How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
My former co-workers said it mostly affected the QA and Load Test teams (I left a few months before it all went down while workload was up and morale was already low). Which is a shame, since those were things Disney really did well. There were a lot of times that someone from those groups would catch issues in a deployment before a release, or even help reassure us that things were working properly in production.
Disney was on a big automation and accountability binge when I left, though. I can see why they'd want to outsource QA/LT to another company that they can point their finger at when things go wrong. When QA/LT is in-house, then (as TFA mentions) it's a big overhead and they only "save money" when things go right (but not in a way that actually hits the books). With an outsourced QA/LT firm, they can probably arrange things so they can charge the external vendor penalties when things go wrong and bugs slip through. Disney is clever like that.
Anyway I feel sadly for my fallen comrades, but with all of the experience and grinding they did at Disney I'm sure they'll fall someplace better. I'm actually more worried about the health and sanity of the H1Bs. As TFA mentioned, it was the outsourcing company that was responsible for hiring and bringing on the H1Bs. What they didn't mention is that a lot of the in-house Disney QA and even Devs that we worked with are already in completely foreign offices in the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina, working US office hours. So this isn't exactly news... just SOP after moving their new website from development/hypercare to sustainment.
So I had an OEM version of Win7 on my gaming PC until the C: OS drive died. Couldn't reinstall, so I just broke down and reinstalled a pirated version onto the replacement disk and plugged my game disk back in.
It's great, absolutely no nags for anything ever, all it does is run Steam, which auto-updates stuff as painlessly as apt or yum.
Well, almost no nags... Steam still wants Adobe Flash.
And since the kids occasionally want to play Minecraft, I get the silly Oracle Java nags too.
Yeah, I hear you. But there's some charm in older houses, and some value that can be wrought from bringing a 'fixer' into a new age while repurposing some of the quirks into features (like the milk delivery door from 50s houses).
But even with a new house, you probably need some plan for maintenance and upgrades over the 30 years it'll take you to pay off the mortgage. I got suckered into reading about the current sorry state of home automation systems a few weekends ago simply because I had to decide which smoke detector to buy... There are no less than 6 big competing standards with big industry backers at the moment! All I wanted was to make sure I could (eventually) get a little notification on my phone if the smoke detector goes off, but that meant wading through that mess and trying to choose a "winnar" now.
Anyway, I went with the FirstAlert detectors, since they could eventually link up to the Lutron Smartbridge hub that talks the ClearConnect protocol. By all accounts, it's the least fully-featured hub, really just talks to lights and window shades, oh, and the smoke detectors. And yet it appears to be the most responsive and reliable.
Microsoft is behind the Insteon line of stuff, that talks through your electrical system like the old X-10 devices.
Zigbee is already dead
Z-wave appears to be what everyone else uses. But all of the products seem to be featureful but unreliable. Hopefully that will improve someday.
Apple has its own thing, but I stopped reading there.
And Google has Nest and stuff, which seems interesting, but maybe not hackable enough for me.
Plus a bunch of open source stuff, a lot of which uses the Raspberry Pi, which I find intriguing. But I don't want to spend too much time rolling my own either.
Does it make sense to do all of that energy efficiency stuff upfront? Or spread it out the installation over the years to maximize, uh, tax incentives?
It's hard to find a good resource... need updated versions of http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroo... that include the plug-in electric vehicle chargers and solar cells.
There are lots of weird restrictions... for example, you can get some energy efficiency credit for installing sunroofs in the ceiling only if they are attached to a home HVAC automation system so it adjusts the blinds and/or vents in concert with the air conditioning. Installing a manually-operated sunroof/blinds doesn't qualify!
We just bought a duplex built in the early 70s with mostly original (high quality but not high efficiency) appliances, and we're trying to budget out home improvements for the next 10 years. The roof needs to be replaced in the next 3 years, so we'd like to have enough saved to do a modest solar panel / sunroof install by then, but they'd probably wouldn't make much of a dent in our electric bill until we replace the appliances:P . Maybe an electric vehicle charger is in our future too, not for the next car but perhaps the one after that, but it's hard to plan for taking advantage of tax incentives that far into the future:/
Also have to improve our water efficiency somehow... we also live in a water rich region, but the water bill is easily the most expensive utility because the sewage / runoff water treatment is astronomical. It is nice to have urban lakes that are safe for swimming, though, so it's worth it.
Now maybe people will actually bother using their email encryption and secure VoIP services and anonymized Tor routers and all of that fun stuff now that you KNOW that they're tracking you. Even moreso now that the telecom companies are in charge of collecting your data, since I trust them less than the NSA.
Yeah, well, you have to pay a premium to get on top of the list: http://videocardbenchmark.net/... (BTW, very useful resource for making rough sense of the alphanumeric soup)
For my part, I'd be happy with the $200 GPU that gets me in the top 20... (GTX 960). I'm guessing that will get the Ti treatment next.
Though I'm still pretty happy with my 560 Ti, which is still pretty decently placed at roughly 1/3rd the speed of the top card. I think the last couple of generations have been skippable, though I'm now starting to get interested in the triple-monitor capability of the GTX 900 series... once I go out and buy 2 more monitors. My only fear, of course, is that VR headsets will make peripheral monitors pointless soon, though it doesn't seem like any of them really tickle your peripheral vision the same way.
I went to an Ivy League engineering school about 2 decades ago. They did just about all of their classes in anything *but* C++ . Intro to intermediate courses were in Java, because it pretty much worked as documented. Higher level courses were in scheme, lisp, or whatever. Low-level assembly language classes were done in your own virtual machine that you had built in the java courses. Engineering programming classes were in C (for low-level I/O), Labview, and Matlab. There was *one* small 2-credit elective on C++ that taught the vagaries of C++ for the students who wanted official exposure to that stuff. That was enough to land them at Microsoft or Apple or Google or whatever big shop they wanted to run off to or start their own thing.
My wife and most of my friends went to State University. Intro-intermediate CS were total weed-out classes, and taught in C++ . They spent all of their homework time fighting the tool, debugging stack and buffer overflows, adjusting ulimits, tracing pointers... anything but actually learning about data structures or algorithms. The smarter students figured out how to use the debugging tools and source control to get by, which weren't covered in the curriculum. The State U. didn't exactly produce CS grads so much as CS survivors. Which I guess is an important quality for employers too.
Speaking of which... just wanted to plug the Impress!ve presentation tool for Linux, which renders your PDF slide deck in OpenGL, and has nice and mildly useful highlighting, annotation, and slide-sorter overviews.
Hmm, I try to take a more graphics-intensive approach, banishing all of the bullet talking points to the notes section, and filling the wide-aspect ratio slide with full-screen diagrams and visuals to provide some sort of guttural association with the topic I'm covering, like a sinking ship with women and children screaming while falling over the rigging into frigid waters in the aftermath of some application failing due to a careless buffer overflow.
But the place I work now tends to put more emphasis on appropriate cat gifs to augment the content. So there's that.
Aw, yeah, that guy was certainly the best TED presenter of the handfuls that I've seen! One (most?) of his big projects was on data visualization, though, and he's pretty good at presenting. I doubt anyone without his particular data viz toolset and mad presentation skills would be able to deliver his pitch adequately, though, even without his strong accent.
For the flip side, I sorta wonder what he could do if we made him present something passionate and heartwarming on "continuous delivery technologies for distributed cloud computing". Hmm.
health care and pensions, both of which we've seen being raided by the politicians in the past few administrations.
What?? It this "opposites" day? Both health care (Medicare) and pensions (Social Security) have not only not been "raided", but are being unsustainably financed by politicians too terrified to attempt any reform. I wish that spending was being "raided". We should be investing more in young families with children, and get spending on retirees under control.
Heh, I hear you... but health care (esp. Medicare) is more about providing money for the insurance companies than old people, though. You can see that just about every COLA (cost of living adjustment) to SSA is accompanied by a corresponding rise in Medicare premiums. ACA ("Obamacare"), without the public option, simply gets younger people to pay into the insurance system. I'm guessing the hospitals are still doing the same thing they've always done for anyone who stumbles into the emergency room.
Hey, thanks for the story bro, or, er, gramps, or, er whomever:-D
Yeah, I probably fall under the atheist / Buddhist camp too, though Buddhism is generally very compatible with just about any other school of thought. My father actually picked it up while he was serving in the Vietnam war and had it on his dog tag, so supposedly if he had died in action he'd be cremated according to Buddhist custom.
Yeah, PopeRatzo's sig is the best. I hope I age as well as you guys... all we have is that when my wife lost her job a couple years ago, we just went on a strict budget and didn't bother applying for unemployment.
-- I support public education : I married a teacher.
Oh, SSA is all fine and good. I mean, I'm a bit worried about the baby boomer generation all hitting retirement age about now, and the millennials hitting the job market are making relatively less money compared to previous generations. But whatever. As long as the US Military can keep the US Dollar strong by making sure it's the only currency used to buy and sell oil in the global market, I'm sure we'll be fine.
Anyways, I was actually referring more to the 2008 financial crisis and the earlier Savings and Loan crisis, where cozying up with Wall Street led to real estate bubbles that burst, taking people's 401k savings with them, and ultimately taking further infusions of taxpayer bailout cash to re-inflate to acceptable levels.
The problem isn't the software, but how people are using it. Banning Power Point won't fix bad end users. They will just find a different way to give crappy presentations.
Perhaps a better approach is bundle or create software that helps people create presentations from the script on up, and perhaps the software should have one presentation the audience sees and one the presenter sees full of more info or a complete script.
Yeah, PowerPoint can actually do that, what with the "Notes" section that shows up on the presenter screen while the projector output shows the slide.
Scanned TFA, lots of whining but not really much counterpoint on how to better organize and deliver information *properly* . There's a gratuitous link to http://prezi.com/ at the end, but just having a sexier, nonlinear presentation tool won't be of much help.
Good presentation delivery is indeed an art. But what properties make a presentation aid helpful? The Daily Show is one example that comes to mind for someone who uses visual aids well... by placing an interesting image to associate with a story. When it does display any bulleted text, it is only used to deliver the punchline... so timing is crucial too.
Yeah, not really sure why this is news. While I admire Musk as much as anyone here for focusing his dotcom wealth on geeky quixotic tech ventures, starting their own grade 1 - 3 daycare for mostly SpaceX employees doesn't sound like that big of a deal.
Yes, there's a lot broken with US public education at the moment. New curriculum is getting more driven by testing, which itself is a ploy to destroy public education funding and divert it towards private "interventions" and "schools". It must be nice to have the freedom to be able to set up a coordinated curriculum where classes support each other... much like what I had when I learned structures and physics and chemistry the same time the appropriate geometry and calculus was being taught, so I could use the abstract mathematical tools almost immediately.
They're by no means nice phones, but they have a good feature set, and we haven't had any problems with them that weren't caused by dropping them into puddles or sending them on a ride through the laundry machine.
BLU also has a slightly larger one with a full Blackberry-like keyboard for texting that also has a broadcast TV receiver instead of just FM radio.
Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).
But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or so? Should we be worried about climate change enough to spend money on trying to cram more people onto Earth, or just let the natural cycles of mass extinctions and famine run its course?
The fine article is somewhat silly, because first they complain about how bad at statistics people are, but then go through the math that the odds of anyone dying due to asteroids are 1 - in 70 million per year.
assuming our world’s population remains level at 7 billion indefinitely into the future
which is 1. a bit ridiculous that the population will hold steady at 7 billion the forseeable future, not that it matters because humans have difficulty relating to any population above a couple hundred. 2. over enough millennia, even with those odds, we'll see definitely see something. Probably not in our lifetimes, but likely on a civilization scale of 10,000 years. 3. Yes, TFA mentions that most of the solar system debris has already been absorbed by Jupiter and the like, but seems to ignore some other million-year scale cycles for encountering space debris http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...
Are people fear-mongering? Definitely. Is any effort we make to tackle the miniscule risk of asteroid impacts or climate change wasted? No. Are historians in the distant future going to look back on our culture and and say "silly fools, they wasted so much time and effort worrying about X that they didn't notice the real issues piling up to destroy their civilization" no matter what we do? Hell yes.
Yeah, large, mass-extinction asteroids are only a problem every 70 million years.
By that logic, why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy life!.... there's nothing that could possibly happen that Earth wouldn't completely recover from in a couple million years.
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How is Disney worse? I think Disney only fired about 130 Americans.
My former co-workers said it mostly affected the QA and Load Test teams (I left a few months before it all went down while workload was up and morale was already low). Which is a shame, since those were things Disney really did well. There were a lot of times that someone from those groups would catch issues in a deployment before a release, or even help reassure us that things were working properly in production.
Disney was on a big automation and accountability binge when I left, though. I can see why they'd want to outsource QA/LT to another company that they can point their finger at when things go wrong. When QA/LT is in-house, then (as TFA mentions) it's a big overhead and they only "save money" when things go right (but not in a way that actually hits the books). With an outsourced QA/LT firm, they can probably arrange things so they can charge the external vendor penalties when things go wrong and bugs slip through. Disney is clever like that.
Anyway I feel sadly for my fallen comrades, but with all of the experience and grinding they did at Disney I'm sure they'll fall someplace better. I'm actually more worried about the health and sanity of the H1Bs. As TFA mentioned, it was the outsourcing company that was responsible for hiring and bringing on the H1Bs. What they didn't mention is that a lot of the in-house Disney QA and even Devs that we worked with are already in completely foreign offices in the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina, working US office hours. So this isn't exactly news... just SOP after moving their new website from development/hypercare to sustainment.
So I had an OEM version of Win7 on my gaming PC until the C: OS drive died. Couldn't reinstall, so I just broke down and reinstalled a pirated version onto the replacement disk and plugged my game disk back in.
It's great, absolutely no nags for anything ever, all it does is run Steam, which auto-updates stuff as painlessly as apt or yum.
Well, almost no nags... Steam still wants Adobe Flash.
And since the kids occasionally want to play Minecraft, I get the silly Oracle Java nags too.
What! No USB Floppy Drive? What is Microsoft thinking!!!
That the people still holding onto their floppy drives probably aren't their target market for upgrading past Win98SE ?
Wonder if ZipDrives still work... I'm not sure if my current PC even has a parallel port anymore...
Yeah, I hear you. But there's some charm in older houses, and some value that can be wrought from bringing a 'fixer' into a new age while repurposing some of the quirks into features (like the milk delivery door from 50s houses).
But even with a new house, you probably need some plan for maintenance and upgrades over the 30 years it'll take you to pay off the mortgage. I got suckered into reading about the current sorry state of home automation systems a few weekends ago simply because I had to decide which smoke detector to buy... There are no less than 6 big competing standards with big industry backers at the moment! All I wanted was to make sure I could (eventually) get a little notification on my phone if the smoke detector goes off, but that meant wading through that mess and trying to choose a "winnar" now.
Anyway, I went with the FirstAlert detectors, since they could eventually link up to the Lutron Smartbridge hub that talks the ClearConnect protocol. By all accounts, it's the least fully-featured hub, really just talks to lights and window shades, oh, and the smoke detectors. And yet it appears to be the most responsive and reliable.
Microsoft is behind the Insteon line of stuff, that talks through your electrical system like the old X-10 devices.
Zigbee is already dead
Z-wave appears to be what everyone else uses. But all of the products seem to be featureful but unreliable. Hopefully that will improve someday.
Apple has its own thing, but I stopped reading there.
And Google has Nest and stuff, which seems interesting, but maybe not hackable enough for me.
Plus a bunch of open source stuff, a lot of which uses the Raspberry Pi, which I find intriguing. But I don't want to spend too much time rolling my own either.
Does it make sense to do all of that energy efficiency stuff upfront? Or spread it out the installation over the years to maximize, uh, tax incentives?
It's hard to find a good resource... need updated versions of http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroo... that include the plug-in electric vehicle chargers and solar cells.
There are lots of weird restrictions... for example, you can get some energy efficiency credit for installing sunroofs in the ceiling only if they are attached to a home HVAC automation system so it adjusts the blinds and/or vents in concert with the air conditioning. Installing a manually-operated sunroof/blinds doesn't qualify!
We just bought a duplex built in the early 70s with mostly original (high quality but not high efficiency) appliances, and we're trying to budget out home improvements for the next 10 years. The roof needs to be replaced in the next 3 years, so we'd like to have enough saved to do a modest solar panel / sunroof install by then, but they'd probably wouldn't make much of a dent in our electric bill until we replace the appliances :P . Maybe an electric vehicle charger is in our future too, not for the next car but perhaps the one after that, but it's hard to plan for taking advantage of tax incentives that far into the future :/
Also have to improve our water efficiency somehow... we also live in a water rich region, but the water bill is easily the most expensive utility because the sewage / runoff water treatment is astronomical. It is nice to have urban lakes that are safe for swimming, though, so it's worth it.
Now maybe people will actually bother using their email encryption and secure VoIP services and anonymized Tor routers and all of that fun stuff now that you KNOW that they're tracking you. Even moreso now that the telecom companies are in charge of collecting your data, since I trust them less than the NSA.
Yeah, well, you have to pay a premium to get on top of the list:
http://videocardbenchmark.net/...
(BTW, very useful resource for making rough sense of the alphanumeric soup)
For my part, I'd be happy with the $200 GPU that gets me in the top 20... (GTX 960). I'm guessing that will get the Ti treatment next.
Though I'm still pretty happy with my 560 Ti, which is still pretty decently placed at roughly 1/3rd the speed of the top card. I think the last couple of generations have been skippable, though I'm now starting to get interested in the triple-monitor capability of the GTX 900 series... once I go out and buy 2 more monitors. My only fear, of course, is that VR headsets will make peripheral monitors pointless soon, though it doesn't seem like any of them really tickle your peripheral vision the same way.
Aw, crap, you half had me hoping San Andreas might have been a GTA movie like Crank.
Oh well, I guess I can appreciate the humor in an earthquake movie starring The Rock.
Yep, Disney is betting big on China becoming a huge emerging market for their entertainment. It's almost as if they were about to...
Oh yeah... next year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
You'll appreciate this, then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Let's hope the OP never discovers the USB power strips, or he'll have 6x more problems in his life...
Well, you really weren't that far off the mark.
I went to an Ivy League engineering school about 2 decades ago. They did just about all of their classes in anything *but* C++ . Intro to intermediate courses were in Java, because it pretty much worked as documented. Higher level courses were in scheme, lisp, or whatever. Low-level assembly language classes were done in your own virtual machine that you had built in the java courses. Engineering programming classes were in C (for low-level I/O), Labview, and Matlab. There was *one* small 2-credit elective on C++ that taught the vagaries of C++ for the students who wanted official exposure to that stuff. That was enough to land them at Microsoft or Apple or Google or whatever big shop they wanted to run off to or start their own thing.
My wife and most of my friends went to State University. Intro-intermediate CS were total weed-out classes, and taught in C++ . They spent all of their homework time fighting the tool, debugging stack and buffer overflows, adjusting ulimits, tracing pointers... anything but actually learning about data structures or algorithms. The smarter students figured out how to use the debugging tools and source control to get by, which weren't covered in the curriculum. The State U. didn't exactly produce CS grads so much as CS survivors. Which I guess is an important quality for employers too.
But... but... but without Dice, my python bash one-liner would make NO SENSE )-;
NONE! Find a real language! *ducks*
Ooh, another Dice discussion!
echo "import random\nprint random.randint(1,6)" | python -
Speaking of which... just wanted to plug the Impress!ve presentation tool for Linux, which renders your PDF slide deck in OpenGL, and has nice and mildly useful highlighting, annotation, and slide-sorter overviews.
http://impressive.sourceforge....
Hmm, I try to take a more graphics-intensive approach, banishing all of the bullet talking points to the notes section, and filling the wide-aspect ratio slide with full-screen diagrams and visuals to provide some sort of guttural association with the topic I'm covering, like a sinking ship with women and children screaming while falling over the rigging into frigid waters in the aftermath of some application failing due to a careless buffer overflow.
But the place I work now tends to put more emphasis on appropriate cat gifs to augment the content. So there's that.
Aw, yeah, that guy was certainly the best TED presenter of the handfuls that I've seen! One (most?) of his big projects was on data visualization, though, and he's pretty good at presenting. I doubt anyone without his particular data viz toolset and mad presentation skills would be able to deliver his pitch adequately, though, even without his strong accent.
For the flip side, I sorta wonder what he could do if we made him present something passionate and heartwarming on "continuous delivery technologies for distributed cloud computing". Hmm.
health care and pensions, both of which we've seen being raided by the politicians in the past few administrations.
What?? It this "opposites" day? Both health care (Medicare) and pensions (Social Security) have not only not been "raided", but are being unsustainably financed by politicians too terrified to attempt any reform. I wish that spending was being "raided". We should be investing more in young families with children, and get spending on retirees under control.
Heh, I hear you... but health care (esp. Medicare) is more about providing money for the insurance companies than old people, though. You can see that just about every COLA (cost of living adjustment) to SSA is accompanied by a corresponding rise in Medicare premiums. ACA ("Obamacare"), without the public option, simply gets younger people to pay into the insurance system. I'm guessing the hospitals are still doing the same thing they've always done for anyone who stumbles into the emergency room.
Hey, thanks for the story bro, or, er, gramps, or, er whomever :-D
Yeah, I probably fall under the atheist / Buddhist camp too, though Buddhism is generally very compatible with just about any other school of thought. My father actually picked it up while he was serving in the Vietnam war and had it on his dog tag, so supposedly if he had died in action he'd be cremated according to Buddhist custom.
Yeah, PopeRatzo's sig is the best. I hope I age as well as you guys... all we have is that when my wife lost her job a couple years ago, we just went on a strict budget and didn't bother applying for unemployment.
--
I support public education : I married a teacher.
Oh, SSA is all fine and good. I mean, I'm a bit worried about the baby boomer generation all hitting retirement age about now, and the millennials hitting the job market are making relatively less money compared to previous generations. But whatever. As long as the US Military can keep the US Dollar strong by making sure it's the only currency used to buy and sell oil in the global market, I'm sure we'll be fine.
Anyways, I was actually referring more to the 2008 financial crisis and the earlier Savings and Loan crisis, where cozying up with Wall Street led to real estate bubbles that burst, taking people's 401k savings with them, and ultimately taking further infusions of taxpayer bailout cash to re-inflate to acceptable levels.
The problem isn't the software, but how people are using it. Banning Power Point won't fix bad end users. They will just find a different way to give crappy presentations.
Perhaps a better approach is bundle or create software that helps people create presentations from the script on up, and perhaps the software should have one presentation the audience sees and one the presenter sees full of more info or a complete script.
Yeah, PowerPoint can actually do that, what with the "Notes" section that shows up on the presenter screen while the projector output shows the slide.
Scanned TFA, lots of whining but not really much counterpoint on how to better organize and deliver information *properly* . There's a gratuitous link to http://prezi.com/ at the end, but just having a sexier, nonlinear presentation tool won't be of much help.
Good presentation delivery is indeed an art. But what properties make a presentation aid helpful?
The Daily Show is one example that comes to mind for someone who uses visual aids well... by placing an interesting image to associate with a story. When it does display any bulleted text, it is only used to deliver the punchline... so timing is crucial too.
Yeah, not really sure why this is news. While I admire Musk as much as anyone here for focusing his dotcom wealth on geeky quixotic tech ventures, starting their own grade 1 - 3 daycare for mostly SpaceX employees doesn't sound like that big of a deal.
Yes, there's a lot broken with US public education at the moment. New curriculum is getting more driven by testing, which itself is a ploy to destroy public education funding and divert it towards private "interventions" and "schools". It must be nice to have the freedom to be able to set up a coordinated curriculum where classes support each other... much like what I had when I learned structures and physics and chemistry the same time the appropriate geometry and calculus was being taught, so I could use the abstract mathematical tools almost immediately.
The problem is, when you look at local taxes, there's actually a LOT of money in education.
http://www.usgovernmentspendin...
It's right there behind health care and pensions, both of which we've seen being raided by the politicians in the past few administrations.
I've been getting a bunch of BLU phones for the kids for about $20 - $30 a pop.
http://www.amazon.com/BLU-Unlo...
They're by no means nice phones, but they have a good feature set, and we haven't had any problems with them that weren't caused by dropping them into puddles or sending them on a ride through the laundry machine.
BLU also has a slightly larger one with a full Blackberry-like keyboard for texting that also has a broadcast TV receiver instead of just FM radio.
Er, just trolling for mod points, and I guess I know my audience for the most part... I was really just looking for a nice place to link to that funny image, and your post sounded smart (though TBH I didn't really understand what position you were arguing for or against, but I agree with the statements you made).
But just to explain my AGW analogy... should we be worried about asteroids enough to spend money on asteroid interceptors, even though any kind of payoff is likely only once every 70,000 years or so? Should we be worried about climate change enough to spend money on trying to cram more people onto Earth, or just let the natural cycles of mass extinctions and famine run its course?
The fine article is somewhat silly, because first they complain about how bad at statistics people are, but then go through the math that the odds of anyone dying due to asteroids are 1 - in 70 million per year.
assuming our world’s population remains level at 7 billion indefinitely into the future
which is
1. a bit ridiculous that the population will hold steady at 7 billion the forseeable future, not that it matters because humans have difficulty relating to any population above a couple hundred.
2. over enough millennia, even with those odds, we'll see definitely see something. Probably not in our lifetimes, but likely on a civilization scale of 10,000 years.
3. Yes, TFA mentions that most of the solar system debris has already been absorbed by Jupiter and the like, but seems to ignore some other million-year scale cycles for encountering space debris http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...
Are people fear-mongering? Definitely. Is any effort we make to tackle the miniscule risk of asteroid impacts or climate change wasted? No. Are historians in the distant future going to look back on our culture and and say "silly fools, they wasted so much time and effort worrying about X that they didn't notice the real issues piling up to destroy their civilization" no matter what we do? Hell yes.
Yeah, large, mass-extinction asteroids are only a problem every 70 million years.
By that logic, why even bother worrying about AGW, since even by the worst predictions it won't have any horrible effects for the next 100 years or so. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy life! .... there's nothing that could possibly happen that Earth wouldn't completely recover from in a couple million years.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-cont...