When a blight comes along which only kills off a specific variant of a crop, historically and typically, everything is OK (except in the locale where the blight occurred): the next season they're planting the same crop again, except it's an imported variant from another region.
With a GMO crop, if that crop gets a blight, that crop is gone. No crop for that year, anywhere. Chances are most places (including the company that makes the GMO) have to start over from scratch - ie, a non-GMO crop.
That's not such a problem as this: since GMO crops have become a monoculture and there aren't a whole lot of variants of "corn" or "wheat" or "soy" being planted, there won't be a sufficient number of seeds to actually plant crops the following year from the available non-GMO variant crops.
Horticulture, like software, wants to be free. It leads to a stronger, better ecosystem with more options. Actually, the analogy translates to "blights", too.
It took us decades to fully realize the danger of radioactive materials, it might take decades to fully understand the implications of GM. Until we have a reasonable comprehension of the dangers and risks, we should use other methods for improving crop yields, which, also as the Prof. tells, are to be easily found in better irrigation and fertilisation for third world countries.
And, this is being done. However, the people who do it are getting branded as "whole food crazies", "crunchy granolas" and a handful of derogatory terminology. They're also being legislated against and (often) pushed against by organizations within the government like the FDA for "health violations" - which, in my experience, most often means "not towing the line" and has no basis in fact.
The problem with Monsanto is that, while all these GM crops are being planted, the regional, local, etc. variants of crops which are specifically adapted to growing in those regions disappear. A lot of effort is going into preserving heirloom plants such as these, but still many generations of work are being lost (through the loss of hierloom variants).
I don't know what the professor is saying, because I didn't RTFA, but I can tell you this: it's imperative that Monsanto be stopped by one means or another. They essentially control the entire food production of the world, and were soemthing to happen to them, there would be massive die-off: not just of people who depend on the food, but also the many, many animals which live "wild" amongst the crop fields, as well as the other plants and animals which will die from the flooding resulting from barren fields.
The issue with Monsanto (and other similar companies) is much more than just "I like my food non-GM" for many people. It's a matter of wanting our very existence to not be at the whim of a multinational corporation (or anyone else, for that matter).
Nevermind that people posted in sensitive areas, privy to potentially compromising information, apparently (as I've heard second hand from the brother of a Marine in said sensitive situation) have their online profile pages screened and cleaned, etc. as a routine part of security clearance. This isn't just for opsec or anything like that; it's for the safety of everyone involved.
I'm not sure how the GPs statement of "more stable than modern hardware" and the parent's statements about the "greatest feeling of stability I have seen" make any sense.
Stable, by what metric? IOPS? MIPS? By neither of these measurements do the old systems hold up - only in "length of time running, untouched".
Even then, it's not all that impressive by modern standards. How many people have Linux machines which have been left unattended for years on end - not just business machines in a back office, but millions of routers, cable modems, access points, and so on. There are many servers with similar characteristics, hidden away somewhere - I've seen FreeBSD and Linux machines serving the same role for as much as a decade without being touched by a human (or rebooted but maybe once or twice during that time by power outages and the like - 1800+ day uptime is incredible but not all that uncommon).
Certainly people have heard the "old VAX bricked away behind an addition" story from years ago. I don't recall its origins but the basic idea is: old VAX served stuff up so reliably that it was forgotten, and they built it into the building. Well, I've seen this in a couple places myself, with modern stuff. In one, an embedded x86 router device (soekris) and DSL router got drywalled into the ceiling when an office was remodeled. This mistake was not found for several years, when the tenants moved out and another tenant (with a different service provider) needed to have things wired.
Honestly, I "get" that machines used to be more reliable, in terms of "time left on uninterrupted", as a whole. But there are a lot more classes of computer now, and they're all millions of times more complex. Many are just as reliable, if not more so due to the improvements in manufacturing and material science.
There are many things we make which have a due amount of deserved nostalgia - as it relates to their quality and performance (cars, handtools, woodworking, tools in general) - because we used to create these things stronger, simpler, etc. However, computing is not one of these things. I've got a half dozen computing devices in this house which can (and have) run for a year+ uninterrupted - and they are all commonplace and better than the old PDPs and VAX systems of old.
When the iPhone came out, there were already Windows Mobile phones with specs closer to the iPhone 2. It had (get this) multitasking and many of the hardware features not found elsewhere. Playing media was not an issue. Symbian, likewise, was fairly mature.
Don't kid yourself: the iPhone wasn't successful because it was prettier hardware. It wazs more successful because it had better marketing, the App Store, iTunes, and a shiney egg shell.
As for "easy to use", I'm not sure how managing information between multiple sources on a device is possible without simple concepts which have been around for over two decades now - copy and paste, and multitasking. Windows CE had that over 10 years ago.
Likewise - OS X is an "OMG it's getting in my way" experience. Using almost anything else, with an unfamiliar laptop keyboard in the dark, is better.
OS X is only "better" if you're used to it. I used it for 6 months and I still abhorred it - I will never voluntarily use it again. It's control panels and widgets are nice and minimalistic once you get used to the semantics, but things like the file manager and dock are next to useless if you're trying to do more than look at porn and check your email.
Me, I also use Awesome WM. It's the first computing environment I've yet used which allows me to leave what I'm doing @ work and come back to it, and still have it be logically mapped/organized, allowing me to start back up on half a dozen projects/tasks immediately.
In contrast, going between a multi-window/tabbed app and another app in OS X is a bit of a pain. Forget side/side arrangement or anything else vaguely useful using modern applications and large screens.
And thus, clearly demonstrating, the general mindset and intellectual fortitude of those who wildly brandish the new Green technologies.
It doesn't matter if carbon offset credits are a Ponzi scheme, that alternative fuels and their vehicles are more ecologically destructive than similarly purposed traditional ICE vehicles, that there are no large-scale deployment ready technologies to augment the power grid. As long as we're passing laws which have a Green statement or impose some draconian restrictions on the status quo, we're going in the right direction!
Or, in this case, passing laws repealing the laws of physics. Awesome, just awesome.
At this rate, I have little hope for the West surviving another generation. Either we'll move towards a totalitarian regime with the scientists and politicians dictating to the rest of us, or we'll just completely devolve into civil war (shortly before the anarchy, but possibly not before being overrun from the outside).
If I get a defective product, it means one of two things: 1) I return it 2) If there is no way to return it within reasonable time and/or they refuse to repair the defects (significant, if advertised features don't work at all), I file as part of a class action suit
In what world does a person not do one of the above when spending hundreds of dollars (or more) on a product - particularly a luxury product?
A year is a significant period of time, particularly in technology. They don't get a year to fix functionality issues (and make them available to the user): they get months of first public outcry. That timeframe is less, if it makes the device close to useless.
As for "win big every time without some risk of losing once in a while"... what do you think Apple is doing, playing the lottery? No, they're offering the (supposedly) 4th revision to their popular product line. A popular product line does not get "rebuilt" or "redesigned", it gets gradually upgraded. There is no excuse for this - and it was no doubt caused by some idiotic designer. (So much for the misnomer "Apple designs good hardware." Say what? Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?)
I'm not sure what a person is supposed to get when being an Apple customer these days that they can't get elsewhere, better. In the 1990s, it was pretty clear. Now, their desktops are the same architecture, based on the most common non-Windows OS (many variants of which are free), with inflated prices. Their other offerings are supposedly superior in many ways, but only because they're shackled to their worst fault - the Apple App Store.
How in the world Apple released such a half-baked platform with a supposedly superior OS is beyond me. The superior OS makes sense - the inferior hardware does not. Just confounding. Pretty much everywhere else, the situation is the reverse: good/better hardware, with not-so-great software. Hell, even the various WinMo/Android/etc. makers manage to do that without much issue.
"Striking similarities?" Go read it: the little you will have to change for it to be synonymous to today will likely be name substitutions. Just the names. In the concise terms used, there is sadly little denial that pretty much everything on the list of grievances which do not apply today - between the States and/or Citizens and the Federal government. The "Colony Rebellion" occurred over much less than we have been putting up with for some time.
(Note,this doesn't just apply to Obama; it's the current Federal government as a whole, as its been performing for the past 20 years. Thought the rate of aggravation has certainly increased significantly in the last year than what it had been previously.)
Yet, this thing was around in 1918. It was some time before computers, and still reasonably capable. Arguably, I'm not quite sure how it's an inferior cipher compared to the Jefferson cipher - this one appears to allow for slightly more "randomness", as well as creating templates which could arguably be used for single-time pads without the additional transmission of information for an effective cipher. (the Jefferson wheel cipher wasn't used past WWII, from what I can tell).
At any rate, it just goes to show you how effective a relatively simple machine can be, compared to modern electronic and/or computational methods to do the same basic thing (in this case, the enigma). Another good example would be drive/steer-by-wire vs. hydraulic or mechanical steering and acceleration/breaking. I'm sure there are more, but I'm not creative enough to think of any of them in my current alcohol-addled state.
Sometimes, the conceptually simpler method is the better one. This thing apparently still works; how many cryptographic engines of later years no longer do due to the copious mantainance required? Same can be said for more modern vehicle electronics vs. the older and more reliable (despite what the automotive industry says) mechanical means of doing the same: instead of outright replacement its often relatively easy to fix the broken systems on an older car.
Of course, when it comes to things depending on complex mathematics and the ability to be generalized, nothing beats generalized computing.:)
No, a degree isn't just a piece of paper. It's also 2-8 years of your life (depending on the degree(s)).
That's a lot of time to spend doing anything - and it's all experience. Who's to say you wouldn't learn more during that period of time working in the field (as a grunt, getting trained and figuring it out as you go) than in the classroom getting taught?
I know with almost certainty I'd have a lot more practical experience had I been working full-time (or even 20h+) in the field instead of going to school, and my schooling wasn't bad. Granted, I'd probably never have read Knuth or touched Visual Studio had I done that, but most of what I know wasn't learned as part of a course curriculum - I picked it up as I went along, mostly because I liked it and found it interesting/useful.
But I thought the iPhone was supposed to be something more than a call-and-text-only generic handset that a person throws away?... and I've been using the same handset for about 6 years, now. It's doing just fine, thanks - though I have replaced the battery twice now.
Similarly, the "bullettime" in Fallout 3 was really irritating - not when you went into the turn-based mode, but when you got a critical and it had slow animation. When you were grinding through the Super Mutants in the DC strip it was particularly agitating, because by that point in the game you got a lot of criticals and it only took 1-2 shots with a rifle to take them out.
The key word here is "consistency". The 'frills' don't matter; what matters is that what is implemented is implemented well.
Two good examples of this are Duke Nukem 3D and Deus Ex. In DN3D, the gameplay world interaction was fairly minimal: there were trash cans, toilets, windows, mirrors, and hookers/strippers which you could destroy and/or alter. There were also the occasional wall you could blow up (often the rough equiv of a keycard door), as well as some mini-games (which were extra fun, and not part of the game's "goal". There wasn't much, but it was consistent.
Deus Ex is a classic example for a game implementing an internal "mini-game" and doing it right. You didn't have to play them, as there were multiple ways to accomplish a goal: you just chose to, and it was often a fun alternative way to reach the end game. Importantly, they were part of the game's plot and development.
Really, when it comes down to it, I think a large part of this immersion failure is due to rushing the games out the door. The newer games feel incomplete and very "demo" like compared to games from 10+ years ago, with significant components which don't seem all that well thought out. Sometimes they manifest as a bug, but most of the time they're something like a map which cuts off where it feels like it should continue or stuff as outlined in the topic.
There are tons of uses; if you can't think of them, then
You can set up a wireless bridge between two distant points. See if you can't get ahold of some old Dish Networks reciever dishes.
And, significantly: freecycle them/give them away. There are a lot of people who use really old stuff and would love free upgrades (you know, manual laborers who are none the less intelligent and enjoy tinkering).
My guess: it was an exploratory product. They had the product sitting around, put some polish on it and said "sure, why not? nothing else is working!"
So they threw it out with a little marketing. It didn't catch. Why?
I'd argue for one of several reasons: 1) Microsoft isn't cool. With most people, "cool" is half the reason to have something, especially in the "Facebook generation". 2) The phones don't really actually fit any demographic that would buy them, from what I can tell. At best, they'd fit the 40+ socially active single women demographic, I think. 3) The ads were, at best, obnoxious and condescending (at least the ones I saw on Hulu). Holy hell! MS really needs a better advertising firm. Windows 7 is doing well in spite of its advertising, not because of it (though the 'get shit done quickly via the modified 'run' dialog' ones did appeal to me, as a geek). 4) The iPhone did well because it wasn't just a phone; it was an MP3 player and could do movies and apps, too. As near as I could tell, the Kin wasn't much more than just an IM client with a phone. Pass, for pretty much everyone. 5) The UI looked retardedly simple and useless. Little nondescript squares you drag around? No thanks.
Not only is this a big corporation, this is Microsoft. The turnaround on this is incredibly fast - dare I say, even agile? They appear to have at least fixed one of their internal problems, and have demonstrated they aren't the Same Old Microsoft we knew even 5 years ago.
Kudos to them for recognizing their mistake and dropping the product.
Corporations have become the invisible hands that control the governments. We're not talking so much about The Coca Cola Bottling Company, here. We're talking about corporations like:
Exxon Mobil Monsanto General Motors Nestle JP Morgan & Chase AT&T Verizon Microsoft WalMart
Sure, these corporations (and ones like them) are the biggest targets of anti-capitalist sentiments. But these guys have incredible sway at the local level (far dwarfing the political power of a medium-sized city, to be certain) as well as unprecedented power at the state and national levels due to their distributed power. In many cases, the absence of one of the above would impact people more negatively at the local level than the absence of state/federal powers. This isn't just a US or Western thing; it's fairly global.
And then you've got the silent giants - the ones nobody sees, the holding groups and conglomerates like Cerberus and Time Warner. These are insidious, as they've got a lot of sway not due to their hold in an industry, but because of their non-trivial holdings in many, many different industries: retail, real estate, finance, automotive, news/media, firearms, etc. The larger ones could likely make most states fall, and many smaller states through inaction alone.
Apparently you don't have kids. They laugh about this shit the next day. I've got two kids around this guy's age. They were laughing at themselves when they sounded funny, and
You've got to remember, kids (those raised by good parents, at least) don't see things in such a jaded light as an adult. They're innocent, and being embarrassed is typically something learned through scorn and ridicule. Children like that end up being head cases with esteem issues - not the ones who have no issue laughing at themselves.
I've been saying this same essential thing for years, though instead of calling it "networked authoritarianism" what I've called it is "cyberpunk corporate feudalism".
The corporations control everything in today's world. Sure, the governments still have their military, but corporations operate within the nation states largely autonomously and often in partially parasitic relationships: if the corporation doesn't like the environment, it leaves.
Corporate relationships change much in the same way as nation-states and fiefdoms did during the Middle Ages: smaller gets absorbed by larger, larger breaks into smaller, and the larger ones fight against each other - but for everyone looking on, nothing substantial really tends to change.
States, and the people living within them, don't really have much (if any) sway over these corporations. They operate under their own rules (only in so much as they don't get caught). In essence, they're operating as the countries of the later Middle Ages did towards the Holy See - except the State is God. They'll do whatever they can get away with, and if the state finds out or protests, they'll just leave - or take over.
It might be the exception, but we live in an area where there are two competing services - Midconntinent and Knology. They're constantly one-upping each other with limited-time specials, and it's reasonably trivial to switch from one to the other and back again.
I think our most recent (on Knology) was $30 or so for basic Internet (5Mbit/2Mbit) for 6 months. (Knology is incompetent, and right now I'm unable to check out their residential rates due to site design issues and/or DNS.) Midco is currently (non-special) $37/mo for 20Mbit/2Mbit. The last time we had Midco, they tacked on a $5/month 'service charge' per month if you wanted to un-bundle the cable TV service.
Notice how there hasn't been nearly as much mention of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill this past week? Or the Blagovich trial?
Yet there's this spy thing and this Kagan SC nomination (which surely isn't serious, on account of her lacking any serious qualifications). Both of these things have been initiated by the executive branch in a time when a distraction poses itself useful, politically.
So, really, it's not such a mystery. It's just a distraction.
Slashdot Mirror
When a blight comes along which only kills off a specific variant of a crop, historically and typically, everything is OK (except in the locale where the blight occurred): the next season they're planting the same crop again, except it's an imported variant from another region.
With a GMO crop, if that crop gets a blight, that crop is gone. No crop for that year, anywhere. Chances are most places (including the company that makes the GMO) have to start over from scratch - ie, a non-GMO crop.
That's not such a problem as this: since GMO crops have become a monoculture and there aren't a whole lot of variants of "corn" or "wheat" or "soy" being planted, there won't be a sufficient number of seeds to actually plant crops the following year from the available non-GMO variant crops.
Horticulture, like software, wants to be free. It leads to a stronger, better ecosystem with more options. Actually, the analogy translates to "blights", too.
It took us decades to fully realize the danger of radioactive materials, it might take decades to fully understand the implications of GM. Until we have a reasonable comprehension of the dangers and risks, we should use other methods for improving crop yields, which, also as the Prof. tells, are to be easily found in better irrigation and fertilisation for third world countries.
And, this is being done. However, the people who do it are getting branded as "whole food crazies", "crunchy granolas" and a handful of derogatory terminology. They're also being legislated against and (often) pushed against by organizations within the government like the FDA for "health violations" - which, in my experience, most often means "not towing the line" and has no basis in fact.
The problem with Monsanto is that, while all these GM crops are being planted, the regional, local, etc. variants of crops which are specifically adapted to growing in those regions disappear. A lot of effort is going into preserving heirloom plants such as these, but still many generations of work are being lost (through the loss of hierloom variants).
I don't know what the professor is saying, because I didn't RTFA, but I can tell you this: it's imperative that Monsanto be stopped by one means or another. They essentially control the entire food production of the world, and were soemthing to happen to them, there would be massive die-off: not just of people who depend on the food, but also the many, many animals which live "wild" amongst the crop fields, as well as the other plants and animals which will die from the flooding resulting from barren fields.
The issue with Monsanto (and other similar companies) is much more than just "I like my food non-GM" for many people. It's a matter of wanting our very existence to not be at the whim of a multinational corporation (or anyone else, for that matter).
Yep, absolutely.
Nevermind that people posted in sensitive areas, privy to potentially compromising information, apparently (as I've heard second hand from the brother of a Marine in said sensitive situation) have their online profile pages screened and cleaned, etc. as a routine part of security clearance. This isn't just for opsec or anything like that; it's for the safety of everyone involved.
I'm not sure how the GPs statement of "more stable than modern hardware" and the parent's statements about the "greatest feeling of stability I have seen" make any sense.
Stable, by what metric? IOPS? MIPS? By neither of these measurements do the old systems hold up - only in "length of time running, untouched".
Even then, it's not all that impressive by modern standards. How many people have Linux machines which have been left unattended for years on end - not just business machines in a back office, but millions of routers, cable modems, access points, and so on. There are many servers with similar characteristics, hidden away somewhere - I've seen FreeBSD and Linux machines serving the same role for as much as a decade without being touched by a human (or rebooted but maybe once or twice during that time by power outages and the like - 1800+ day uptime is incredible but not all that uncommon).
Certainly people have heard the "old VAX bricked away behind an addition" story from years ago. I don't recall its origins but the basic idea is: old VAX served stuff up so reliably that it was forgotten, and they built it into the building. Well, I've seen this in a couple places myself, with modern stuff. In one, an embedded x86 router device (soekris) and DSL router got drywalled into the ceiling when an office was remodeled. This mistake was not found for several years, when the tenants moved out and another tenant (with a different service provider) needed to have things wired.
Honestly, I "get" that machines used to be more reliable, in terms of "time left on uninterrupted", as a whole. But there are a lot more classes of computer now, and they're all millions of times more complex. Many are just as reliable, if not more so due to the improvements in manufacturing and material science.
There are many things we make which have a due amount of deserved nostalgia - as it relates to their quality and performance (cars, handtools, woodworking, tools in general) - because we used to create these things stronger, simpler, etc. However, computing is not one of these things. I've got a half dozen computing devices in this house which can (and have) run for a year+ uninterrupted - and they are all commonplace and better than the old PDPs and VAX systems of old.
When the iPhone came out, there were already Windows Mobile phones with specs closer to the iPhone 2. It had (get this) multitasking and many of the hardware features not found elsewhere. Playing media was not an issue. Symbian, likewise, was fairly mature.
Don't kid yourself: the iPhone wasn't successful because it was prettier hardware. It wazs more successful because it had better marketing, the App Store, iTunes, and a shiney egg shell.
As for "easy to use", I'm not sure how managing information between multiple sources on a device is possible without simple concepts which have been around for over two decades now - copy and paste, and multitasking. Windows CE had that over 10 years ago.
Likewise - OS X is an "OMG it's getting in my way" experience. Using almost anything else, with an unfamiliar laptop keyboard in the dark, is better.
OS X is only "better" if you're used to it. I used it for 6 months and I still abhorred it - I will never voluntarily use it again. It's control panels and widgets are nice and minimalistic once you get used to the semantics, but things like the file manager and dock are next to useless if you're trying to do more than look at porn and check your email.
Me, I also use Awesome WM. It's the first computing environment I've yet used which allows me to leave what I'm doing @ work and come back to it, and still have it be logically mapped/organized, allowing me to start back up on half a dozen projects/tasks immediately.
In contrast, going between a multi-window/tabbed app and another app in OS X is a bit of a pain. Forget side/side arrangement or anything else vaguely useful using modern applications and large screens.
Did parent and GP just describe the influx of people from high-replacement rural areas to low-replacement urban areas, or did I miss something?
And thus, clearly demonstrating, the general mindset and intellectual fortitude of those who wildly brandish the new Green technologies.
It doesn't matter if carbon offset credits are a Ponzi scheme, that alternative fuels and their vehicles are more ecologically destructive than similarly purposed traditional ICE vehicles, that there are no large-scale deployment ready technologies to augment the power grid. As long as we're passing laws which have a Green statement or impose some draconian restrictions on the status quo, we're going in the right direction!
Or, in this case, passing laws repealing the laws of physics. Awesome, just awesome.
At this rate, I have little hope for the West surviving another generation. Either we'll move towards a totalitarian regime with the scientists and politicians dictating to the rest of us, or we'll just completely devolve into civil war (shortly before the anarchy, but possibly not before being overrun from the outside).
I'm sorry, wait a year?
If I get a defective product, it means one of two things:
1) I return it
2) If there is no way to return it within reasonable time and/or they refuse to repair the defects (significant, if advertised features don't work at all), I file as part of a class action suit
In what world does a person not do one of the above when spending hundreds of dollars (or more) on a product - particularly a luxury product?
A year is a significant period of time, particularly in technology. They don't get a year to fix functionality issues (and make them available to the user): they get months of first public outcry. That timeframe is less, if it makes the device close to useless.
As for "win big every time without some risk of losing once in a while"... what do you think Apple is doing, playing the lottery? No, they're offering the (supposedly) 4th revision to their popular product line. A popular product line does not get "rebuilt" or "redesigned", it gets gradually upgraded. There is no excuse for this - and it was no doubt caused by some idiotic designer. (So much for the misnomer "Apple designs good hardware." Say what? Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?)
I'm not sure what a person is supposed to get when being an Apple customer these days that they can't get elsewhere, better. In the 1990s, it was pretty clear. Now, their desktops are the same architecture, based on the most common non-Windows OS (many variants of which are free), with inflated prices. Their other offerings are supposedly superior in many ways, but only because they're shackled to their worst fault - the Apple App Store.
How in the world Apple released such a half-baked platform with a supposedly superior OS is beyond me. The superior OS makes sense - the inferior hardware does not. Just confounding. Pretty much everywhere else, the situation is the reverse: good/better hardware, with not-so-great software. Hell, even the various WinMo/Android/etc. makers manage to do that without much issue.
"Striking similarities?" Go read it: the little you will have to change for it to be synonymous to today will likely be name substitutions. Just the names. In the concise terms used, there is sadly little denial that pretty much everything on the list of grievances which do not apply today - between the States and/or Citizens and the Federal government. The "Colony Rebellion" occurred over much less than we have been putting up with for some time.
(Note ,this doesn't just apply to Obama; it's the current Federal government as a whole, as its been performing for the past 20 years. Thought the rate of aggravation has certainly increased significantly in the last year than what it had been previously.)
Yet, this thing was around in 1918. It was some time before computers, and still reasonably capable. Arguably, I'm not quite sure how it's an inferior cipher compared to the Jefferson cipher - this one appears to allow for slightly more "randomness", as well as creating templates which could arguably be used for single-time pads without the additional transmission of information for an effective cipher. (the Jefferson wheel cipher wasn't used past WWII, from what I can tell).
At any rate, it just goes to show you how effective a relatively simple machine can be, compared to modern electronic and/or computational methods to do the same basic thing (in this case, the enigma). Another good example would be drive/steer-by-wire vs. hydraulic or mechanical steering and acceleration/breaking. I'm sure there are more, but I'm not creative enough to think of any of them in my current alcohol-addled state.
Sometimes, the conceptually simpler method is the better one. This thing apparently still works; how many cryptographic engines of later years no longer do due to the copious mantainance required? Same can be said for more modern vehicle electronics vs. the older and more reliable (despite what the automotive industry says) mechanical means of doing the same: instead of outright replacement its often relatively easy to fix the broken systems on an older car.
Of course, when it comes to things depending on complex mathematics and the ability to be generalized, nothing beats generalized computing. :)
I agree. I had such a professor who was very good at "teaching" students how to learn.
Except, really, he didn't do anything but ask questions. He didn't give answers, which is the hallmark of teaching.
A better saying might be: "Teaching someone how to learn is like giving someone a VD to turn them into a virgin."
No, a degree isn't just a piece of paper. It's also 2-8 years of your life (depending on the degree(s)).
That's a lot of time to spend doing anything - and it's all experience. Who's to say you wouldn't learn more during that period of time working in the field (as a grunt, getting trained and figuring it out as you go) than in the classroom getting taught?
I know with almost certainty I'd have a lot more practical experience had I been working full-time (or even 20h+) in the field instead of going to school, and my schooling wasn't bad. Granted, I'd probably never have read Knuth or touched Visual Studio had I done that, but most of what I know wasn't learned as part of a course curriculum - I picked it up as I went along, mostly because I liked it and found it interesting/useful.
But I thought the iPhone was supposed to be something more than a call-and-text-only generic handset that a person throws away? ... and I've been using the same handset for about 6 years, now. It's doing just fine, thanks - though I have replaced the battery twice now.
Similarly, the "bullettime" in Fallout 3 was really irritating - not when you went into the turn-based mode, but when you got a critical and it had slow animation. When you were grinding through the Super Mutants in the DC strip it was particularly agitating, because by that point in the game you got a lot of criticals and it only took 1-2 shots with a rifle to take them out.
The key word here is "consistency". The 'frills' don't matter; what matters is that what is implemented is implemented well.
Two good examples of this are Duke Nukem 3D and Deus Ex. In DN3D, the gameplay world interaction was fairly minimal: there were trash cans, toilets, windows, mirrors, and hookers/strippers which you could destroy and/or alter. There were also the occasional wall you could blow up (often the rough equiv of a keycard door), as well as some mini-games (which were extra fun, and not part of the game's "goal". There wasn't much, but it was consistent.
Deus Ex is a classic example for a game implementing an internal "mini-game" and doing it right. You didn't have to play them, as there were multiple ways to accomplish a goal: you just chose to, and it was often a fun alternative way to reach the end game. Importantly, they were part of the game's plot and development.
Really, when it comes down to it, I think a large part of this immersion failure is due to rushing the games out the door. The newer games feel incomplete and very "demo" like compared to games from 10+ years ago, with significant components which don't seem all that well thought out. Sometimes they manifest as a bug, but most of the time they're something like a map which cuts off where it feels like it should continue or stuff as outlined in the topic.
There are tons of uses; if you can't think of them, then
You can set up a wireless bridge between two distant points. See if you can't get ahold of some old Dish Networks reciever dishes.
And, significantly: freecycle them/give them away. There are a lot of people who use really old stuff and would love free upgrades (you know, manual laborers who are none the less intelligent and enjoy tinkering).
My guess: it was an exploratory product. They had the product sitting around, put some polish on it and said "sure, why not? nothing else is working!"
So they threw it out with a little marketing. It didn't catch. Why?
I'd argue for one of several reasons:
1) Microsoft isn't cool. With most people, "cool" is half the reason to have something, especially in the "Facebook generation".
2) The phones don't really actually fit any demographic that would buy them, from what I can tell. At best, they'd fit the 40+ socially active single women demographic, I think.
3) The ads were, at best, obnoxious and condescending (at least the ones I saw on Hulu). Holy hell! MS really needs a better advertising firm. Windows 7 is doing well in spite of its advertising, not because of it (though the 'get shit done quickly via the modified 'run' dialog' ones did appeal to me, as a geek).
4) The iPhone did well because it wasn't just a phone; it was an MP3 player and could do movies and apps, too. As near as I could tell, the Kin wasn't much more than just an IM client with a phone. Pass, for pretty much everyone.
5) The UI looked retardedly simple and useless. Little nondescript squares you drag around? No thanks.
Which is amazing, when you think about it.
Not only is this a big corporation, this is Microsoft. The turnaround on this is incredibly fast - dare I say, even agile? They appear to have at least fixed one of their internal problems, and have demonstrated they aren't the Same Old Microsoft we knew even 5 years ago.
Kudos to them for recognizing their mistake and dropping the product.
Corporations have become the invisible hands that control the governments. We're not talking so much about The Coca Cola Bottling Company, here. We're talking about corporations like:
Exxon Mobil
Monsanto
General Motors
Nestle
JP Morgan & Chase
AT&T
Verizon
Microsoft
WalMart
Sure, these corporations (and ones like them) are the biggest targets of anti-capitalist sentiments. But these guys have incredible sway at the local level (far dwarfing the political power of a medium-sized city, to be certain) as well as unprecedented power at the state and national levels due to their distributed power. In many cases, the absence of one of the above would impact people more negatively at the local level than the absence of state/federal powers. This isn't just a US or Western thing; it's fairly global.
And then you've got the silent giants - the ones nobody sees, the holding groups and conglomerates like Cerberus and Time Warner. These are insidious, as they've got a lot of sway not due to their hold in an industry, but because of their non-trivial holdings in many, many different industries: retail, real estate, finance, automotive, news/media, firearms, etc. The larger ones could likely make most states fall, and many smaller states through inaction alone.
Apparently you don't have kids. They laugh about this shit the next day. I've got two kids around this guy's age. They were laughing at themselves when they sounded funny, and
You've got to remember, kids (those raised by good parents, at least) don't see things in such a jaded light as an adult. They're innocent, and being embarrassed is typically something learned through scorn and ridicule. Children like that end up being head cases with esteem issues - not the ones who have no issue laughing at themselves.
I've been saying this same essential thing for years, though instead of calling it "networked authoritarianism" what I've called it is "cyberpunk corporate feudalism".
The corporations control everything in today's world. Sure, the governments still have their military, but corporations operate within the nation states largely autonomously and often in partially parasitic relationships: if the corporation doesn't like the environment, it leaves.
Corporate relationships change much in the same way as nation-states and fiefdoms did during the Middle Ages: smaller gets absorbed by larger, larger breaks into smaller, and the larger ones fight against each other - but for everyone looking on, nothing substantial really tends to change.
States, and the people living within them, don't really have much (if any) sway over these corporations. They operate under their own rules (only in so much as they don't get caught). In essence, they're operating as the countries of the later Middle Ages did towards the Holy See - except the State is God. They'll do whatever they can get away with, and if the state finds out or protests, they'll just leave - or take over.
Rapid City, SD.
It might be the exception, but we live in an area where there are two competing services - Midconntinent and Knology. They're constantly one-upping each other with limited-time specials, and it's reasonably trivial to switch from one to the other and back again.
I think our most recent (on Knology) was $30 or so for basic Internet (5Mbit/2Mbit) for 6 months. (Knology is incompetent, and right now I'm unable to check out their residential rates due to site design issues and/or DNS.) Midco is currently (non-special) $37/mo for 20Mbit/2Mbit. The last time we had Midco, they tacked on a $5/month 'service charge' per month if you wanted to un-bundle the cable TV service.
No, America is the communist country now (or getting there damn fast).
Russia is just an increasingly totalitarian country.
Notice how there hasn't been nearly as much mention of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill this past week? Or the Blagovich trial?
Yet there's this spy thing and this Kagan SC nomination (which surely isn't serious, on account of her lacking any serious qualifications). Both of these things have been initiated by the executive branch in a time when a distraction poses itself useful, politically.
So, really, it's not such a mystery. It's just a distraction.