You may not see it, but it is most definitely there. It's just that China's government is a hell of a lot more quiet about it, and the little bit that does see daylight is considered normal, especially when compared to the more outrageous crap (by Western standards) that businesses pull off both with and against each other.
It also helps the facade when you occasionally execute the occasional minor official or two who don't pay enough of a 'vig' to keep the upper echelons' bank accounts properly greased.
1) WebOS users would probably desire a very well designed system, and apart from iOS the only system with strong design behind it is WP7.
Subjective opinions do not facts make. Try again?
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
...so long as you forget that Nokia exists, the same Nokia who has preference over anyone else, including independent devs. And also this requires forgetting Microsoft's entire history.
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
...if one wants to count 12 months or more in the future as "soon"...
There's a very real possibility WP7 could start cutting in to Android marketshare before too long...
By that logic, there's a very real possibility of your having sex with every young woman in the Portland Trailblazers cheerleading squad. (In other words, barring some astronomical miracle, I wouldn't stock up on either condoms or MSFT stock just yet, if I were you...)
...wouldn't it be easier to simply bar them from ever becoming an elected official of any kind outside of the judiciary branch (for federal, state, local, etc)?
Fer cryin' out loud - your UID says you've been online long enough to know about this phenomenon
Now all that said? Seriously - your profession does leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired, all things considered. So while I certainly do not condone the GP's proposed action, I can easily understand why he expressed the sentiments.
I really don't know how else to say it, but seriously - real life is horrid sometimes. IMHO, if you want to know about the subject, you should have to see it, unvarnished and as it really is. If you can get a grasp as to how horrible something truly is, maybe it'll motivate you to help try and prevent it from happening - be it a disease or a war crime. I could understand not having it shoved into your face when you're not looking it up, but at the same time... you're looking it up. If you want to know about it, then by all means, know *all* about it.
I'm not even sure a kid-friendly version would be appropriate. Even as a kid, I recall never seeing any sort of 'kid-friendly' version of various encyclopedias or reference material - my parents never allowed that. If I wanted to know about something, I went to the nearby college library and looked it up. I learned about it as it actually was, without the censorship or dumbing-down.
I didn't turn out to be a psychopath, and such images still disgust me. OTOH, I gained a full appreciation for how real things can get. I gained an appreciation for the beauty inherent in the nude body, learned that nudity is for more than just sex, thus I don't view it as a dirty object that somehow always must be hidden. I also learned that governments can become corrupt and even evil, which taught me to regard all governments with healthy suspicion. I know well just how fragile (and at the same time resilient) the human body is, and have learned that horrid diseases does not make one a monster, but is something that requires assistance and a respectful pity.
The big bad world out here is a place where reality isn't censored, so why should our media be?
Sure you may complain about the movies he makes, but chances are you go to them anyway.
...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best summary of why Hollywood's output generally sucks these days: It's no longer about the art, and there isn't even the pretense anymore.
And how are they to know if you have built adequately engineered rafters?
There are these things called codes - they're published by nearly every trade. Note that I didn't say laws, just "codes". For instance, the NFP publishes the National Electric Code (for the US). Again, no statutory requirement.
Fuck you Libertarians...
What part of "I'm not a libertarian" Did you completely fail to comprehend?
Err, I'm pointing to actual overall trends, and you're pointing to theoreticals and minor aspects.
Android having occasional malware is a minor aspect at absolute best, and your postulation of Apple's future capacity to innovate or not isn't slowing down the massive wave of growth they've been experiencing over the past decade. RIM will probably die off anyway, though more likely due to massive organizational problems and lack of even basic features in the product... not because the product will 'bore' consumers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's marketshare drop is demonstrable, and factual. There is nothing to indicate that it is being reversed, or that it will reverse within the foreseeable next couple of years.
I think you got it running backwards - you're not going to be able to build it in the first place if your neighbors won't let you. It isn't regulatory (or rather, statutory), nor does it have to be, since there would be no written account/law/commandment/whatever. It is instead a social contract that you're not going to get out of so easily if you decide to defy it. If said neighbors don't care, then they get to eat the consequences afterwards. If you lie/deceive them and the results harm them, they'll take it out of your hide, or whatever you do have left. Odds are also good that there's going to be at least one bookie-err, insurance agency-that will be involved, either to protect against happenstance or to insure against liability. That agency is also going to take a big interest in how well your building is constructed, as well as that of your neighbors - if someone (you or the new neighbor) fails to meet some sort of standards, the premiums will go up until the problem is fixed to satisfaction.
Think of it as a free-market version of enforced socialism - either you care what your neighbor does that will probably affect you, or you put up with the consequences (sorry, I'm not a libertarian, so it doesn't bother me to use the "s" word).
That must've been why I wrote: "If your building ain't up to snuff (As dictated by natural events, fire, etc), then you'll soon be short a building, and liable for any collateral damage. This (coupled with demands from your closest neighbors) would likely be more than enough of an impetus to get your shit sorted out beforehand, no?"
One would suspect that the neighbors would, in their own self-interest, demand that you build your place strong enough to not do things like fall over, etc.
* have something a navy wants, and trade it for treaty coverage.
* buy/build enough weaponry and hire enough sailors/gunners/etc to fend off anything that isn't itself already part of a navy. Protip: If you're your own nation, buying real armament (that is, anything bigger than AK-47's and RPGs) becomes only a matter of price.
Not saying it's a good/bad/whatever idea, but from an engineering and logistics standpoint, this aspect is actually quite workable.
All goofy replies aside, the answer is: It depends on where they build the thing.
If you build it in areas where hurricanes are prevalent (Caribbean, around the Philippines, etc), then it's something you have to worry about and brace against. If you build it off the coast of Oregon, Buenos Aries, or Italy, you don't have to worry about hurricanes or typhoons so much. Same with pretty much any other massive and ugly natural phenomenon, really.
Something came to mind about the building code snickering... I figure Darwin's Law would sort out the building requirements, no? If your building ain't up to snuff (As dictated by natural events, fire, etc), then you'll soon be short a building, and liable for any collateral damage. This (coupled with demands from your closest neighbors) would likely be more than enough of an impetus to get your shit sorted out beforehand, no?
Question is, for how long will they have that iron grip on the consumer side? Windows has already dropped below 90% marketshare, and is likely far lower than that once you remove the corporate/business boxen from the equation. They've been trending downwards for quite awhile now, and that downward trend has been slowly gaining velocity.
To add salt to the wound, consider the tablets. Forget iOS vs. Android, count 'em all, and you notice that few if any of them selling in volume have windows on them. You'll also notice that the growth curve for them is staggering, and that the numbers will soon be (if they're not already) substantial enough to start taking some really large bites out of the typical laptop/desktop market. So what? Well, those are consumers/users/seats/licenses that aren't Windows-by-default-based laptops or PCs. While tablets aren't desktops or even laptops, they are computing devices that fulfill most (if not all) of the needs of the typical Joe Consumer who is buying it.
If I were Ballmer, I'd be scared shitless. Sure, he's got the EA and SA money coming in by the tanker-full. OTOH, the consumer side of things is, IMHO, rapidly slipping from his grasp. We can already see some reaction from Microsoft in the form of the whole Windows 8 initiative (though honestly I think it'll shape up to be another WinFS), and the whole Nokia buy-off thing, not to mention all the software patent hanky-panky we've seen in the past couple years. But... in spite of all that, Microsoft is still losing the consumer.
I mean, sure, you can say that the remaining grip on the enterprise will keep Microsoft from becoming obsolete, but then again, Sun Microsystems once had that too, no?
I have the same story as sibling... coming in from Beaverton is much, much easier than wrestling with half a zillion morons on Hwy 26. Hands down.
Taking WES or somesuch is going to take longer, even if you took 217. Hell, I remember going from the Hillsboro Fairgrounds to the Airport once... 2 hours, or roughly the same amount of time the flight itself took to LA. Never doing that again.:/
I agree that making it fareless would be awesome, and I'd happily pony up the tax ducats to do it. OTOH, not a lot of other folks will - especially those who don't use it. That said, a lot of companies do give out free passes, both downtown and in the outlying areas (and Intel provides free shuttles between the MAX stations and the various larger campuses, e.g. Jones Farm or Ronler Acres in Hillsboro).
I'm guessing that, since NSDAP symbology and speech is illegal in Germany, it would be slightly hard to tell. They couch it into as many subtleties as they can for the most part. Aside from the occasional concert or march, you'd likely have an easier time finding neo-nazis in Idaho than you would in Germany.
I'm already at that point as well, and I've already specc'd out a box that will replace my fire-breathing 850W desktop (complete with massive Radeon Crossfire cards) with a small 180W file/print server.
The 25" widescreen monitor will probably be part of an impromptu docking station that I'll plug my Core i7/6GB/nVidia laptop into, if I don't just plug the HDMI connector into the bedroom cable box, and replace the bulky 25" CRT TV there (and save a few bucks on the power bill by doing so).
Long story short, the desktop as I know it is about to be no more. Instead of spending just shy of $1k on a new CG/gaming box every couple of years, I'll just do the majority of that on the laptop, spend $400 on a glorified file-server/print-server/render-node box, and keep the little box around until the internal 2TB RAID1-rigged disks run out of space.
Apparenty they found a computer model that infuses people with a desire to walk and bike
You haven't been downtown here, have you? Walking and biking is about the only way you're going to get anywhere during a typical weekday... especially after Mssr. Adams decided to go slightly crazy about the bike lanes, which left less room for cars.
...and this was after the Max tracks ate quite a bit of asphalt on their own (though this isn't really as bad, considering that the rail is actually a good deal, and actually useful)
You can add pirates to the sim, and it would still look like the real thing (no, seriously, you can). No word on ninjas, though.
It's cool and all that IBM thought to do a sim of us out here in Stumptown, but I mean, we're not exactly going to be one of them thar model cities that will replicate easily to other towns.
I mean, hell, couldn't IBM choose something easier to do, like, oh, Des Moines or something?
Now to be fair to the fine folks in Iowa, they do have the Carp Festival, but seriously? IBM would have a *much* easier time there than here. Just a hint, fellas.
The proverb "There is nothing new under the Sun" still holds true, especially in this case. Rockefeller, JP Morgan (the guy, not the company), JJ Astor (before the Titanic got him), Carnegie, you-name-it... most of these boys had their own 'pets' in Congress, and happily got what they paid for, with few exceptions. You rarely heard about it back then because, lo and behold, the papers (and later, radio stations) were owned by --tada!-- corporate interests.
The only real diff now is that the Internet lets a lot of that information leak out.
Oh, and here's a dirty little secret: The rest of the democratized world is (brace yourself...) run the exact same way.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't the Discovery Channel have an Extreme Engineering episode covering such a thing, like, 10 years ago?
If that's the case, I cannot frickin' wait to see the mile-high tower/city complex in Tokyo.
One question, though... who the hell is footing the bill for this thing, and what is the expected ROI timeline?
Nice try, but you're going to have to try harder. So far, you only have hard wishes, and not actual facts to back up your suppositions.
Ah well.
You don't see this kind of stuff in China
You may not see it, but it is most definitely there. It's just that China's government is a hell of a lot more quiet about it, and the little bit that does see daylight is considered normal, especially when compared to the more outrageous crap (by Western standards) that businesses pull off both with and against each other.
It also helps the facade when you occasionally execute the occasional minor official or two who don't pay enough of a 'vig' to keep the upper echelons' bank accounts properly greased.
Yay! Microsoft fanboys get mod points too! ;) )
(g'wan, waste 'em... I got more than enough to spare.
1) WebOS users would probably desire a very well designed system, and apart from iOS the only system with strong design behind it is WP7.
Subjective opinions do not facts make. Try again?
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
...so long as you forget that Nokia exists, the same Nokia who has preference over anyone else, including independent devs. And also this requires forgetting Microsoft's entire history.
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
...if one wants to count 12 months or more in the future as "soon"...
There's a very real possibility WP7 could start cutting in to Android marketshare before too long...
By that logic, there's a very real possibility of your having sex with every young woman in the Portland Trailblazers cheerleading squad.
(In other words, barring some astronomical miracle, I wouldn't stock up on either condoms or MSFT stock just yet, if I were you...)
I want the raw reality people to allow the people who don't want to see it have an opportunity to turn it off.
...in which case you can simply not look up war crimes and such on Wikipedia, and rely on someone else to filter it down for you.
...wouldn't it be easier to simply bar them from ever becoming an elected official of any kind outside of the judiciary branch (for federal, state, local, etc)?
Fer cryin' out loud - your UID says you've been online long enough to know about this phenomenon
Now all that said? Seriously - your profession does leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired, all things considered. So while I certainly do not condone the GP's proposed action, I can easily understand why he expressed the sentiments.
I really don't know how else to say it, but seriously - real life is horrid sometimes. IMHO, if you want to know about the subject, you should have to see it, unvarnished and as it really is. If you can get a grasp as to how horrible something truly is, maybe it'll motivate you to help try and prevent it from happening - be it a disease or a war crime. I could understand not having it shoved into your face when you're not looking it up, but at the same time... you're looking it up. If you want to know about it, then by all means, know *all* about it.
I'm not even sure a kid-friendly version would be appropriate. Even as a kid, I recall never seeing any sort of 'kid-friendly' version of various encyclopedias or reference material - my parents never allowed that. If I wanted to know about something, I went to the nearby college library and looked it up. I learned about it as it actually was, without the censorship or dumbing-down.
I didn't turn out to be a psychopath, and such images still disgust me. OTOH, I gained a full appreciation for how real things can get. I gained an appreciation for the beauty inherent in the nude body, learned that nudity is for more than just sex, thus I don't view it as a dirty object that somehow always must be hidden. I also learned that governments can become corrupt and even evil, which taught me to regard all governments with healthy suspicion. I know well just how fragile (and at the same time resilient) the human body is, and have learned that horrid diseases does not make one a monster, but is something that requires assistance and a respectful pity.
The big bad world out here is a place where reality isn't censored, so why should our media be?
Sure you may complain about the movies he makes, but chances are you go to them anyway.
...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best summary of why Hollywood's output generally sucks these days: It's no longer about the art, and there isn't even the pretense anymore.
And how are they to know if you have built adequately engineered rafters?
There are these things called codes - they're published by nearly every trade. Note that I didn't say laws, just "codes". For instance, the NFP publishes the National Electric Code (for the US). Again, no statutory requirement.
Fuck you Libertarians...
What part of "I'm not a libertarian" Did you completely fail to comprehend?
Err, I'm pointing to actual overall trends, and you're pointing to theoreticals and minor aspects.
Android having occasional malware is a minor aspect at absolute best, and your postulation of Apple's future capacity to innovate or not isn't slowing down the massive wave of growth they've been experiencing over the past decade. RIM will probably die off anyway, though more likely due to massive organizational problems and lack of even basic features in the product... not because the product will 'bore' consumers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's marketshare drop is demonstrable, and factual. There is nothing to indicate that it is being reversed, or that it will reverse within the foreseeable next couple of years.
I think you got it running backwards - you're not going to be able to build it in the first place if your neighbors won't let you. It isn't regulatory (or rather, statutory), nor does it have to be, since there would be no written account/law/commandment/whatever. It is instead a social contract that you're not going to get out of so easily if you decide to defy it. If said neighbors don't care, then they get to eat the consequences afterwards. If you lie/deceive them and the results harm them, they'll take it out of your hide, or whatever you do have left. Odds are also good that there's going to be at least one bookie-err, insurance agency-that will be involved, either to protect against happenstance or to insure against liability. That agency is also going to take a big interest in how well your building is constructed, as well as that of your neighbors - if someone (you or the new neighbor) fails to meet some sort of standards, the premiums will go up until the problem is fixed to satisfaction.
Think of it as a free-market version of enforced socialism - either you care what your neighbor does that will probably affect you, or you put up with the consequences (sorry, I'm not a libertarian, so it doesn't bother me to use the "s" word).
The rest follows from that...
That must've been why I wrote: "If your building ain't up to snuff (As dictated by natural events, fire, etc), then you'll soon be short a building, and liable for any collateral damage. This (coupled with demands from your closest neighbors) would likely be more than enough of an impetus to get your shit sorted out beforehand, no?"
One would suspect that the neighbors would, in their own self-interest, demand that you build your place strong enough to not do things like fall over, etc.
That's actually fixable:
* have something a navy wants, and trade it for treaty coverage.
* buy/build enough weaponry and hire enough sailors/gunners/etc to fend off anything that isn't itself already part of a navy. Protip: If you're your own nation, buying real armament (that is, anything bigger than AK-47's and RPGs) becomes only a matter of price.
Not saying it's a good/bad/whatever idea, but from an engineering and logistics standpoint, this aspect is actually quite workable.
All goofy replies aside, the answer is: It depends on where they build the thing.
If you build it in areas where hurricanes are prevalent (Caribbean, around the Philippines, etc), then it's something you have to worry about and brace against. If you build it off the coast of Oregon, Buenos Aries, or Italy, you don't have to worry about hurricanes or typhoons so much. Same with pretty much any other massive and ugly natural phenomenon, really.
Something came to mind about the building code snickering... I figure Darwin's Law would sort out the building requirements, no? If your building ain't up to snuff (As dictated by natural events, fire, etc), then you'll soon be short a building, and liable for any collateral damage. This (coupled with demands from your closest neighbors) would likely be more than enough of an impetus to get your shit sorted out beforehand, no?
Microsoft is referring to the fact that Google withholds Android source from non-privileged partners.
Bullshit. I can download it right now, and I'm not even an OEM.
Question is, for how long will they have that iron grip on the consumer side? Windows has already dropped below 90% marketshare, and is likely far lower than that once you remove the corporate/business boxen from the equation. They've been trending downwards for quite awhile now, and that downward trend has been slowly gaining velocity.
To add salt to the wound, consider the tablets. Forget iOS vs. Android, count 'em all, and you notice that few if any of them selling in volume have windows on them. You'll also notice that the growth curve for them is staggering, and that the numbers will soon be (if they're not already) substantial enough to start taking some really large bites out of the typical laptop/desktop market. So what? Well, those are consumers/users/seats/licenses that aren't Windows-by-default-based laptops or PCs. While tablets aren't desktops or even laptops, they are computing devices that fulfill most (if not all) of the needs of the typical Joe Consumer who is buying it.
If I were Ballmer, I'd be scared shitless. Sure, he's got the EA and SA money coming in by the tanker-full. OTOH, the consumer side of things is, IMHO, rapidly slipping from his grasp. We can already see some reaction from Microsoft in the form of the whole Windows 8 initiative (though honestly I think it'll shape up to be another WinFS), and the whole Nokia buy-off thing, not to mention all the software patent hanky-panky we've seen in the past couple years. But... in spite of all that, Microsoft is still losing the consumer.
I mean, sure, you can say that the remaining grip on the enterprise will keep Microsoft from becoming obsolete, but then again, Sun Microsystems once had that too, no?
I have the same story as sibling... coming in from Beaverton is much, much easier than wrestling with half a zillion morons on Hwy 26. Hands down.
Taking WES or somesuch is going to take longer, even if you took 217. Hell, I remember going from the Hillsboro Fairgrounds to the Airport once... 2 hours, or roughly the same amount of time the flight itself took to LA. Never doing that again. :/
I agree that making it fareless would be awesome, and I'd happily pony up the tax ducats to do it. OTOH, not a lot of other folks will - especially those who don't use it. That said, a lot of companies do give out free passes, both downtown and in the outlying areas (and Intel provides free shuttles between the MAX stations and the various larger campuses, e.g. Jones Farm or Ronler Acres in Hillsboro).
I'm guessing that, since NSDAP symbology and speech is illegal in Germany, it would be slightly hard to tell. They couch it into as many subtleties as they can for the most part. Aside from the occasional concert or march, you'd likely have an easier time finding neo-nazis in Idaho than you would in Germany.
I'm already at that point as well, and I've already specc'd out a box that will replace my fire-breathing 850W desktop (complete with massive Radeon Crossfire cards) with a small 180W file/print server.
The 25" widescreen monitor will probably be part of an impromptu docking station that I'll plug my Core i7/6GB/nVidia laptop into, if I don't just plug the HDMI connector into the bedroom cable box, and replace the bulky 25" CRT TV there (and save a few bucks on the power bill by doing so).
Long story short, the desktop as I know it is about to be no more. Instead of spending just shy of $1k on a new CG/gaming box every couple of years, I'll just do the majority of that on the laptop, spend $400 on a glorified file-server/print-server/render-node box, and keep the little box around until the internal 2TB RAID1-rigged disks run out of space.
Tear up all the roads. Replace with rail.
Heh - they're working on that already.
(in all seriousness though - the Max is a pretty good deal, *especially* for going downtown).
Apparenty they found a computer model that infuses people with a desire to walk and bike
You haven't been downtown here, have you? Walking and biking is about the only way you're going to get anywhere during a typical weekday... especially after Mssr. Adams decided to go slightly crazy about the bike lanes, which left less room for cars.
You can add pirates to the sim, and it would still look like the real thing (no, seriously, you can). No word on ninjas, though.
It's cool and all that IBM thought to do a sim of us out here in Stumptown, but I mean, we're not exactly going to be one of them thar model cities that will replicate easily to other towns.
I mean, hell, couldn't IBM choose something easier to do, like, oh, Des Moines or something?
Now to be fair to the fine folks in Iowa, they do have the Carp Festival, but seriously? IBM would have a *much* easier time there than here. Just a hint, fellas.
This. Right here.
The proverb "There is nothing new under the Sun" still holds true, especially in this case. Rockefeller, JP Morgan (the guy, not the company), JJ Astor (before the Titanic got him), Carnegie, you-name-it... most of these boys had their own 'pets' in Congress, and happily got what they paid for, with few exceptions. You rarely heard about it back then because, lo and behold, the papers (and later, radio stations) were owned by --tada!-- corporate interests.
The only real diff now is that the Internet lets a lot of that information leak out.
Oh, and here's a dirty little secret: The rest of the democratized world is (brace yourself...) run the exact same way.