In its short run, it had a couple of fairly weak episodes that didn't bode well for a long run. As awesome as the good bits were, I think we're suffering from the effects of advice they were forced to follow: "Always leave them wanting more".
No and yes. Creative development doesn't work like that - missteps happen in a new series while it's finding its feet, and some of the longer term stuff set up just begged to be developed... the worse things can just be dropped. Remember Star Trek TNG season 1? Amazed that made it out alive...
>Nothing short of a reboot of the series will satisfy.
Too soon. I know I remember the original well enough that I would be disappointed no matter what they did. I'd rather somebody just come up with a vaguely similar premise and slap a different name on it, with 'inspired by Firefly' in the closing credits or something.
Agreed, that and I doubt Whedon would go there again, it's not really his style to recast and restart, more likely to move on to something new.
Yet, if you had those experiences with an iPhone it would be all over the media and class action suits would be apprearing from every state in the Union. People are far more forgiving of Google. Beats me why. They are just as objectionable as Apple.
Price of success. Google sold a few million Pixels at the most optimistic. Apple sell hundreds of millions of iPhones.
The technology is interesting and useful, but cryptocurrency value is just due to the Beanie Baby effect.
I think it more likely that Goldman and/or their buddies went short on cryptocurrencies.
It is strange that the markets can be moved by the analyses/opinions of those who stand to benefit from making the markets move in a particular direction, no?
I thought one of the central points of cryptocurrency is that it can't be manipulated in this way? That's why it's so inflexible to any sort of monetary policy (that libertarians believe is bad). If it's possible to do this then what is the point?
The last I saw, it was still over $600 for the Pixel 2. I don't know what the price is now, but if it's over $300 it's still too expensive. A good phone is useless if it's too expensive for most people to justify buying it. A lot of us have gotten fucked by Google with their Nexus devices, where the devices still work fine but newer releases of Android stops supporting them after only a few years. The Nexus 5 came out in late 2013, yet it was no longer supported by Android 7, which was released in August 2016! It's stupid to pay $600 or more for a phone that might stop receiving updates within 3 years of its release!
I mean they announce the support period when they released the phones... and infact have extended it after-the-fact for some of the phones. So I hardly call that "fucking over"
Also, apps do not immediately drop support for old Android versions like iOS developers do, so running an old version of Android isn't usually noticeable for the end user. They can still download and use the latest apps. Backwards compatibility support & libraries for app developers is generally good in Android, very little effort is needed.
My 2012 Samsung Galaxy Note II, a flagship model in its time, hasn't received a version update since 2014 (it runs KitKat). However it still got a security/stability firmware upgrade in 2017, and does get "Security Policy" updates (guessing these are SELinux changes). This isn't ideal for anyone who wants new features, but 5 years of security and stability patches is not so bad.
This is really what we should be expecting - we buy a device with a particular featureset, and to get more is a bonus, but assuming and expecting is unreasonable. What we should get is regular security fixes for the reasonable lifetime of the device.
Many times, major software updates on anaemic hardware is a bad thing for the usability of the device (looking hard at Apple...)
Having got a Pixelbook to replace my Pixel C, I think this will probably happen. Android has never been ideal on a tablet mostly because the apps haven't taken full advantage of the space. Also the larger screen leads to more web-use, and Android Chrome is quite limiting compared to the desktop version.
Android apps on ChromeOS fill in the most obvious deficiencies of ChromeOS, ie the lack of decent touch support (try using web Google Sheets with a touch screen, without scroll-flinging it is very odd), and offline support (apps are much more often built to handle intermittent network). It's a strange device, I'll say that, but much more capable than a pure Android tablet.
tl;dr: There's no point in fighting the inevitable. CO2 is going to continue to increase. Fortunately, this also means that there is no longer any reason to continue making exaggerated end-of-the world claims. The planet is warming, some anthropogenic, some natural. it will probably warm by a degree or even two in the next 80 years. Figure out what impact that's going to have, and deal with it.
Isn't this always the way? People who don't want to do anything, find a reason. People who don't want to believe because their life it quite nice thankyouverymuch will do pretty much any mental gymnastics to find a reason to justify it, *because* of that inherent laziness. A scientist would be very suspicious for coming to the conclusion that they want to. But you're not a scientist, you're a person that made some assertions without looking it up, and even wear that on your sleeve as some sort of boast.
It's not like it's important like the fate of the planet or anything.
Yeah, sounds about right. Uncanny valley is still weird - I suppose that goes in the "is this human" classifier rather than the "which one" classifier...
I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.
A better analogy would be pictures of hands.
You could tell me if you thought a given hand was attractive / not-attractive, but could you identify people based on pictures of their hands (alone)? Maybe, especially after some time and practice, but it certainly wouldn't ever be as easy as recognition by face.
Agreed. It's rather like everyone else has a dedicated co-processor that takes a set of facial features and returns a person, but mine is broken, or needs much more training. With new people, I find myself unable to re-recognise them when I see them later in the same evening, atleast not with full confidence. I often end up picking out something distinctive, like their style of earring, or tattoo, or clothing, that I can remember as a yes-or-no answer. One of the reasons it's undetected is that there are lots of mitigation techniques, and I've *never* had the ability so I don't know any different.
I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
It's not that you can't see faces, atleast not for me anyway (I have a reasonably mild form), it's more that you don't have a bit of you brain that automatically collates all the relative sizes and positions of features and links that to a human identity. You can still see faces, and features, and be attracted to them, it's just that link to a person isn't as easy.
As far as I know the grey blur thing isn't true, certainly not for the 1 in 50 anyway. For much more severe, perhaps.
The world isn't black and white: there are also those that are not in the Apple garden, and have no intention of going in there, but see Apple as a useful foil to help keep the likes of Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. at least slightly honest, competetive and innovative. I might not have or want any of Apple's products in my life, but I don't want them to slowly fade slowly back into the relative niche obscurity they had in the late 1990s and early 2000s either. While that's obviously not going to happen any time soon thanks to their huge cash reserves, launching technically lame and overpriced products compared to the competition like this are not exactly going to help.
Agreed. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but I recognise that they have been a force for innovation in the industry. (And I would argue that the existence of competition is good for Apple too, do we think iOS would have half of the features it has without Android around?) The last thing we should want, whether you buy their stuff or not, is them losing their way. Unfortunately that seems to be what's happening.
Critics in general are fairly worthless. The vast majority of the current crop (whether film, video game, etc.) thinks their job is to masturbate for a few paragraphs, show everyone how insightful and woke they are, and try to wow us with how much flowery language they can pack in. Long gone are the days where their job's chief concern was about whether the subject was something the audience would actually enjoy.
Depends how you see criticism - consumer advice, or an art in itself. Personally, I enjoy learning something, hearing a viewpoint on the film. I don't know why we're so surprised - the Transformers films were reviewed terribly but extremely popular. Nobody is suggesting that they were *good* films though.
I picked a phone for being waterproof, and I think all of those have non-removable batteries. Waterproof was more important to me than a removable battery.
Why should my choice be illegal because you don't like it? Are there no phones with removable batteries? I'm failing to see the issue here.
Because (a) you can have both, it's just the manufacturers have no reason to do that as it means they can sell you a whole new phone when the battery degrades, and (b) we live in the same world, and waste is a thing that affects all of us.
It is fair and just to charge young men more for car insurance, it's just actuarial reality.
It is evil and wrong to charge young women more for health insurance, actuaries are sexists.
I thought this had been long covered...
I realise you think you're being clever and 'noticing' a hypocrisy. Actually this has (or atleast attempting to be) addressed within discrimination laws. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi... Yes it does work both ways, it's just in most cases men have been on the receiving end of the historical advantage.
But it will also unlock using a simple folded photograph if held correctly, making it trivial for adversaries to unlock.
Please cite your evidence for this. I'll wait.
Yeah... there are loads of disadvantages to having face-unlock as the security mechanism, but from all the actual reviews I've read have said that it works pretty well, at all sensible angles, and requires a real 3D person to work. I can find loads of reasons to criticise Apple without making shit up.
Anyway your moral absolutism doesn't wash. You don't have to give up everything that is potentially bad for the environment, to atleast start to consider your impact, and improve it. Your straw-man is transparent.
The only way to tell if this is real is to wait, take the measurement, and compare it with prior prediction. That's science. Everything else is speculation.
Is short-term weather forecast not a science? Or does it only work when looking backwards? Prediction of climate is as much science as orbital mechanics predicting where the moon will be. Albeit more complex, and with more uncertainty.
Sometimes you can't just wait. When the measurement can only be taken after catastrophic change has happened? What then?
The fourth study is picked out, so let's start there. Of course the 'current' era is the 'worst', I bet that will be the result whenever you carry out a study like that. Previous decades have natural selection, only the strongest survive and all the pap gets forgotten / never played again. But the decade you're living in is a) not finished so you have limited scope to pick hits from, and b) unfiltered, you get all the good and bad mixed together. So of course it feels worse.
In the UK there's a radio programme that does the whole Top 40 from whatever week was exactly 50 years ago, and it's almost universally pap. Take a sample Top 40 chart from each decade and play that to your group, and then tell me what they think of that, rather than just an uncontrolled opinion based on memory.
I mean replacing a CPU is a non-trivial task in a desktop, nevermind impossible for laptops which are the majority of purchases. And even if you could find someone else to do it you have to give up your device while they do, and you can bet that won't be a quick procedure.
How many components of your car, or washing machine, boiler, oven have *you* considered replacing? Even if you know what components there are in there, and what flaws they might have? Would you even know what particular components are in your car's engine management unit, for example? Because that's how most people view computers - they bought a Dell, not an Intel.
It's not "fucking lazy", it's "fucking have other shit to do, and don't have the technical expertise or time".
Slashdot Mirror
In its short run, it had a couple of fairly weak episodes that didn't bode well for a long run. As awesome as the good bits were, I think we're suffering from the effects of advice they were forced to follow: "Always leave them wanting more".
No and yes. Creative development doesn't work like that - missteps happen in a new series while it's finding its feet, and some of the longer term stuff set up just begged to be developed... the worse things can just be dropped. Remember Star Trek TNG season 1? Amazed that made it out alive...
>Nothing short of a reboot of the series will satisfy.
Too soon. I know I remember the original well enough that I would be disappointed no matter what they did. I'd rather somebody just come up with a vaguely similar premise and slap a different name on it, with 'inspired by Firefly' in the closing credits or something.
Agreed, that and I doubt Whedon would go there again, it's not really his style to recast and restart, more likely to move on to something new.
Yet, if you had those experiences with an iPhone it would be all over the media and class action suits would be apprearing from every state in the Union.
People are far more forgiving of Google. Beats me why. They are just as objectionable as Apple.
Price of success. Google sold a few million Pixels at the most optimistic. Apple sell hundreds of millions of iPhones.
The technology is interesting and useful, but cryptocurrency value is just due to the Beanie Baby effect.
I think it more likely that Goldman and/or their buddies went short on cryptocurrencies.
It is strange that the markets can be moved by the analyses/opinions of those who stand to benefit from making the markets move in a particular direction, no?
I thought one of the central points of cryptocurrency is that it can't be manipulated in this way? That's why it's so inflexible to any sort of monetary policy (that libertarians believe is bad). If it's possible to do this then what is the point?
The last I saw, it was still over $600 for the Pixel 2. I don't know what the price is now, but if it's over $300 it's still too expensive. A good phone is useless if it's too expensive for most people to justify buying it. A lot of us have gotten fucked by Google with their Nexus devices, where the devices still work fine but newer releases of Android stops supporting them after only a few years. The Nexus 5 came out in late 2013, yet it was no longer supported by Android 7, which was released in August 2016! It's stupid to pay $600 or more for a phone that might stop receiving updates within 3 years of its release!
I mean they announce the support period when they released the phones... and infact have extended it after-the-fact for some of the phones. So I hardly call that "fucking over"
Also, apps do not immediately drop support for old Android versions like iOS developers do, so running an old version of Android isn't usually noticeable for the end user. They can still download and use the latest apps. Backwards compatibility support & libraries for app developers is generally good in Android, very little effort is needed.
My 2012 Samsung Galaxy Note II, a flagship model in its time, hasn't received a version update since 2014 (it runs KitKat). However it still got a security/stability firmware upgrade in 2017, and does get "Security Policy" updates (guessing these are SELinux changes). This isn't ideal for anyone who wants new features, but 5 years of security and stability patches is not so bad.
This is really what we should be expecting - we buy a device with a particular featureset, and to get more is a bonus, but assuming and expecting is unreasonable. What we should get is regular security fixes for the reasonable lifetime of the device.
Many times, major software updates on anaemic hardware is a bad thing for the usability of the device (looking hard at Apple...)
Having got a Pixelbook to replace my Pixel C, I think this will probably happen. Android has never been ideal on a tablet mostly because the apps haven't taken full advantage of the space. Also the larger screen leads to more web-use, and Android Chrome is quite limiting compared to the desktop version.
Android apps on ChromeOS fill in the most obvious deficiencies of ChromeOS, ie the lack of decent touch support (try using web Google Sheets with a touch screen, without scroll-flinging it is very odd), and offline support (apps are much more often built to handle intermittent network). It's a strange device, I'll say that, but much more capable than a pure Android tablet.
tl;dr: There's no point in fighting the inevitable. CO2 is going to continue to increase. Fortunately, this also means that there is no longer any reason to continue making exaggerated end-of-the world claims. The planet is warming, some anthropogenic, some natural. it will probably warm by a degree or even two in the next 80 years. Figure out what impact that's going to have, and deal with it.
Isn't this always the way? People who don't want to do anything, find a reason. People who don't want to believe because their life it quite nice thankyouverymuch will do pretty much any mental gymnastics to find a reason to justify it, *because* of that inherent laziness. A scientist would be very suspicious for coming to the conclusion that they want to. But you're not a scientist, you're a person that made some assertions without looking it up, and even wear that on your sleeve as some sort of boast.
It's not like it's important like the fate of the planet or anything.
Yeah, sounds about right. Uncanny valley is still weird - I suppose that goes in the "is this human" classifier rather than the "which one" classifier...
I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.
A better analogy would be pictures of hands.
You could tell me if you thought a given hand was attractive / not-attractive, but could you identify people based on pictures of their hands (alone)?
Maybe, especially after some time and practice, but it certainly wouldn't ever be as easy as recognition by face.
Agreed. It's rather like everyone else has a dedicated co-processor that takes a set of facial features and returns a person, but mine is broken, or needs much more training. With new people, I find myself unable to re-recognise them when I see them later in the same evening, atleast not with full confidence. I often end up picking out something distinctive, like their style of earring, or tattoo, or clothing, that I can remember as a yes-or-no answer. One of the reasons it's undetected is that there are lots of mitigation techniques, and I've *never* had the ability so I don't know any different.
I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
It's not that you can't see faces, atleast not for me anyway (I have a reasonably mild form), it's more that you don't have a bit of you brain that automatically collates all the relative sizes and positions of features and links that to a human identity. You can still see faces, and features, and be attracted to them, it's just that link to a person isn't as easy.
As far as I know the grey blur thing isn't true, certainly not for the 1 in 50 anyway. For much more severe, perhaps.
The world isn't black and white: there are also those that are not in the Apple garden, and have no intention of going in there, but see Apple as a useful foil to help keep the likes of Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. at least slightly honest, competetive and innovative. I might not have or want any of Apple's products in my life, but I don't want them to slowly fade slowly back into the relative niche obscurity they had in the late 1990s and early 2000s either. While that's obviously not going to happen any time soon thanks to their huge cash reserves, launching technically lame and overpriced products compared to the competition like this are not exactly going to help.
Agreed. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but I recognise that they have been a force for innovation in the industry. (And I would argue that the existence of competition is good for Apple too, do we think iOS would have half of the features it has without Android around?) The last thing we should want, whether you buy their stuff or not, is them losing their way. Unfortunately that seems to be what's happening.
Critics in general are fairly worthless. The vast majority of the current crop (whether film, video game, etc.) thinks their job is to masturbate for a few paragraphs, show everyone how insightful and woke they are, and try to wow us with how much flowery language they can pack in. Long gone are the days where their job's chief concern was about whether the subject was something the audience would actually enjoy.
Depends how you see criticism - consumer advice, or an art in itself. Personally, I enjoy learning something, hearing a viewpoint on the film. I don't know why we're so surprised - the Transformers films were reviewed terribly but extremely popular. Nobody is suggesting that they were *good* films though.
I picked a phone for being waterproof, and I think all of those have non-removable batteries. Waterproof was more important to me than a removable battery.
Why should my choice be illegal because you don't like it? Are there no phones with removable batteries? I'm failing to see the issue here.
Because (a) you can have both, it's just the manufacturers have no reason to do that as it means they can sell you a whole new phone when the battery degrades, and (b) we live in the same world, and waste is a thing that affects all of us.
It is fair and just to charge young men more for car insurance, it's just actuarial reality.
It is evil and wrong to charge young women more for health insurance, actuaries are sexists.
I thought this had been long covered...
I realise you think you're being clever and 'noticing' a hypocrisy.
Actually this has (or atleast attempting to be) addressed within discrimination laws. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...
Yes it does work both ways, it's just in most cases men have been on the receiving end of the historical advantage.
Difference being:
Apple makes money by selling you stuff
*Currently*. The same apology was made for Microsoft, and then they pivoted and started hoovering up the data too.
And you don't actually know that, that's just what you're assuming based on their well-oiled public relations machine.
But it will also unlock using a simple folded photograph if held correctly, making it trivial for adversaries to unlock.
Please cite your evidence for this. I'll wait.
Yeah... there are loads of disadvantages to having face-unlock as the security mechanism, but from all the actual reviews I've read have said that it works pretty well, at all sensible angles, and requires a real 3D person to work. I can find loads of reasons to criticise Apple without making shit up.
Made a lot of assumptions there, buddy.
Anyway your moral absolutism doesn't wash. You don't have to give up everything that is potentially bad for the environment, to atleast start to consider your impact, and improve it. Your straw-man is transparent.
If it can't be expressed in ASCII, it's not worth writing.
No other languages exist in the world.
Oh I feel much better, an AC has explained it all! An AC that clearly doesn't care about drinking or eating.
If we invent practical immortality and I can afford it, then I will care about climate change.
Yeah. Fuck future generations. Only you matter.
The only way to tell if this is real is to wait, take the measurement, and compare it with prior prediction. That's science. Everything else is speculation.
Is short-term weather forecast not a science? Or does it only work when looking backwards? Prediction of climate is as much science as orbital mechanics predicting where the moon will be. Albeit more complex, and with more uncertainty.
Sometimes you can't just wait. When the measurement can only be taken after catastrophic change has happened? What then?
If you want what's left of your privacy, and actual data security preserved, GET RID OF YOUR SMARTPHONE!
Better get that Intel-chipped laptop out then...
The fourth study is picked out, so let's start there. Of course the 'current' era is the 'worst', I bet that will be the result whenever you carry out a study like that. Previous decades have natural selection, only the strongest survive and all the pap gets forgotten / never played again. But the decade you're living in is a) not finished so you have limited scope to pick hits from, and b) unfiltered, you get all the good and bad mixed together. So of course it feels worse.
In the UK there's a radio programme that does the whole Top 40 from whatever week was exactly 50 years ago, and it's almost universally pap. Take a sample Top 40 chart from each decade and play that to your group, and then tell me what they think of that, rather than just an uncontrolled opinion based on memory.
I mean replacing a CPU is a non-trivial task in a desktop, nevermind impossible for laptops which are the majority of purchases. And even if you could find someone else to do it you have to give up your device while they do, and you can bet that won't be a quick procedure.
How many components of your car, or washing machine, boiler, oven have *you* considered replacing? Even if you know what components there are in there, and what flaws they might have? Would you even know what particular components are in your car's engine management unit, for example? Because that's how most people view computers - they bought a Dell, not an Intel.
It's not "fucking lazy", it's "fucking have other shit to do, and don't have the technical expertise or time".