What prevents you from going up to a hotel, going in their elevator, waiting until you were alone, and taking a dump in their elevator? What prevents you from going up to a bank, signing up for a vault box, waiting until you were alone, and then taking a dump in the vault box room? I'm sure you could imagine any number of other semi-private locations owned by private entities other than yourself that you could imagine people taking dumps in, and the answer is the same for all of them: the fact that they probably have security cameras, and they wouldn't hesitate to track you down and make you pay for cleanup (well, that and in the majority of cases of people who are neither hobos nor psychopaths, they wouldn't even think of doing anything that absurd in the first place... but for the benefit of hobos and psychopaths, the above.)
Presumably such hypothetical cars would have security. Probably less for the benefit of warding off poo-leavers, and more for the benefit of warding off, you know, hot-wirers looking for free cars. But it would apply equally for both.
That would work for supergeeks. By "prove", I don't mean to a mad genius - I mean to a first-level phone tech grunt when you decided you wanted to buy something, and they won't let you because your name doesn't match the name on your card or something. (A friend had a hell of a time getting a problem sorted with Blizzard a couple years for that exact reason.)
Heh. I tend to use my real name everywhere that asks for my name, regardless of temporary-ness, because who cares if they have my name, and it's jarring seeing someone else's name (plus, maybe you do want to be able to prove that you're yourself for something later. It's difficult to prove you're yourself if you claim to be Mr ASDF ASDF in account creation.)
I do enjoy giving fake addresses, though. I generally claim to live on 666 Hell St. (Every once in a blue moon a site will inform me that there isn't actually a 666 Hell St, Texas, or at the very least that the area code isn't a Texas zip code (I'm way too lazy to look up actual Texas zip codes), but that's pretty rare.)
Quoth, "It's a shock that people still rely on them to protect their data".
Important fact that many of these studies miss: not everybody cares about their data, and not all data is the same. Anyone using a password like this to protect their bank account, or their email address (that they use to send forgotten password requests from their bank account) deserves to have their money stolen.
On the other hand, anyone who uses a password like this to protect the fact that they once logged into some random crappy site that they joined to post one comment, and which they have subsequently never used again and have forgotten about, deserves... absolutely nothing bad to happen to them as a result. Who cares if someone gets their password to some random crappy site? I certainly don't. It would be a much worse idea to use a more secure password to those throwaway sites, because then you'd be tempted to use the same password you used on more secure sites you actually cared about.
There are probably a lot of passwords to throwaway sites like that in any database of stolen passwords, specifically because people are more likely to use better passwords on the sorts of sites that are also (I certainly hope!) less likely to get all their passwords leaked.
I've seen some really depressing stories, but also extremely useful in countering these sorts of allegations, about a number of infants who had genitalia-related accidents long before they would have had any ability to remember - boys who were thus raised as girls. They were treated entirely like they were girls, but 100% entirely still wanted to play with "male" toys and do other stereotypically male-child activities very early on.
I'm not saying societal norms don't exist, they do. I'm not saying it isn't stupid that, just because boys are more *likely* to want to play with computers or science kids or action figures that shoot realistic bullets or whatever, those sorts of toys are marketed *exclusively* to boys, leaving girls who do want to play with them anyway feeling left out and/or weird: that is definitely stupid. But boys *are* more likely to want to play with those sorts of things, on average, and girls *are* more likely to want to play with dolls.
Thus, it is not at all weird to think that guys might also be somewhat more likely to want to fiddle with electronics when they grow up, too, even if they were completely in a social vacuum. Are there social reasons too? Sure, there probably are - if nothing else, the fact that a group of mostly guys in an office might well act like a group of mostly guys anywhere else, and that environment wouldn't really be as enticing to most girls, which is kinda too bad, but anyway. The *reasons* for it being mostly guys in the first place, are not totally social, just partially.
(I would argue that the girls with CS degrees from outside the US, partially there *is* probably less of a culture of 'girls don't like coding, you're weird if you do and we'll make fun of you', yes, but also something to do with more of a culture of seeing that it's a good job, and caring more about career.)
Regardless of whether it's taboo or not - I agree with you, it shouldn't be taboo to state a hypothesis, merely to claim you know a clearly obviously false statement is true based on no evidence - it is clearly incorrect. Studies *have* been done as to whether there are any racial difference in intelligence, and no, there aren't. "Races" aren't known for any of those things you mention outside of very clearly racist people - *cultures* are. It's not racist to assume that an Irish guy from Ireland who lived his whole life there is fairly likely to enjoy drinking beer, but it is totally racist to assume that a guy who's lived his whole life in Idaho is more likely to enjoy drinking beer than his neighbors, just because his parents were Irish. Asians are good at math because there exists a culture that values bookishness; (American) Mexicans tend to not be so good at math entirely because they *don't* have such a culture.
On the other hand, there is very clear evidence that biological gender differences do exist - not so much in ability, but definitely in interest. I wouldn't want to argue that the gap is entirely genetic in nature, but it is definitely a major factor. Race? Not so much.
I haven't used it either. It might have the ability to disable taking a screenshot on your phone. It most certainly doesn't have the ability to disable taking a picture of your phone from another physical device, because that would be impossible.
So... the taskbar? Sounds like something you could use the QuickLaunch space for. (Yes, I know they removed it in Win7 and up, but it's easy to get back, in Win7 at least. I have no idea about Win8, screw Win8.)
My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer's ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike room.
The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.
Monsanto is terrible, and the world would be a much better place if every single Monsanto office burned to the ground (preferably while, by some miracle, every everyone else was on vacation, but all the CEOs were in the office). That doesn't change the fact that there is not *inherently* wrong with GMO foodstuffs. There's no direct relation between those two. That'd be like saying "Toyota tried to cover up some issue with one of their cars so they wouldn't get sued! Therefore, ban all cars forever!" There can certainly be issues with some GMO products, and disregarding that, Monsanto deserves to die in a fire for all kinds of other things they've done. But there's nothing *inherently* worse about GMO products than products modified through regular, boring, done-that-way-for-thousands-of-years artificial selection.
Oh hey! That was the article that inspired The Adolescence of P-1! I never read the original article (being that I wasn't even born when that book was written ), but that was a fun book. I actually wasn't aware it was based off a real article rather than one the author made up, but apparently it was. Neat.
I do agree with the OP, though: I have no problem with google glass in the abstract, in fact I think it's pretty neat. I have no desire to wear dorky-looking, heavy glasses on my face, though, no matter how much I can do with them. Give me google contact lenses like in crazy spy movies, then maybe I'll think about it.
Actually, it is probably literally true: all the tens of millions of people killed by Hitler and Stalin weren't killed by the books written by those dictators, they were killed by the dictators directly, or by their policies. If you only include deaths due to people directly influenced by those two books, but not deaths directly or indirectly *ordered* by those dictators, you have a much smaller number. Whereas if you go by the literal bible, the number of deaths Yahweh Himself directly ordered to occur, is not zero, but it's not that big, either.
that directly benefit them, they should pay me for it.
Which is not to say I don't run computers at home. Of course I do. I have a small server to do various things on that require running a small server. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with work. It couldn't be - work is an all-Microsoft shop, and my server runs Linux (though my personal, non-server machines are all Windows.)
Yeah, except it's a huge pain, and always freaking breaks. Also, that is still technically a third-party service which requires an app (though not a PC or Mac app, and it was free. Though I thought PlayOn had a free version too?)
My favorite is not actually an edit war, but a close/reopen war. The article about The Game has seriously been closed and then unclosed about a dozen times, it was hilarious watching it. (Also I just lost the game.)
"3. Dawkins completely misses the role religion plays in humans affairs when there is a crisis. This is my most serious objection to his stridency. Try telling a simple family the reason their child is dying of cancer is due to possibly random DNA copying errors in a meaningless universe."
And that's better than telling the family that God loves everyone, and that's why He decided for inscrutable reasons to give an innocent kid a horribly painful and eventually fatal affliction, how?
Reminds me of a great quote I saw somewhere a while ago (possibly actually here). I wouldn't have done it, but I still think it's a hilarious and not completely awful thing to do:
"One time, I found a cell phone in a dorm lounge. I was there watching my show and was planning to leave the phone in place in case the owner came looking for it. The phone began to ring incessantly, and eventually I answered in case the owner was calling to search for the phone. Before I could say more than, "Hello", the owner started chewing me out as a despicable cell phone thief. I didn't appreciate this sort of mistreatment. What to do? Well, I am not a thief, so naturally I decided to do the right thing. I took the phone and dropped it down the nearby elevator shaft, then resumed watching my show. "
The Consumerist covered this a couple days ago. It pointed out that they were clear about the fact that they didn't make it a bra because of any feeling that girls need this and guys don't. They made it a bra because they were playing around with unusual smart devices, and the measurements they needed for this particular device required placing a sensor in a location that would require placing it in a bra.
(And anyway, this was literally just something some guys made because they were playing around with unusual smart devices to test their ability to make some unusual smart devices; nothing Microsoft was even considering making a real product.)
Oh yeah, totally. IF, and this is a big if: * advertising were always clearly labeled as advertising * advertising were off to the side rather than being interstitial or overlapping with content * advertising didn't play music, jump around wildly, flash, grab your focus, attempt to create new windows, or do anything else distracting you from what you were trying to do * advertising didn't try to download megs of data and refuse to fully render the page until it was done * advertising never showed images that were NSFW (either because they were disgusting pictures of morbidly obese people, or because they were giant pictures of half-exposed breasts, and I have seen both of those exact ads on sites that had no business displaying either of those things) * advertising actually announced what it was advertising, and in a way not clearly anticipating that I have the brain of a 4 year old * advertising was actually relevant to my interests
IF all of those things were true, then I would totally be willing to turn internet ads back on, and might actually even click on them occasionally.
I occasionally see advertisements in real life, like on billboards and stuff, for tv shows or movies that look interesting, and as a result go home and google them. Then if the reviews are good, I might end up watching them (of course in the tv case, nobody is getting any money as a result of that decision anyway, but that's not my problem.)
Every once in a blue moon I might click on an ad for a web comic on a site where I specifically un-adblocked their ads because I want them to get money and they don't put awful spammy in-your-face ads up. But that's quite rare.
I certainly never go out and buy soda or clothes or cars or whatever the crap gets advertised by traditional advertising, though. But then, I never buy most of that crap regardless, either.
I do agree with you completely, though - kids are the obvious demographic to advertise to. They're the most likely to DESPERATELY NEED random crap they totally don't actually need, plus it's not *their* money that would be spent. MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY BUY ME THIS THING I SAW ON TV IT LOOKS AWESOME was certainly heard enough by my parents between the age of 5 and 12.
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What prevents you from going up to a hotel, going in their elevator, waiting until you were alone, and taking a dump in their elevator? What prevents you from going up to a bank, signing up for a vault box, waiting until you were alone, and then taking a dump in the vault box room? I'm sure you could imagine any number of other semi-private locations owned by private entities other than yourself that you could imagine people taking dumps in, and the answer is the same for all of them: the fact that they probably have security cameras, and they wouldn't hesitate to track you down and make you pay for cleanup (well, that and in the majority of cases of people who are neither hobos nor psychopaths, they wouldn't even think of doing anything that absurd in the first place... but for the benefit of hobos and psychopaths, the above.)
Presumably such hypothetical cars would have security. Probably less for the benefit of warding off poo-leavers, and more for the benefit of warding off, you know, hot-wirers looking for free cars. But it would apply equally for both.
Why would I mention the planet? And what "it" do I get for mentioning the law?
That would work for supergeeks. By "prove", I don't mean to a mad genius - I mean to a first-level phone tech grunt when you decided you wanted to buy something, and they won't let you because your name doesn't match the name on your card or something. (A friend had a hell of a time getting a problem sorted with Blizzard a couple years for that exact reason.)
Heh. I tend to use my real name everywhere that asks for my name, regardless of temporary-ness, because who cares if they have my name, and it's jarring seeing someone else's name (plus, maybe you do want to be able to prove that you're yourself for something later. It's difficult to prove you're yourself if you claim to be Mr ASDF ASDF in account creation.)
I do enjoy giving fake addresses, though. I generally claim to live on 666 Hell St. (Every once in a blue moon a site will inform me that there isn't actually a 666 Hell St, Texas, or at the very least that the area code isn't a Texas zip code (I'm way too lazy to look up actual Texas zip codes), but that's pretty rare.)
Quoth, "It's a shock that people still rely on them to protect their data".
Important fact that many of these studies miss: not everybody cares about their data, and not all data is the same. Anyone using a password like this to protect their bank account, or their email address (that they use to send forgotten password requests from their bank account) deserves to have their money stolen.
On the other hand, anyone who uses a password like this to protect the fact that they once logged into some random crappy site that they joined to post one comment, and which they have subsequently never used again and have forgotten about, deserves... absolutely nothing bad to happen to them as a result. Who cares if someone gets their password to some random crappy site? I certainly don't. It would be a much worse idea to use a more secure password to those throwaway sites, because then you'd be tempted to use the same password you used on more secure sites you actually cared about.
There are probably a lot of passwords to throwaway sites like that in any database of stolen passwords, specifically because people are more likely to use better passwords on the sorts of sites that are also (I certainly hope!) less likely to get all their passwords leaked.
I've seen some really depressing stories, but also extremely useful in countering these sorts of allegations, about a number of infants who had genitalia-related accidents long before they would have had any ability to remember - boys who were thus raised as girls. They were treated entirely like they were girls, but 100% entirely still wanted to play with "male" toys and do other stereotypically male-child activities very early on.
I'm not saying societal norms don't exist, they do. I'm not saying it isn't stupid that, just because boys are more *likely* to want to play with computers or science kids or action figures that shoot realistic bullets or whatever, those sorts of toys are marketed *exclusively* to boys, leaving girls who do want to play with them anyway feeling left out and/or weird: that is definitely stupid. But boys *are* more likely to want to play with those sorts of things, on average, and girls *are* more likely to want to play with dolls.
Thus, it is not at all weird to think that guys might also be somewhat more likely to want to fiddle with electronics when they grow up, too, even if they were completely in a social vacuum. Are there social reasons too? Sure, there probably are - if nothing else, the fact that a group of mostly guys in an office might well act like a group of mostly guys anywhere else, and that environment wouldn't really be as enticing to most girls, which is kinda too bad, but anyway. The *reasons* for it being mostly guys in the first place, are not totally social, just partially.
(I would argue that the girls with CS degrees from outside the US, partially there *is* probably less of a culture of 'girls don't like coding, you're weird if you do and we'll make fun of you', yes, but also something to do with more of a culture of seeing that it's a good job, and caring more about career.)
Regardless of whether it's taboo or not - I agree with you, it shouldn't be taboo to state a hypothesis, merely to claim you know a clearly obviously false statement is true based on no evidence - it is clearly incorrect. Studies *have* been done as to whether there are any racial difference in intelligence, and no, there aren't. "Races" aren't known for any of those things you mention outside of very clearly racist people - *cultures* are. It's not racist to assume that an Irish guy from Ireland who lived his whole life there is fairly likely to enjoy drinking beer, but it is totally racist to assume that a guy who's lived his whole life in Idaho is more likely to enjoy drinking beer than his neighbors, just because his parents were Irish. Asians are good at math because there exists a culture that values bookishness; (American) Mexicans tend to not be so good at math entirely because they *don't* have such a culture.
On the other hand, there is very clear evidence that biological gender differences do exist - not so much in ability, but definitely in interest. I wouldn't want to argue that the gap is entirely genetic in nature, but it is definitely a major factor. Race? Not so much.
I haven't used it either. It might have the ability to disable taking a screenshot on your phone. It most certainly doesn't have the ability to disable taking a picture of your phone from another physical device, because that would be impossible.
So... the taskbar? Sounds like something you could use the QuickLaunch space for. (Yes, I know they removed it in Win7 and up, but it's easy to get back, in Win7 at least. I have no idea about Win8, screw Win8.)
From the great book, Zodiac:
My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer's ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike room.
The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.
Monsanto is terrible, and the world would be a much better place if every single Monsanto office burned to the ground (preferably while, by some miracle, every everyone else was on vacation, but all the CEOs were in the office). That doesn't change the fact that there is not *inherently* wrong with GMO foodstuffs. There's no direct relation between those two. That'd be like saying "Toyota tried to cover up some issue with one of their cars so they wouldn't get sued! Therefore, ban all cars forever!" There can certainly be issues with some GMO products, and disregarding that, Monsanto deserves to die in a fire for all kinds of other things they've done. But there's nothing *inherently* worse about GMO products than products modified through regular, boring, done-that-way-for-thousands-of-years artificial selection.
Oh hey! That was the article that inspired The Adolescence of P-1! I never read the original article (being that I wasn't even born when that book was written ), but that was a fun book. I actually wasn't aware it was based off a real article rather than one the author made up, but apparently it was. Neat.
Relatedly, my favorite picture on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MOBAcamera.JPG
Shorter summary: "doing things changes your brain". Obviously it does, or we'd all be living like that guy from Memento. #notnews
Luls. I wish I had some mod points for this.
I do agree with the OP, though: I have no problem with google glass in the abstract, in fact I think it's pretty neat. I have no desire to wear dorky-looking, heavy glasses on my face, though, no matter how much I can do with them. Give me google contact lenses like in crazy spy movies, then maybe I'll think about it.
Actually, it is probably literally true: all the tens of millions of people killed by Hitler and Stalin weren't killed by the books written by those dictators, they were killed by the dictators directly, or by their policies. If you only include deaths due to people directly influenced by those two books, but not deaths directly or indirectly *ordered* by those dictators, you have a much smaller number. Whereas if you go by the literal bible, the number of deaths Yahweh Himself directly ordered to occur, is not zero, but it's not that big, either.
that directly benefit them, they should pay me for it.
Which is not to say I don't run computers at home. Of course I do. I have a small server to do various things on that require running a small server. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with work. It couldn't be - work is an all-Microsoft shop, and my server runs Linux (though my personal, non-server machines are all Windows.)
Wait, seriously?! I had an unofficial Youtube app for a while, and the one I had, when Roku disabled it, it stopped working. :(
I hate you.
Yeah, except it's a huge pain, and always freaking breaks. Also, that is still technically a third-party service which requires an app (though not a PC or Mac app, and it was free. Though I thought PlayOn had a free version too?)
Anyway, this is great news.
My favorite is not actually an edit war, but a close/reopen war. The article about The Game has seriously been closed and then unclosed about a dozen times, it was hilarious watching it. (Also I just lost the game.)
"3. Dawkins completely misses the role religion plays in humans affairs when there is a crisis. This is my most serious objection to his stridency. Try telling a simple family the reason their child is dying of cancer is due to possibly random DNA copying errors in a meaningless universe."
And that's better than telling the family that God loves everyone, and that's why He decided for inscrutable reasons to give an innocent kid a horribly painful and eventually fatal affliction, how?
Reminds me of a great quote I saw somewhere a while ago (possibly actually here). I wouldn't have done it, but I still think it's a hilarious and not completely awful thing to do:
"One time, I found a cell phone in a dorm lounge. I was there watching my show and was planning to leave the phone in place in case the owner came looking for it. The phone began to ring incessantly, and eventually I answered in case the owner was calling to search for the phone.
Before I could say more than, "Hello", the owner started chewing me out as a despicable cell phone thief.
I didn't appreciate this sort of mistreatment. What to do? Well, I am not a thief, so naturally I decided to do the right thing.
I took the phone and dropped it down the nearby elevator shaft, then resumed watching my show. "
The Consumerist covered this a couple days ago. It pointed out that they were clear about the fact that they didn't make it a bra because of any feeling that girls need this and guys don't. They made it a bra because they were playing around with unusual smart devices, and the measurements they needed for this particular device required placing a sensor in a location that would require placing it in a bra.
(And anyway, this was literally just something some guys made because they were playing around with unusual smart devices to test their ability to make some unusual smart devices; nothing Microsoft was even considering making a real product.)
Oh yeah, totally. IF, and this is a big if:
* advertising were always clearly labeled as advertising
* advertising were off to the side rather than being interstitial or overlapping with content
* advertising didn't play music, jump around wildly, flash, grab your focus, attempt to create new windows, or do anything else distracting you from what you were trying to do
* advertising didn't try to download megs of data and refuse to fully render the page until it was done
* advertising never showed images that were NSFW (either because they were disgusting pictures of morbidly obese people, or because they were giant pictures of half-exposed breasts, and I have seen both of those exact ads on sites that had no business displaying either of those things)
* advertising actually announced what it was advertising, and in a way not clearly anticipating that I have the brain of a 4 year old
* advertising was actually relevant to my interests
IF all of those things were true, then I would totally be willing to turn internet ads back on, and might actually even click on them occasionally.
Unlikely, though.
I occasionally see advertisements in real life, like on billboards and stuff, for tv shows or movies that look interesting, and as a result go home and google them. Then if the reviews are good, I might end up watching them (of course in the tv case, nobody is getting any money as a result of that decision anyway, but that's not my problem.)
Every once in a blue moon I might click on an ad for a web comic on a site where I specifically un-adblocked their ads because I want them to get money and they don't put awful spammy in-your-face ads up. But that's quite rare.
I certainly never go out and buy soda or clothes or cars or whatever the crap gets advertised by traditional advertising, though. But then, I never buy most of that crap regardless, either.
I do agree with you completely, though - kids are the obvious demographic to advertise to. They're the most likely to DESPERATELY NEED random crap they totally don't actually need, plus it's not *their* money that would be spent. MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY BUY ME THIS THING I SAW ON TV IT LOOKS AWESOME was certainly heard enough by my parents between the age of 5 and 12.