched in money and free market theories that border on religion that does not automatically mean that other ways of organizing a civilization do not work as well. If you pulled a Roman citizen off the streets of Rome and told him/her that in 2000 year or so people will buy silk (a very expensive luxury back then) with something resembling papyrus money rather than solid gold aurei he/she would have either laughed at you or if they were a kind hearted person offered to escort you to the temple of Apollo so that you might have your lunacy treated by a skilled healer. That same reaction would have remained a constant reaction into the 18th century everywhere on earth except perhaps in parts of China where paper money came into general circulation earlier than elsewhere in the world. Outside of China, except for the mercantile and banking communities in Europe and the Middle East who were familiar with the basic concept of promissory notes and trust based value, the rest of the population would have written you off as a lunatic for talking about paper money. It's all a matter of culture and common consensus about value and how things should work.
Personally I'd rather rot outside than inside. If you're locked up with more than one person you'll have to be constantly watching your back.
That depends on where you are locked in and with whom. If you are locked in with a bunch of regular people they usually form some kindo of regulated community sooner or later. If, on the other hand, you are locked in with a bunch of virtuously selfish sociopaths in an Ayn Randish paradise like Galt''s Gulch you'd better watch out.
Use a GUI like Atlassian's "SourceTree". It's what we use at work, and it works pretty well. You'll still want at least one Git expert on the team for when someone does something stupid, but you'll need that for whatever platform you choose.
With an inexperienced team you'd probably be better off with SVN. It's easier for complete noobs to understand and a bunch of noobs is not likely to need the extra features you get with Git. By the time they have gotten comfortable with SVN and you feel that your team is ready for more complex work you can always upgrade to Git.
There are plenty of things to do in the company. For one thing, they have to have a bunch of people trying to convince advertisers to buy space. I assume that's the main reason to have a bunch of scattered offices; they have to have the people selling the ads where the buyers are. They also have a bunch of developers working on new features, like their new "moments" thingy, and presumably on better ways of targeting their ads. Finally, they have to have customer service and support people to do things like responding to abuse complaints.
I have always wondered how Twitter makes their money. I suppose these layoffs answer that question... they don't make money.
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
Why don't we turn the "NASA faked the moon landings" conspiracy theory on it's head and convince the tinfoil-hat community NASA has secretly sent astronauts to Mars? I'm challenging all Slashdot users to discreetly spread rumours and manifestly fake and/or weak evidence that NASA has secretly gone to Mars and that this film is a reenactment documentary based on revelations by a mysterious unidentified NASA whistle blower thus fanning the flames of this simple misconception among a few uninformed people into a full blown conspiracy theory. If people believe NASA faked the moon landings even though you can see the astronaut's footprints on the moon to this day they'll swallow this story hook line and sinker since the believability of a conspiracy theory seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of evidence proving that it is a big steaming pile of bullshit.
The reason Europeans were so susceptible to the plague is that they were Europeans, just as the reason Native Americans were so susceptible to small pox was that they were Native Americans. Inbreeding leads to weakness, crossbreeding leads to strength.
I agree that crossbreeding builds a strong population and pure bloodlines (aka. inbreeding) leads to weak populations but the rest of your post is wrong. There was steady gene flow between Asia and Europe for millennia whereas the aboriginals of the Americas were isolated after the end of the last ice age and the submergence of Beringia which cut the land bridge between Asia and North America. There were some old-world diseases that caused devastation among Native American populations and there were some new world diseases that caused devastation in the Old World. However, some of the pandemics that wiped out the native populations of the Americas (and that were previously thought to have been introduced pathogens) would in the light of modern research seem to have been entirely home grown. For example the pandemic that wiped out the Aztecs after the Spanish invasion seems to have been a hemorrhagic fever endemic to the Americas. Scholars in the past wrote a whole lot of stuff about pandemics without having the foggiest notion of which pathogens had been involved and those writings unfortunately remained gospel until very recently. Until only a couple of decades ago we had only a limited idea of whether the Black Death pathogen was the same as the modern plague bacteria, there were divided opinions. Some thought he plague of 1346 was an influenza. The last time I looked plague DNA had indeed been found in ancient remains but we still do not know if the Black Death and the Justinian plague were the same or not, the Justinian plague could have been something else altogether. There is also this persistent myth, born out of the 19th and early 20th century fascination with the orient, that all culture flowed from the east (i.e. Ex oriente lux = From the east the light), that medieval Europeans were somehow dirtier, more ignorant and more primitive than oriental people and that that is why the plague spread so rapidly in Europe. Roman bathing culture did not just evaporate with the fall of the old empire and throughout the Middle Ages there were bathhouses in many cities and towns in Europe (in the 13th century Paris had 32 bathouses). If the Medieval European really was so dirty and Asians so clean why did a pandemic spread by fleas spread from Asia to the West? You'd think it would originate among the dirty Europeans and then travel east and dissipate when it reached Asia because of the supposedly superior hygiene of medieval period Asians who would not, or so the conventional theory goes, have had fleas. In actual fact the Plague ravaged Europe and Asia pretty much equally and Asians of the 14th century seem to have been just as flea ridden as their European contemporaries. For example in 1334, a pandemic that was probably the same black death that ravaged Europe a decade later killed 5 million people in Hebei Province China with a death toll of about 90%.
That bugged me too. It was stupid, impractical, and unbelievable. There was nothing wrong with the actual ending that needed to be fixed unless you feel the need to give the -ists and the Rambo crowd some thrills.
Yeah I have to concur, you pay for the ticket, spend all that time watching the move, it is so realistic and promising and then in the last 15 minutes Watney gets eaten by a pack of banths.... oops, was that a spoiler?
We've been eating genetically modified food since before the dark ages. Hell, broccoli is pretty much entirely man made. Maize that we eat today has never existed in the wild. Fear for fear's sake is anti-science.
And we have been making weapons since the stone age but the difference between breeding cattle by traditional means and what geneticists can do today, never mind what they will be able to do over the next century, is about the same as the difference between a hand-axe and and a cruise missile. How many times haven't we heard scientist say that some new technology or the other is perfectly safe (anybody remember DTT) only to see them fall on their face and admit that they (surprise surprise) overlooked something. This idea that anybody who has reservations on going to town with GMO technology is a stupid luddite, because GMO is a technology that cannot possibly cause any unforeseen harm, is pretty idiotic in it self. I'm all for science but deregulating GMO and allowing greedy corporations to do anything they want without any oversight because GMO is a supposedly such a safe technology is not something I'm prepared to do.
Who would have thought it would be the Europeans who are being anti-science? Yet they scoff at the US citizens (also retarded) who decry global warming. Personally, I like the idea of GMO. And yes, yes I will (and I presume I do) eat some.
So anybody who seeks to minimise his/her intake of Monsanto's GM crops in "anti-scientific"? And furthermore I suppose it could not possibly be the case that their opposition to Monsanto and the rest of that ilk has just as much to do with DNA patents, i.e. corporations turning staple crops into "intellectual property" and then using it as a tool with which to abuse the public? Personally it is the latter that worries me more than the former.
I once spent the better part of an evening trying to make a payment via PayPal. After having several payment attempts fail without explanation I first thought that something was wrong with my credit card and called the bank. When the card turned out to be OK I sent PayPal a support request and after a lengthy phone conversation with their support people we finally found out that their fraud detection algorithm had flagged the payment I was trying to make as suspicions because previously I had always made smaller payments in the sub $50 range and now I wanted to buy a piece of audio equipment for a little over $500. That's fair enough, I don't mind fraud detection but I'd like:
1) Descriptive error messages. When the fraud detector fails it should tell me why, exactly why, not just: "There was an error processing your payment.". I should not have to call support to find out what is wrong and when that is unavoidable, first line support should not have to call a second level specialist to find out what the fuck is wrong with the fraud detector.
2) Resolution that does not require a lengthy e-mail exchange or telephone conversations with support staff. When the fraud detector fails there should be a quick and simple to convince it you are not a gangster. At the time PayPal did not have such an option.
I have since stopped using PayPal. Partly it is because of this episode and because PayPal is a bit of a pain to use but mostly it is just due to the amount of phishing mail I get that is targeted at PayPal which is another thing I'd like them to do something about.
The classical purpose and function of US government regulatory agencies is to indemnify the industries which they are charged with regulating from any legal repercussions resulting from egregious and outlandish acts of greed and irresponsibility.
This is just another case.
Actually, in this case the US government seems to have failed in it's primary purpose. Now that this loop hole has been used it will have to be closed because of public outrage and I'm pretty sure the senators who created this loop hole intended that it should be used by a US car manufacturer, not a European one. Heads must be rolling on capitol hill.
How can you exceed a data cap? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what a data cap is. Where I come from a data cap is implemented on your provider's servers/switches/exchanges, you set the cap via a web interface and it caps your downloads (as in you can no longer download anything) when you have reached X dollars/euros/etc... or Y bytes where X or Y can be set to whatever value you prefer. If the cap is exceeded despite you explicitly setting it to some value its their own damn fault and they have to eat the costs.
Had a coworker move to an EA. All i saw was the same shit pay, the same shit work, and my own workload stack up while his lessened. Yet I made less, worked twice as many hours, and got none of the recognition. EA's should be shit canned.
Maybe you didn't get any recognition because you were an easily replaceable grunt that was helping to build the system that your coworker architected? The carpenter working on a flashy new building doesn't get any credit either while he toils away at relatively low pay to build the design from the architect.
If I had modpoints I'd mot your post '+1 Funny'. I love software architects. I once witnessed as one of these people was turned loose on a company I was working for. When they introduced him they listed his accomplishments, chief among whom was the design of a customer relationship management and provisioning web-app. The thing was extensively built on ActiveX plugins which meant that it was only usable on Windows and on Windows it only worked properly in Internet Explorer. At the introductory meeting after they finished heaping laurels upon their new software architect and it was time for questions, I was the only one to raise my hand. Being really curious about his architectural expert opinion I asked the guy what the point had been of developing a web-app that was only really usable on one browser on one operating system, why not just develop a native GUI program? I didn't really want to know I mostly just wanted to seem him weasel himself out of the question. They guy changed colours briefly, clearly discomforted by the question, and then explained: "Due to special circumstances at the time we made the conscious decision to... blah blah blah... and thus it made good business sense at the time." I will never forget the voice of words "conscious decision". This translates into every day english as: "Well we drank some Microsoft cool aid and then... blah blah blah... and when we sobered up we were stuck with a giant polished turd.". Of course the company bought this pile of crap CRM system for a very significant sum of money and then retired it (along with the architect) a there or four years later.
Whenever something bad happens - 9/11, Challenger, Katrina, Bill Crosby, SUV rollovers, every president, Deepwater Horizon - someone will selflessly step forward and say "I knew it was going to happen, I warned you, but nobody would listen!"
Next time a screw-up is in the news, pay attention and wait for the inevitable soothsayer.
You don't need to be a soothsayer to figure out that cheating on emissions tests and then manufacturing and selling millions of cars based on those falsifications is going to get you into a shitload of trouble. This is especially true if all somebody has to do to catch you red-handed is attach an emissions analyser to the exhaust pipe of one of your cars and drive it through town for a while. Even when the idea of doing this was first proposed it was just bloody obvious it was a dumbs thing to do. Between plunging stock prices, the product recall, the government fines in the US/EU, the class action lawsuits that will doubtless be filed in the USA, law suits by VW stockholders, falling sales and the massive damage to VW's reputation there is a chance this could bankrupt VW. I just got through watching a debate on German TV where they were talking about this costing VW several tens of billions of euros and most of those costs could have been calculated accurately enough to demonstrate the galactic stupidity of cheating on emissions tests years ago and without the use of a crystal ball.
The movies pirated at theaters are usually low quality and not very interesting to watch due to all the quality issues.
Also consider the possibility that piracy of movies at the theaters may be performed by the employees themselves whenever that happens.
I agree 100%, what kind of a miserly dork would watch a pirated movie recorded with a smartphone in a cinema. The amount of effort spent by the paranoid dickheads that seem to rule the media industry on preventing this sort of piracy is completely out of all proportion to the small amount of damage it does. It's a bit like swatting flies with a 12 gauge shotgun.
I'm curious, were your non Apple laptops a match in terms of $. I have a theory that if you spend the same amount on a Windows machine it would last just as long.
That depends on the 'Windows Machine' you buy (Let's call them PCs since you can run more OS'es on them than just Windows ++shock/awe++). My experience with large laptop pools have taught me that the really cheap ones that ship with chargers the size of a lunch box, batteries that last a two to three hours and cases that are made of plastic tend to age fast while the MacBooks and other PC's with metal housings last longer although there are also some gracefully designed and light high quality laptops with polymer cases that are pretty rugged. Then there is the issue of CPU, RAM, SSD vs. HD and so on. Cheaper machines tend to ship with new CPUs but many other components that are obsolete and/or inadequate (as in too little RAM, HDs/SSDs that are to small and low quality batteries). If you want small form factor and high quality/new components you have to pay for it, regardless of whether you buy an Apple PC or a 'Windows PC'. If you don't care about form factor, don't mind squeaky plastic casings and component quality/newness matters less then you can pay less. Apple laptops are some of the best designed highest quality laptops you can get and if you go looking for PCs with the same build quality, lightness, small form factor, battery life/quality/cycle-count and components the price difference isn't really that massive. I use Apple PCs mainly because I hate the Windows UI, I don't have the patience to sort out the couple of dozen glitches (usually not serious, just annoying) that seem to come with ever major release of every Linux distro I have ever used and because I like the build quality, huge trackpads and small form factors of the MacBooks. If Apple HQ ever gets sucked into a gravitational singularity generated by all the Android users on Slashdot getting together in one place and hating Apple simultaneously, my close second choice would probably be a high end Lenvo Think Pad running Linux and Gnome 3 (I know, that last part is sacrilegious but I like the Gnome 3 UI even more than Aqua) but I do not expect it to be massively cheaper than the MacBook I am using now..
Wipe it. Flash a new ROM; don't install any other app stores, don't download sketchy apps.
If you have malware, that's cause you (or someone with access to your phone) installed it. Don't do that.
In other words voluntarily lock yourself into a walled garden? But isn't one of the biggest advantages of Android the freedom to install anything you want from any place you want?
Really? Down here in COS there's only 1 place that does diesel emissions "testing" (really they just test the opacity of the exhaust and don't look for any particular gas) and that runs me $50 every 2 years. I'd love to avoid that fee.
Really? you are appalled by paying $50 every two years? The government fleeces you many times more than that every year for farm subsidies and corporate welfare.
How many of the 5 star reviews are coming from users who already use IOS over andriod.
And how many of the 1 star reviews come from Android users who hate iOS despite never having used it?...welcome to the computer operating system holy wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, next time the automated system will imprison him. Why is he complaining now?
Automated imprisonment?!? Don't be so 1984, we have long since moved on to drone strikes.
And for convenience sake it only affects OLDER devices. Seriously, Troll? OS is software, Apple could patch it to a similar level of encryption, or better for the stock price - advise you to upgrade the hardware.
There is a military axiom about not defending indefensible positions. What would you have Apple do? Patch ancient 2nd and 3rd gen iPhones. Should Microsoft still be patching Windows 2000? Should Fedora still be patching FD12? And don't tell me that old phones being obsoleted because they are unable to run a new OS is some sinister plan by Apple to force users to buy new phones. I have a small pile of old Android phones and tablets that were orphaned (as in: Your device is incompatible with this version of Android) long before the end of their useful life because they could not handle the bloat of the new Android OS. Operating systems get upgraded, hardware becomes obsolete and some people do not bother to upgrade and that is a platform independent fact so if you want to rag on Apple try finding something better to complain about.
How does it compare to a well-made crossbow or normal bow?
That depends on draw weight, draw length and projectile weight of the bow but as a general rule of thumb a medieval longbow would fire an arrow at between 50 m/s for a hunting bow to perhaps a bit more than 100 m/s for a monster of a warbow. This is comparable to modern high-tech recurve bows. Crossbows are a different story. They have shorter limbs in order to make the weapon more compact which shortens the draw length and they made up for that by making the draw weight much greater than that of a longbow. Relatively manageable crossbows for one man field use could have a draw weight that ranged from 200-300 of KG But because of the slower draw weight the speed of a run-of-the-mill crossbow quarrel was about the same as that of a longbow arrow despite the higher draw weight. Crossbow quarrels and longbow arrows weighed about the same. However crossbows existed in much greater sizes than longbows. There were man portable windlass bows (well, theoretically man portable, in practice they seem to have had a two man crew) with draw weights of 500kg or more which would probably have had projectile velocities well above 100 m/s. There were also wheeled/tripod mounted ones with much higher draw weights that also fired stones as well as what amounted to heavy spears. In those cases projectile velocity obviously depended on projectile weight. During the siege of Jerusalem the Romans used a giant Ballista (technically torsion artillery not a crossbow) that flung stones that were so big they could rip the merlon off of the city wall or one occasion a ballista ball ripped the head clean off of a guard standing on the wall (Roman ballista crews were apparently very, very good) but the projectiles of the giant ballista were so heavy and therefore so slow that they could be seen in flight and warnings could be shouted to the target until the Romans got wind of this and camouflaged the stones. These Ballistas were also used quite aggressively by the Romans as field artillery. There are accounts dating back to the 12th-13th century of ranks of crossbowmen firing in relays like musket armed infantry of the 17th-19th centuries.
If Starcraft cheating can rock all of Korea then Korea has some serious problems that go far beyond Starcraft cheating,
Big Data Attempts To Find Meaning In 40 Years of UK Political Debate
Good luck with that....
And as a gesture of goodwill, they've also left him a large wooden horse with a bow tied around it outside the embassy.
At least the British still have a degree of respect for the diplomatic status of embassies even if they have a hard time being civilised about it. If Edward Snowden had sought shelter in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Washington it would probably have stood an excellent chance of been stormed by delta forces inside of 24 hours. I thought that the US Govt. showed uncharacteristic restraint when they made do with convincing France and Spain into refusing Evo Morales' jet entry and thus forced it to land in Austria. I was expecting them to simply send fighters to intercept the plane over the Atlantic and forcing it to land on some US airbase. I'd like to know just how close Obama and his administration came to actually going ahead and doing that.
The star trek fantasy is exactly that - a fantasy. For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources, which we don't, there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own.
Why would an economy without money not work? Just because we and our economic elite are so entrenched in money and free market theories that border on religion that does not automatically mean that other ways of organizing a civilization do not work as well. If you pulled a Roman citizen off the streets of Rome and told him/her that in 2000 year or so people will buy silk (a very expensive luxury back then) with something resembling papyrus money rather than solid gold aurei he/she would have either laughed at you or if they were a kind hearted person offered to escort you to the temple of Apollo so that you might have your lunacy treated by a skilled healer. That same reaction would have remained a constant reaction into the 18th century everywhere on earth except perhaps in parts of China where paper money came into general circulation earlier than elsewhere in the world. Outside of China, except for the mercantile and banking communities in Europe and the Middle East who were familiar with the basic concept of promissory notes and trust based value, the rest of the population would have written you off as a lunatic for talking about paper money. It's all a matter of culture and common consensus about value and how things should work.
None, and who will you complain to?
Personally I'd rather rot outside than inside. If you're locked up with more than one person you'll have to be constantly watching your back.
That depends on where you are locked in and with whom. If you are locked in with a bunch of regular people they usually form some kindo of regulated community sooner or later. If, on the other hand, you are locked in with a bunch of virtuously selfish sociopaths in an Ayn Randish paradise like Galt''s Gulch you'd better watch out.
Use a GUI like Atlassian's "SourceTree". It's what we use at work, and it works pretty well. You'll still want at least one Git expert on the team for when someone does something stupid, but you'll need that for whatever platform you choose.
With an inexperienced team you'd probably be better off with SVN. It's easier for complete noobs to understand and a bunch of noobs is not likely to need the extra features you get with Git. By the time they have gotten comfortable with SVN and you feel that your team is ready for more complex work you can always upgrade to Git.
There are plenty of things to do in the company. For one thing, they have to have a bunch of people trying to convince advertisers to buy space. I assume that's the main reason to have a bunch of scattered offices; they have to have the people selling the ads where the buyers are. They also have a bunch of developers working on new features, like their new "moments" thingy, and presumably on better ways of targeting their ads. Finally, they have to have customer service and support people to do things like responding to abuse complaints.
I have always wondered how Twitter makes their money. I suppose these layoffs answer that question... they don't make money.
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
Why don't we turn the "NASA faked the moon landings" conspiracy theory on it's head and convince the tinfoil-hat community NASA has secretly sent astronauts to Mars? I'm challenging all Slashdot users to discreetly spread rumours and manifestly fake and/or weak evidence that NASA has secretly gone to Mars and that this film is a reenactment documentary based on revelations by a mysterious unidentified NASA whistle blower thus fanning the flames of this simple misconception among a few uninformed people into a full blown conspiracy theory. If people believe NASA faked the moon landings even though you can see the astronaut's footprints on the moon to this day they'll swallow this story hook line and sinker since the believability of a conspiracy theory seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of evidence proving that it is a big steaming pile of bullshit.
The reason Europeans were so susceptible to the plague is that they were Europeans, just as the reason Native Americans were so susceptible to small pox was that they were Native Americans. Inbreeding leads to weakness, crossbreeding leads to strength.
I agree that crossbreeding builds a strong population and pure bloodlines (aka. inbreeding) leads to weak populations but the rest of your post is wrong. There was steady gene flow between Asia and Europe for millennia whereas the aboriginals of the Americas were isolated after the end of the last ice age and the submergence of Beringia which cut the land bridge between Asia and North America. There were some old-world diseases that caused devastation among Native American populations and there were some new world diseases that caused devastation in the Old World. However, some of the pandemics that wiped out the native populations of the Americas (and that were previously thought to have been introduced pathogens) would in the light of modern research seem to have been entirely home grown. For example the pandemic that wiped out the Aztecs after the Spanish invasion seems to have been a hemorrhagic fever endemic to the Americas. Scholars in the past wrote a whole lot of stuff about pandemics without having the foggiest notion of which pathogens had been involved and those writings unfortunately remained gospel until very recently. Until only a couple of decades ago we had only a limited idea of whether the Black Death pathogen was the same as the modern plague bacteria, there were divided opinions. Some thought he plague of 1346 was an influenza. The last time I looked plague DNA had indeed been found in ancient remains but we still do not know if the Black Death and the Justinian plague were the same or not, the Justinian plague could have been something else altogether. There is also this persistent myth, born out of the 19th and early 20th century fascination with the orient, that all culture flowed from the east (i.e. Ex oriente lux = From the east the light), that medieval Europeans were somehow dirtier, more ignorant and more primitive than oriental people and that that is why the plague spread so rapidly in Europe. Roman bathing culture did not just evaporate with the fall of the old empire and throughout the Middle Ages there were bathhouses in many cities and towns in Europe (in the 13th century Paris had 32 bathouses). If the Medieval European really was so dirty and Asians so clean why did a pandemic spread by fleas spread from Asia to the West? You'd think it would originate among the dirty Europeans and then travel east and dissipate when it reached Asia because of the supposedly superior hygiene of medieval period Asians who would not, or so the conventional theory goes, have had fleas. In actual fact the Plague ravaged Europe and Asia pretty much equally and Asians of the 14th century seem to have been just as flea ridden as their European contemporaries. For example in 1334, a pandemic that was probably the same black death that ravaged Europe a decade later killed 5 million people in Hebei Province China with a death toll of about 90%.
That bugged me too. It was stupid, impractical, and unbelievable. There was nothing wrong with the actual ending that needed to be fixed unless you feel the need to give the -ists and the Rambo crowd some thrills.
Yeah I have to concur, you pay for the ticket, spend all that time watching the move, it is so realistic and promising and then in the last 15 minutes Watney gets eaten by a pack of banths.... oops, was that a spoiler?
We've been eating genetically modified food since before the dark ages. Hell, broccoli is pretty much entirely man made. Maize that we eat today has never existed in the wild. Fear for fear's sake is anti-science.
And we have been making weapons since the stone age but the difference between breeding cattle by traditional means and what geneticists can do today, never mind what they will be able to do over the next century, is about the same as the difference between a hand-axe and and a cruise missile. How many times haven't we heard scientist say that some new technology or the other is perfectly safe (anybody remember DTT) only to see them fall on their face and admit that they (surprise surprise) overlooked something. This idea that anybody who has reservations on going to town with GMO technology is a stupid luddite, because GMO is a technology that cannot possibly cause any unforeseen harm, is pretty idiotic in it self. I'm all for science but deregulating GMO and allowing greedy corporations to do anything they want without any oversight because GMO is a supposedly such a safe technology is not something I'm prepared to do.
Who would have thought it would be the Europeans who are being anti-science? Yet they scoff at the US citizens (also retarded) who decry global warming. Personally, I like the idea of GMO. And yes, yes I will (and I presume I do) eat some.
So anybody who seeks to minimise his/her intake of Monsanto's GM crops in "anti-scientific"? And furthermore I suppose it could not possibly be the case that their opposition to Monsanto and the rest of that ilk has just as much to do with DNA patents, i.e. corporations turning staple crops into "intellectual property" and then using it as a tool with which to abuse the public? Personally it is the latter that worries me more than the former.
How would you like it to work instead?
I once spent the better part of an evening trying to make a payment via PayPal. After having several payment attempts fail without explanation I first thought that something was wrong with my credit card and called the bank. When the card turned out to be OK I sent PayPal a support request and after a lengthy phone conversation with their support people we finally found out that their fraud detection algorithm had flagged the payment I was trying to make as suspicions because previously I had always made smaller payments in the sub $50 range and now I wanted to buy a piece of audio equipment for a little over $500. That's fair enough, I don't mind fraud detection but I'd like:
1) Descriptive error messages. When the fraud detector fails it should tell me why, exactly why, not just: "There was an error processing your payment.". I should not have to call support to find out what is wrong and when that is unavoidable, first line support should not have to call a second level specialist to find out what the fuck is wrong with the fraud detector.
2) Resolution that does not require a lengthy e-mail exchange or telephone conversations with support staff. When the fraud detector fails there should be a quick and simple to convince it you are not a gangster. At the time PayPal did not have such an option.
I have since stopped using PayPal. Partly it is because of this episode and because PayPal is a bit of a pain to use but mostly it is just due to the amount of phishing mail I get that is targeted at PayPal which is another thing I'd like them to do something about.
The classical purpose and function of US government regulatory agencies is to indemnify the industries which they are charged with regulating from any legal repercussions resulting from egregious and outlandish acts of greed and irresponsibility.
This is just another case.
Actually, in this case the US government seems to have failed in it's primary purpose. Now that this loop hole has been used it will have to be closed because of public outrage and I'm pretty sure the senators who created this loop hole intended that it should be used by a US car manufacturer, not a European one. Heads must be rolling on capitol hill.
How can you exceed a data cap? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what a data cap is. Where I come from a data cap is implemented on your provider's servers/switches/exchanges, you set the cap via a web interface and it caps your downloads (as in you can no longer download anything) when you have reached X dollars/euros/etc... or Y bytes where X or Y can be set to whatever value you prefer. If the cap is exceeded despite you explicitly setting it to some value its their own damn fault and they have to eat the costs.
Had a coworker move to an EA. All i saw was the same shit pay, the same shit work, and my own workload stack up while his lessened. Yet I made less, worked twice as many hours, and got none of the recognition. EA's should be shit canned.
Maybe you didn't get any recognition because you were an easily replaceable grunt that was helping to build the system that your coworker architected? The carpenter working on a flashy new building doesn't get any credit either while he toils away at relatively low pay to build the design from the architect.
If I had modpoints I'd mot your post '+1 Funny'. I love software architects. I once witnessed as one of these people was turned loose on a company I was working for. When they introduced him they listed his accomplishments, chief among whom was the design of a customer relationship management and provisioning web-app. The thing was extensively built on ActiveX plugins which meant that it was only usable on Windows and on Windows it only worked properly in Internet Explorer. At the introductory meeting after they finished heaping laurels upon their new software architect and it was time for questions, I was the only one to raise my hand. Being really curious about his architectural expert opinion I asked the guy what the point had been of developing a web-app that was only really usable on one browser on one operating system, why not just develop a native GUI program? I didn't really want to know I mostly just wanted to seem him weasel himself out of the question. They guy changed colours briefly, clearly discomforted by the question, and then explained: "Due to special circumstances at the time we made the conscious decision to... blah blah blah ... and thus it made good business sense at the time." I will never forget the voice of words "conscious decision". This translates into every day english as: "Well we drank some Microsoft cool aid and then ... blah blah blah ... and when we sobered up we were stuck with a giant polished turd.". Of course the company bought this pile of crap CRM system for a very significant sum of money and then retired it (along with the architect) a there or four years later.
Whenever something bad happens - 9/11, Challenger, Katrina, Bill Crosby, SUV rollovers, every president, Deepwater Horizon - someone will selflessly step forward and say "I knew it was going to happen, I warned you, but nobody would listen!"
Next time a screw-up is in the news, pay attention and wait for the inevitable soothsayer.
You don't need to be a soothsayer to figure out that cheating on emissions tests and then manufacturing and selling millions of cars based on those falsifications is going to get you into a shitload of trouble. This is especially true if all somebody has to do to catch you red-handed is attach an emissions analyser to the exhaust pipe of one of your cars and drive it through town for a while. Even when the idea of doing this was first proposed it was just bloody obvious it was a dumbs thing to do. Between plunging stock prices, the product recall, the government fines in the US/EU, the class action lawsuits that will doubtless be filed in the USA, law suits by VW stockholders, falling sales and the massive damage to VW's reputation there is a chance this could bankrupt VW. I just got through watching a debate on German TV where they were talking about this costing VW several tens of billions of euros and most of those costs could have been calculated accurately enough to demonstrate the galactic stupidity of cheating on emissions tests years ago and without the use of a crystal ball.
The movies pirated at theaters are usually low quality and not very interesting to watch due to all the quality issues.
Also consider the possibility that piracy of movies at the theaters may be performed by the employees themselves whenever that happens.
I agree 100%, what kind of a miserly dork would watch a pirated movie recorded with a smartphone in a cinema. The amount of effort spent by the paranoid dickheads that seem to rule the media industry on preventing this sort of piracy is completely out of all proportion to the small amount of damage it does. It's a bit like swatting flies with a 12 gauge shotgun.
I'm curious, were your non Apple laptops a match in terms of $. I have a theory that if you spend the same amount on a Windows machine it would last just as long.
That depends on the 'Windows Machine' you buy (Let's call them PCs since you can run more OS'es on them than just Windows ++shock/awe++). My experience with large laptop pools have taught me that the really cheap ones that ship with chargers the size of a lunch box, batteries that last a two to three hours and cases that are made of plastic tend to age fast while the MacBooks and other PC's with metal housings last longer although there are also some gracefully designed and light high quality laptops with polymer cases that are pretty rugged. Then there is the issue of CPU, RAM, SSD vs. HD and so on. Cheaper machines tend to ship with new CPUs but many other components that are obsolete and/or inadequate (as in too little RAM, HDs/SSDs that are to small and low quality batteries). If you want small form factor and high quality/new components you have to pay for it, regardless of whether you buy an Apple PC or a 'Windows PC'. If you don't care about form factor, don't mind squeaky plastic casings and component quality/newness matters less then you can pay less. Apple laptops are some of the best designed highest quality laptops you can get and if you go looking for PCs with the same build quality, lightness, small form factor, battery life/quality/cycle-count and components the price difference isn't really that massive. I use Apple PCs mainly because I hate the Windows UI, I don't have the patience to sort out the couple of dozen glitches (usually not serious, just annoying) that seem to come with ever major release of every Linux distro I have ever used and because I like the build quality, huge trackpads and small form factors of the MacBooks. If Apple HQ ever gets sucked into a gravitational singularity generated by all the Android users on Slashdot getting together in one place and hating Apple simultaneously, my close second choice would probably be a high end Lenvo Think Pad running Linux and Gnome 3 (I know, that last part is sacrilegious but I like the Gnome 3 UI even more than Aqua) but I do not expect it to be massively cheaper than the MacBook I am using now..
Wipe it. Flash a new ROM; don't install any other app stores, don't download sketchy apps.
If you have malware, that's cause you (or someone with access to your phone) installed it. Don't do that.
In other words voluntarily lock yourself into a walled garden? But isn't one of the biggest advantages of Android the freedom to install anything you want from any place you want?
Really? Down here in COS there's only 1 place that does diesel emissions "testing" (really they just test the opacity of the exhaust and don't look for any particular gas) and that runs me $50 every 2 years. I'd love to avoid that fee.
Really? you are appalled by paying $50 every two years? The government fleeces you many times more than that every year for farm subsidies and corporate welfare.
How many of the 5 star reviews are coming from users who already use IOS over andriod.
And how many of the 1 star reviews come from Android users who hate iOS despite never having used it? ...welcome to the computer operating system holy wars.