Not understanding numbers is as harmful as not being able to read.
True, but only up to a point. The difference between "being able to read" and reading at the graduate school level is pretty vast. Just like your average person doesn't need to have the capacity to read Milton and Proust to get by, your average person won't really benefit from learning math much further than first-year algebra (or maybe geometry, if they want to be a carpenter). Call that anti-intellectualism if you want, but it's the truth. Likewise, I'm sure many musicians will say I'm missing out if I never learn to play an instrument, but I probably never will, and the actual harm that will cause me is pretty tough to quantify.
I seriously question the extent to which all of these "engineers" in the Chinese leadership have really devoted their lives to engineering. Engineering public policy, yes. But actually designing and building things? I wonder.
The official bio of pretty much all of the current Chinese leadership is that each came from a poor family, studied hard in high school, went to university, graduated with a degree in engineering that just so happens to coincide with a major government project (e.g. Hu Jintao worked on a major hydroelectric dam), and went on to great success and rose to the top through hard work and perseverance. In other words, each "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" in true Western, rugged individualist fashion.
Really? It's a great story to feed the Western media, but do we honestly think that's how it works in China? There seems to be some wires getting crossed here between what we know about China and what we in the West like to believe about individual success.
Say instead that "engineering" is a euphemism for "Party studies," and I think you have something closer to the truth.
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
This doesn't follow at all. You might as well say prison inmates will always vote for big government, for the same reason.
In my own experience, political thought in all professions runs the gamut, depending more upon an individual's upbringing, values, and experience than anything else. The idea that engineers or scientists went into a certain field because of some hard-wired biological characteristic that also controls their emotions, morals, and values just sounds like a modern-day spin on phrenology to me.
But since I might as well use this comment to throw out an inflammatory opinion of my own, scientists are more likely to be left-leaning because they're intelligent.
The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely.
So what do you propose? Do you ask a child, "Did you want to have sex?" Suppose the child is smart enough to understand the question, but is also smart enough to understand that if he/she answers "no," his/her parent will go to jail for 20 years. Is this really a better way to determine whether this individual child is "mature enough" to make an informed choice?
I find it hard to understand how Stallman, a man who took great lengths to write not one, not two, but three versions of a copyright contract that would ensure that his software is used in exactly the ways he wants it used, would not understand that in order for a law to be enforceable, it must be written in a very specific, very comprehensible way. The "line in the sand" may not be perfect, but it removes the ambiguity that would otherwise allow a great many children to be raped every year.
I'm not getting into this argument myself, but here's your cite... Stallman wrote it on 28 June 2003 (and the poster's paraphrase seems valid, though I doubt the statement represents the full breadth of Stallman's views).
Need 3 years experience in something basic and simple like C++ or Java (preferred) Need 2 years experience in obscure item 1 Need 1 year experience in obscure item 2 Need 5 years experience in industry A Need 10 years experience
So what 20 something year old is going to have 10 years experience?
And my experience (though admittedly this was years ago now) is that these "requirements" don't really matter.
As a young person, you kinda juice up your resume to look like you have experience you don't really have, as a way to get your foot in the door and get the interview. At the most basic level, this might mean citing your experience in college, or with open source projects -- you simply ignore the fact that they probably want professional experience and list what you feel comfortable using. If you tailor your resume a little bit and hit all the buttons the ad is asking for, you'll probably get a callback. During the interview, it will probably become apparent that you're not quite what you seemed from the resume... and there's a good chance they'll hire you anyway. At that point, it all comes down to how well you answer interview questions, how friendly and likable you seem, and how well they think your personality will mesh with those of the other people on the team.
On the other hand, a 30-something (or older) will put down his or her real experience on the resume, state quite clearly when and where they did what they say they've done (professionally), and do it in a realistic manner that doesn't sound like the pie-in-the-sky bullshit the recruiter is asking for... and they won't even get a callback.
Bitter? I don't know. Maybe it was just the 90s and the economy was different, but back when I was in my 20s, aggressively trying to climb the ladder, I found I would get hired for "senior" positions when I didn't even have any "junior" experience in the same field. These days, they want me to fill out an online form full of silly questions before they'll even deign to look at my resume -- and yet, by definition I have a decade more experience than I did back then. The big lie of the HR game seems to be that, in real life, experience doesn't matter as much as they pretend it does.
My best guess is that, now more than ever, networking is the only way to get your foot in the door. You have to know somebody who can give you a real-person recommendation. With every other method, you might as well be tearing the little tabs off an ad posted on a telephone pole.
Performance, dumbass. C (or C++) based OpenGL (i.e. iOS) will always run circles around WebKit rendering HTML (i.e. WebOS).
Riiiight. And you say that as an experienced developer, yes? Because A.) I have never heard of the UI of a handheld application requiring significant processor resources; and B.) I have never heard anyone complain about the performance of the WebOS UI. But yeah, C is "faster" than JavaScript, that took a lot of brain cells on your part.
The New York Times really needs to move past putting periods after each letter in acronyms like HP. They do the same thing with acronyms like the NFL. It just looks stupid, because pretty much nobody else does that any more, even other newspapers. Language changes, and sometimes for the better.
That's not language, it's style. Many publications have their own style guides. The New Yorker, for example, follows many standards that seem archaic, such as including a dieresis on the second vowel of a double-vowel word, as in "coördination." It's done out of respect for the tradition and heritage of that specific publication. As for abbreviations, you may note that the Associated Press styles the abbreviation for the United Kingdom as "UK" (no dots) but the United States is "U.S." (with dots). The English language itself, however, includes no rules or claims about such matters.
For the record, the New York Times rule is simple: If you pronounce the abbreviation as a word (e.g OPEC) then it doesn't get the periods. If you pronounce it by spelling out each letter, one at a time (e.g. F.B.I., I.R.S., etc) then you include the periods. It makes some exceptions, however; for example, the names of television networks don't get the periods. It's just the Times' own style.
Sending what is a basically a web browser with some java script libraries out to compete against polished binary platforms in a consumer already dominated by well polished easy to manage binary apps was space was not and is not going to work.
Then it is fortunate that WebOS developers have an alternative.
*WebOS uses WebKit to render its user interface* and you compare that to web browsers, where it's reasonable to use the webkit to build the favorite pages menus and such.
Why is it reasonable to render the UIs of Web apps using WebKit but unreasonable to render any other kind of UI using WebKit? Your objection doesn't make any sense. If WebKit is totally unsuitable for rendering UIs then Web-based apps must be unusable on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, all of which use WebKit to render Web UIs. I don't understand the artificial distinction you're creating between "Web UI" and "every other kind of UI."
Explain to me this: In all of the (presumably many) times you have used a WebOS device, has the performance of the UI been your #1 complaint? What didn't you like about the UI on WebOS?
Not really. WebOS doesn't force you to do absolutely everything with HTML/JavaScript, contrary to the article (and a lot of the assumptions in this thread). Palm is kind of a victim of its own hype in this respect. Palm told the world that everything in WebOS was based on Web standards to get across the idea that anyone with Web development experience should have no difficulty learning how to code apps for WebOS using what they already know. What gets lost in all the talk about HTML, though, is that there's also a Native SDK for WebOS that lets you code more processor-intensive stuff in C/C++ etc. I don't know if final versions were ever shipped, but they've demoed Doom, Quake, and OpenGL apps running on WebOS.
The New York Times reporter was obviously only marginally technical and not very familiar with the WebOS platform, and he was quoting self-serving statements by a former Palm exec who wants to excuse the fact that (by his own admission) his team failed to execute its own ambitious plans.
Yes it does, but Safari is not an operating system. That's what you're missing
But what you seem to be missing is that the idea that an entire OS can be written using WebKit is absurd. Are WebOS's device drivers and filesystem written in JavaScript?
WebOS uses WebKit to render its user interface -- the same way Safari, Chrome, Opera, the Android browser, the BlackBerry browser, the Symbian browser, etc., all do. From this article, you'd think all of those products should be failures.
I think it more likely that the reporter is quoting sour grapes from a former WebOS manager who blames tools and frameworks for his projects failure. Quoting elsewhere in the same article:
From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
I've never seen an x86-64 used in an embedded system; they're too power-hungry and expensive for anything other than things like >$100k test instruments.
Well, Windows Embedded runs on x86, MIPS, and ARM in the Compact edition, and the Standard edition runs only on x86 and x64. Are you suggesting there are no customers for these products?
I strongly suspect all of the new color Bank of America ATM machines are running on x86 processors.
This has to be one of the dumbest articles -- and by dumb, I mean written by an ignorant and stupid person -- that has ever been posted to Slashdot.
Really? Has it really been established that orangutans "go ook a lot"? Is that one of their defining characteristics?
I find it strange that the same article would go on to explain that orangutans are intelligent, inquisitive, and self-aware -- miming things that orangutan researchers might say, while ignoring what those adjectives actually mean -- and then say something as utterly stupid as "someone should make an iOok app!"
How nice of them to include an image of an orangutan holding an iPad -- which was obviously Photoshopped, because the video quite clearly states that the researchers haven't got to the point of letting the orangutans hold the iPad, because they are powerful animals and would probably "destroy it in an instant."
Then, after attempting, in his semi-literate, grade-school manner, to write an article about orangutan research, he concludes by posting a video of an ape researcher with a gorilla, explaining that "it comes off as a little bit creepy." Amazing. Thanks for your contributions to human learning, you drooling fucking moron.
P.S. I'm particularly interested in how orangutans would react to Skype, given that in the wild, orangutans tend to be solitary.
OK, based on the summary I kind of agree with some of the sentiments, but then from glancing at the link, I really don't want to read the bitter, angry thoughts of Ken Murray and hear about how little he thinks of the medical profession and how futile he thinks life is. Ken, buddy, have a nice cup of coffee, treat yourself to a scone, and let the rest of us continue to muddle through the way we always have.
This will get modded Troll, but seriously? If you're planning extended travel, why on Earth would you think about buying a gadget to play with before you go? Get a grip!
I'm being serious, and I speak from experience. Now me, I like books. I always figure that when I have a lot of travel time ahead of me, I should sock a bunch of reading matter into my bag for those long stretches, so I don't run out. And you know what? Almost always, that stuff ends up sitting in my bag unread.
Do you know why you travel? To travel. To experience new things, new people, new places. Not to fuck around with a gadget, or spend your time sitting in a chair by yourself, reading a book.
Count your trip as a blessing, expect it to be one of the experiences of your life that you will always look back on fondly, and please, for the love of God, put the fucking phone DOWN.
There are no facilities provided for the homeless in San Francisco? They are actually forced to use a sink in the library or remain dirty?
Now I think maybe you've never visited San Francisco at all. There are a lot of homeless on the streets of San Francisco. A lot. If you ever come here, even for a day, you will see them. Many of them have varying levels of mental illness. In fact, legend has it that when the Ronald Reagan administration cut funding for mental health facilities in the 80s, a lot of hospitals back East shipped their most at-risk patients out here, because at least in San Francisco they would have a chance of surviving the winter on the street. Of course lots more have substance abuse problems (and don't you think you might, too, if you were living on the street?).
Thus, while there are plenty of facilities, they are often sorely overburdened. There might not always be a bed for anyone on any given night; so for some homeless people, they spend some nights in the shelter and others on the street, in any given week. Shelters can be dangerous, too, which makes some people hesitant to use them (or specific ones). People's personal effects are sometimes stolen, and sometimes there's violence. You don't really know who you're spending the night with. Then again, some people drift out of the system because they can't or won't comply with substance abuse treatment programs, or because they're mentally ill.
Homelessness is an intractable problem. There isn't enough funding for outreach programs nationwide. Charitable organizations can only do so much. And at the end of the day, it is a humanitarian concern -- which is why they're not going to post armed guards on a library men's room. Some things are just going to be the way they are, until we address the root causes of the problem.
Socialism / Communism isn't a way of running a society.
I'm not sure either was ever sold as such. And that was the problem. Communism and socialism are ways of running economies, but historically people have tried to use them as the basis of entire societies. (And maybe that's because, in practice, a totalitarian society is the only way to gain enough control over markets to make a planned economy work; nonetheless, we've seen the results.)
Because there's running water there and free soap, and the library doesn't block the door just because you look poor. You can't blame them, really, but the library is not the place for it.
Sounds like B.S. to me. I moved to the United States in 1976 and I never saw a pump measure in liters. And as for high prices, by 1979 oil was so scarce that we were actually rationing gasoline here in California... if the last digit of your license plate was even, you could only buy gas on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and so on. It had less to do with gas stations gauging than with an organization called OPEC. Don't believe me? Google it.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
I thought most manufacturing already used the metric system, so what does it matter? And if you want to buy a 355 mL can of Coke instead of a 12 ounce one, more power to you... both figures are right there on the label, so you can take your pick.
The severe accident management guidelines did NOT, in fact, state that venting should only be performed post-evac. They were ignored in the event.
Judging by the news reports at the time, the Japanese government was intent on denying that this even was a "severe accident." I wonder if that was just media spin, or whether there was something about the Japanese cultural mindset that they just refused to believe things were getting out of control as fast as they did? And that's why the appropriate protocols weren't followed -- because they didn't believe this was a case that merited "severe accident management"?
The thing about checking out e-books is that there's no way to return it early so it's pretty easy to calculate how long you have to wait for your turn.
There is a way with Adobe Digital Editions (which is how you borrow books from the library for pretty much everything except a Kindle). When you push the "Return this Book" button, it reappears in the library's inventory almost instantly. The problem is that nobody knows this feature exists, yet alone how to use it, and they also have no incentive to use it: There are no late fees for keeping an e-book too long, and eventually it will just be "returned" to the library automatically (though possibly only many days after they actually finished reading it).
Slashdot Mirror
Not understanding numbers is as harmful as not being able to read.
True, but only up to a point. The difference between "being able to read" and reading at the graduate school level is pretty vast. Just like your average person doesn't need to have the capacity to read Milton and Proust to get by, your average person won't really benefit from learning math much further than first-year algebra (or maybe geometry, if they want to be a carpenter). Call that anti-intellectualism if you want, but it's the truth. Likewise, I'm sure many musicians will say I'm missing out if I never learn to play an instrument, but I probably never will, and the actual harm that will cause me is pretty tough to quantify.
I seriously question the extent to which all of these "engineers" in the Chinese leadership have really devoted their lives to engineering. Engineering public policy, yes. But actually designing and building things? I wonder.
The official bio of pretty much all of the current Chinese leadership is that each came from a poor family, studied hard in high school, went to university, graduated with a degree in engineering that just so happens to coincide with a major government project (e.g. Hu Jintao worked on a major hydroelectric dam), and went on to great success and rose to the top through hard work and perseverance. In other words, each "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" in true Western, rugged individualist fashion.
Really? It's a great story to feed the Western media, but do we honestly think that's how it works in China? There seems to be some wires getting crossed here between what we know about China and what we in the West like to believe about individual success.
Say instead that "engineering" is a euphemism for "Party studies," and I think you have something closer to the truth.
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
This doesn't follow at all. You might as well say prison inmates will always vote for big government, for the same reason.
In my own experience, political thought in all professions runs the gamut, depending more upon an individual's upbringing, values, and experience than anything else. The idea that engineers or scientists went into a certain field because of some hard-wired biological characteristic that also controls their emotions, morals, and values just sounds like a modern-day spin on phrenology to me.
But since I might as well use this comment to throw out an inflammatory opinion of my own, scientists are more likely to be left-leaning because they're intelligent.
The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely.
So what do you propose? Do you ask a child, "Did you want to have sex?" Suppose the child is smart enough to understand the question, but is also smart enough to understand that if he/she answers "no," his/her parent will go to jail for 20 years. Is this really a better way to determine whether this individual child is "mature enough" to make an informed choice?
I find it hard to understand how Stallman, a man who took great lengths to write not one, not two, but three versions of a copyright contract that would ensure that his software is used in exactly the ways he wants it used, would not understand that in order for a law to be enforceable, it must be written in a very specific, very comprehensible way. The "line in the sand" may not be perfect, but it removes the ambiguity that would otherwise allow a great many children to be raped every year.
I'm not getting into this argument myself, but here's your cite ... Stallman wrote it on 28 June 2003 (and the poster's paraphrase seems valid, though I doubt the statement represents the full breadth of Stallman's views).
Yeeowtch! Now you, sir, are bitter. Unfortunately, I agree completely.
The agism is reverse from what I've seen.
Most job requirements look like this:
Need 3 years experience in something basic and simple like C++ or Java (preferred)
Need 2 years experience in obscure item 1
Need 1 year experience in obscure item 2
Need 5 years experience in industry A
Need 10 years experience
So what 20 something year old is going to have 10 years experience?
And my experience (though admittedly this was years ago now) is that these "requirements" don't really matter.
As a young person, you kinda juice up your resume to look like you have experience you don't really have, as a way to get your foot in the door and get the interview. At the most basic level, this might mean citing your experience in college, or with open source projects -- you simply ignore the fact that they probably want professional experience and list what you feel comfortable using. If you tailor your resume a little bit and hit all the buttons the ad is asking for, you'll probably get a callback. During the interview, it will probably become apparent that you're not quite what you seemed from the resume ... and there's a good chance they'll hire you anyway. At that point, it all comes down to how well you answer interview questions, how friendly and likable you seem, and how well they think your personality will mesh with those of the other people on the team.
On the other hand, a 30-something (or older) will put down his or her real experience on the resume, state quite clearly when and where they did what they say they've done (professionally), and do it in a realistic manner that doesn't sound like the pie-in-the-sky bullshit the recruiter is asking for ... and they won't even get a callback.
Bitter? I don't know. Maybe it was just the 90s and the economy was different, but back when I was in my 20s, aggressively trying to climb the ladder, I found I would get hired for "senior" positions when I didn't even have any "junior" experience in the same field. These days, they want me to fill out an online form full of silly questions before they'll even deign to look at my resume -- and yet, by definition I have a decade more experience than I did back then. The big lie of the HR game seems to be that, in real life, experience doesn't matter as much as they pretend it does.
My best guess is that, now more than ever, networking is the only way to get your foot in the door. You have to know somebody who can give you a real-person recommendation. With every other method, you might as well be tearing the little tabs off an ad posted on a telephone pole.
Performance, dumbass. C (or C++) based OpenGL (i.e. iOS) will always run circles around WebKit rendering HTML (i.e. WebOS).
Riiiight. And you say that as an experienced developer, yes? Because A.) I have never heard of the UI of a handheld application requiring significant processor resources; and B.) I have never heard anyone complain about the performance of the WebOS UI. But yeah, C is "faster" than JavaScript, that took a lot of brain cells on your part.
The New York Times really needs to move past putting periods after each letter in acronyms like HP. They do the same thing with acronyms like the NFL. It just looks stupid, because pretty much nobody else does that any more, even other newspapers. Language changes, and sometimes for the better.
That's not language, it's style. Many publications have their own style guides. The New Yorker, for example, follows many standards that seem archaic, such as including a dieresis on the second vowel of a double-vowel word, as in "coördination." It's done out of respect for the tradition and heritage of that specific publication. As for abbreviations, you may note that the Associated Press styles the abbreviation for the United Kingdom as "UK" (no dots) but the United States is "U.S." (with dots). The English language itself, however, includes no rules or claims about such matters.
For the record, the New York Times rule is simple: If you pronounce the abbreviation as a word (e.g OPEC) then it doesn't get the periods. If you pronounce it by spelling out each letter, one at a time (e.g. F.B.I., I.R.S., etc) then you include the periods. It makes some exceptions, however; for example, the names of television networks don't get the periods. It's just the Times' own style.
Sending what is a basically a web browser with some java script libraries out to compete against polished binary platforms in a consumer already dominated by well polished easy to manage binary apps was space was not and is not going to work.
Then it is fortunate that WebOS developers have an alternative.
*WebOS uses WebKit to render its user interface* and you compare that to web browsers, where it's reasonable to use the webkit to build the favorite pages menus and such.
Why is it reasonable to render the UIs of Web apps using WebKit but unreasonable to render any other kind of UI using WebKit? Your objection doesn't make any sense. If WebKit is totally unsuitable for rendering UIs then Web-based apps must be unusable on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, all of which use WebKit to render Web UIs. I don't understand the artificial distinction you're creating between "Web UI" and "every other kind of UI."
Explain to me this: In all of the (presumably many) times you have used a WebOS device, has the performance of the UI been your #1 complaint? What didn't you like about the UI on WebOS?
Maybe games were hard to code
Not really. WebOS doesn't force you to do absolutely everything with HTML/JavaScript, contrary to the article (and a lot of the assumptions in this thread). Palm is kind of a victim of its own hype in this respect. Palm told the world that everything in WebOS was based on Web standards to get across the idea that anyone with Web development experience should have no difficulty learning how to code apps for WebOS using what they already know. What gets lost in all the talk about HTML, though, is that there's also a Native SDK for WebOS that lets you code more processor-intensive stuff in C/C++ etc. I don't know if final versions were ever shipped, but they've demoed Doom, Quake, and OpenGL apps running on WebOS.
The New York Times reporter was obviously only marginally technical and not very familiar with the WebOS platform, and he was quoting self-serving statements by a former Palm exec who wants to excuse the fact that (by his own admission) his team failed to execute its own ambitious plans.
Errr, correction: Not Opera.
Yes it does, but Safari is not an operating system. That's what you're missing
But what you seem to be missing is that the idea that an entire OS can be written using WebKit is absurd. Are WebOS's device drivers and filesystem written in JavaScript?
WebOS uses WebKit to render its user interface -- the same way Safari, Chrome, Opera, the Android browser, the BlackBerry browser, the Symbian browser, etc., all do. From this article, you'd think all of those products should be failures.
I think it more likely that the reporter is quoting sour grapes from a former WebOS manager who blames tools and frameworks for his projects failure. Quoting elsewhere in the same article:
From concept to creation, WebOS was developed in about nine months, this person said, and the company took some shortcuts. With a project like this, programmers typically start by creating the equivalent of building blocks that can be reused and combined to create different applications. But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
Ah. I see.
I've never seen an x86-64 used in an embedded system; they're too power-hungry and expensive for anything other than things like >$100k test instruments.
Well, Windows Embedded runs on x86, MIPS, and ARM in the Compact edition, and the Standard edition runs only on x86 and x64. Are you suggesting there are no customers for these products?
I strongly suspect all of the new color Bank of America ATM machines are running on x86 processors.
This has to be one of the dumbest articles -- and by dumb, I mean written by an ignorant and stupid person -- that has ever been posted to Slashdot.
Really? Has it really been established that orangutans "go ook a lot"? Is that one of their defining characteristics?
I find it strange that the same article would go on to explain that orangutans are intelligent, inquisitive, and self-aware -- miming things that orangutan researchers might say, while ignoring what those adjectives actually mean -- and then say something as utterly stupid as "someone should make an iOok app!"
How nice of them to include an image of an orangutan holding an iPad -- which was obviously Photoshopped, because the video quite clearly states that the researchers haven't got to the point of letting the orangutans hold the iPad, because they are powerful animals and would probably "destroy it in an instant."
Then, after attempting, in his semi-literate, grade-school manner, to write an article about orangutan research, he concludes by posting a video of an ape researcher with a gorilla, explaining that "it comes off as a little bit creepy." Amazing. Thanks for your contributions to human learning, you drooling fucking moron.
P.S. I'm particularly interested in how orangutans would react to Skype, given that in the wild, orangutans tend to be solitary.
OK, based on the summary I kind of agree with some of the sentiments, but then from glancing at the link, I really don't want to read the bitter, angry thoughts of Ken Murray and hear about how little he thinks of the medical profession and how futile he thinks life is. Ken, buddy, have a nice cup of coffee, treat yourself to a scone, and let the rest of us continue to muddle through the way we always have.
This will get modded Troll, but seriously? If you're planning extended travel, why on Earth would you think about buying a gadget to play with before you go? Get a grip!
I'm being serious, and I speak from experience. Now me, I like books. I always figure that when I have a lot of travel time ahead of me, I should sock a bunch of reading matter into my bag for those long stretches, so I don't run out. And you know what? Almost always, that stuff ends up sitting in my bag unread.
Do you know why you travel? To travel. To experience new things, new people, new places. Not to fuck around with a gadget, or spend your time sitting in a chair by yourself, reading a book.
Count your trip as a blessing, expect it to be one of the experiences of your life that you will always look back on fondly, and please, for the love of God, put the fucking phone DOWN.
There are no facilities provided for the homeless in San Francisco? They are actually forced to use a sink in the library or remain dirty?
Now I think maybe you've never visited San Francisco at all. There are a lot of homeless on the streets of San Francisco. A lot. If you ever come here, even for a day, you will see them. Many of them have varying levels of mental illness. In fact, legend has it that when the Ronald Reagan administration cut funding for mental health facilities in the 80s, a lot of hospitals back East shipped their most at-risk patients out here, because at least in San Francisco they would have a chance of surviving the winter on the street. Of course lots more have substance abuse problems (and don't you think you might, too, if you were living on the street?).
Thus, while there are plenty of facilities, they are often sorely overburdened. There might not always be a bed for anyone on any given night; so for some homeless people, they spend some nights in the shelter and others on the street, in any given week. Shelters can be dangerous, too, which makes some people hesitant to use them (or specific ones). People's personal effects are sometimes stolen, and sometimes there's violence. You don't really know who you're spending the night with. Then again, some people drift out of the system because they can't or won't comply with substance abuse treatment programs, or because they're mentally ill.
Homelessness is an intractable problem. There isn't enough funding for outreach programs nationwide. Charitable organizations can only do so much. And at the end of the day, it is a humanitarian concern -- which is why they're not going to post armed guards on a library men's room. Some things are just going to be the way they are, until we address the root causes of the problem.
Socialism / Communism isn't a way of running a society.
I'm not sure either was ever sold as such. And that was the problem. Communism and socialism are ways of running economies, but historically people have tried to use them as the basis of entire societies. (And maybe that's because, in practice, a totalitarian society is the only way to gain enough control over markets to make a planned economy work; nonetheless, we've seen the results.)
Because there's running water there and free soap, and the library doesn't block the door just because you look poor. You can't blame them, really, but the library is not the place for it.
Sounds like B.S. to me. I moved to the United States in 1976 and I never saw a pump measure in liters. And as for high prices, by 1979 oil was so scarce that we were actually rationing gasoline here in California ... if the last digit of your license plate was even, you could only buy gas on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and so on. It had less to do with gas stations gauging than with an organization called OPEC. Don't believe me? Google it.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
I thought most manufacturing already used the metric system, so what does it matter? And if you want to buy a 355 mL can of Coke instead of a 12 ounce one, more power to you ... both figures are right there on the label, so you can take your pick.
The severe accident management guidelines did NOT, in fact, state that venting should only be performed post-evac. They were ignored in the event.
Judging by the news reports at the time, the Japanese government was intent on denying that this even was a "severe accident." I wonder if that was just media spin, or whether there was something about the Japanese cultural mindset that they just refused to believe things were getting out of control as fast as they did? And that's why the appropriate protocols weren't followed -- because they didn't believe this was a case that merited "severe accident management"?
The thing about checking out e-books is that there's no way to return it early so it's pretty easy to calculate how long you have to wait for your turn.
There is a way with Adobe Digital Editions (which is how you borrow books from the library for pretty much everything except a Kindle). When you push the "Return this Book" button, it reappears in the library's inventory almost instantly. The problem is that nobody knows this feature exists, yet alone how to use it, and they also have no incentive to use it: There are no late fees for keeping an e-book too long, and eventually it will just be "returned" to the library automatically (though possibly only many days after they actually finished reading it).