For all of the QA at Boing; they don't believe in software QA. Take a look at their job openings some time: In years of searching, I've seen only one software QA position, and it wasn't dealing with aircraft. Any such search results will return developers that are to write their own tests against the spec. Developers are not Testers.... and I'll ask: How many more such bugs are out there?
I know of two other software "bugs"... that can be attributed to a lack of QA. How many people will die due to a bad management decision on the part of Boeing?
Disclosure: Yes, I'm a software QA / Test professional.
The worst part is that when the Software bugs are finally discovered they are not fixed because it takes too much time and is too expensive to do (even though the physical update process is essentially no different to re-flashing/updating the firmware/software in a consumer grade digital device). I'd argue that you could cut the red security tape, reduce costs and install updates quicker if you massively increase the software QA work being done. Apparently Boeing disagrees, I dunno about Airbus, they might be just as bad but for some reason it's Boeing planes that seem to top the list over software related bloopers we get in our sector. Another good example is American Airlines who replaced 35 pounds of on board paper documentation with iPads only to have massive delays when the damn app they were using forced pilots to return to gate to get a wifi connection. I'm not sure about the wisdom of using garden variety consumer level tablets for this but the idea in it self is a good one, pilots are probably way quicker at looking up stuff up on a tablet of some description than rifling through 35 pounds of paper documents but you'd think issues like that could be fixed with a combination of proper software/hardware QA and adding whatever iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/WhateverOS tablet the pilots are using for their docs to the pre-flight checklist and having each aircraft carry two of devices. Perhaps the thing to do would be to create a quality rating/stamp for "aviation certified" hardened tablets?... but knowing the aviation industry such devices would be updated once over their lifespan (at production time) because getting an update certified takes 8 months of wading through a quagmire of red tape, it would costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an update vetted and it would costs of thousands of dollars to have it installed by a duly certified and highly trained aviation safety professional even though he'd essentially just be doing the same thing the rest of us do when we update our iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc....
And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues.....:)
1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.
1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.
2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.
2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.
2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......
2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......
2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......
1970s: Wait three hours for your arpanet dial-back modem to download ASCII porn of Jane Fonda. Annoy your workmates by monopolizing the Telex printer unit.
There was life before xmodems you young whippersnapper!
Apparently we don't care about a terrible natural disaster unless some famous white guy, livin' the dream for his Googlionaire foundation, dies in an avalanche.
The world has looked the other way for a long time at the exploitation of the Sherpa and the other problems caused by rich Westerners, many not well-qualified, who feel they just have to make the Everest attempt. It's mostly the Sherpa who pay the toll.
I've never understood the sherpa thing.
If you're going to climb Everest, shouldn't you at least do the work yourself? Claiming you climbed Mt. Everest and not acknowledging the people who hauled your ass up there is like claiming you trekked the Grand Canyon and not mentioning that it was a bus tour and all you did was get out for a few photos.
I've never understood the whole Everest thing and I have heard a number of people who climbed Everest say the same. They either almost got their ass killed climbing up there or they walked past people who didn't make it and either lay there dead beside the path or were in the process of dying. Apparently it's an unwritten rule that you leave people to die if they can't make it and there are some pretty chilling stories by people who summited Everest of dying people laying there next to the path pleading for help. So why climb Everest? It's been done, what's there to prove? Those last two sentences aren't my words they are the words of an American who got the idea in his head to climb Everest and lost his nose and most of his fingers and toes in the process. Most of the people who 'summit' Everest are literally carried up there by Sherpas. If I ever get the notion to 'summit' Everest I'll take a helicopter, jump out, take a few snaps and fly back down again and even that would be (1) a stupid risk and (2) something that has been done before: Didier Delsalle, Eurocopter AS350 (It kind of surprised me that it was done by a little flea like the AS350, you'd expect the first chopper to summit Everest to be some big burly monster like a Black Hawk brimming with horsepowers.)
I will never understand why the loser doesn't pay the winner's fees.
I won't either. Where I come from it is the looser who pays the entire cost of the proceedings, the idea being that you better be damn sure of your case before bothering the courts with a lawsuit. It's not a cure-all though since it has lead to people trying to bringing lawsuits through shell companies who then declare bankruptcy when they loose the suit. It is nevertheless better than the US system where a party suing somebody does not have to worry automatic financial consequences if they loose. It encourages people to regard using the legal system to shake down other people through law suits as a business model rather than what it should be, a way to get a redress of your grievances.
When did Congress pass a declaration of war on Pakistan? I missed it?
It's not a war when the other government doesn't mind you being there. They do get to make that decision as a sovereign state. And it was known to be a military operation, so that was approved as such. If the civilians were collateral damage in a legitimate military operation with legitimate military objectives where they tried but failed to ascertain the presence of the civilians, then it sucks, but it's not illegal.
Of course, strangely, I'd suggest that the operation for getting bin Laden was more of an act of war because it is clear that the Pakistanis were not clued in on it and could not have therefore approved it. However, on that point, they could go fuck themselves. If some part of their government knowingly let him stay there, a mile or so from their military academy, us simply going in and killing him is probably the best could have expected.
Much as Islamabad screams its head off in righteous indignation about drone strikes it alway struck me as odd that the Pakistanis never did anything about the drone strikes. I mean they do have an air force don't they? In fact the PAF is an airforce of some renown if I recall correctly. If the government in Islamabad really wanted to it could post a squadron of their new JF-17s to the Northern Tribal Territories and sweep the skies clear of drones in an afternoon and it would be in the right to do so since they'd only be putting a stop to some really outrageous violations of their sovereign territory, but they haven't done that now have they? The way this game seems to work is that the Americans get to do airstrikes with impunity in the tribal areas where the Pakistani government has very limited control and the people that get zapped are militant tribal leaders who'd be busy ambushing Pakistani troops if they didn't have their hands full with the Americans in Afghanistan. Either way, these guys are not going to be missed in Islamabad. Meanwhile the Pakistanis make all sorts of noises about the drone strikes being a violation of their sovereignty while not lifting a finger to stop the drone attacks and just back and watch as the Americans kill off the cream of their domestic insurgency problem's leadership.
Do you know any models, or dancers, or anyone else in the performing arts? Even sitting still for a photo takes skill, even if it doesn't seem like it to you.
Calling it "skill" is an insult to human intelligence, and to anyone who graduated in college. It can be acquired in few weeks/months of training. Instead, you need 10 years to become a doctor, 7 to become a lawyer, 7-8 to become a physicist (BSc+PhD).
Anybody can pose for a photograph looking like a lumpy sack of potatoes. Posing for a photograph and reproducing the body language and visual cues that make people desire you or evoke some emotion in people even when you aren't in the kind of mood you are being asked to portray takes a certain talent. Call it social intelligence or whatever but being able to fake body language, moods and emotions is definitely a skill and therefore models and actors are highly socially and emotionally skilled individuals. The reason people who possess a high degree of the analytic/academic intelligence that makes them good physicists, mathematicians, chemists, programmers, etc... is that this kind of intelligence often seems to be inversely proportional with social skills, and therefore social and emotional skills tend to be a skill set such people hold in contempt. This is also why highly intelligent people usually make absolutely horrendous teachers which is ironic because they often also the first to pull out some phrase like "those who can't do, teach" whenever somebody exposes their utter incompetence in social interactions when in reality that axiom should be "just because you have a 180 IQ, it does not mean that you automatically have the social skills required to teach people how teach".
The notion that North American native peoples lived in any kind of harmony with nature is simply false.
Wait, what? That's nonsense. Any kind clearly covers a lot of ground, and some North American native peoples clearly did live in some kind of harmony with nature. They didn't leave it untouched, but they did see themselves as stewards with a responsibility to maintain the land. Again, there's variation between peoples. On the plains they burned down forests to make room for bison. But in other places they set controlled burns which successfully maintained forests throughout thousands of years of continuous occupation.
....and they managed to live on the N-American continent for at least 20.000 years without rotting out large numbers of higher vertebrate species like the currently dominant human cultures on the N-American continent have either managed to do or will do within the next few decades.
Google has added handwriting support to Android? And people complain about every single minor feature upgrade to iOS being big news.... for Pete's sake there was handwriting support in Windows Mobile and on Symbian a decade ago and it worked pretty well. Plus those guys weren't the firs to include this feature in a mobile device by any stretch...
You mean like the iPhone supported the vast majority of smartphone features when it was released, like native applications beyond what's bundled, MMS, video recording, 3G, Copy/Paste/Cut functionality, multitasking...
Oh, wait, that was a rushed piece of shit as well.
And yet people lined up to buy iPhones by the truckload, Google copied it's user interface and general device layout, the iPhone changed the mobile phone business forever and Nokia who dominated the mobile market went from having over 50% of the cellphone market to being a marginal player that got bought up by Microsoft. All things considered that is a pretty good track record for a rushed piece of shit.
You demonstrate why Europeans have been defeated by Americans in practically every industry: You're fucking morons who think success should be punished.
The success of digital communism^W^W Linux not withstanding I suppose.
Why the frak would they let a competitor get up and leave the playing area at all, much less after every single move? Were they playing in someone's garage drinking cheap beer and no one gave a shit?
I have no idea, what I do know is that somehow all of this is Apple's fault.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission.
Was the blockade of the South during the Civil War an attempt at Genocide? How about blockading Germany during WWI/WWII? That's not an example of genocide, that's trying to defeat an enemy by targeting their ability to wage war (can't fight without food). As I said, it was more a low intensity guerrilla war than it was a genocide.
Was the population of the American South reduced by 75% as a result of the blockade? No?...because the Native American population was systematically reduced by 75-80% first by the colonial authorities and then by the US government who really stepped up the speed of the eradication process. Entire tribes were wiped out in one way or another in the name of 'Manifest destiny'. Genocide is the systematic eradication of an ethnic group by a government or other organisation and if you manage to wipe out 75-80% of the Native American population then that is genocide in my book.
Soon the Pope will be saying the US genocided the Native Americans.
That's a bit of a stretch. The aim of the US western expansion wasn't to kill all traces of Native American peoples and culture, it was to gain control of their land. While there certainly were numerous instances of massacres, they seemed to be more due to individual ignorance, prejudice, or misunderstanding than any systemic attempt to wipe out all Indians. Not even considering all the treaties and reservations set up (the quality-or lack thereof-of the land provided on the reservations can again I think be attributed mostly to apathy or ignorance as opposed to outright malice), the numerous attempts at integrating and Westernizing Native Americans shows a (misguided perhaps) desire to help them and make them become "Americans". In reality, the Western expansion was in effect a protracted, low-intensity guerrilla war, and there are plenty of cases of these types of conflicts to show that they very often lead to instances of overreactions of force, excessive non-combatant casualties, and mass killings.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission. There is probably about as much proof of methodical and premeditated extermination of the Native American by the US Government as there is for the genocide of the Armenians being part of some plot carefully and extensively planned and executed at government level in Turkey. It was a policy aimed at 'pacifying the native peoples', any mass deaths were probably regarded as a bonus. That having been said millions of people died as a result of the actions of a government against a certain ethnic group and we call that genocide whether it was acerbically planned like the Jewish Holocaust or a spontaneous disorganized series massacres like the Armenian Genocide or the near extermination of the Native Americans.
I haven't worn a (wrist) watch for decades
When you have to do frequent hand washing (in the last 35 years I have been employed in the meat industry, food industry, childcare and elder care) its not worth the hassle.
Of course I gave up Apple in 1988
I kept forgetting my cell phone so I decided to stop wearing a wrist watch and started to use the phone to keep track of time. Between chencking the time, receiving e-mails, SMS'es and phone calls, browsing the net, playing games or reading e-books when I'm bored it's been years since I left the house without me noticing I had forgotten the damn cellphone within a few minutes.
When you cheat you tax collectors a few thousand then you end up in court. When a large corporation is minimising tax then it is much more of a negotiation. You are insignificant. Google employs lots of people and generates lots of revenue and can hire the best legal advice and accountants.
That's also the reason bankers and corporate use news media like the Daily Mail or Fox News to get you worked up over J.Q Public down the street cheating on his taxes or scrounging a few $ / £ / € in benefits because it distracts your attention from their corporate and banker friends who are cheating the public purse out of billions upon billions. It is a constant source of puzzlement to me how people can get so worked out about Polish/Romanian/Bulgarian workers coming to the UK and cheating on benefits (when in actual fact studies have shown that they work more and cheat less on benefits than native Britons) that I have actually heard people talk about wholesale deportations (and some ideas that are way scarier than that), but they do not seem to be bothered at all by bankers and corporations (read: the owners of organizations like the Daily Mail and Fox News et. al.) swindling the state out of amounts of money that make benefits swindling look like a mosquito on an elephant's ass.
I always find it amazing that these huge companies with enormous public domains don't have a person who's job description includes managing all of their certs and making sure they don't expire. You could even assign the job to two people just to make sure one of them doesn't get sick or something and miss one.
Facebook screwed this up once too. For the better part of a day I could not go anywhere on the internet without getting tiresome sequences certificate errors every single time I loaded a page with complaints about an expired Facebook certificate. I would not just get errors on pages with those crappy Facebook 'Like' buttons and little commenting plugin or pages that offered logging in with Facebook but even on sites that were serving what looked like pure 1990 something vintage HTML 2.0 pages but under the hood, buried in the page source code were Facebook tags that were presumably put there for tracking. Even though I knew at the time that Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. monitor every move we make on line, this oversight on part of Facebook was an interesting experience for me because it showed me that Facebook's monitoring operation is much more pervasive than I had suspected.
Somewhere along the way, the "writers" that foist these lame stories missed that the whole point of April Fools Day is to actually FOOL people (with stories that are plausible enough to sucker some people in). Any idiot can write a fake story. But a good fake story that's actually just plausible enough to have people repeating it and believing it, THAT'S what it's about.
C'mon, don't be a grumpus, that story made me and everybody in my office laugh.
The situation since new-year is absolutely horrendous. At January 1st, the VAT rules changed so that digital goods have to be taxed using the VAT rate of the buyer's location, and using the tax law of the buyer's home country. That is: a web shop of any size have to keep track of up to 80 different VAT rates, and the disparate tax law regarding VAT of 28 different EU countries in order to deduce which VAT rate and goods classification is applicable on each single transaction.
As a telling example: In several countries an e-book is only an e-book if it has an ISBN number (usually with a lower than standard VAT rate). Otherwise it's a digital service (with a higher VAT rate). In other countries it's a e-book as long it's a digital text. Or humorously enough, in the case of France: It's only taxed as an e-book if it doesn't have pornographic content, otherwise it's taxed as a digital service.
A good start would be what is proposed in the press release: Harmonized VAT rates and rules for digital goods.
And it is a real pain for the customers when web shops keep raping them on shipping costs and for some reason, even though they are supposed to refund their own countries VAT, they don't do that but pocket the money instead. The poor bloody customer ends up having to pay local VAT on: the product list price + Host country VAT + inflated shipping cost. Just as an example I wanted to buy a few A/D converters on Amazon recently because my local electronics monger went under a while ago (and keep in mind these things ship soldered to a small circuit board and are about the size of a stamp). The price was: $3 per converter * 5 = $15 but they wanted to charge me $42 for shipping!! I recently had a 1 meter long $150 equipment case shipped to me from the US for slightly less than that. Now don't get me wrong, I really like online shopping and I second your call for reform but web merchants can be real scam artists. At the moment I only shop online, particularly across borders, if the price difference is really substantial or I simply can't source the product locally and need it really badly.
I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't give a crap about what 99% of developers do or say.
When most mobile developers make 1/5th or 1/10th minimum wage, you can treat them like panhandlers -- no respect. Even though the millions of 99 cent/free apps are the main and only reason Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones/iPads. If desktops and laptops had such a vast array of apps created by modern-day slave labor, I doubt people would use the inferior, small screen phones or tablets.
For what it is worth I have bought over a hundred apps on the iTunes and very few of them were in the 99 cent/free category. There have actually been a few moments when I went looking for a specific type of app and was so inundated with crappy 99 cent/free crap that I had trouble finding the handful of better quality apps whose developers demanded a bit more money for their product leading me to wish there was a filter in iTunes that allowed me to search only for apps over a certain price range just to filter out the 99 cent/free garbage (not that all 99 cent/free apps are garbage. I've actually bought a few useful 99 cent apps, but the overwhelming majority is garbage).
The whole Apple ecosystem is built, designed and operated like a cult. People on both sides of debate frequently refer to it as a "Church". It funnels more and more money from the fanatical congregation into the pockets of the leadership through convincing them that they absolutely, positively *need* to upgrade to the next Operating Thetan, erm, I mean "version". Seriously, Scientology could take lessons from them. WTF did you expect?
Forget to put on our tinfoil hat and take our medication this morning did we?
The Web of trust only works... When we all agree to the same rules.
The CA system is broken.Trusting many different CAs has proven to be a bad idea since any CA can issue a certificate for any domain name they please like these guys did plus the fact that many CAs have suffered serious security breaches. What we've needed for years is some sort of DNS like system for certificates where certificates can be revoked and the action will be cascaded through the entire net quickly like domain name changes. There even have been proposals to use DNS for this purpose which as far as I understand it would render CAs redundant. Under the current system Google can only remove the certificates from the CA Root lists Google controls if the bad certificates have made it into those, and politely request that others who maintain CA Root lists do the same. I can only theorise that CA reform has proven problematic since implementing such a system would be taking a bowl of soup from the cauldron of certain set of people who have an interest in maintaining the old system and have resisted reform. I can't imagine any other reason why the certificate system hasn't been changed.
While AMD fans cry foul, it really is true that AMD drivers are worse on Windows than nVidia drivers. It isn't the massive gap like on Linux, but it is there. OpenGL stuff sees particular issues, with slower performance or even stuff outright failing to run on AMD cards, but other issues as well. My 7970M in my laptop has been headaches since I got the thing and only recently got up to a competent level.
Problems aside, they are just slow with updates for things like Crossfire. Multi-GPU support generally requires game specific profiles to work well, or even work at all. nVidia is quite fast at getting their SLI profiles out, but AMD hasn't had an update to Crossfire profiles since 2014.
AMD just doesn't focus on the software side of things like nVidia does. Their hardware development team seems to be top notch but their software development is lacking.
Dunno about performance, but when it comes to stability AMD is the clear winner in my experience plus the AMD drivers are open source straight from AMD and ship with most Linux distros so everything in the graphics department works out of the box. The Linux Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards that seem to ship with most Linux distros suck ass in terms of stability and the proprietary Nvidia driver is a constant source of irritation every time yum pulls down a kernel update. We installed 30 inch monitors on a bunch of Linux workstations running Fedora+Gnome and the damn things crashed several times per day until we either upgraded them with Nvidia proprietary driver or swapped out the graphics card for ones from AMD.
Still irrelevant - Microsoft doesn't "owe" you anything.
Microsoft exists as a publicly-traded for-profit company. They "just happen" to provide an operating system that is superior to the competition, but they have absolutely no obligation to market that tool "fairly". If they want to ship things with their OS that make them money at the top of the list, they can.
If they wanted to ship a video player with their OS that only plays cat videos, they could do that, too. And none of us have the least right to complain about it.
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For all of the QA at Boing; they don't believe in software QA. Take a look at their job openings some time: In years of searching, I've seen only one software QA position, and it wasn't dealing with aircraft. Any such search results will return developers that are to write their own tests against the spec. Developers are not Testers.... and I'll ask: How many more such bugs are out there? I know of two other software "bugs" ... that can be attributed to a lack of QA. How many people will die due to a bad management decision on the part of Boeing?
Disclosure: Yes, I'm a software QA / Test professional.
The worst part is that when the Software bugs are finally discovered they are not fixed because it takes too much time and is too expensive to do (even though the physical update process is essentially no different to re-flashing/updating the firmware/software in a consumer grade digital device). I'd argue that you could cut the red security tape, reduce costs and install updates quicker if you massively increase the software QA work being done. Apparently Boeing disagrees, I dunno about Airbus, they might be just as bad but for some reason it's Boeing planes that seem to top the list over software related bloopers we get in our sector. Another good example is American Airlines who replaced 35 pounds of on board paper documentation with iPads only to have massive delays when the damn app they were using forced pilots to return to gate to get a wifi connection. I'm not sure about the wisdom of using garden variety consumer level tablets for this but the idea in it self is a good one, pilots are probably way quicker at looking up stuff up on a tablet of some description than rifling through 35 pounds of paper documents but you'd think issues like that could be fixed with a combination of proper software/hardware QA and adding whatever iOS/Android/Linux/Windows/WhateverOS tablet the pilots are using for their docs to the pre-flight checklist and having each aircraft carry two of devices. Perhaps the thing to do would be to create a quality rating/stamp for "aviation certified" hardened tablets? ... but knowing the aviation industry such devices would be updated once over their lifespan (at production time) because getting an update certified takes 8 months of wading through a quagmire of red tape, it would costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an update vetted and it would costs of thousands of dollars to have it installed by a duly certified and highly trained aviation safety professional even though he'd essentially just be doing the same thing the rest of us do when we update our iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc....
And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues..... :)
1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.
1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.
2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.
2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.
2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......
2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......
2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......
1970s: Wait three hours for your arpanet dial-back modem to download ASCII porn of Jane Fonda. Annoy your workmates by monopolizing the Telex printer unit.
There was life before xmodems you young whippersnapper!
So how does a 40 year old computer system get replaced and only doubles the number of flights capable of being tracked?
Very very slowly and at great expense.
Apparently we don't care about a terrible natural disaster unless some famous white guy, livin' the dream for his Googlionaire foundation, dies in an avalanche.
The world has looked the other way for a long time at the exploitation of the Sherpa and the other problems caused by rich Westerners, many not well-qualified, who feel they just have to make the Everest attempt. It's mostly the Sherpa who pay the toll.
I've never understood the sherpa thing. If you're going to climb Everest, shouldn't you at least do the work yourself? Claiming you climbed Mt. Everest and not acknowledging the people who hauled your ass up there is like claiming you trekked the Grand Canyon and not mentioning that it was a bus tour and all you did was get out for a few photos.
I've never understood the whole Everest thing and I have heard a number of people who climbed Everest say the same. They either almost got their ass killed climbing up there or they walked past people who didn't make it and either lay there dead beside the path or were in the process of dying. Apparently it's an unwritten rule that you leave people to die if they can't make it and there are some pretty chilling stories by people who summited Everest of dying people laying there next to the path pleading for help. So why climb Everest? It's been done, what's there to prove? Those last two sentences aren't my words they are the words of an American who got the idea in his head to climb Everest and lost his nose and most of his fingers and toes in the process. Most of the people who 'summit' Everest are literally carried up there by Sherpas. If I ever get the notion to 'summit' Everest I'll take a helicopter, jump out, take a few snaps and fly back down again and even that would be (1) a stupid risk and (2) something that has been done before: Didier Delsalle, Eurocopter AS350 (It kind of surprised me that it was done by a little flea like the AS350, you'd expect the first chopper to summit Everest to be some big burly monster like a Black Hawk brimming with horsepowers.)
The release of Oculus Rift always seems to be juuuuuust around the corner. Is this thing turning into the hardware equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever?
I will never understand why the loser doesn't pay the winner's fees.
I won't either. Where I come from it is the looser who pays the entire cost of the proceedings, the idea being that you better be damn sure of your case before bothering the courts with a lawsuit. It's not a cure-all though since it has lead to people trying to bringing lawsuits through shell companies who then declare bankruptcy when they loose the suit. It is nevertheless better than the US system where a party suing somebody does not have to worry automatic financial consequences if they loose. It encourages people to regard using the legal system to shake down other people through law suits as a business model rather than what it should be, a way to get a redress of your grievances.
When did Congress pass a declaration of war on Pakistan? I missed it?
It's not a war when the other government doesn't mind you being there. They do get to make that decision as a sovereign state. And it was known to be a military operation, so that was approved as such. If the civilians were collateral damage in a legitimate military operation with legitimate military objectives where they tried but failed to ascertain the presence of the civilians, then it sucks, but it's not illegal.
Of course, strangely, I'd suggest that the operation for getting bin Laden was more of an act of war because it is clear that the Pakistanis were not clued in on it and could not have therefore approved it. However, on that point, they could go fuck themselves. If some part of their government knowingly let him stay there, a mile or so from their military academy, us simply going in and killing him is probably the best could have expected.
Much as Islamabad screams its head off in righteous indignation about drone strikes it alway struck me as odd that the Pakistanis never did anything about the drone strikes. I mean they do have an air force don't they? In fact the PAF is an airforce of some renown if I recall correctly. If the government in Islamabad really wanted to it could post a squadron of their new JF-17s to the Northern Tribal Territories and sweep the skies clear of drones in an afternoon and it would be in the right to do so since they'd only be putting a stop to some really outrageous violations of their sovereign territory, but they haven't done that now have they? The way this game seems to work is that the Americans get to do airstrikes with impunity in the tribal areas where the Pakistani government has very limited control and the people that get zapped are militant tribal leaders who'd be busy ambushing Pakistani troops if they didn't have their hands full with the Americans in Afghanistan. Either way, these guys are not going to be missed in Islamabad. Meanwhile the Pakistanis make all sorts of noises about the drone strikes being a violation of their sovereignty while not lifting a finger to stop the drone attacks and just back and watch as the Americans kill off the cream of their domestic insurgency problem's leadership.
Do you know any models, or dancers, or anyone else in the performing arts? Even sitting still for a photo takes skill, even if it doesn't seem like it to you.
Calling it "skill" is an insult to human intelligence, and to anyone who graduated in college. It can be acquired in few weeks/months of training. Instead, you need 10 years to become a doctor, 7 to become a lawyer, 7-8 to become a physicist (BSc+PhD).
Anybody can pose for a photograph looking like a lumpy sack of potatoes. Posing for a photograph and reproducing the body language and visual cues that make people desire you or evoke some emotion in people even when you aren't in the kind of mood you are being asked to portray takes a certain talent. Call it social intelligence or whatever but being able to fake body language, moods and emotions is definitely a skill and therefore models and actors are highly socially and emotionally skilled individuals. The reason people who possess a high degree of the analytic/academic intelligence that makes them good physicists, mathematicians, chemists, programmers, etc... is that this kind of intelligence often seems to be inversely proportional with social skills, and therefore social and emotional skills tend to be a skill set such people hold in contempt. This is also why highly intelligent people usually make absolutely horrendous teachers which is ironic because they often also the first to pull out some phrase like "those who can't do, teach" whenever somebody exposes their utter incompetence in social interactions when in reality that axiom should be "just because you have a 180 IQ, it does not mean that you automatically have the social skills required to teach people how teach".
The notion that North American native peoples lived in any kind of harmony with nature is simply false.
Wait, what? That's nonsense. Any kind clearly covers a lot of ground, and some North American native peoples clearly did live in some kind of harmony with nature. They didn't leave it untouched, but they did see themselves as stewards with a responsibility to maintain the land. Again, there's variation between peoples. On the plains they burned down forests to make room for bison. But in other places they set controlled burns which successfully maintained forests throughout thousands of years of continuous occupation.
....and they managed to live on the N-American continent for at least 20.000 years without rotting out large numbers of higher vertebrate species like the currently dominant human cultures on the N-American continent have either managed to do or will do within the next few decades.
Google has added handwriting support to Android? And people complain about every single minor feature upgrade to iOS being big news.... for Pete's sake there was handwriting support in Windows Mobile and on Symbian a decade ago and it worked pretty well. Plus those guys weren't the firs to include this feature in a mobile device by any stretch...
You mean like the iPhone supported the vast majority of smartphone features when it was released, like native applications beyond what's bundled, MMS, video recording, 3G, Copy/Paste/Cut functionality, multitasking...
Oh, wait, that was a rushed piece of shit as well.
And yet people lined up to buy iPhones by the truckload, Google copied it's user interface and general device layout, the iPhone changed the mobile phone business forever and Nokia who dominated the mobile market went from having over 50% of the cellphone market to being a marginal player that got bought up by Microsoft. All things considered that is a pretty good track record for a rushed piece of shit.
You demonstrate why Europeans have been defeated by Americans in practically every industry: You're fucking morons who think success should be punished.
The success of digital communism^W^W Linux not withstanding I suppose.
Why the frak would they let a competitor get up and leave the playing area at all, much less after every single move? Were they playing in someone's garage drinking cheap beer and no one gave a shit?
I have no idea, what I do know is that somehow all of this is Apple's fault.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission.
Was the blockade of the South during the Civil War an attempt at Genocide? How about blockading Germany during WWI/WWII? That's not an example of genocide, that's trying to defeat an enemy by targeting their ability to wage war (can't fight without food). As I said, it was more a low intensity guerrilla war than it was a genocide.
Was the population of the American South reduced by 75% as a result of the blockade? No? ...because the Native American population was systematically reduced by 75-80% first by the colonial authorities and then by the US government who really stepped up the speed of the eradication process. Entire tribes were wiped out in one way or another in the name of 'Manifest destiny'. Genocide is the systematic eradication of an ethnic group by a government or other organisation and if you manage to wipe out 75-80% of the Native American population then that is genocide in my book.
Soon the Pope will be saying the US genocided the Native Americans.
That's a bit of a stretch. The aim of the US western expansion wasn't to kill all traces of Native American peoples and culture, it was to gain control of their land. While there certainly were numerous instances of massacres, they seemed to be more due to individual ignorance, prejudice, or misunderstanding than any systemic attempt to wipe out all Indians. Not even considering all the treaties and reservations set up (the quality-or lack thereof-of the land provided on the reservations can again I think be attributed mostly to apathy or ignorance as opposed to outright malice), the numerous attempts at integrating and Westernizing Native Americans shows a (misguided perhaps) desire to help them and make them become "Americans". In reality, the Western expansion was in effect a protracted, low-intensity guerrilla war, and there are plenty of cases of these types of conflicts to show that they very often lead to instances of overreactions of force, excessive non-combatant casualties, and mass killings.
Ahemm.. extermination of the American BIson... anybody? By the 1860s numerous US military figures advocated the extermination of the bison as a method to subjugate the American Aboriginals. General Philip Sheridan even stepped before Congress to plead for permissions to slaughter the bison herds to starve Native Americans into submission. There is probably about as much proof of methodical and premeditated extermination of the Native American by the US Government as there is for the genocide of the Armenians being part of some plot carefully and extensively planned and executed at government level in Turkey. It was a policy aimed at 'pacifying the native peoples', any mass deaths were probably regarded as a bonus. That having been said millions of people died as a result of the actions of a government against a certain ethnic group and we call that genocide whether it was acerbically planned like the Jewish Holocaust or a spontaneous disorganized series massacres like the Armenian Genocide or the near extermination of the Native Americans.
I haven't worn a (wrist) watch for decades When you have to do frequent hand washing (in the last 35 years I have been employed in the meat industry, food industry, childcare and elder care) its not worth the hassle. Of course I gave up Apple in 1988
I kept forgetting my cell phone so I decided to stop wearing a wrist watch and started to use the phone to keep track of time. Between chencking the time, receiving e-mails, SMS'es and phone calls, browsing the net, playing games or reading e-books when I'm bored it's been years since I left the house without me noticing I had forgotten the damn cellphone within a few minutes.
When you cheat you tax collectors a few thousand then you end up in court. When a large corporation is minimising tax then it is much more of a negotiation. You are insignificant. Google employs lots of people and generates lots of revenue and can hire the best legal advice and accountants.
That's also the reason bankers and corporate use news media like the Daily Mail or Fox News to get you worked up over J.Q Public down the street cheating on his taxes or scrounging a few $ / £ / € in benefits because it distracts your attention from their corporate and banker friends who are cheating the public purse out of billions upon billions. It is a constant source of puzzlement to me how people can get so worked out about Polish/Romanian/Bulgarian workers coming to the UK and cheating on benefits (when in actual fact studies have shown that they work more and cheat less on benefits than native Britons) that I have actually heard people talk about wholesale deportations (and some ideas that are way scarier than that), but they do not seem to be bothered at all by bankers and corporations (read: the owners of organizations like the Daily Mail and Fox News et. al.) swindling the state out of amounts of money that make benefits swindling look like a mosquito on an elephant's ass.
I always find it amazing that these huge companies with enormous public domains don't have a person who's job description includes managing all of their certs and making sure they don't expire. You could even assign the job to two people just to make sure one of them doesn't get sick or something and miss one.
Facebook screwed this up once too. For the better part of a day I could not go anywhere on the internet without getting tiresome sequences certificate errors every single time I loaded a page with complaints about an expired Facebook certificate. I would not just get errors on pages with those crappy Facebook 'Like' buttons and little commenting plugin or pages that offered logging in with Facebook but even on sites that were serving what looked like pure 1990 something vintage HTML 2.0 pages but under the hood, buried in the page source code were Facebook tags that were presumably put there for tracking. Even though I knew at the time that Facebook, Google, Twitter et. al. monitor every move we make on line, this oversight on part of Facebook was an interesting experience for me because it showed me that Facebook's monitoring operation is much more pervasive than I had suspected.
Somewhere along the way, the "writers" that foist these lame stories missed that the whole point of April Fools Day is to actually FOOL people (with stories that are plausible enough to sucker some people in). Any idiot can write a fake story. But a good fake story that's actually just plausible enough to have people repeating it and believing it, THAT'S what it's about.
C'mon, don't be a grumpus, that story made me and everybody in my office laugh.
The situation since new-year is absolutely horrendous. At January 1st, the VAT rules changed so that digital goods have to be taxed using the VAT rate of the buyer's location, and using the tax law of the buyer's home country. That is: a web shop of any size have to keep track of up to 80 different VAT rates, and the disparate tax law regarding VAT of 28 different EU countries in order to deduce which VAT rate and goods classification is applicable on each single transaction.
As a telling example: In several countries an e-book is only an e-book if it has an ISBN number (usually with a lower than standard VAT rate). Otherwise it's a digital service (with a higher VAT rate). In other countries it's a e-book as long it's a digital text. Or humorously enough, in the case of France: It's only taxed as an e-book if it doesn't have pornographic content, otherwise it's taxed as a digital service.
A good start would be what is proposed in the press release: Harmonized VAT rates and rules for digital goods.
And it is a real pain for the customers when web shops keep raping them on shipping costs and for some reason, even though they are supposed to refund their own countries VAT, they don't do that but pocket the money instead. The poor bloody customer ends up having to pay local VAT on: the product list price + Host country VAT + inflated shipping cost. Just as an example I wanted to buy a few A/D converters on Amazon recently because my local electronics monger went under a while ago (and keep in mind these things ship soldered to a small circuit board and are about the size of a stamp). The price was: $3 per converter * 5 = $15 but they wanted to charge me $42 for shipping!! I recently had a 1 meter long $150 equipment case shipped to me from the US for slightly less than that. Now don't get me wrong, I really like online shopping and I second your call for reform but web merchants can be real scam artists. At the moment I only shop online, particularly across borders, if the price difference is really substantial or I simply can't source the product locally and need it really badly.
When most mobile developers make 1/5th or 1/10th minimum wage, you can treat them like panhandlers -- no respect. Even though the millions of 99 cent/free apps are the main and only reason Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones/iPads. If desktops and laptops had such a vast array of apps created by modern-day slave labor, I doubt people would use the inferior, small screen phones or tablets.
For what it is worth I have bought over a hundred apps on the iTunes and very few of them were in the 99 cent/free category. There have actually been a few moments when I went looking for a specific type of app and was so inundated with crappy 99 cent/free crap that I had trouble finding the handful of better quality apps whose developers demanded a bit more money for their product leading me to wish there was a filter in iTunes that allowed me to search only for apps over a certain price range just to filter out the 99 cent/free garbage (not that all 99 cent/free apps are garbage. I've actually bought a few useful 99 cent apps, but the overwhelming majority is garbage).
The whole Apple ecosystem is built, designed and operated like a cult. People on both sides of debate frequently refer to it as a "Church". It funnels more and more money from the fanatical congregation into the pockets of the leadership through convincing them that they absolutely, positively *need* to upgrade to the next Operating Thetan, erm, I mean "version". Seriously, Scientology could take lessons from them. WTF did you expect?
Forget to put on our tinfoil hat and take our medication this morning did we?
The Web of trust only works ... When we all agree to the same rules.
The CA system is broken.Trusting many different CAs has proven to be a bad idea since any CA can issue a certificate for any domain name they please like these guys did plus the fact that many CAs have suffered serious security breaches. What we've needed for years is some sort of DNS like system for certificates where certificates can be revoked and the action will be cascaded through the entire net quickly like domain name changes. There even have been proposals to use DNS for this purpose which as far as I understand it would render CAs redundant. Under the current system Google can only remove the certificates from the CA Root lists Google controls if the bad certificates have made it into those, and politely request that others who maintain CA Root lists do the same. I can only theorise that CA reform has proven problematic since implementing such a system would be taking a bowl of soup from the cauldron of certain set of people who have an interest in maintaining the old system and have resisted reform. I can't imagine any other reason why the certificate system hasn't been changed.
While AMD fans cry foul, it really is true that AMD drivers are worse on Windows than nVidia drivers. It isn't the massive gap like on Linux, but it is there. OpenGL stuff sees particular issues, with slower performance or even stuff outright failing to run on AMD cards, but other issues as well. My 7970M in my laptop has been headaches since I got the thing and only recently got up to a competent level.
Problems aside, they are just slow with updates for things like Crossfire. Multi-GPU support generally requires game specific profiles to work well, or even work at all. nVidia is quite fast at getting their SLI profiles out, but AMD hasn't had an update to Crossfire profiles since 2014.
AMD just doesn't focus on the software side of things like nVidia does. Their hardware development team seems to be top notch but their software development is lacking.
Dunno about performance, but when it comes to stability AMD is the clear winner in my experience plus the AMD drivers are open source straight from AMD and ship with most Linux distros so everything in the graphics department works out of the box. The Linux Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards that seem to ship with most Linux distros suck ass in terms of stability and the proprietary Nvidia driver is a constant source of irritation every time yum pulls down a kernel update. We installed 30 inch monitors on a bunch of Linux workstations running Fedora+Gnome and the damn things crashed several times per day until we either upgraded them with Nvidia proprietary driver or swapped out the graphics card for ones from AMD.
Still irrelevant - Microsoft doesn't "owe" you anything.
Microsoft exists as a publicly-traded for-profit company. They "just happen" to provide an operating system that is superior to the competition, but they have absolutely no obligation to market that tool "fairly". If they want to ship things with their OS that make them money at the top of the list, they can.
If they wanted to ship a video player with their OS that only plays cat videos, they could do that, too. And none of us have the least right to complain about it.
Don't like it? Use OS X.
There IFTFY.