There are plenty of things different between Canadians and Americans, and I'm not just talking about toques and hockey.
There are plenty of ways that we're the same, too, but I don't get into arguments with my Canadian friends about restricting firearms. There's a lot less discussion of whether or not abortion is something that should be left up to a woman or who should pay for healthcare. The set of 'Canadian values' is different, it's just not so different that when you see the average American talk to the average Canadian that these things come out.
Americans almost certainly don't deserve the vitriol that they occasionally get from Canadians (except for your dickbag border guards--what's WITH those guys?) and when push comes to shove, we're there. On 9/11, diverted planes landed at Canadian airports, and Canadians drove out to offer accommodations for the passengers that were stuck there. I was still in University, and basically every class had an announcement that we should go give blood. And we did.
I'm pretty sure Canadians don't think Americans are any dumber than AMERICANS do. We just have the benefit of distance.
Well, being bitten is something else that they planned for--by having an enormous mountain of cash. Part of the brilliance of how Apple operates is not just that they plan for the stuff that they can control, they've also been planning for wild contingencies like this. Being able to buy your way out of any situation (at least once or twice) is terribly valuable.
I love that this is modded 'Informative'--like we really needed to know that email and telephone are the best way to get ahold of 'aaaaaaargh!'
But this also marks you as OLD. Email is not the primary way to get ahold of younger people today. Messaging apps and SMS (though that's trailing off) are what's being used. Just search for 'teenagers email' on google. The first 5 or 6 stories are just about how teenagers don't use email at all.
For myself (I'm in my mid-30s, now) I hardly ever use the phone. Talking to people? Gah. I prefer texts or iMessage or even WhatsApp. I do a lot more communicating via Twitter and Facebook than email and phone.
So, yeah, I guess the modding is right and your post WAS informative: it informs us that you're old and out of touch.;)
(I say that tongue in cheek; there's nothing wrong with the way you do things per se, but nobody's gonna make money selling stuff to you, so this isn't being sold to you.)
First of all, a system where people profit off of people being sick will tend to encourage keeping people sick. Why would it work any other way? At the very least, it seems to profit off of doing tests that aren't necessary and charging exorbitant multipliers on cheap items. If you haven't read it already, go read the Time article on the state of costs in the US healthcare system: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html
It's notable that there's actually a new profession for people that analyse the bills line-by-line to figure out what hospitals are triple-billing for (i.e., things that should be included in, say, room costs, are showing up as separate line items) and where the markups of three or four-HUNDRED percent are unnecessary.
My Mother is a 60+ year old Chinese woman that never really liked working with computers much. A mouse looks clumsy in her hand, and she can't touch type.
The people here on/. are probably never going to give up PCs, but always remember that WE'RE the weird ones in society. Our use cases are very different.
I got my Mom an iPad mini and she can sit and play scrabble with people and read her email. Typing is just as easy (or difficult, if you prefer) as it was before, but now we can chat over facetime. Even the prospect of installing something like Skype is a bit beyond her ken (my sister installed Scrabble for her).
So that's who the post-PC world is for. People that arguably never should've had anything to do with PCs in the first place. I personally use my own iPad as a reading and gaming device, but I do my work on full PCs. The more I use a tablet device, the more I realise how much overkill my full browser and keyboard are for 90% of my non-work tasks.
Computing is a field where we EXPECT things to change and shift. 25 years of PC dominance and we expected it to last? It's surprising that it made it this long, really.
What complete bullshit. Do you complain because your PC/Server/Whatever has a DETACHABLE keyboard? What if the keyboard isn't there? What if somebody took it? What if you just don't keep the keyboard attached because it doesn't need to be attached all the time? Have you really ever run a server? Or a lot of servers? Sometimes you have to carry around a small SCREEN, for pity's sake. In point of fact, a tablet--ANY tablet, Android, Windows or Apple--has a built in advantage because you're never far away from a keyboard, even if it's kind of crummy for administering UNIX servers.
I've SSHed into plenty of things on my tablet, and if all you need to do is get a process listing or run a script, it works just fine. If you're writing an email, it works just fine. I have a colleague that can put his iPad on his lap and touch type at about 80% of what he normally gets on a normal keyboard. Do try to get with the times; a physical keyboard isn't strictly necessary anymore, even if you don't like using one much.
And, incidentally, it's clear you've never seen a unicycle either, since you CAN'T just jam that wheel into a bicycle or attach another wheel to the unicycle--they're fundamentally incompatible devices. You may as well suggest adding a bicycle wheel to a Ferrari. Even your metaphor is abjectly terrible.
Well, if you get right down to it, this is what most graphical file browsers do already. So if I open up the Finder or Pathfinder in OS X, I get a previewer for all sorts of files automatically loaded. If I highlight a file and hit the spacebar, I get a preview of the content (or, really, you just see the content outside of a specific viewer; 'preview' is the the terminology that Apple uses, but it's not strictly correct). All this terminal application is doing is making it so that if you prefer to work in a terminal to manipulate and view files, you have the same functionality as a GUI filebrowser.
It's certainly the case that I use and appreciate the functionality of this quickview system in OS X, and I definitely would appreciate it when I have a shell open. I still do a lot of operations in the shell when I'm working in OS X because that command line interface is often still just much better.
I suppose that in the end, the question is why we would not build something like this in if we can. If it's implemented well, you wouldn't see a performance penalty when doing simple operations, but it's a massive expansion of utility and prevents switching to a different application when all you want to do is quickly scan the content of some items to understand what to do with them.
'Gnostic', as a bare definition, merely means 'learned'. That means if you're gnostic, you know something. Agnostics, by comparison, don't know that thing.
Similarly, Theists believe in God. Athiests don't believe in God.
The two concepts are completely orthogonal--one does not influence the other, per se. In fact, you can combine them, thus:
Agnostic Theist: Someone that believes in God, but does not know for sure if God exists. Agnostic Atheist: Someone that does not believe in God, but does not know for sure if God exists. (Most of us that identify as atheist, I dare say.)
Gnostic Theist: Someone that believes in God and KNOWS God to exist. Gnostic Atheist: Someone that does not believe in God and KNOWS that God doesn't exist.
Gnostics, in general, are hard to take seriously in this regard. Even Richard Dawkins would tell you that he's technically an Agnostic Atheist, as he cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God one way or the other, but the dearth of positive proof leads him to his atheist position.
This is for people that like to work in the terminal--instead of a file browser--but still want to look at all their files.
When the UNIX terminal was invented, there weren't a lot of things to look at other than text files. Times have changed somewhat since then.
The terminal is often the best place to get work done, and sometimes you don't want to go into a file browser or fire up an external viewer just to look at a PDF. Being able to preview a file so you can correctly sort it into a directory, for instance, seems like a good use of this upgrade.
In OS X, you can get something like Pathfinder that lets you manage your files graphically, but has an attached shell if you need one. This is just a more terminal-centric view of things. You can still work text-only, if you like.
I'm with Rogers now, but I'm unlocking my phone and going with Fido at the end of the month. The plans at Fido and Koodo have suddenly changed, and Virgin Canada seems to be matching them. $50/month gets you effectively unlimited everything, with 1GB of data. $10/GB overage. When I discussed my imminent departure with the people at Rogers, they tried to make me comparable offers, but most of them seemed surprised those new plans existed.
Oh, and no contracts if you have your own unlocked phone, but it doesn't seem to reduce the cost. If you go with a 2 year contract, you can cancel any time (here in Quebec) and just pay out the rest of the phone subsidy. There's also a $50 cancellation fee. So it's slowly getting better here.
If the phone was locked in a way I didn't want, I wouldn't have one. I got this iPhone 4 almost 2.5 years ago, and I'm still pretty happy with it.
I jailbroke it because I wanted to test out the Auxo app switcher. I only bothered with Evasi0n because it's simple. If it had involved any other steps, I wouldn't have done it. And as it happens, nothing that I tested while my phone has been jailbroken has been worth me keeping the phone jailbroken for. When the next half-way significant patch comes out, I'll update and lose the jailbreak.
I've jailbroken my phone using Evasi0n. I'll probably be going back to an un-jailbroken version soon (i.e., when a new patch drops that I care about).
I jailbroke the phone to have access to Auxo. Turns out Auxo crashes on the iPhone 4 constantly (which I reported to the dev; he said they were working on it...they may have already fixed it). I tried a few other things in the meantime: Jukebox, Bulletin, Dashboard X, etc. All they did was make my phone slower and give me no appreciable extra functionality. Bulletin is the one that I stuck with the longest, but it's not that much better than the normal notification centre. Now I've got a translucent notification area and it shows the currently playing song and some shortcuts to configuration options. Ehn.
And the problem I've had with Bulletin have made it a bit of a chore to live with. When there's a bug in the system that unlocks your phone (you can set Bulletin to appear on the lock screen) you can't unlock the phone anymore.
So, yeah, the iPhone isn't perfect. Apple hasn't done absolutely everything right. But I'm a lot happier with the stock build than the jailbroken one. Apple's got something very close to what I want, because I won't shed a single tear when my phone is un-Jailbroken.
Man, what is this? Of course exercise takes a time commitment. It's only your FUCKING HEALTH. Why shouldn't it take a time commitment?
Listen, I know we all have busy days and too much to do and we'd like to sit down and relax. The answer is to work less and rest and relax more. I know that's hard to sell, but it's the honest truth.
Wake up early, go to work, put in your 8 best hours, and then leave and go walk or run or ride your bike for an hour or two. On the weekends, do some exercise in the morning after a small breakfast, and then go for another walk or whatever before coming home to lunch. Then you can go on with the rest of your day.
Don't look at exercise as a chore. You don't have to run marathons or train for them to be healthier. I listen to a lot of science podcasts while I ride and walk, so I'm always learning something.
It's your life and health on the line here. What are you even working for if it's not to live a good life?
I'm Canadian. Your government's bad behaviour is your business. Moreover, your government's bad behaviour is widespread and often genderless, or along class lines. But in any case, government programs that exclude men usually do so because of the existing imbalance between men and women. This is the same thing as providing ramps outside buildings: the ramp isn't there to FAVOUR people in wheelchairs, it's there so that people in wheelchairs are closer to parity. We sometimes treat people differently in order to treat them equally. It's the difference between identical and equal--you and I are equal, but we're not identical.
Who controls the money in the World? In North America? In the USA?
Men.
Who controls the political power?
Mostly men.
Who writes the laws?
By and large, men.
There are a few cases where men suffer some form of discrimination, and it doesn't undo the considerably higher and more ingrained sexism against women. And most of the time we see cases of discrimination against men, it's a subtle form of discrimination against women.
More women are nurses because that's a 'female' role. They're confined to a box, so it's harder for men to get in. But I bet you didn't know that male nurses make more and are promoted into management faster. (At least, that's the case in Canada.)
The myth of the stranger-rapist hiding in the dark is a different issue entirely. It's wrong, usually racist, and ugly. But women still get raped by men. Kids get raped by men (and usually men they know) a lot more than by women.
I know I'm a week late on this, but it's clear that you're mis-reading the headline. It's close to the highest that it's ever been--that's the peak. The fact that 25% of the last 11000 years was spent in a temperature band equal or marginally higher than the current near-peak temperatures isn't really relevant. We're still very close to the highest average temperatures the planet has seen for a long while.
(Also, it's worth pointing out that I'm not strictly just 'white'. I'm half-asian, so I pass for white in day-to-day life, so for the sake of argument in this regard, I AM white.)
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies.
Except the GP didn't mention Hulk or Superman. I also think Han Solo is markedly different than the likes of Hulk or Superman, so I think it's disingenuous for you to lump them all together.
Oh PLEASE. The whole point of the GP was that men ALSO have it so rough. My goodness, all these men running around in movies ALSO being sexy. There's no problem!
Of course Han Solo is for men/boys. I wanted to BE Han Solo when I was a kid. That's a good way to sell toys. Han Solo is attractive to women as a side benefit--as part of his persona. But he wasn't there for the ladies. They're just collateral damage.
I mentioned those other characters because they're popular to point to and say, "Everything is just fine! Superman is an example of an unattainable body-type in men and it's sexist and he's dressed in tight clothes and everything is equal!" Superman being a strong-man in tights isn't about enticing women, even if that's a thing that might happen.
That's because men were the ones EXPECTED to spend money. Being the bread winner and provider has been the traditional male role. Gender roles affects BOTH men and women.
It's been the traditional male role...imposed by MEN. And, actually, once women got out into the workforce, they were still forced into the same gender roles as before, just with less time on their hands. But in any case, that's not an excuse, it's just part of a larger problem. Why do those gender roles exist? Why are we so bad at overturning them? Why do more women graduate with undergraduate degrees, but fewer complete graduate studies? Why are women expected to take care of children and put THEIR careers on hold? Hmm?
That's not irony. That's pointing out the truth. Liking something that portrays you like crap makes you a battered wife, not a nerd.
Real nerds would do the geeky thing and hack their own comics and video games (as is the case of TFS).
Nice, it's their fault again. See how this keeps popping up? Why is it so weird to demand--as I'm trying to--that we portray women in a way that's equitable and inoffensive? I understand metaphor and characterization and storytelling, but it's so hard to find stuff that just gives women a fair shake. But it's possible. Mass Effect 3 did a good job of it, by and large. I'll bet you can find some girl that was called a fake nerd for liking ME3, too.
Again, you're just making excuses for your shitty behavior. Or at the very least, you're making apologies for others' shitty behavior. 99% of these guys calling women 'fake nerds' or 'attention whores' don't have half the nerd-cred that I do, if you want to get into a pissing contest about it. These girls are allowed to be nerds about whatever they want, whatever comics they want, and they can demand that the stories be kinder to their gender. If someone called a black dude a 'fake nerd' because he likes Superman or Batman comics, and he should really be liking something 'more black', we'd all be completely fucking appalled. So why aren't we ticked off when this happens to women?
Anyway, AC, maybe you have your reasons for wanting to make sure your shitty attitude and opinions are hidden behind this cloak of anonymity, but I suspect it's because you're a coward that doesn't actually have the courage of their convictions. I may strongly disagree with the post I responded to, and maybe Ms. Sarkeesian isn't right about everything, but at least they're willing to put their names to their opinions.
You're right, things CAN be shitty for both men and women. To wit: the way men are portrayed in basically every single sitcom since the 1980s is horrible. Almost without fail, the men are arrogant jerk-offs that are wildly insensitive, and barely functional as legitimate people in every day society. I agree that it's unfair, but it's a relatively small fraction of the media we consume. I hope that one day those bad tropes go away, the same way the sexist tropes about women disappear.
I'm NOT a self-hating guy. I like myself just fine. I just think that equality is more important than trying to complain about how AWFUL my lot in life is because Twilight is a thing, or Fabio is on the cover of romance novels and that I don't look like him.
False. Equivalence. Again.
There is nothing wrong with my life when it comes to this stuff. I'm not discriminated against because of my looks or gender. I DO have to spend extra time checking my reactions to make sure that I'm giving other people a fair shake without pre-judging them based on THEIR race or gender. I like to think I do a good job. Mostly it's natural, but sometimes I go back and think about it and make sure. Y'know, introspection. Know thyself, right?
There IS sexism in games. To claim otherwise is to ignore the reality of the world.
What is great about this story is that this is how sexism ENDS. It's about little steps that fathers take for their daughters, mothers for their sons, and people for one another.
This is a feminist act because all it does is try to make a girl feel happy about the games that she plays, so that she doesn't feel excluded or lesser just because she's a girl. That's all that feminism is.
The guy wants what's best for his daughter and he's willing to go to lengths to achieve it. He was able to do something, so he did. If everyone else did the same, we wouldn't need feminism--equality would already be here.
Oh god, this is the same bullshit that willfully blind sexists like bleating about over and over again. The problem with sexism in our nerdy community is that we think that we're above it, so we spend a lot of time trying to justify the unjustifiable, or pin the blame back on women somehow, or claim that 'both sides got it'. It's not true, and you're too smart to claim ignorance.
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies. The reason why men look the way they do in media--including Han Solo, incidentally--is because that's what sells TO MEN. For a long time, Men were effectively the only people spending large amounts of money, and they were the only demographic that mattered. (And, in a terrible twist of irony, when women claim to like comics or video games despite the shitty way they're generally portrayed, they get called 'fake nerds' or 'attention whores'.)
You think Tomb Raider was somehow NOT marketed to men? You think the overt sexualisation of Cortana over the progression of Halo wasn't for the hetero men? Why the fuck does an AI need tits like that anyway?
The fact that there are now emerging some shows and movies that women can go to and get a bit of a sexy fix isn't a justification for the last 30 years of sexist video games. Anita Sarkeesian (who received death and rape threats for starting a kickstarter so she could make a video series about this sort of thing) just released her first video. Go watch it. http://tropesversuswomen.tumblr.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
Sex sells, yes. Sex and gender are deeply ingrained in our culture, yes. It doesn't mean that a bad or stilted view of sexuality is embedded in our culture. It doesn't mean we shouldn't change it.
Man, I'm probably wasting my breath, but I'm 100% sick of this BS. I'm a dude. I'm hetero and white and I have all the privileges afforded to me simply by being those things and I'm really irritated that I still have to see stuff like this that makes no sense and seems only to exist so you don't have to feel bad about your part in how shitty things still are for women, even just in the media (before we get to all the other feminist issues surrounding equality of pay, access to health services, work, etc., etc.)
Sure, if you're a climatologist. But if you're just doing research, I suspect that there's a lot more money in the Geology/Engineering department.
I did my undergrad at the University of Alberta. There are a lot of oil company donors on the walls of faculty buildings, particularly in the Engineering department.
There's plenty of oil money in academia, too. Very little of it is in climatology.
The value that you've given for g is the acceleration due to gravity ON EARTH. G in your first equation should be capitalised, and it's the Universal Gravitational constant. G ~= 6.67 x 10^-11 N(m / kg)^2
This doesn't make your logic less correct, but your numbers are going to be several orders of magnitude off.
I know I'm a bit late to this party, but I've recently encountered the same thing.
This weekend, we set my partner up a special account on the computer that actually has parental controls on it so extraneous programs can't be run. It also means that the tabs that she opens for non-work-related things on her main account aren't available on the work account. It has none of her bookmarks or anything. This is a good solution if you've got full control over the computer. It enforces the work/recreation split in a more distinct way.
For my part, at work, I don't do anything until I really have to buckle down and get things done. At that point, I shut down everything except what I need. I have to use IE for work related web tasks, so I leave that open. It has no interesting bookmarks, and when I'm working in this mode, I can convince myself to not type in anything interesting to look at. I actually just stare at the compiler because that 'wasted' time is more efficient than a context switch. I also do three other, very specific things:
1) I mark myself as 'do not disturb' on the work IM. I won't accept code review requests. 2) I put my computer glasses on. I don't always wear them (even if I should), but putting them on puts me in a specific state of mind that I've associated with work and nothing but work. 3) I turn on loud music that takes no effort to listen to. No podcasts or anything. Just stuff that I like (so I don't have the burden of skipping songs that I think are mediocre) that doesn't make me zone out.
I still look at email notifications, but I make a specific effort to ignore anything that doesn't immediately require my attention. If I respond, I respond quickly to that one item. Later, if I didn't respond to something, I know it wasn't desperately worth my attention. Most of those messages can be marked as read and put out of my mind.
Oh, one other thing: eat first. Willpower is lowest when you're hungry. If you're satisfied, you can deny yourself recreational reading a lot easier.
I only do this a few times a month, for half a day at a time or so. Otherwise, the distractions aren't so bad, and they keep me sane. But if you need to really get things done, I find things like the glasses are an interesting psychological trick. When I take those glasses off, I know I can relax, but as long as they're on, I feel like I'm in work-mode.
The point is that people make 'Scumbag EA' memes regardless of what EA is doing, whether or not it's actually good or, indeed, whether or not it affects them at all.
I have no love lost for EA--I used to work for them, after all--but knee jerk reactions are ugly and pointless.
Knee-jerk hate is something the tech community is good at, though. Microsoft was the butt of it for a while, now it's Apple. EA gets it in the teeth at the moment, while Valve can do no wrong even while they're doing largely the same thing.
Is it too much to ask that products be evaluated on their own merits? I know, it might involve roaming into unfamiliar territory--y'know, trying new things--but you don't have to buy anything you don't like.
To be even more deconstructionist about it, the problem is that we have a culture that allows for a political system that does this sort of thing.
Nobody likes paying taxes because it feels like someone is just taking your money and you get nothing in return. It's only when you stop and think about the roads and schools that you realise that taxes actually DO something. But we still vote for people that say they'll lower our taxes because we hope one day to be in the group that's so wealthy that we 'deserve' a tax break. We're all one lottery ticket away from being millionaires. We're all one idea away from being Zuckerberg. Right?
Political change starts at the bottom, with the people and with the culture. The reason why you see equal marriage laws being passed is because of a CULTURAL shift, where we can inherently recognise the worth of LGBT people is no different from that of straight people. That started with protests and people being angry about the short shrift they were getting.
So we've started down the path already. The real work is now moving out and convincing people that are pro-patent-reform to run for office, and to convince more average people that patent reform is in their own best interests. Then you can see it move into the political space.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of things different between Canadians and Americans, and I'm not just talking about toques and hockey.
There are plenty of ways that we're the same, too, but I don't get into arguments with my Canadian friends about restricting firearms. There's a lot less discussion of whether or not abortion is something that should be left up to a woman or who should pay for healthcare. The set of 'Canadian values' is different, it's just not so different that when you see the average American talk to the average Canadian that these things come out.
Americans almost certainly don't deserve the vitriol that they occasionally get from Canadians (except for your dickbag border guards--what's WITH those guys?) and when push comes to shove, we're there. On 9/11, diverted planes landed at Canadian airports, and Canadians drove out to offer accommodations for the passengers that were stuck there. I was still in University, and basically every class had an announcement that we should go give blood. And we did.
I'm pretty sure Canadians don't think Americans are any dumber than AMERICANS do. We just have the benefit of distance.
Well, being bitten is something else that they planned for--by having an enormous mountain of cash. Part of the brilliance of how Apple operates is not just that they plan for the stuff that they can control, they've also been planning for wild contingencies like this. Being able to buy your way out of any situation (at least once or twice) is terribly valuable.
I love that this is modded 'Informative'--like we really needed to know that email and telephone are the best way to get ahold of 'aaaaaaargh!'
But this also marks you as OLD. Email is not the primary way to get ahold of younger people today. Messaging apps and SMS (though that's trailing off) are what's being used. Just search for 'teenagers email' on google. The first 5 or 6 stories are just about how teenagers don't use email at all.
For myself (I'm in my mid-30s, now) I hardly ever use the phone. Talking to people? Gah. I prefer texts or iMessage or even WhatsApp. I do a lot more communicating via Twitter and Facebook than email and phone.
So, yeah, I guess the modding is right and your post WAS informative: it informs us that you're old and out of touch. ;)
(I say that tongue in cheek; there's nothing wrong with the way you do things per se, but nobody's gonna make money selling stuff to you, so this isn't being sold to you.)
First of all, a system where people profit off of people being sick will tend to encourage keeping people sick. Why would it work any other way? At the very least, it seems to profit off of doing tests that aren't necessary and charging exorbitant multipliers on cheap items. If you haven't read it already, go read the Time article on the state of costs in the US healthcare system: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html
It's notable that there's actually a new profession for people that analyse the bills line-by-line to figure out what hospitals are triple-billing for (i.e., things that should be included in, say, room costs, are showing up as separate line items) and where the markups of three or four-HUNDRED percent are unnecessary.
My Mother is a 60+ year old Chinese woman that never really liked working with computers much. A mouse looks clumsy in her hand, and she can't touch type.
The people here on /. are probably never going to give up PCs, but always remember that WE'RE the weird ones in society. Our use cases are very different.
I got my Mom an iPad mini and she can sit and play scrabble with people and read her email. Typing is just as easy (or difficult, if you prefer) as it was before, but now we can chat over facetime. Even the prospect of installing something like Skype is a bit beyond her ken (my sister installed Scrabble for her).
So that's who the post-PC world is for. People that arguably never should've had anything to do with PCs in the first place. I personally use my own iPad as a reading and gaming device, but I do my work on full PCs. The more I use a tablet device, the more I realise how much overkill my full browser and keyboard are for 90% of my non-work tasks.
Computing is a field where we EXPECT things to change and shift. 25 years of PC dominance and we expected it to last? It's surprising that it made it this long, really.
What complete bullshit. Do you complain because your PC/Server/Whatever has a DETACHABLE keyboard? What if the keyboard isn't there? What if somebody took it? What if you just don't keep the keyboard attached because it doesn't need to be attached all the time? Have you really ever run a server? Or a lot of servers? Sometimes you have to carry around a small SCREEN, for pity's sake. In point of fact, a tablet--ANY tablet, Android, Windows or Apple--has a built in advantage because you're never far away from a keyboard, even if it's kind of crummy for administering UNIX servers.
I've SSHed into plenty of things on my tablet, and if all you need to do is get a process listing or run a script, it works just fine. If you're writing an email, it works just fine. I have a colleague that can put his iPad on his lap and touch type at about 80% of what he normally gets on a normal keyboard. Do try to get with the times; a physical keyboard isn't strictly necessary anymore, even if you don't like using one much.
And, incidentally, it's clear you've never seen a unicycle either, since you CAN'T just jam that wheel into a bicycle or attach another wheel to the unicycle--they're fundamentally incompatible devices. You may as well suggest adding a bicycle wheel to a Ferrari. Even your metaphor is abjectly terrible.
Well, if you get right down to it, this is what most graphical file browsers do already. So if I open up the Finder or Pathfinder in OS X, I get a previewer for all sorts of files automatically loaded. If I highlight a file and hit the spacebar, I get a preview of the content (or, really, you just see the content outside of a specific viewer; 'preview' is the the terminology that Apple uses, but it's not strictly correct). All this terminal application is doing is making it so that if you prefer to work in a terminal to manipulate and view files, you have the same functionality as a GUI filebrowser.
It's certainly the case that I use and appreciate the functionality of this quickview system in OS X, and I definitely would appreciate it when I have a shell open. I still do a lot of operations in the shell when I'm working in OS X because that command line interface is often still just much better.
I suppose that in the end, the question is why we would not build something like this in if we can. If it's implemented well, you wouldn't see a performance penalty when doing simple operations, but it's a massive expansion of utility and prevents switching to a different application when all you want to do is quickly scan the content of some items to understand what to do with them.
'Gnostic', as a bare definition, merely means 'learned'. That means if you're gnostic, you know something.
Agnostics, by comparison, don't know that thing.
Similarly, Theists believe in God.
Athiests don't believe in God.
The two concepts are completely orthogonal--one does not influence the other, per se. In fact, you can combine them, thus:
Agnostic Theist: Someone that believes in God, but does not know for sure if God exists.
Agnostic Atheist: Someone that does not believe in God, but does not know for sure if God exists. (Most of us that identify as atheist, I dare say.)
Gnostic Theist: Someone that believes in God and KNOWS God to exist.
Gnostic Atheist: Someone that does not believe in God and KNOWS that God doesn't exist.
Gnostics, in general, are hard to take seriously in this regard. Even Richard Dawkins would tell you that he's technically an Agnostic Atheist, as he cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God one way or the other, but the dearth of positive proof leads him to his atheist position.
This is for people that like to work in the terminal--instead of a file browser--but still want to look at all their files.
When the UNIX terminal was invented, there weren't a lot of things to look at other than text files. Times have changed somewhat since then.
The terminal is often the best place to get work done, and sometimes you don't want to go into a file browser or fire up an external viewer just to look at a PDF. Being able to preview a file so you can correctly sort it into a directory, for instance, seems like a good use of this upgrade.
In OS X, you can get something like Pathfinder that lets you manage your files graphically, but has an attached shell if you need one. This is just a more terminal-centric view of things. You can still work text-only, if you like.
I'm with Rogers now, but I'm unlocking my phone and going with Fido at the end of the month. The plans at Fido and Koodo have suddenly changed, and Virgin Canada seems to be matching them. $50/month gets you effectively unlimited everything, with 1GB of data. $10/GB overage. When I discussed my imminent departure with the people at Rogers, they tried to make me comparable offers, but most of them seemed surprised those new plans existed.
Oh, and no contracts if you have your own unlocked phone, but it doesn't seem to reduce the cost. If you go with a 2 year contract, you can cancel any time (here in Quebec) and just pay out the rest of the phone subsidy. There's also a $50 cancellation fee. So it's slowly getting better here.
If the phone was locked in a way I didn't want, I wouldn't have one. I got this iPhone 4 almost 2.5 years ago, and I'm still pretty happy with it.
I jailbroke it because I wanted to test out the Auxo app switcher. I only bothered with Evasi0n because it's simple. If it had involved any other steps, I wouldn't have done it. And as it happens, nothing that I tested while my phone has been jailbroken has been worth me keeping the phone jailbroken for. When the next half-way significant patch comes out, I'll update and lose the jailbreak.
I've jailbroken my phone using Evasi0n. I'll probably be going back to an un-jailbroken version soon (i.e., when a new patch drops that I care about).
I jailbroke the phone to have access to Auxo. Turns out Auxo crashes on the iPhone 4 constantly (which I reported to the dev; he said they were working on it...they may have already fixed it). I tried a few other things in the meantime: Jukebox, Bulletin, Dashboard X, etc. All they did was make my phone slower and give me no appreciable extra functionality. Bulletin is the one that I stuck with the longest, but it's not that much better than the normal notification centre. Now I've got a translucent notification area and it shows the currently playing song and some shortcuts to configuration options. Ehn.
And the problem I've had with Bulletin have made it a bit of a chore to live with. When there's a bug in the system that unlocks your phone (you can set Bulletin to appear on the lock screen) you can't unlock the phone anymore.
So, yeah, the iPhone isn't perfect. Apple hasn't done absolutely everything right. But I'm a lot happier with the stock build than the jailbroken one. Apple's got something very close to what I want, because I won't shed a single tear when my phone is un-Jailbroken.
Man, what is this? Of course exercise takes a time commitment. It's only your FUCKING HEALTH. Why shouldn't it take a time commitment?
Listen, I know we all have busy days and too much to do and we'd like to sit down and relax. The answer is to work less and rest and relax more. I know that's hard to sell, but it's the honest truth.
Wake up early, go to work, put in your 8 best hours, and then leave and go walk or run or ride your bike for an hour or two. On the weekends, do some exercise in the morning after a small breakfast, and then go for another walk or whatever before coming home to lunch. Then you can go on with the rest of your day.
Don't look at exercise as a chore. You don't have to run marathons or train for them to be healthier. I listen to a lot of science podcasts while I ride and walk, so I'm always learning something.
It's your life and health on the line here. What are you even working for if it's not to live a good life?
I'm Canadian. Your government's bad behaviour is your business. Moreover, your government's bad behaviour is widespread and often genderless, or along class lines. But in any case, government programs that exclude men usually do so because of the existing imbalance between men and women. This is the same thing as providing ramps outside buildings: the ramp isn't there to FAVOUR people in wheelchairs, it's there so that people in wheelchairs are closer to parity. We sometimes treat people differently in order to treat them equally. It's the difference between identical and equal--you and I are equal, but we're not identical.
Who controls the money in the World? In North America? In the USA?
Men.
Who controls the political power?
Mostly men.
Who writes the laws?
By and large, men.
There are a few cases where men suffer some form of discrimination, and it doesn't undo the considerably higher and more ingrained sexism against women. And most of the time we see cases of discrimination against men, it's a subtle form of discrimination against women.
More women are nurses because that's a 'female' role. They're confined to a box, so it's harder for men to get in. But I bet you didn't know that male nurses make more and are promoted into management faster. (At least, that's the case in Canada.)
The myth of the stranger-rapist hiding in the dark is a different issue entirely. It's wrong, usually racist, and ugly. But women still get raped by men. Kids get raped by men (and usually men they know) a lot more than by women.
I know I'm a week late on this, but it's clear that you're mis-reading the headline. It's close to the highest that it's ever been--that's the peak. The fact that 25% of the last 11000 years was spent in a temperature band equal or marginally higher than the current near-peak temperatures isn't really relevant. We're still very close to the highest average temperatures the planet has seen for a long while.
What racism is that?
(Also, it's worth pointing out that I'm not strictly just 'white'. I'm half-asian, so I pass for white in day-to-day life, so for the sake of argument in this regard, I AM white.)
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies.
Except the GP didn't mention Hulk or Superman. I also think Han Solo is markedly different than the likes of Hulk or Superman, so I think it's disingenuous for you to lump them all together.
Oh PLEASE. The whole point of the GP was that men ALSO have it so rough. My goodness, all these men running around in movies ALSO being sexy. There's no problem!
Of course Han Solo is for men/boys. I wanted to BE Han Solo when I was a kid. That's a good way to sell toys. Han Solo is attractive to women as a side benefit--as part of his persona. But he wasn't there for the ladies. They're just collateral damage.
I mentioned those other characters because they're popular to point to and say, "Everything is just fine! Superman is an example of an unattainable body-type in men and it's sexist and he's dressed in tight clothes and everything is equal!" Superman being a strong-man in tights isn't about enticing women, even if that's a thing that might happen.
That's because men were the ones EXPECTED to spend money. Being the bread winner and provider has been the traditional male role. Gender roles affects BOTH men and women.
It's been the traditional male role...imposed by MEN. And, actually, once women got out into the workforce, they were still forced into the same gender roles as before, just with less time on their hands. But in any case, that's not an excuse, it's just part of a larger problem. Why do those gender roles exist? Why are we so bad at overturning them? Why do more women graduate with undergraduate degrees, but fewer complete graduate studies? Why are women expected to take care of children and put THEIR careers on hold? Hmm?
That's not irony. That's pointing out the truth. Liking something that portrays you like crap makes you a battered wife, not a nerd.
Real nerds would do the geeky thing and hack their own comics and video games (as is the case of TFS).
Nice, it's their fault again. See how this keeps popping up?
Why is it so weird to demand--as I'm trying to--that we portray women in a way that's equitable and inoffensive? I understand metaphor and characterization and storytelling, but it's so hard to find stuff that just gives women a fair shake. But it's possible. Mass Effect 3 did a good job of it, by and large. I'll bet you can find some girl that was called a fake nerd for liking ME3, too.
Again, you're just making excuses for your shitty behavior. Or at the very least, you're making apologies for others' shitty behavior. 99% of these guys calling women 'fake nerds' or 'attention whores' don't have half the nerd-cred that I do, if you want to get into a pissing contest about it. These girls are allowed to be nerds about whatever they want, whatever comics they want, and they can demand that the stories be kinder to their gender. If someone called a black dude a 'fake nerd' because he likes Superman or Batman comics, and he should really be liking something 'more black', we'd all be completely fucking appalled. So why aren't we ticked off when this happens to women?
Anyway, AC, maybe you have your reasons for wanting to make sure your shitty attitude and opinions are hidden behind this cloak of anonymity, but I suspect it's because you're a coward that doesn't actually have the courage of their convictions. I may strongly disagree with the post I responded to, and maybe Ms. Sarkeesian isn't right about everything, but at least they're willing to put their names to their opinions.
You're right, things CAN be shitty for both men and women. To wit: the way men are portrayed in basically every single sitcom since the 1980s is horrible. Almost without fail, the men are arrogant jerk-offs that are wildly insensitive, and barely functional as legitimate people in every day society. I agree that it's unfair, but it's a relatively small fraction of the media we consume. I hope that one day those bad tropes go away, the same way the sexist tropes about women disappear.
I'm NOT a self-hating guy. I like myself just fine. I just think that equality is more important than trying to complain about how AWFUL my lot in life is because Twilight is a thing, or Fabio is on the cover of romance novels and that I don't look like him.
False. Equivalence. Again.
There is nothing wrong with my life when it comes to this stuff. I'm not discriminated against because of my looks or gender. I DO have to spend extra time checking my reactions to make sure that I'm giving other people a fair shake without pre-judging them based on THEIR race or gender. I like to think I do a good job. Mostly it's natural, but sometimes I go back and think about it and make sure. Y'know, introspection. Know thyself, right?
There IS sexism in games. To claim otherwise is to ignore the reality of the world.
What is great about this story is that this is how sexism ENDS. It's about little steps that fathers take for their daughters, mothers for their sons, and people for one another.
This is a feminist act because all it does is try to make a girl feel happy about the games that she plays, so that she doesn't feel excluded or lesser just because she's a girl. That's all that feminism is.
The guy wants what's best for his daughter and he's willing to go to lengths to achieve it. He was able to do something, so he did. If everyone else did the same, we wouldn't need feminism--equality would already be here.
Oh god, this is the same bullshit that willfully blind sexists like bleating about over and over again.
The problem with sexism in our nerdy community is that we think that we're above it, so we spend a lot of time trying to justify the unjustifiable, or pin the blame back on women somehow, or claim that 'both sides got it'. It's not true, and you're too smart to claim ignorance.
The Hulk or Superman aren't FEMALE sex fantasies, they're MALE power fantasies. The reason why men look the way they do in media--including Han Solo, incidentally--is because that's what sells TO MEN. For a long time, Men were effectively the only people spending large amounts of money, and they were the only demographic that mattered. (And, in a terrible twist of irony, when women claim to like comics or video games despite the shitty way they're generally portrayed, they get called 'fake nerds' or 'attention whores'.)
You think Tomb Raider was somehow NOT marketed to men? You think the overt sexualisation of Cortana over the progression of Halo wasn't for the hetero men? Why the fuck does an AI need tits like that anyway?
This is a classic example of a false equivalence. You're claiming a molehill is a mountain. Here's a comic strip for you that boils it down much faster than I can: http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/falseequivalence/
The fact that there are now emerging some shows and movies that women can go to and get a bit of a sexy fix isn't a justification for the last 30 years of sexist video games. Anita Sarkeesian (who received death and rape threats for starting a kickstarter so she could make a video series about this sort of thing) just released her first video. Go watch it.
http://tropesversuswomen.tumblr.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
Sex sells, yes. Sex and gender are deeply ingrained in our culture, yes. It doesn't mean that a bad or stilted view of sexuality is embedded in our culture. It doesn't mean we shouldn't change it.
Man, I'm probably wasting my breath, but I'm 100% sick of this BS. I'm a dude. I'm hetero and white and I have all the privileges afforded to me simply by being those things and I'm really irritated that I still have to see stuff like this that makes no sense and seems only to exist so you don't have to feel bad about your part in how shitty things still are for women, even just in the media (before we get to all the other feminist issues surrounding equality of pay, access to health services, work, etc., etc.)
Sure, if you're a climatologist. But if you're just doing research, I suspect that there's a lot more money in the Geology/Engineering department.
I did my undergrad at the University of Alberta. There are a lot of oil company donors on the walls of faculty buildings, particularly in the Engineering department.
There's plenty of oil money in academia, too. Very little of it is in climatology.
The value that you've given for g is the acceleration due to gravity ON EARTH. G in your first equation should be capitalised, and it's the Universal Gravitational constant. G ~= 6.67 x 10^-11 N(m / kg)^2
This doesn't make your logic less correct, but your numbers are going to be several orders of magnitude off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth
I know I'm a bit late to this party, but I've recently encountered the same thing.
This weekend, we set my partner up a special account on the computer that actually has parental controls on it so extraneous programs can't be run. It also means that the tabs that she opens for non-work-related things on her main account aren't available on the work account. It has none of her bookmarks or anything. This is a good solution if you've got full control over the computer. It enforces the work/recreation split in a more distinct way.
For my part, at work, I don't do anything until I really have to buckle down and get things done. At that point, I shut down everything except what I need. I have to use IE for work related web tasks, so I leave that open. It has no interesting bookmarks, and when I'm working in this mode, I can convince myself to not type in anything interesting to look at. I actually just stare at the compiler because that 'wasted' time is more efficient than a context switch. I also do three other, very specific things:
1) I mark myself as 'do not disturb' on the work IM. I won't accept code review requests.
2) I put my computer glasses on. I don't always wear them (even if I should), but putting them on puts me in a specific state of mind that I've associated with work and nothing but work.
3) I turn on loud music that takes no effort to listen to. No podcasts or anything. Just stuff that I like (so I don't have the burden of skipping songs that I think are mediocre) that doesn't make me zone out.
I still look at email notifications, but I make a specific effort to ignore anything that doesn't immediately require my attention. If I respond, I respond quickly to that one item. Later, if I didn't respond to something, I know it wasn't desperately worth my attention. Most of those messages can be marked as read and put out of my mind.
Oh, one other thing: eat first. Willpower is lowest when you're hungry. If you're satisfied, you can deny yourself recreational reading a lot easier.
I only do this a few times a month, for half a day at a time or so. Otherwise, the distractions aren't so bad, and they keep me sane. But if you need to really get things done, I find things like the glasses are an interesting psychological trick. When I take those glasses off, I know I can relax, but as long as they're on, I feel like I'm in work-mode.
The point is that people make 'Scumbag EA' memes regardless of what EA is doing, whether or not it's actually good or, indeed, whether or not it affects them at all.
I have no love lost for EA--I used to work for them, after all--but knee jerk reactions are ugly and pointless.
Knee-jerk hate is something the tech community is good at, though. Microsoft was the butt of it for a while, now it's Apple. EA gets it in the teeth at the moment, while Valve can do no wrong even while they're doing largely the same thing.
Is it too much to ask that products be evaluated on their own merits? I know, it might involve roaming into unfamiliar territory--y'know, trying new things--but you don't have to buy anything you don't like.
To be even more deconstructionist about it, the problem is that we have a culture that allows for a political system that does this sort of thing.
Nobody likes paying taxes because it feels like someone is just taking your money and you get nothing in return. It's only when you stop and think about the roads and schools that you realise that taxes actually DO something. But we still vote for people that say they'll lower our taxes because we hope one day to be in the group that's so wealthy that we 'deserve' a tax break. We're all one lottery ticket away from being millionaires. We're all one idea away from being Zuckerberg. Right?
Political change starts at the bottom, with the people and with the culture. The reason why you see equal marriage laws being passed is because of a CULTURAL shift, where we can inherently recognise the worth of LGBT people is no different from that of straight people. That started with protests and people being angry about the short shrift they were getting.
So we've started down the path already. The real work is now moving out and convincing people that are pro-patent-reform to run for office, and to convince more average people that patent reform is in their own best interests. Then you can see it move into the political space.