I think users really like to have the formats applied first, since a second formatting pass feels tedious.
I believe it wouldn't be unreasonable to provide a template and then lock off all other formatting tools from users at edit-time. Here are all the paragraph styles you get; here are the headers and footers. You can make tables, but all you get to define are rows and columns and maybe headers.
That wouldn't fix everything, but at the very least discouraging users from fiddling with the format instead of working would make for more attractive documents that would, coincidentally, be easier to transfer to other editors.
Yeah, I don't know why I picked fonts as the example. It's the layout that's the real problem. I hadn't even though about graphics, but they're also a nightmare.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.
Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.
Still... for a lot of offices, that's going to be the one unbreakable rule. MS Office is the de facto standard, and anything else needs to comply with that, even if the standard is for something user's shouldn't really want and which is poorly implemented (perhaps specifically to make it impossible to switch).
I'd love to see more offices switch to something like Google Docs or other systems with minimal formatting, so that they can stop tinkering with fonts and actually focus on the words. Sadly, users do love it.
The actual laws get written in committees a bit bigger than that, around one to two dozen. Actually, the original text is generally written by 2 or 3 people (and their aides, another 4-8 people), and then tinkered with by the group as a whole.
The laws then get amended by the full group, 100 or 435 people, but that doesn't generally change the fundamental structure of the bill.
The process does kinda sorta work. Or at least, it used to, a couple of decades ago. These days, there's usually enough incentive for one party or the other to make sure it doesn't happen, that nothing does. But at least in theory, it's a decent enough structure for a republic, as long as the public doesn't actively hate each other.
The power of the oligarchs is easy to restrict. The government has a fair bit of power to constrain them, if the Congress authorizes them to. The problem is that the Congress is deeply divided between two nearly equal parties, and we've designed the rules so that it takes overwhelming support (the House plus the Senate plus the President plus the Supreme Court) to do anything.
The Congress is divided because the people are divided. You can complain about the oligarchs, but your real problem is with the 150 million or so voters who disagree bitterly with your solutions. You can try to appeal to some of the 150 million or so who didn't vote at all. (And that's for a high-turnout year. The numbers are worse in the off years.) The voters *do* have the power. They just have to be unified, or rather, a lot more unified than they are.
I disapprove deeply of those voters who support the "oligarchs". I think they're stupid for buying into the line of BS that the "oligarchs" spew through their media channels. And so I blame them more than the oligarchs themselves. But the worst part is, they blame me just as much, and it doesn't do any good to just rail against either the oligarchs or their stupid voters. You change their minds, not mine, if you want something.
Presidents do have more power than that, though in a very different way from what's commonly portrayed. They lead the executive branch, and the executive branch does the majority of the heavy lifting of government. They set regulations, negotiate treaties, do scientific research (including judging grant applications), decide where to spend money on national infrastructure, etc. The President's relationship to it is usually indirect: he appoints the top-level people, who manage the career civil servants who do the work. The President is the ultimate arbiter between them; it's usually fairly hands-off but there is such a vast apparatus that there are hands-on things to do every single day.
They do all of this within the confines of law determined by Congress, but despite the incredible length that some bills go to, there's still an enormous amount of leeway for the various departments and agencies, and thus ultimately the President. It's not the glamour stuff; it's mostly the tedious stuff of managing parks, inspecting foreign trade, writing benefits checks (and dealing with the clients of that), and so on, but it actually has a more direct effect on most people's lives than the high-level stuff set by legislature.
With 300 million people, is it really possible for them to have a "say" in what's happening? The present system is far from ideal, and there's a lot I would do to change it, but even if you implemented every procedural change I had in mind your individual vote still isn't going to add up to much.
Real issues aren't binary. I can't think of any way for 300 million people to meaningfully collaborate on writing a bill. It's hard enough getting a few hundred Congressmen to do it. The binary part comes at the very end, when there's a vote, after the difficult compromises are hammered out, and it's really the least important part of the process.
I'm not crazy about the fact that our checks and balances mean that even very popular bills are impossible to move, but they're in there for a reason. If I could I would tweak the balance, but minority protections are a good thing, even if they're also ripe for abuse. And I just can't envision any scenario where those protections don't make people feel like their vote is insignificant.
The national politics is ultimately a process by which those 300 million people (or at least, the quarter or so who turn out to vote) make group decisions. Given how hard it is to get six people to decide on pizza toppings I really don't see how we're going to get to a place where the populace feels it has a lot more say than it already has. We can certainly do better than we do, but even in the best of all possible worlds I can't imagine a case that people all feel like their voices have a significant effect.
Netflix and Amazon are both producing their own content now. If HBO and AMC vanished, there are other ways for their studios to receive distribution.
It is, however, a valid point that Netflix may start getting commercials. They recently promised that they wouldn't (after scaring everybody by running some commercials for their own content, in front of their own content), and that probably holds for the next few years. HBO isn't going anywhere just yet. After that... well, a lot can change. Netflix is already facing competition from Amazon, and I bet Apple would like to get in on it as well. Probably more.
I have let Netflix know that I cancel my subscription the day I see an ad on streaming.
Because the normal human cannot distinguish shades of color beyond 32 bit RGB.
We can see a bit outside of the RGB color gamut. That's largely a limitation of the screens: it's cheap and easy to produce RGB, and there's not a whole lot of advantage to adding in the indigo. Artists would like it, since it's one of the biggest differences between the screen and print; they can buy special monitors, driven by special software. They require a wide-gamut format with up to 48 bits.
That's not a huge imposition on memory. The limiting factor tends to be processing speed (as well as the limitations imposed by the varying formats, which aren't as universal as 32 bit RGB). And the monitor, since wide-gamut monitors don't have wide demand.
You can also turn your head and move around. You may not need to keep the entire thing in your field of view all at once. Sometimes you want the big picture, sometimes you want to drill down.
You can emulate that in software, but there are kinaesthetic senses you can take advantage of. If you're looking at a large map, for example, it's very intuitive to move your face in to read names, and then away to see where that fits into the whole. It's faster and more effective for me to switch from a debugger window on screen B and my running program on screen A.
I don't know what the limits are; the GP suggested 8K and that sounds about right to me. But I think that assuming a single, fixed head position for the user can be unnecessarily limiting, and miss out on one kind of gesture to enable smoother interaction.
I'm having a bit of trouble following the article. There are a few clear editing errors ("Why not create a generic with only 300 mg of acetaminophen, unlike the generics?"), so I don't think it's just me.
As far as I can tell, it sounds like some kind of patent/regulation thing that prevents the generics makers from making 5/300. Or at least it used to be; another sentence says "Other manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon since then so the 300 mg product is now generic." So I'm not quite sure why the presence of generics hasn't forced the price down, except for the usual "because they can".
I don't get it. Wouldn't the FDA's requirement apply to the generics manufacturers as well?
Is this just about the period where they've got a bunch of 5/325 on hand that they can't get rid of when docs start writing scripts for 5/300? I wouldn't have expected it to be that big of a problem.
You might find that you're more of a cow than you think. Or rather, if you were to see some of the videos, you might find that your empathy towards them is closer to human and further from "other" than you might expect.
That doesn't mean you have to stop being an omnivore. Meat and animal products are good food. But you can demand that the animals you consume be treated humanely, while they live and as they die. You do indeed live in the first world, which means you have enough money to pay them to use processes that take at least some care for the animals, rather than treating them as inanimate objects that can't feel pain.
It's very unfortunate that the loudest advocates for the rights of animals make fools of themselves in the process. They're fools, and you're right to ignore them. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real abuses going on in factory farming, and you're in a position to demand that they stop the abuses. Pretending they don't exist is just as foolish. And you can tell yourself that these are purely inanimate objects whose pain doesn't matter to you, but I suspect you'd feel otherwise if you went and looked.
(Or maybe not. There are people who don't. But people who don't empathize with animal suffering often don't empathize with human suffering, either, and that's widely considered a moral failing. Which means I wouldn't be able to convince you of that, either. But for anybody reading this, I think it's worth considering the notion that they should look at the videos and see if they would rather have it be different.)
Bingo. This "writeoff" is goodwill, which it just a way of accounting for why you're paying more for a company than appeared on its balance sheets. That includes a lot of things like "the experience of the employees", which is often what you're really buying when you purchase a company, and "expected future growth". Microsoft itself has only $61B in assets, but $380B in market cap. If you could buy it, the extra $320B would all be "goodwill".
You have to put it on your balance sheet to make the books balance, but there's no reason to keep it there forever. You used to just depreciate it; now it just gets "reevaluated" under various accounting rules. That's all MSFT has done.
It's not saying much about what Nokia has meant to Microsoft. It's just accountants trying to track where the value goes for the purposes of comparing one company to another. It doesn't indicate one way or the other on whether the Nokia deal was a good one, or whether Microsoft has managed it well.
Russia got out of the moon-race business once it lost. "Yay, we spent billions to come in second" would not have really worked for them. They've specialized in near-earth activities, and it's turned out really well.
China is still talking about it, and just might. They've landed a probe, have put people in orbit, and are working for real on a space station. They're not in a rush to get to the moon, since they'll need to do more than just plant a flag to make it seem like an achievement to rival America's, but the odds are good that the next feet on the moon will be Chinese.
Did he not have a charger at home? If he lived in a place where he couldn't charge his car, a Tesla was probably not a good choice for him. If he did, he should easily been able to fully charge his car every single day.
You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.
That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.
So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?
Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.
Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.
Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.
I'd be curious about the distribution of the lights. Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much. And if they're turning them off in places where there are few people walking, such as rural lanes, it might help astronomers without hurting pedestrians. (Criminals would be less likely to gather there, though those pedestrians had better be really aware of cars.)
I could see it working if there were more streetlights than we really needed. If that were the case, it could yield positive results. But it would also be invalid to extrapolate from those to the majority of lights in more densely populated places.
Indeed. There was an article floating around a few months ago with a hypothetical review of a gasoline-powered car if electric cars dominated. A lot of the downsides of ICEs that we take for granted would be really aggravating if we hadn't grown up with them.
Even for you, there could be considerable advantages to hiring an automatic car rather than owning one. You offload the maintenance overhead (though that's smaller for an electric car than an internal-combustion engine); that doesn't save money but it does save time. What would save you money is if your car were off servicing four or five other families during the times you didn't need it. Cutting a $30,000 expense by a factor of 4 or 5 would be a huge cost saving to you. Even if the service imposed an overhead of a factor of 2, it's still not an amount of money you'd give up on lightly.
It need not even reduce your flexibility, if you could summon anybody's car on five minutes' notice. It's easy to see how that could happen, if large fleets were deployed strategically, even in the suburbs. (It would work less well as the density dropped, but even in a residential neighborhood, a car can move a fair distance in five minutes. Your house, your work site, your grocery store, etc. are all likely to be five minutes from a lot.)
There are still advantages to just having your own car. Mine is full of my crap, for example. I haven't taken my toolbox out in a while, but I will, and I don't know when. If I were calling for a car every day I wouldn't lug my toolbox around, and thus wouldn't have it. Customization is nice. Not having to worry about peak usage times would be nice (though peak usage will also coincide with peak traffic, which I try to avoid anyway).
Still... I'd consider ditching a car entirely if it saved me that much money. My car hit 200k miles, and while it's a Honda, I'm still gonna need to fork out $20k within the next few years. (I'm cheap, and don't want a luxurious car. I just want it to get me places.) A two-car household would likely make it very compelling to at least split the difference.
Hands are just incredibly complicated. There are a lot of tendons and ligaments in there, and I imagine that fine motor control comes from a lot of different nerves. How much dexterity can he be expected to get out of this?
I imagine that getting it done young means that he's got years to re-establish connections and train pathways for it. Still... anybody know how good it might get? Will he be able to play the violin?
My Osborne 1 split the capslock key into two regular-sized keys, one for CTRL and the other for capslock. That worked well. (And I really miss Wordstar. Amazing what they could cram into 64k. They had to play silly games, loading and unloading parts of the software from the floppy disk, a really primitive kind of virtual memory.)
It has the advantage of once having been worth something. People have a fondness for it. It might tempt back some of the old users. Social networks have an advantage in that they're worth more when more people are there, and that history might just barely let them leverage that.
The main value of the site, at least to me, was always its user base. I didn't RTFA because the commenters would often be able to give me a better summary of what was really going on. Especially when TFA was clickbait; I could see why it was clickbait without having to read it myself. Or for sciencey stuff that's out of my domain, Slashdot often had people who could explain it at my level. (That is, more than the average layman, but less than a grad student in that field.)
I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'll note that I'm still here, though mostly lurking. There may be others waiting for an improvement to the site's management to contribute more.
Slashdot Mirror
I think users really like to have the formats applied first, since a second formatting pass feels tedious.
I believe it wouldn't be unreasonable to provide a template and then lock off all other formatting tools from users at edit-time. Here are all the paragraph styles you get; here are the headers and footers. You can make tables, but all you get to define are rows and columns and maybe headers.
That wouldn't fix everything, but at the very least discouraging users from fiddling with the format instead of working would make for more attractive documents that would, coincidentally, be easier to transfer to other editors.
Yeah, I don't know why I picked fonts as the example. It's the layout that's the real problem. I hadn't even though about graphics, but they're also a nightmare.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office. For a large number of office workers, Office is a collaboration tool. A document saved by one user and emailed to another, then edited and returned, needs to be able to preserve all of the formatting. Users care a *lot* about formatting, and if it gets messed up, they lose confidence in the software.
Office's formatting algorithms are abominable, and it's no surprise that LibreOffice can't mimic them perfectly. And users really, really need to apply a lot less formatting and focus instead on content.
Still... for a lot of offices, that's going to be the one unbreakable rule. MS Office is the de facto standard, and anything else needs to comply with that, even if the standard is for something user's shouldn't really want and which is poorly implemented (perhaps specifically to make it impossible to switch).
I'd love to see more offices switch to something like Google Docs or other systems with minimal formatting, so that they can stop tinkering with fonts and actually focus on the words. Sadly, users do love it.
The actual laws get written in committees a bit bigger than that, around one to two dozen. Actually, the original text is generally written by 2 or 3 people (and their aides, another 4-8 people), and then tinkered with by the group as a whole.
The laws then get amended by the full group, 100 or 435 people, but that doesn't generally change the fundamental structure of the bill.
The process does kinda sorta work. Or at least, it used to, a couple of decades ago. These days, there's usually enough incentive for one party or the other to make sure it doesn't happen, that nothing does. But at least in theory, it's a decent enough structure for a republic, as long as the public doesn't actively hate each other.
The power of the oligarchs is easy to restrict. The government has a fair bit of power to constrain them, if the Congress authorizes them to. The problem is that the Congress is deeply divided between two nearly equal parties, and we've designed the rules so that it takes overwhelming support (the House plus the Senate plus the President plus the Supreme Court) to do anything.
The Congress is divided because the people are divided. You can complain about the oligarchs, but your real problem is with the 150 million or so voters who disagree bitterly with your solutions. You can try to appeal to some of the 150 million or so who didn't vote at all. (And that's for a high-turnout year. The numbers are worse in the off years.) The voters *do* have the power. They just have to be unified, or rather, a lot more unified than they are.
I disapprove deeply of those voters who support the "oligarchs". I think they're stupid for buying into the line of BS that the "oligarchs" spew through their media channels. And so I blame them more than the oligarchs themselves. But the worst part is, they blame me just as much, and it doesn't do any good to just rail against either the oligarchs or their stupid voters. You change their minds, not mine, if you want something.
Presidents do have more power than that, though in a very different way from what's commonly portrayed. They lead the executive branch, and the executive branch does the majority of the heavy lifting of government. They set regulations, negotiate treaties, do scientific research (including judging grant applications), decide where to spend money on national infrastructure, etc. The President's relationship to it is usually indirect: he appoints the top-level people, who manage the career civil servants who do the work. The President is the ultimate arbiter between them; it's usually fairly hands-off but there is such a vast apparatus that there are hands-on things to do every single day.
They do all of this within the confines of law determined by Congress, but despite the incredible length that some bills go to, there's still an enormous amount of leeway for the various departments and agencies, and thus ultimately the President. It's not the glamour stuff; it's mostly the tedious stuff of managing parks, inspecting foreign trade, writing benefits checks (and dealing with the clients of that), and so on, but it actually has a more direct effect on most people's lives than the high-level stuff set by legislature.
With 300 million people, is it really possible for them to have a "say" in what's happening? The present system is far from ideal, and there's a lot I would do to change it, but even if you implemented every procedural change I had in mind your individual vote still isn't going to add up to much.
Real issues aren't binary. I can't think of any way for 300 million people to meaningfully collaborate on writing a bill. It's hard enough getting a few hundred Congressmen to do it. The binary part comes at the very end, when there's a vote, after the difficult compromises are hammered out, and it's really the least important part of the process.
I'm not crazy about the fact that our checks and balances mean that even very popular bills are impossible to move, but they're in there for a reason. If I could I would tweak the balance, but minority protections are a good thing, even if they're also ripe for abuse. And I just can't envision any scenario where those protections don't make people feel like their vote is insignificant.
The national politics is ultimately a process by which those 300 million people (or at least, the quarter or so who turn out to vote) make group decisions. Given how hard it is to get six people to decide on pizza toppings I really don't see how we're going to get to a place where the populace feels it has a lot more say than it already has. We can certainly do better than we do, but even in the best of all possible worlds I can't imagine a case that people all feel like their voices have a significant effect.
Netflix and Amazon are both producing their own content now. If HBO and AMC vanished, there are other ways for their studios to receive distribution.
It is, however, a valid point that Netflix may start getting commercials. They recently promised that they wouldn't (after scaring everybody by running some commercials for their own content, in front of their own content), and that probably holds for the next few years. HBO isn't going anywhere just yet. After that... well, a lot can change. Netflix is already facing competition from Amazon, and I bet Apple would like to get in on it as well. Probably more.
I have let Netflix know that I cancel my subscription the day I see an ad on streaming.
Because the normal human cannot distinguish shades of color beyond 32 bit RGB.
We can see a bit outside of the RGB color gamut. That's largely a limitation of the screens: it's cheap and easy to produce RGB, and there's not a whole lot of advantage to adding in the indigo. Artists would like it, since it's one of the biggest differences between the screen and print; they can buy special monitors, driven by special software. They require a wide-gamut format with up to 48 bits.
That's not a huge imposition on memory. The limiting factor tends to be processing speed (as well as the limitations imposed by the varying formats, which aren't as universal as 32 bit RGB). And the monitor, since wide-gamut monitors don't have wide demand.
You can also turn your head and move around. You may not need to keep the entire thing in your field of view all at once. Sometimes you want the big picture, sometimes you want to drill down.
You can emulate that in software, but there are kinaesthetic senses you can take advantage of. If you're looking at a large map, for example, it's very intuitive to move your face in to read names, and then away to see where that fits into the whole. It's faster and more effective for me to switch from a debugger window on screen B and my running program on screen A.
I don't know what the limits are; the GP suggested 8K and that sounds about right to me. But I think that assuming a single, fixed head position for the user can be unnecessarily limiting, and miss out on one kind of gesture to enable smoother interaction.
I'm having a bit of trouble following the article. There are a few clear editing errors ("Why not create a generic with only 300 mg of acetaminophen, unlike the generics?"), so I don't think it's just me.
As far as I can tell, it sounds like some kind of patent/regulation thing that prevents the generics makers from making 5/300. Or at least it used to be; another sentence says "Other manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon since then so the 300 mg product is now generic." So I'm not quite sure why the presence of generics hasn't forced the price down, except for the usual "because they can".
I don't get it. Wouldn't the FDA's requirement apply to the generics manufacturers as well?
Is this just about the period where they've got a bunch of 5/325 on hand that they can't get rid of when docs start writing scripts for 5/300? I wouldn't have expected it to be that big of a problem.
You might find that you're more of a cow than you think. Or rather, if you were to see some of the videos, you might find that your empathy towards them is closer to human and further from "other" than you might expect.
That doesn't mean you have to stop being an omnivore. Meat and animal products are good food. But you can demand that the animals you consume be treated humanely, while they live and as they die. You do indeed live in the first world, which means you have enough money to pay them to use processes that take at least some care for the animals, rather than treating them as inanimate objects that can't feel pain.
It's very unfortunate that the loudest advocates for the rights of animals make fools of themselves in the process. They're fools, and you're right to ignore them. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real abuses going on in factory farming, and you're in a position to demand that they stop the abuses. Pretending they don't exist is just as foolish. And you can tell yourself that these are purely inanimate objects whose pain doesn't matter to you, but I suspect you'd feel otherwise if you went and looked.
(Or maybe not. There are people who don't. But people who don't empathize with animal suffering often don't empathize with human suffering, either, and that's widely considered a moral failing. Which means I wouldn't be able to convince you of that, either. But for anybody reading this, I think it's worth considering the notion that they should look at the videos and see if they would rather have it be different.)
Bingo. This "writeoff" is goodwill, which it just a way of accounting for why you're paying more for a company than appeared on its balance sheets. That includes a lot of things like "the experience of the employees", which is often what you're really buying when you purchase a company, and "expected future growth". Microsoft itself has only $61B in assets, but $380B in market cap. If you could buy it, the extra $320B would all be "goodwill".
You have to put it on your balance sheet to make the books balance, but there's no reason to keep it there forever. You used to just depreciate it; now it just gets "reevaluated" under various accounting rules. That's all MSFT has done.
It's not saying much about what Nokia has meant to Microsoft. It's just accountants trying to track where the value goes for the purposes of comparing one company to another. It doesn't indicate one way or the other on whether the Nokia deal was a good one, or whether Microsoft has managed it well.
Russia got out of the moon-race business once it lost. "Yay, we spent billions to come in second" would not have really worked for them. They've specialized in near-earth activities, and it's turned out really well.
China is still talking about it, and just might. They've landed a probe, have put people in orbit, and are working for real on a space station. They're not in a rush to get to the moon, since they'll need to do more than just plant a flag to make it seem like an achievement to rival America's, but the odds are good that the next feet on the moon will be Chinese.
"Hey, Attenborough, how hungry were you?"
"Well, I was so hungry..."
Did he not have a charger at home? If he lived in a place where he couldn't charge his car, a Tesla was probably not a good choice for him. If he did, he should easily been able to fully charge his car every single day.
You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.
That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.
So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?
Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.
Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.
Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.
Thanks.
I'd be curious about the distribution of the lights. Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much. And if they're turning them off in places where there are few people walking, such as rural lanes, it might help astronomers without hurting pedestrians. (Criminals would be less likely to gather there, though those pedestrians had better be really aware of cars.)
I could see it working if there were more streetlights than we really needed. If that were the case, it could yield positive results. But it would also be invalid to extrapolate from those to the majority of lights in more densely populated places.
Indeed. There was an article floating around a few months ago with a hypothetical review of a gasoline-powered car if electric cars dominated. A lot of the downsides of ICEs that we take for granted would be really aggravating if we hadn't grown up with them.
Gasoline Car Test Drive: Noisy, Wasteful, Polluting, Fast But Pricey Refueling
Even for you, there could be considerable advantages to hiring an automatic car rather than owning one. You offload the maintenance overhead (though that's smaller for an electric car than an internal-combustion engine); that doesn't save money but it does save time. What would save you money is if your car were off servicing four or five other families during the times you didn't need it. Cutting a $30,000 expense by a factor of 4 or 5 would be a huge cost saving to you. Even if the service imposed an overhead of a factor of 2, it's still not an amount of money you'd give up on lightly.
It need not even reduce your flexibility, if you could summon anybody's car on five minutes' notice. It's easy to see how that could happen, if large fleets were deployed strategically, even in the suburbs. (It would work less well as the density dropped, but even in a residential neighborhood, a car can move a fair distance in five minutes. Your house, your work site, your grocery store, etc. are all likely to be five minutes from a lot.)
There are still advantages to just having your own car. Mine is full of my crap, for example. I haven't taken my toolbox out in a while, but I will, and I don't know when. If I were calling for a car every day I wouldn't lug my toolbox around, and thus wouldn't have it. Customization is nice. Not having to worry about peak usage times would be nice (though peak usage will also coincide with peak traffic, which I try to avoid anyway).
Still... I'd consider ditching a car entirely if it saved me that much money. My car hit 200k miles, and while it's a Honda, I'm still gonna need to fork out $20k within the next few years. (I'm cheap, and don't want a luxurious car. I just want it to get me places.) A two-car household would likely make it very compelling to at least split the difference.
Hands are just incredibly complicated. There are a lot of tendons and ligaments in there, and I imagine that fine motor control comes from a lot of different nerves. How much dexterity can he be expected to get out of this?
I imagine that getting it done young means that he's got years to re-establish connections and train pathways for it. Still... anybody know how good it might get? Will he be able to play the violin?
My Osborne 1 split the capslock key into two regular-sized keys, one for CTRL and the other for capslock. That worked well. (And I really miss Wordstar. Amazing what they could cram into 64k. They had to play silly games, loading and unloading parts of the software from the floppy disk, a really primitive kind of virtual memory.)
It has the advantage of once having been worth something. People have a fondness for it. It might tempt back some of the old users. Social networks have an advantage in that they're worth more when more people are there, and that history might just barely let them leverage that.
The main value of the site, at least to me, was always its user base. I didn't RTFA because the commenters would often be able to give me a better summary of what was really going on. Especially when TFA was clickbait; I could see why it was clickbait without having to read it myself. Or for sciencey stuff that's out of my domain, Slashdot often had people who could explain it at my level. (That is, more than the average layman, but less than a grad student in that field.)
I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'll note that I'm still here, though mostly lurking. There may be others waiting for an improvement to the site's management to contribute more.