More like an oligarchy. But then, most governments really are, despite ideological trappings suggesting otherwise.
Must be we humans are wired that way.
Re:Yes now it takes two clicks to log out of Gmail
on
Google's New Design
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· Score: 1
All my new incoming messages are marked important now:( WTF! Most of them aren't important, marking them all such loses value anyway, and that's what I used the star for.
Gmail used to be nearly perfect, and they are really fixing what ain't broke with this dumb "upgrades".
There is a series I liked. Unfortunately, it has a bunch of differing continuities and movies of varying quality, and amazon has saw fit to lump reviews all of these varying products into all of the series' products.
The result is that one movie from this series, which should only be getting 2 stars out of 5 (by the 7 reviews that are directly about it) are instead inflated to 4.5 stars by the other 40 product reviews there that are actually refering to different products within that series. Since most people don't sit there and look the reviews one by one, it's extremely misleading.
The other shortfall of amazon's system is the inability to give 0 stars. Minimum is 1. This also inflates the rating. One revies give gives one star to a product, another 5-stars, the result would be 3 stars instead of 2.5. Two people giving 1-star ratings, and one 5-star, results in 2.33, or it would look like 2.5 on Amazon's filled out stars. (If 0-star ratings were enable, the result would be 1.66 stars). 3 out of 5 should indicate "good", not simply fair, which traditionally is 2.5 stars. Basically, it's way too easy to have a 4+ star product on Amazon even if more than half the reviewers thought it sucked to varying degrees.
So your entire opinion of this person is based on a short paragraph, where, to me, he seems focused and driven, if a bit single-minded?
Our greatest scientists, mathematicians, and engineers were the same way. I think you're the one who may be short-sighted.
If he is an arrogant prick that knows it all, then I could see hiring him being problematic. Maybe he is, but I think a bit more observation is called for than passing verdict just based on this.
I think you underestimate the value of those things. Most of these classes aren't strictly about history, english, and the like, but enhance your overall mental ability - such as the ability to write, comprehend, and reason, which frankly, is generally missing from those in our field.
If you don't have those things, that's fine, but that's not a BS or a BA, thats a trade school education.
Bullshit. I never learned anything in my general education in college that I couldn't see on something like the history/science channels or read on the net. Yes, I did learn stuff, but it was not worth the price of entry (tuition). Put it this way: buy/torrent some DVDs that will expand you mind on topics and it will do as good a job as most of those overcrowded college course. Most of them were an utter waste of time and gas. But also, I refute the people that look down on trade schools. Being a code monkey, which most people who graduate with a CS tend to be, is more of a trade than the actual academic aims of a CS degree.
And I know some European trade schools that turn out excellent tradesmen who get paid WELL. Not so much here (but it exists, just that Germany often has more strenuous requirements).
To davidjbeveridge, look into Digipen, located in Redmond. It has way less of that nonsense and with hands-on projects, not just pie-in-the-sky theory.
I think the problem will be lack of demand as well. Only cologne/perfume is marketed by smell.
Someone suggests this will be used as background music, maybe like the main girl enters the movie for the first time and you get a pleasant scent that sorta becomes her signature.... but if smell was so hot at selling, wouldn't they have used it in low tech applications already? Perhaps a slight wiff from a movie poster, or those displays at a theater?
Maybe it becomes a real art in a couple decades, where you walk by a Superman display, and Superman gives off some type of manly pheromones that attracts the ladies and men look at the beautiful love interest who has some lady pheromones and slight hint of some perfume to attract them.
But I'm just not seeing it. About the only time scent enticed me was with food. Especially go to a bakery (more in Europe than USA, but sometimes US too), and you can smell the fresh baked bread emanating out from the building, it just reels me in. I think fresh rolls served before dinner at some restaurants serve a similiar purpose. That would be a relatively low-tech smell technology, and I'm surprised more restaurants don't use it - either by natural or artificial means. Buildings are sometimes so sealed these days, you don't get anything from outside the building. Could be a real opportunity.
If you get to a place where you can associate every word sequence in a language to a correspondent word sequence in another, then we'll have almost perfect translators.
"You may be a cunning linguist, but I'm a master debater!"
Yeah, but for years, machine translation was stuck on alta vista's dreary babelfish... which was basically a one to one dictionary translation (often without using the right definition) for hilariously bad translations.
A couple of years ago, Google translate gave a big bump to the whole concept using UN documents (which are usually in 5+ languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but translations often went from unreadable babble babel to something that often ranged from a decent translation to something you can figure out if you put some thought into it.
I have done a lot of work with translators and even they get things wrong, so I think Kurzweil is actually off in a way. IMO, by the end of this decade, machine translation will often be good enough (really, google translate needs to start looking for more context cues and I can't think that will be 19 years away) but there will never be perfection because language itself isn't perfect. Look at humans communicating sometime, it's not a strict protocol, can misunderstandings happen all the time between people. But when a machine gets it wrong, people will point to it as bad, instead of the nature of language itself.
I don't think Apple is just a hardware company anymore.
They make 30% of sales on the apps. They say they aren't making money off of it, but then, with their automization, they aren't making money off of 30%, I can guarantee that the developers who make 70% aren't either. And that's just not the case.
It's not an either/or here. Apple does both hardware/software. What throws people off is that they sell enough of their own hardware, that they don't need to license out their software for use with other hardware, ala Microsoft, but it doesn't make them exclusively a hardware comany.
In fact, considering music/movies/app sales, I'd say they're in the the media business too. Especially considering Steve Job's stake in Disney and Pixar, which he uses to be an ambassador between the computer and media worlds and cut deals.
A lot of the life expectancy is lowered because of death at child birth (both children and women) and also in the fragile toddler years. There were people who regularly lived to 40s/50s/60s.
They always tell me before the rise of civilization that human teeth were perfectly fine. That natural sweets like fruit fibers forced the sugar away before any real damage was done. That white flour and white sugar, removed from it's natural fibers do all the damage. And I know that is true to some extent, but I really don't think before that crap came that everyone was running around with perfect teeth.
So, was Oetzi from a civilization with all that bad stuff in that sense, since he's way younger than 10,000 years old? Or do human teeth really just suck that much? (FWIW, I wish all our teeth were like baby teeth, constantly displaced and renewed every 5-7 years).
If you want an iPad-like experience then OBVIOUSLY iPad is the way to go. Vice versa, if you want an Android experience Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a very good, solid choice.
WTF?
I can see a "PC experience" or "OS X" experience because there are different programs (PC has more games), significantly different ways of interacting with it, or adminstering it, but iOS and Android pretty much have the same apps, so in the end, you're just looking for the best tablet.
Not to mention the tablet market (of the type Apple introduced) is so dang new that hardly any significant % of consumers know what the "iPad experience" or "android experience" is.
I don't get the point of this gotcha post. So the term "republic" has changed meaning. I'm using 21st century vocabulary because, wait for it, I live and communicate in the 21st century.
Dictionary.com's first definition is: -a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
and merriam webster's definition of pure democracy (vs direct democracy) is: -democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives
If you read the Federalist Papers, you must have also read lots of Thomas Jefferson's own writings where he basically thought the Constitution should be abolished every 20 years and a new one made up for those times and that generation.
Sorry, I don't buy that at all. Some people scrape together everything to get their car. Just because it's property, doesn't mean it belongs to "the man" or that the guy owning it has insurance to cover the damage.
I was in a crowd plenty of times and when things turned ugly, I just went the other way. And not just looting. Once standing for tickets to something, the counter opened, and the line didn't maintain, some idiots rushed it and then everyone rushed and some woman got trampled and taken to the hospital.
What's the old saying: "No single raindrop thinks its responsible for the flood?" or something like that?
So yeah, I would love to see an obstacle put up that make people in a crowd stop and think: "Hey, just because I'm in a crowd doesn't mean I absolve my personal responsibility for my own actions."
If you had seen the reaction of the Japanese in the aftermath of the Tsunami vs LA residents to Katrina, perhaps you could appreciate my view.
That article you linked to was full of shit. The richer EU nations have consistently given money to poorer areas in the EU (although imo it isnt their responsibility). The US bailing out its carmakers is not an example of the govt bailing out economically depressed area (vs companies). Flint, MI is going to stay as poor as ever. And Greece is in trouble largely through its own overspending - ie everyone there wants to be early retiring overpaid underworked bureaucrat there.
And that was only from the opening of that article. Needless to say, people/countries that don't pay back debts won't find a lot of investment dollars going their way. That's the price of walking away.
I don't know today's practices, but traditionally feces or cow dung was spread on the fields after the last harvest in fall, and left over the winter. I guess time/natural processes broke that stuff down further.
I kinda prefer that. Especially with the ecoli stories now in the news in Europe...
My thinking is that I don't want a remote control house from both security implications and simplicity.
A switch just never breaks. With it's a simple interruptor switch, 3 way switch, or 4 way switch. Go into a 80 year house, and it's possible that you'll have the original switches (and outlets) in there if not wiring (which can go bad).
However, I know from experience that anything electronic from ceiling fan controls (which are not of the hanging chain type), photovoltaic sensors, and motions sensor are usually garbage and need to be replaced every 1-5 years.
Until they can make those rock solid, with 30+ year life spans, I really don't want to hear about remote control homes. Just more shit that takes up more time, $$$ and energy than it saves except in rare cases.
There has to be closed-garden companies like Apple to make new paradigms. They control the OS, they can make it do what they want. They're also not afraid to do away with tradition that has no use anymore.
Unlike PC manufacturers, who with Microsoft, can only design computers with what Microsoft had in mind. Tweaking can be done, but nowhere near the level needed that went from OS X -> iOS. They had PC tablets from 2001, and guess what, they were just junk. Just like the Windows phones, which had the same start button on bottom left mentality - give me a break!
Even after 15 years of Linux, I haven't seen the open approach yield much in productive innovation on the desktop front. Design by committee is the worst. Or a 100 comittees in this case. And Microsoft has that same problem. And PCs have design by tradition. It took Apple to get rid of the floppy and some legacy ports that 99% of people don't use.
And even after Apple is gobbling up the notebook market, I don't see many of the PC manufacturer so much as even copy them. Same plasticky, gimmicky shit notebooks as ever. Sure, Dell make copy MacBook Air with Adamo or whatever it's called (as useless as either were), and they may also make the shiny screens, or chicklet keyboards - but the bodies, the very first impression of a notebook on PCs has remains the same plasticky, unwiedly, fugly crap that they've been pushing out in 1998. No clean lines or anything like the Power Mac or moreso MacBook Pro. Boggles my mind.
And I say this as someone that would like to see nice computers on the PC front as I work on a PC desktop. I recently got a hand me down desktop and it was fucking gaudy - LED lights and gauges everywhere, like a poor man's F1 racer in computer case form. Tried to find something minimalistic, and the nicest thing I could find was a black case version of das keyboard.
*(I do love open source and open standards, but keep them the hell away from the GUI:D)
It suggests to me they need a cheaper version of the iPhone (I think offering 3GS this long was the idea behind that) but also cheaper plans or just offering it unlocked, cheap, so I can have the carrier of my choice.
Who knows, maybe they'll start offering the 3GS for $229 or some such with the pre-paid cell phone plans out there is Apple smartens up.
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More like an oligarchy. But then, most governments really are, despite ideological trappings suggesting otherwise.
Must be we humans are wired that way.
All my new incoming messages are marked important now:( WTF! Most of them aren't important, marking them all such loses value anyway, and that's what I used the star for.
Gmail used to be nearly perfect, and they are really fixing what ain't broke with this dumb "upgrades".
There is a series I liked. Unfortunately, it has a bunch of differing continuities and movies of varying quality, and amazon has saw fit to lump reviews all of these varying products into all of the series' products.
The result is that one movie from this series, which should only be getting 2 stars out of 5 (by the 7 reviews that are directly about it) are instead inflated to 4.5 stars by the other 40 product reviews there that are actually refering to different products within that series. Since most people don't sit there and look the reviews one by one, it's extremely misleading.
The other shortfall of amazon's system is the inability to give 0 stars. Minimum is 1. This also inflates the rating. One revies give gives one star to a product, another 5-stars, the result would be 3 stars instead of 2.5. Two people giving 1-star ratings, and one 5-star, results in 2.33, or it would look like 2.5 on Amazon's filled out stars. (If 0-star ratings were enable, the result would be 1.66 stars). 3 out of 5 should indicate "good", not simply fair, which traditionally is 2.5 stars. Basically, it's way too easy to have a 4+ star product on Amazon even if more than half the reviewers thought it sucked to varying degrees.
So your entire opinion of this person is based on a short paragraph, where, to me, he seems focused and driven, if a bit single-minded?
Our greatest scientists, mathematicians, and engineers were the same way. I think you're the one who may be short-sighted.
If he is an arrogant prick that knows it all, then I could see hiring him being problematic. Maybe he is, but I think a bit more observation is called for than passing verdict just based on this.
Bullshit. I never learned anything in my general education in college that I couldn't see on something like the history/science channels or read on the net. Yes, I did learn stuff, but it was not worth the price of entry (tuition). Put it this way: buy/torrent some DVDs that will expand you mind on topics and it will do as good a job as most of those overcrowded college course. Most of them were an utter waste of time and gas. But also, I refute the people that look down on trade schools. Being a code monkey, which most people who graduate with a CS tend to be, is more of a trade than the actual academic aims of a CS degree.
And I know some European trade schools that turn out excellent tradesmen who get paid WELL. Not so much here (but it exists, just that Germany often has more strenuous requirements).
To davidjbeveridge, look into Digipen, located in Redmond. It has way less of that nonsense and with hands-on projects, not just pie-in-the-sky theory.
I think the problem will be lack of demand as well. Only cologne/perfume is marketed by smell.
Someone suggests this will be used as background music, maybe like the main girl enters the movie for the first time and you get a pleasant scent that sorta becomes her signature.... but if smell was so hot at selling, wouldn't they have used it in low tech applications already? Perhaps a slight wiff from a movie poster, or those displays at a theater?
Maybe it becomes a real art in a couple decades, where you walk by a Superman display, and Superman gives off some type of manly pheromones that attracts the ladies and men look at the beautiful love interest who has some lady pheromones and slight hint of some perfume to attract them.
But I'm just not seeing it. About the only time scent enticed me was with food. Especially go to a bakery (more in Europe than USA, but sometimes US too), and you can smell the fresh baked bread emanating out from the building, it just reels me in. I think fresh rolls served before dinner at some restaurants serve a similiar purpose. That would be a relatively low-tech smell technology, and I'm surprised more restaurants don't use it - either by natural or artificial means. Buildings are sometimes so sealed these days, you don't get anything from outside the building. Could be a real opportunity.
"You may be a cunning linguist, but I'm a master debater!"
Yeah, but for years, machine translation was stuck on alta vista's dreary babelfish... which was basically a one to one dictionary translation (often without using the right definition) for hilariously bad translations.
A couple of years ago, Google translate gave a big bump to the whole concept using UN documents (which are usually in 5+ languagels) as a reliable translation. It has a lot of hiccups, but translations often went from unreadable babble babel to something that often ranged from a decent translation to something you can figure out if you put some thought into it.
I have done a lot of work with translators and even they get things wrong, so I think Kurzweil is actually off in a way. IMO, by the end of this decade, machine translation will often be good enough (really, google translate needs to start looking for more context cues and I can't think that will be 19 years away) but there will never be perfection because language itself isn't perfect. Look at humans communicating sometime, it's not a strict protocol, can misunderstandings happen all the time between people. But when a machine gets it wrong, people will point to it as bad, instead of the nature of language itself.
I don't think Apple is just a hardware company anymore.
They make 30% of sales on the apps. They say they aren't making money off of it, but then, with their automization, they aren't making money off of 30%, I can guarantee that the developers who make 70% aren't either. And that's just not the case.
It's not an either/or here. Apple does both hardware/software. What throws people off is that they sell enough of their own hardware, that they don't need to license out their software for use with other hardware, ala Microsoft, but it doesn't make them exclusively a hardware comany.
In fact, considering music/movies/app sales, I'd say they're in the the media business too. Especially considering Steve Job's stake in Disney and Pixar, which he uses to be an ambassador between the computer and media worlds and cut deals.
A lot of the life expectancy is lowered because of death at child birth (both children and women) and also in the fragile toddler years. There were people who regularly lived to 40s/50s/60s.
Somewhat, except I don't want 2x3 rows of teeth in my mouth at any one time:)
They always tell me before the rise of civilization that human teeth were perfectly fine. That natural sweets like fruit fibers forced the sugar away before any real damage was done. That white flour and white sugar, removed from it's natural fibers do all the damage. And I know that is true to some extent, but I really don't think before that crap came that everyone was running around with perfect teeth.
So, was Oetzi from a civilization with all that bad stuff in that sense, since he's way younger than 10,000 years old? Or do human teeth really just suck that much? (FWIW, I wish all our teeth were like baby teeth, constantly displaced and renewed every 5-7 years).
WTF?
I can see a "PC experience" or "OS X" experience because there are different programs (PC has more games), significantly different ways of interacting with it, or adminstering it, but iOS and Android pretty much have the same apps, so in the end, you're just looking for the best tablet.
Not to mention the tablet market (of the type Apple introduced) is so dang new that hardly any significant % of consumers know what the "iPad experience" or "android experience" is.
I don't get the point of this gotcha post. So the term "republic" has changed meaning. I'm using 21st century vocabulary because, wait for it, I live and communicate in the 21st century.
Dictionary.com's first definition is:
-a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.
and merriam webster's definition of pure democracy (vs direct democracy) is:
-democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives
If you read the Federalist Papers, you must have also read lots of Thomas Jefferson's own writings where he basically thought the Constitution should be abolished every 20 years and a new one made up for those times and that generation.
That's why we're not a pure democracy but a republic.
Individual people might be smart, but crowds are reactive, mirroring and stupid.
Sorry, I don't buy that at all. Some people scrape together everything to get their car. Just because it's property, doesn't mean it belongs to "the man" or that the guy owning it has insurance to cover the damage.
I was in a crowd plenty of times and when things turned ugly, I just went the other way. And not just looting. Once standing for tickets to something, the counter opened, and the line didn't maintain, some idiots rushed it and then everyone rushed and some woman got trampled and taken to the hospital.
What's the old saying: "No single raindrop thinks its responsible for the flood?" or something like that?
So yeah, I would love to see an obstacle put up that make people in a crowd stop and think: "Hey, just because I'm in a crowd doesn't mean I absolve my personal responsibility for my own actions."
If you had seen the reaction of the Japanese in the aftermath of the Tsunami vs LA residents to Katrina, perhaps you could appreciate my view.
I didn't even know you could be extradited over a civil, not criminal matter.
Replace "cows" with "corporations".
That article you linked to was full of shit. The richer EU nations have consistently given money to poorer areas in the EU (although imo it isnt their responsibility). The US bailing out its carmakers is not an example of the govt bailing out economically depressed area (vs companies). Flint, MI is going to stay as poor as ever. And Greece is in trouble largely through its own overspending - ie everyone there wants to be early retiring overpaid underworked bureaucrat there.
And that was only from the opening of that article. Needless to say, people/countries that don't pay back debts won't find a lot of investment dollars going their way. That's the price of walking away.
I don't know today's practices, but traditionally feces or cow dung was spread on the fields after the last harvest in fall, and left over the winter. I guess time/natural processes broke that stuff down further.
I kinda prefer that. Especially with the ecoli stories now in the news in Europe...
Please show me where you get 5 combination luggage? I'm still struggling to finding any with more than 3 combos :D
My thinking is that I don't want a remote control house from both security implications and simplicity.
A switch just never breaks. With it's a simple interruptor switch, 3 way switch, or 4 way switch. Go into a 80 year house, and it's possible that you'll have the original switches (and outlets) in there if not wiring (which can go bad).
However, I know from experience that anything electronic from ceiling fan controls (which are not of the hanging chain type), photovoltaic sensors, and motions sensor are usually garbage and need to be replaced every 1-5 years.
Until they can make those rock solid, with 30+ year life spans, I really don't want to hear about remote control homes. Just more shit that takes up more time, $$$ and energy than it saves except in rare cases.
There has to be closed-garden companies like Apple to make new paradigms. They control the OS, they can make it do what they want. They're also not afraid to do away with tradition that has no use anymore.
Unlike PC manufacturers, who with Microsoft, can only design computers with what Microsoft had in mind. Tweaking can be done, but nowhere near the level needed that went from OS X -> iOS. They had PC tablets from 2001, and guess what, they were just junk. Just like the Windows phones, which had the same start button on bottom left mentality - give me a break!
Even after 15 years of Linux, I haven't seen the open approach yield much in productive innovation on the desktop front. Design by committee is the worst. Or a 100 comittees in this case. And Microsoft has that same problem. And PCs have design by tradition. It took Apple to get rid of the floppy and some legacy ports that 99% of people don't use.
And even after Apple is gobbling up the notebook market, I don't see many of the PC manufacturer so much as even copy them. Same plasticky, gimmicky shit notebooks as ever. Sure, Dell make copy MacBook Air with Adamo or whatever it's called (as useless as either were), and they may also make the shiny screens, or chicklet keyboards - but the bodies, the very first impression of a notebook on PCs has remains the same plasticky, unwiedly, fugly crap that they've been pushing out in 1998. No clean lines or anything like the Power Mac or moreso MacBook Pro. Boggles my mind.
And I say this as someone that would like to see nice computers on the PC front as I work on a PC desktop. I recently got a hand me down desktop and it was fucking gaudy - LED lights and gauges everywhere, like a poor man's F1 racer in computer case form. Tried to find something minimalistic, and the nicest thing I could find was a black case version of das keyboard.
*(I do love open source and open standards, but keep them the hell away from the GUI :D)
I think he meant design. From motherboards to the exterior.
It suggests to me they need a cheaper version of the iPhone (I think offering 3GS this long was the idea behind that) but also cheaper plans or just offering it unlocked, cheap, so I can have the carrier of my choice.
Who knows, maybe they'll start offering the 3GS for $229 or some such with the pre-paid cell phone plans out there is Apple smartens up.