On the other hand, I once owned a Mac desktop (can't remember the model, it was from the mid-1990s) that had absolutely the dumbest internal design I've ever seen.
I work in a building in NYC. Close door button? It wouldn't matter if it worked or not, because the doors close as soon as the sensors are clear (and not all the sensors work that well).
Walk button? Nobody pushes them. People in NYC cross streets whenever the light is green or traffic is clear, or they think they can make it without getting run over.
Office thermostats are another matter. IME, it doesn't take long for people to figure out which thermostats work and which don't. But I've always worked with engineers.
There already is a process and has been working since the Industrial Revolution. It's called mass production and while it's best known for producing physical goods, the same economic principle of distributing the total cost over enough items to make the price affordable for the masses still holds for digital goods.
Mass production lets you spend a LOT of money to build a factory, then sell a lot of items from that factory for less than the cost of hand-building the same items. Anyone else wanting to make the same item either has to build a factory themselves, or hand-build the item. In the first case they suffer the same expenses; in the second, the unit cost is much more. With digital goods, the cost of "hand building" the additional item is nearly zero; most of the expense of the "factory" infrastructure is related to obtaining payment, not distribution itself.
You think the old ways should be changed? Change the law. Don't go breaking existing laws.
"Change the law" is the cry of the supporter of the status quo who wishes his opponents to waste their efforts in futile activities. The supporters of these laws are far too powerful to allow any change. They claim to be hurt by violations of the law. If that is _true_, then the best way to change the law is to violate it, hoping to weaken or destroy the law's supporters. If it is _false_, then there is no way to change the law, and the choices amount to breaking it or knuckling under.
Or when Ebay refused to show me a bunch of listings because my browser included German in the list of accepted content languages -- not even the preferred language, just in the list. Ebay tech support advised me to only allow US English and no other languages if I wanted to see all US listings.
Sure, that's the only reliable way to distinguish Americans from natives of other English-speaking countries. Everyone knows Americans can't speak anything but English.
It's not like they weren't ALREADY rubber-stamping approval of patents which e.g. apply a known technique to improve similar products. This just formalizes their actual practice.
Thus they could reject a hugely overpriced drug that added 2 weeks to the life of a late-stage cancer patient and spend the money saved on a drug that might allow a very sick child to reach adulthood. That second part *never* got a mention by the rightwing critics.
Sorry, but Grampa's gotta die so little Timmy can live. Sure, it sounds better than "Grampa's gotta die so some bean counters can be happy", but it's rationing nonetheless.
The right to be forgotten is the right to control other people's minds. I realize they don't mean it quite that literally, but the way they do mean it is extremely intrusive as well.
And thus the curse of Open Source manifests itself - Develop something to to the virge of usability and robustness...then BAM! "Fuggit" let's start again in a new direction and it will be "better" and spend more years in development wilderness.
In the time X11 has been around, Apple has switched processor families twice and gone through two rewrites of the operating system (System 7 and OS X). Microsoft has gone from Windows 2 to Windows 3.1 (16 bit!) to Windows 95 to the NT based versions. Sun has gone from SunOS 4 to Solaris 2 and ceased to exist.
And you think starting in a new direction is an Open Source curse?
They've already got that. The last thing they want is for NK to collapse, be taken over by or reunify with SK, and lose their buffer state between them and US troops.
ROTFL. The presence of the 30,000 or so troops the US has in South Korea is no real threat to China, with or without any border state, even if we were openly hostile to them.
Gradual does nothing to help you if technology improves even more gradually. Why? Because after one year your society has degraded and technology improves even more slowly as resources get shifted towards base survival. The next year it's even worse. It's very easy to fall into an imploding spiral.
You want to know the best way to ensure that happens? Enforce rationing.
Children shouldn't be drinking alcohol period. Just because civilized countries allow it does not make it a good idea. Unfortunately alcohol screws with the body's chemistry worse than pretty much anything else and it does do damage.
Tell you what; let's do an experiment. We'll take a bunch of sets of identical twins and give one of each set alcohol and and the other cyanide, and see whose body chemistry gets more screwed up. No? How about heroin instead of cyanide? Methamphetamine? Clozapine? Phencyclidine? Hmm... maybe alcohol isn't anywhere near the worst thing possible after all.
And really, kids and young adults ought to be really careful about what they put in their bodies up until their late 20s, because the brain is still developing and those things can still have a significant impact.
Yet smart kids drink more, heavy drinkers live longer than teetotalers, and alcohol in moderation has well-established beneficial effects. Perhaps your unholy marriage of bluenose morality, the precautionary principle, and pseudoscience isn't valid after all. BTW, there's a technical term for a brain which is no longer developing. It's "dead".
The wife keeps saying things like, "But we'll probably have a good one this time. We're due." I keep pointing out that her chances are neither better, nor worse, which she doesn't seem to quite get, despite being a rather intelligent person.
This has nothing to do with math, but rather biology and psychology. The woman wants another child like a junkie wants heroin. She's already made that decision. She'll do or say anything to justify that decision to her husband, outsiders she cares about, and most of all her rational self which knows damn well she's getting another bad seed.
Your analysis assumes tablets are a commodity; they're all identical except in a few well-defined ways, so we can objectively classify Apple's tablet as "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi" and assume that it is interchangeable with other tablets with the same specifications, and strictly inferior to "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi, SD cards, USB input". They aren't, though.
Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life.
Wait... what relevance does literature have to everyday life? What good is it, aside from making and catching references that other people who have read the same literature understand (Math works as well for this, as XKCD has shown ad nauseum). History? I'll grant you it's important, but not in the "everyday life" sense. There are plenty of people doing just fine today who don't know what the Soviet Union was, never mind such "ancient history" as WWI. Politics? Great for water-cooler arguments, not so useful for much else. Music? Mere entertainment, and certainly nothing in a music class is at all relevant to most people's every day life.
So what do they teach you in school which is useful in everyday life?
1) Reading. If you're totally illiterate, you're at a serious disadvantage. 2) Math. Not the sort he's talking about, but basic arithmetic. If you don't know enough math to make change, you've got problems. 3) Geography. Not world geography, just the basic stuff like how to read a map. 4) Whatever's needed for your particular vocation.
As for his complaint about contrived examples in calculus texts... so what? If students learn better if they think of a nap of a cone as a martini glass, that's good (if they don't, it's just silly). Pretty much any example you put in a math book is going to be contrived, because real problems tend to be too complex to illustrate the particular technique being highlighted. Physics textbooks have been doing this forever, with frictionless pulleys, weightless ropes, spherical cows, etc, and nobody seems to be upset about that.
The responses usually are that Apple is in fact good value for money because you get this and that and the cheaper competition doesn't, etc. etc. Even Apple PR itself will say this when trolled.
Now cue to Apple, corporate site, where they don't talk customer language but investor language. Why should I buy AAPL, according to Apple? According to Apple, because of their profit maximization. Funny, that.
What makes you think they are contradictory? Apple can provide good value for money AND make great profits. They aren't selling commodities, identical with those of their competitors aside from price.
If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Fortunately they've learned they can stab each other with the forks, which doesn't make a smartphone but does provide entertainment value.
Which will almost certainly culminate in a ruling which essentially says "Airports are different to other parts of the world and the TSA can essentially invent their own law there, and if their law says they can gently fondle your bollocks with one hand while jacking off with the other, so be it".
Did you used to clerk for the 2nd Circuit? Sounds like their "special needs" test.
Re:Works until it gets polluted
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
·
· Score: 1
As soon as the RIAA et al thugs can find the locations they will fill the devices up with garbage, pr0n, incorrectly named and incredibly distorted music/video files. Nice idea but too easy to corrupt
Wait, they're going to put the contents of retail CDs on them?
Now, to play the devil's advocate, if I were a defense lawyer on this one, I would look into the woman's dietary and exercise history: if I could show that with better diet and exercise, other people her age would have reasonably been able to recover from such an accident, I could probably minimize or even remove my client's liability.
No, you couldn't. The "thin skull rule" makes all that irrelevant. One is liable for all damages one causes, even if the victim is unusually fragile.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the PowerMac 8500.
I work in a building in NYC. Close door button? It wouldn't matter if it worked or not, because the doors close as soon as the sensors are clear (and not all the sensors work that well).
Walk button? Nobody pushes them. People in NYC cross streets whenever the light is green or traffic is clear, or they think they can make it without getting run over.
Office thermostats are another matter. IME, it doesn't take long for people to figure out which thermostats work and which don't. But I've always worked with engineers.
Mass production lets you spend a LOT of money to build a factory, then sell a lot of items from that factory for less than the cost of hand-building the same items. Anyone else wanting to make the same item either has to build a factory themselves, or hand-build the item. In the first case they suffer the same expenses; in the second, the unit cost is much more. With digital goods, the cost of "hand building" the additional item is nearly zero; most of the expense of the "factory" infrastructure is related to obtaining payment, not distribution itself.
"Change the law" is the cry of the supporter of the status quo who wishes his opponents to waste their efforts in futile activities. The supporters of these laws are far too powerful to allow any change. They claim to be hurt by violations of the law. If that is _true_, then the best way to change the law is to violate it, hoping to weaken or destroy the law's supporters. If it is _false_, then there is no way to change the law, and the choices amount to breaking it or knuckling under.
Sure, that's the only reliable way to distinguish Americans from natives of other English-speaking countries. Everyone knows Americans can't speak anything but English.
Google is an intermediary. Hulu IS the content producers; they're a joint venture between several of the networks.
It's not like they weren't ALREADY rubber-stamping approval of patents which e.g. apply a known technique to improve similar products. This just formalizes their actual practice.
Sorry, but Grampa's gotta die so little Timmy can live. Sure, it sounds better than "Grampa's gotta die so some bean counters can be happy", but it's rationing nonetheless.
The right to be forgotten is the right to control other people's minds. I realize they don't mean it quite that literally, but the way they do mean it is extremely intrusive as well.
In the time X11 has been around, Apple has switched processor families twice and gone through two rewrites of the operating system (System 7 and OS X). Microsoft has gone from Windows 2 to Windows 3.1 (16 bit!) to Windows 95 to the NT based versions. Sun has gone from SunOS 4 to Solaris 2 and ceased to exist.
And you think starting in a new direction is an Open Source curse?
...when he realizes that he has no decision making power, and all the decisions are made on politically basis with his job being to justify them.
ROTFL. The presence of the 30,000 or so troops the US has in South Korea is no real threat to China, with or without any border state, even if we were openly hostile to them.
You want to know the best way to ensure that happens? Enforce rationing.
Tell you what; let's do an experiment. We'll take a bunch of sets of identical twins and give one of each set alcohol and and the other cyanide, and see whose body chemistry gets more screwed up. No? How about heroin instead of cyanide? Methamphetamine? Clozapine? Phencyclidine? Hmm... maybe alcohol isn't anywhere near the worst thing possible after all.
Yet smart kids drink more, heavy drinkers live longer than teetotalers, and alcohol in moderation has well-established beneficial effects. Perhaps your unholy marriage of bluenose morality, the precautionary principle, and pseudoscience isn't valid after all. BTW, there's a technical term for a brain which is no longer developing. It's "dead".
The Mathemetician's Apology
Sure, but Perl is often derided as a "write only language", and Perl 6 is simply continuing the tradition.
This has nothing to do with math, but rather biology and psychology. The woman wants another child like a junkie wants heroin. She's already made that decision. She'll do or say anything to justify that decision to her husband, outsiders she cares about, and most of all her rational self which knows damn well she's getting another bad seed.
Your analysis assumes tablets are a commodity; they're all identical except in a few well-defined ways, so we can objectively classify Apple's tablet as "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi" and assume that it is interchangeable with other tablets with the same specifications, and strictly inferior to "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi, SD cards, USB input". They aren't, though.
Wait... what relevance does literature have to everyday life? What good is it, aside from making and catching references that other people who have read the same literature understand (Math works as well for this, as XKCD has shown ad nauseum). History? I'll grant you it's important, but not in the "everyday life" sense. There are plenty of people doing just fine today who don't know what the Soviet Union was, never mind such "ancient history" as WWI. Politics? Great for water-cooler arguments, not so useful for much else. Music? Mere entertainment, and certainly nothing in a music class is at all relevant to most people's every day life.
So what do they teach you in school which is useful in everyday life?
1) Reading. If you're totally illiterate, you're at a serious disadvantage.
2) Math. Not the sort he's talking about, but basic arithmetic. If you don't know enough math to make change, you've got problems.
3) Geography. Not world geography, just the basic stuff like how to read a map.
4) Whatever's needed for your particular vocation.
As for his complaint about contrived examples in calculus texts... so what? If students learn better if they think of a nap of a cone as a martini glass, that's good (if they don't, it's just silly). Pretty much any example you put in a math book is going to be contrived, because real problems tend to be too complex to illustrate the particular technique being highlighted. Physics textbooks have been doing this forever, with frictionless pulleys, weightless ropes, spherical cows, etc, and nobody seems to be upset about that.
Microsoft's XML dispute with i4i.
Kodak's instant cameras.
It happens all the time with smaller companies which are crushed out of existence, you just don't hear about it.
What makes you think they are contradictory? Apple can provide good value for money AND make great profits. They aren't selling commodities, identical with those of their competitors aside from price.
Fortunately they've learned they can stab each other with the forks, which doesn't make a smartphone but does provide entertainment value.
Did you used to clerk for the 2nd Circuit? Sounds like their "special needs" test.
Wait, they're going to put the contents of retail CDs on them?