What's wrong with rooting your device is that it takes a ton of research to figure out how to do it, that research is different for every device, and if you do it wrong, you can totally screw up your device, and if you're *lucky*, it'll take a bunch more research to figure out how to un-screw it.
I did root my device (installing cyanogenmod), because I got tired of not being able to uninstall a bunch of crapware that was installed on it. I would have been much happier if I hadn't had to, though, given the time it took to figure out how to get it installed. Cyanogenmod is pretty neat, but I wish those features were just incorporated into native Android.
Except, if you asked the average teenager you didn't know a question phrased like that, his answer would likely be "I don't know and I don't care. Go away." You don't need to give the *correct* answer, just a *human-like* one. Thus, the brilliance of this particular attempt, though it also does feel a bit like cheating.
Indeed - Ting is the *only* non-scummy phone provider I've had any experience with. I'm always happy to tell people about Ting's awesomeness (quite large) - though in this case it's not super relevant, being that it doesn't matter what their international roaming charges would be, as you can't roam very far internationally on Sprint networks anyway.
I'm not sure how that would help, then, given that most people in the US are using US carriers that would totally not work outside of North America... and most of the rest are still using a US carrier, that would absolutely ream them a new one in roaming charges (i.e. AT&T - which I suppose is why it's AT&T who wants to implement this, so they can trick people into letting them get reamed with roaming charges?)
Anyone have any idea what this will do for Sprint-based MVNOs? I am quite fond of the one I use (Ting), and am curious whether this will change anything, either good or bad. (Bad would be their service getting crappier or prices being forced upwards; good would be, for instance, Sprint phones being sold that allow swapping out sim cards because they support GSM. That'd be cool.)
> Indeed...Classic Shell removes all the suck from Windows 8 and makes it act like Windows 7
You mean like XP. Not like the native Windows 7 UI was perfect either - better than 8, sure, but still kinda crap in its own right. My Windows 7 environment behaves more like XP (only better - but incrementally so), and it is quite nice to know that, even though it requires several third-party tools, when I'm forced onto Windows 8 eventually, my Windows 8 environment will behave just as nicely.
(While, yes, keeping the under-the-hood improvements. Windows 7 is way better than XP in all sorts of ways, just none of them involving the UI. If Microsoft would just fire all their UI people responsible for the "different + dumbed down = better" concepts they've been pushing the past couple releases of all their products... their products would be so much better.)
The second one is not at all ambiguous. "2.3 times larger" means "multiply how large the first thing is by 2.3" to absolutely anyone. It's kinda ambiguous when you're talking percent, but not a literal multiplier.
Or you just need to find a private tracker that isn't dumb? I only really participate with any frequency in one, but between the occasional site-wide freeleech holidays, the fact that full-season or full-show tv packs are always freeleech, and the bonus for idling in their irc channel, I don't have any problem maintaining a proper ratio even though, sadly, most of my torrents haven't reached 1:1, even the years-old ones. Doesn't change the fact that there's still an *incentive* to seed as much as possible, as a better ratio is still better.
It's unfortunate, but hit-and-running makes a lot more sense on public trackers: not only do you have no positive incentive for seeding, because nothing is tracking your ratio, but you also have a stronger *negative* incentive to seed, in that you're more likely to get caught the more you seed something.
So yeah. Private trackers are all kinds of better.
If machines are incapable of true intelligence, then so are we, because we are machines.
Do I think that any of the AI research currently going on even begins to come close to the ridiculous complexity of a human brain? No. I think they're useful approximations in terms of getting stuff done, but nothing we're doing now will produce anything that's actually "intelligent", as opposed to merely acting like it. But it's clearly *possible* to create a brain, because brains exist.
You have to factor in time, as well. I *do* walk and take public transportation, when the combination of effort, time and money one of those options costs seems nicer than driving - for instance, driving into downtown LA, is a lot faster than taking the light rail if there isn't traffic, but there's usually traffic, plus then when you get there you have the immense fun of finding parking. So it's often (not always) nicer taking the train, so I do. On the other hand, I tried taking the bus once across town. It's pretty cheap, but it takes bloody forever, so it's unlikely I'll ever try that particular experiment again, given that taking a car across town is far more convenient. If public transportation were more convenient, I imagine people would use it more. (That's not particularly insightful, though; seems pretty obvious, really.)
Alternatively, often you can also download it (still just as quasi-legally, of course) from the original source. For instance, Whedon's new movie, that everyone was complaining about not being able to download. Guess what? I totally downloaded it. I paid 5 bucks to "rent" it, then I immediately went and ripped it from the stream to disk with one of those free browser plugins. Now I can watch it on the plane like I wanted to! And I even got to still give Whedon my 5 bucks (which I honestly wish I could do more often for shows I like, actually give money to the people who made the show. I have no desire to pay ridiculously too much money for the dvd box sets, and know that almost none of that money is actually going to get into the hands of anyone who had a direct part in the making of the thing.)
I definitely don't pay anywhere near that much in gas in a standard month. I don't spend a huge amount on maintenance so far, either - a couple checkups, which you'd presumably still have, replacing the tires (the largest single expense, which you'd presumably still have), replacing batteries a couple times (which I gather you'd have to do far less often in an electric car, but when you *do* have to, would be waaaay more expensive). So basically you're saving on oil changes? Those aren't very expensive. What other maintenance are you referring to?
Factoring in that money right now is worth a lot more than money in 7 years... (either that or you're putting that extra 11k into a payment plan - then you have to factor in the extra interest over the life of the loan of an extra 11k, too), I'm not really seeing it.
I would love to buy an electric car, for environmental reasons - I just feel like it doesn't currently make enough sense economically. I'm completely hoping, though, that my car will last so long that by the time I do need to buy a new car, it will be far more reasonable to consider all-electric, or at least hybrid. If they're still 10k more, though, I probably won't, unless gas has gotten *completely* bonkers expensive by then (which is also totally possible.)
Nissan Leaf MSRP: about $29k, according to Google. The car I drive, which I bought new a few years ago but google indicates a new 2014 is still about the same price: about $18k. *There's* your big reason: ignoring range, even at half the price of the Tesla, electrics cars are still crazy expensive.
I'm actually one of the few weird people in my social group who really didn't think The Avengers was that great. It wasn't *terrible*, but it wasn't that great. On the other hand, it wasn't Whedon's movie, he just had a hand in it.
On the other hand, I feel like you are trolling. Firefly, characters you can't possibly care about? Like frack it does.
If by some miracle you aren't trolling, just crazy, though, I would agree - if you don't like Firefly, you probably also wouldn't like any of his other stuff, either; and I'm surprised you liked Cabin in the Woods, either, given that you have no taste.:p
I'm going to be in Europe next week. I want to know what parts of Europe it's available in, because I'm rather curious what it was taste like and whether you could actually get successfully intoxicated off it. Where can you buy it?
When I read the title, I was like, holy crap, someone got sent to jail for tricking Comcast into giving them a lower rate? That's a new low.
But no, after reading the whole description - while I have absolutely no sympathy for Comcast whatsoever, that definitely sounds like a legitimate crime that deserves jail time, even if the victims of the crime are also scum who deserve getting ripped off.
Like, say, what kind of movie it is. I had to google to find out anything about the movie itself, rather than just its distribution strategy - apparently it's a "supernatural romance" about two people, not currently in a relationship with each other, who realize that they can communicate psychically with each other over any distance.
That, coupled with the Whedon name, does seem interesting enough to give it a shot. It is pretty lame of him to only release it via a streaming-only site, but you know what? I'm sure there'll be a way around that. I have no problem tossing him 5 bucks anyway, and then immediately turning around and figuring out a way to get the results onto my hard drive one way or another. I can't imagine Whedon would mind, either; he's a pretty cool guy.:p
I wouldn't be surprised if Whedon would do exactly that. It's not like he needs money at this point, so why not try something new? Especially since after Doctor Horrible, he specifically said that is exactly what he was going to do next time? After being totally screwed by Fox on several occasions, it's not surprising that he would want the thing wherein he exerts basically complete control over the creation and distribution of stuff, and I don't really blame him.
That said, he really does need to work on his marketing strategy a bit. I'm a giant Whedon fanboy, and I hadn't heard a peep about this project until today. Why is that?
If it is true that you can only get it via Vimeo, though, that'd be pretty dumb. I do recall the available options for Doctor Horrible were kinda dumb at first, too, leading me to torrent it until I could buy it reasonably. If it is really just Vimeo (can't check at work), it does seem likely that I would do something similar this time as well (give him 5 dollars, then go find a torrent.)
Yes it is (now)... I just bought some music literally yesterday from iTunes, for 99 cents, same price as it's always been. I didn't have to toggle anything, and as soon as it'd finished downloading, where once upon a time I would have to burn it to a virtual cd then rip it back, now I could just immediately convert it to mp3.
I have no idea the status of movies or books, as I don't ever buy those off iTunes, and it's possible not every artist is the same? The dozen or so artists I've bought music from via itunes in the past couple years, though, have all been DRM-free for the expected price...
Oh, I completely agree. I'm not saying having a million dollars is meaningless. I certainly don't have anywhere near that *now*. I'm just saying that having that much at some point in your life might give you the right to call yourself financially stable, but it doesn't give you the right to call yourself "rich" anymore. Unless you're like 25. Even 30. Not 65, though. I'm not saying I would expect that the average person on the planet is likely to have that much by the time they retire - just that the average currently-employed software developer in America is.
(And incidentally, I do know people who make 80k a year and who have legitimate reason to say that their life is terrible... yes, they don't have to worry about being able to afford necessities, and yes, if given the choice I'd rather work 14 hours a day including weekends and crash exhausted in a new condo than work 14 hours a day including weekends and then crash in a dump in a slum that I'm worried I'll get evicted from, obviously. But it still blows hard having a stressful, neverending job from hell even if it pays well.)
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Why wouldn't it be able to? Michigan isn't *that* confusing...
What's wrong with rooting your device is that it takes a ton of research to figure out how to do it, that research is different for every device, and if you do it wrong, you can totally screw up your device, and if you're *lucky*, it'll take a bunch more research to figure out how to un-screw it.
I did root my device (installing cyanogenmod), because I got tired of not being able to uninstall a bunch of crapware that was installed on it. I would have been much happier if I hadn't had to, though, given the time it took to figure out how to get it installed. Cyanogenmod is pretty neat, but I wish those features were just incorporated into native Android.
Great name, assuming that their goal is to see how much pain a user can endure before going insane.
http://princessbride.wikia.com...
Except, if you asked the average teenager you didn't know a question phrased like that, his answer would likely be "I don't know and I don't care. Go away." You don't need to give the *correct* answer, just a *human-like* one. Thus, the brilliance of this particular attempt, though it also does feel a bit like cheating.
Indeed - Ting is the *only* non-scummy phone provider I've had any experience with. I'm always happy to tell people about Ting's awesomeness (quite large) - though in this case it's not super relevant, being that it doesn't matter what their international roaming charges would be, as you can't roam very far internationally on Sprint networks anyway.
Though maybe after the T-Mobile merger...
I'm not sure how that would help, then, given that most people in the US are using US carriers that would totally not work outside of North America... and most of the rest are still using a US carrier, that would absolutely ream them a new one in roaming charges (i.e. AT&T - which I suppose is why it's AT&T who wants to implement this, so they can trick people into letting them get reamed with roaming charges?)
Anyone have any idea what this will do for Sprint-based MVNOs? I am quite fond of the one I use (Ting), and am curious whether this will change anything, either good or bad. (Bad would be their service getting crappier or prices being forced upwards; good would be, for instance, Sprint phones being sold that allow swapping out sim cards because they support GSM. That'd be cool.)
> Indeed...Classic Shell removes all the suck from Windows 8 and makes it act like Windows 7
You mean like XP. Not like the native Windows 7 UI was perfect either - better than 8, sure, but still kinda crap in its own right. My Windows 7 environment behaves more like XP (only better - but incrementally so), and it is quite nice to know that, even though it requires several third-party tools, when I'm forced onto Windows 8 eventually, my Windows 8 environment will behave just as nicely.
(While, yes, keeping the under-the-hood improvements. Windows 7 is way better than XP in all sorts of ways, just none of them involving the UI. If Microsoft would just fire all their UI people responsible for the "different + dumbed down = better" concepts they've been pushing the past couple releases of all their products... their products would be so much better.)
The second one is not at all ambiguous. "2.3 times larger" means "multiply how large the first thing is by 2.3" to absolutely anyone. It's kinda ambiguous when you're talking percent, but not a literal multiplier.
The first one is totally ambiguous, though.
Or you just need to find a private tracker that isn't dumb? I only really participate with any frequency in one, but between the occasional site-wide freeleech holidays, the fact that full-season or full-show tv packs are always freeleech, and the bonus for idling in their irc channel, I don't have any problem maintaining a proper ratio even though, sadly, most of my torrents haven't reached 1:1, even the years-old ones. Doesn't change the fact that there's still an *incentive* to seed as much as possible, as a better ratio is still better.
It's unfortunate, but hit-and-running makes a lot more sense on public trackers: not only do you have no positive incentive for seeding, because nothing is tracking your ratio, but you also have a stronger *negative* incentive to seed, in that you're more likely to get caught the more you seed something.
So yeah. Private trackers are all kinds of better.
If machines are incapable of true intelligence, then so are we, because we are machines.
Do I think that any of the AI research currently going on even begins to come close to the ridiculous complexity of a human brain? No. I think they're useful approximations in terms of getting stuff done, but nothing we're doing now will produce anything that's actually "intelligent", as opposed to merely acting like it. But it's clearly *possible* to create a brain, because brains exist.
You have to factor in time, as well. I *do* walk and take public transportation, when the combination of effort, time and money one of those options costs seems nicer than driving - for instance, driving into downtown LA, is a lot faster than taking the light rail if there isn't traffic, but there's usually traffic, plus then when you get there you have the immense fun of finding parking. So it's often (not always) nicer taking the train, so I do. On the other hand, I tried taking the bus once across town. It's pretty cheap, but it takes bloody forever, so it's unlikely I'll ever try that particular experiment again, given that taking a car across town is far more convenient. If public transportation were more convenient, I imagine people would use it more. (That's not particularly insightful, though; seems pretty obvious, really.)
It is crazy that that particular meme has not yet been posted, as this is a pretty clear example of where its invocation would be accurate.
And blows! At the same time!
All together now: every computer crashes, cause every OS sucks!
Alternatively, often you can also download it (still just as quasi-legally, of course) from the original source. For instance, Whedon's new movie, that everyone was complaining about not being able to download. Guess what? I totally downloaded it. I paid 5 bucks to "rent" it, then I immediately went and ripped it from the stream to disk with one of those free browser plugins. Now I can watch it on the plane like I wanted to! And I even got to still give Whedon my 5 bucks (which I honestly wish I could do more often for shows I like, actually give money to the people who made the show. I have no desire to pay ridiculously too much money for the dvd box sets, and know that almost none of that money is actually going to get into the hands of anyone who had a direct part in the making of the thing.)
I definitely don't pay anywhere near that much in gas in a standard month. I don't spend a huge amount on maintenance so far, either - a couple checkups, which you'd presumably still have, replacing the tires (the largest single expense, which you'd presumably still have), replacing batteries a couple times (which I gather you'd have to do far less often in an electric car, but when you *do* have to, would be waaaay more expensive). So basically you're saving on oil changes? Those aren't very expensive. What other maintenance are you referring to?
Factoring in that money right now is worth a lot more than money in 7 years... (either that or you're putting that extra 11k into a payment plan - then you have to factor in the extra interest over the life of the loan of an extra 11k, too), I'm not really seeing it.
I would love to buy an electric car, for environmental reasons - I just feel like it doesn't currently make enough sense economically. I'm completely hoping, though, that my car will last so long that by the time I do need to buy a new car, it will be far more reasonable to consider all-electric, or at least hybrid. If they're still 10k more, though, I probably won't, unless gas has gotten *completely* bonkers expensive by then (which is also totally possible.)
Nissan Leaf MSRP: about $29k, according to Google. The car I drive, which I bought new a few years ago but google indicates a new 2014 is still about the same price: about $18k. *There's* your big reason: ignoring range, even at half the price of the Tesla, electrics cars are still crazy expensive.
I'm actually one of the few weird people in my social group who really didn't think The Avengers was that great. It wasn't *terrible*, but it wasn't that great. On the other hand, it wasn't Whedon's movie, he just had a hand in it.
On the other hand, I feel like you are trolling. Firefly, characters you can't possibly care about? Like frack it does.
If by some miracle you aren't trolling, just crazy, though, I would agree - if you don't like Firefly, you probably also wouldn't like any of his other stuff, either; and I'm surprised you liked Cabin in the Woods, either, given that you have no taste. :p
I'm going to be in Europe next week. I want to know what parts of Europe it's available in, because I'm rather curious what it was taste like and whether you could actually get successfully intoxicated off it. Where can you buy it?
When I read the title, I was like, holy crap, someone got sent to jail for tricking Comcast into giving them a lower rate? That's a new low.
But no, after reading the whole description - while I have absolutely no sympathy for Comcast whatsoever, that definitely sounds like a legitimate crime that deserves jail time, even if the victims of the crime are also scum who deserve getting ripped off.
Like, say, what kind of movie it is. I had to google to find out anything about the movie itself, rather than just its distribution strategy - apparently it's a "supernatural romance" about two people, not currently in a relationship with each other, who realize that they can communicate psychically with each other over any distance.
That, coupled with the Whedon name, does seem interesting enough to give it a shot. It is pretty lame of him to only release it via a streaming-only site, but you know what? I'm sure there'll be a way around that. I have no problem tossing him 5 bucks anyway, and then immediately turning around and figuring out a way to get the results onto my hard drive one way or another. I can't imagine Whedon would mind, either; he's a pretty cool guy. :p
I wouldn't be surprised if Whedon would do exactly that. It's not like he needs money at this point, so why not try something new? Especially since after Doctor Horrible, he specifically said that is exactly what he was going to do next time? After being totally screwed by Fox on several occasions, it's not surprising that he would want the thing wherein he exerts basically complete control over the creation and distribution of stuff, and I don't really blame him.
That said, he really does need to work on his marketing strategy a bit. I'm a giant Whedon fanboy, and I hadn't heard a peep about this project until today. Why is that?
If it is true that you can only get it via Vimeo, though, that'd be pretty dumb. I do recall the available options for Doctor Horrible were kinda dumb at first, too, leading me to torrent it until I could buy it reasonably. If it is really just Vimeo (can't check at work), it does seem likely that I would do something similar this time as well (give him 5 dollars, then go find a torrent.)
Yes it is (now)... I just bought some music literally yesterday from iTunes, for 99 cents, same price as it's always been. I didn't have to toggle anything, and as soon as it'd finished downloading, where once upon a time I would have to burn it to a virtual cd then rip it back, now I could just immediately convert it to mp3.
I have no idea the status of movies or books, as I don't ever buy those off iTunes, and it's possible not every artist is the same? The dozen or so artists I've bought music from via itunes in the past couple years, though, have all been DRM-free for the expected price...
Oh, I completely agree. I'm not saying having a million dollars is meaningless. I certainly don't have anywhere near that *now*. I'm just saying that having that much at some point in your life might give you the right to call yourself financially stable, but it doesn't give you the right to call yourself "rich" anymore. Unless you're like 25. Even 30. Not 65, though. I'm not saying I would expect that the average person on the planet is likely to have that much by the time they retire - just that the average currently-employed software developer in America is.
(And incidentally, I do know people who make 80k a year and who have legitimate reason to say that their life is terrible... yes, they don't have to worry about being able to afford necessities, and yes, if given the choice I'd rather work 14 hours a day including weekends and crash exhausted in a new condo than work 14 hours a day including weekends and then crash in a dump in a slum that I'm worried I'll get evicted from, obviously. But it still blows hard having a stressful, neverending job from hell even if it pays well.)