The steaming pile of poo that was Mobile Safari in its earlier versions. I bought an iPhone 3G - you know, iPhone v. 2.0 - and I literally could not browse the web for more than five minutes at a time without Mobile Safari locking up. Sure, they ultimately corrected the problem (mostly - I still have a few problems with it), but still - this was the freaking web browser on a product line that had been out for over a year by the time I bought it, and almost a year and a half before it was finally fixed. And it was almost completely unusable. And I know it wasn't just me, because the web was full of fixes/work-arounds for the problem (which amounted to clearing caches and rebooting the phone).
Microsoft may be the worst at this sort of thing, but Apple is hardly immune to it.
I was in grad school, taking some kind of moderately advanced math (PDE's? can't remember which course). The prof was working through some proof on the board, when it became apparent that he had made a mistake somewhere. I finally pointed at one of the steps and said "I think you lost an i back there. He was about to look at it when some wiseass in the back chimed in with "it's always funny until someone loses an i. Class had to stop for a few minutes until we all finished laughing.
"for gaming" - Don't game much, but from all I've heard there are a wider variety of titles on Windows. But is this the fault of OS X not being able to play games or just a lower number of third party developers are making games for the Mac?
Mac user here (and not much of a gamer either). And although I agree with a lot of what you're saying, the quoted bit... not so much. The point is that a gamers don't care whose FAULT it is that the game selection in the world of Mac isn't that great (not being a gamer, I'm taking it on faith that this assertion is true). They care that the games aren't available. So they rationally choose Windows. The fact that it's not Apple's fault that game developers gravitate to Windows is pretty much not even relevant here.
"compatibility with older versions of applications" - OS X has that too
Not so much. I own a late-model G4 Powerbook, which I ended up passing on to my wife. I'd still be using it today, but it can only run 10.5.x... and the latest versions of various bits of the iLife suite require 10.6.x. I suppose technically this is a problem of compatibility with older versions of operating systems, but still. I (am forced to) run Windows at work, and Win XP runs office 2007 just fine, and in fact, I'm not aware of any programs that won't run on XP but do run on Vista/Win 7 - if there are such programs, I haven't had any use for them.
So, the bottom line: I love Macs myself, but it's not like there are no issues in the Mac world. There are some rational use cases for Windows.
Try reading the bill, smart guy. It specifically prohibits profiling based on skin color, and if the people claims the police officer did arrest them because of their skin color (and they can prove it), they hit pay dirt.
So all they have to do is PROVE the cop didn't pick them up based on the color of their skin? That should be no problem. And racial profiling is actually the least of the issues here. Go out for a run and leave your wallet behind? You might have just earned yourself a trip uptown.
The fact of the matter is that the Arizona legislature just gave the police the authority and more importantly, the responsibility, to try to make a determination whether someone might be an illegal alien, even though there's no earthly way to detect someone's immigration status by looking at them. Unless, of course, you somehow happen to notice that the "suspect" is swarthy and has a Hispanic accent. Think you've been discriminated against? You get to prove it based on what's going on in the head of the guy arresting you. Good luck with that.
In fact, my understanding is that a lot of Arizona police hate this law, because it puts them in a no-win situation. They're REQUIRED to make a determination of whether someone with whom they have some kind of interaction is a potential undocumented immigrant, PROHIBITED from using any racial characteristic, and not given any other plausible method of making such a determination. So their choices are: 1) blow off enforcement of the law (which some departments have already announced they plan to do) or 2) check people more or less at random. Either way, this law is a big fat mess.
C. The only reason they didn't use RTGs was because of cost and the nut cases that would protest the launch.
Although I'm betting that cost alone was a sufficient driver of the decision. Why spend the extra money to use RTG when solar is all you need? I'm all in favor of using nuclear power when it's called for, but I'll never understand this "nuclear uber alles" viewpoint that some people seem to have.
We'll just die out, just like the dinosaurs and nature will just shrug and try again.
If we don't get our greenhouse gas emissions under control, it could be the end of more than humanity - the existence of multi-cellular life could be at stake. Some of the worst-case scenarios for global warming predict summertime highs in the eastern US to hit 130+ degrees within the next hundred years. The probability of that is not very high, but still - I guarantee that there is not a single vascular plant species east of the Mississippi that could survive it. It's not out of the question that we could end up producing a runaway warming effect with an end result that rivals Venus for unhospitality to life.
This is serious business. The possibility of terraforming other planets is much discussed on Slashdot. But there's a non-zero probability that we're actually "veneraforming" the earth - which would obviously have very serious consequences to those living here.
Here's a news flash: there are more choices for going forward than to keep doing what we're doing and live with the accompanying environmental devastation, or living in the stone age. We could begin moving to a so-called "bright green" economy today, and in addition to avoiding these fun instances of ecological Armageddon, we could 1) stop shipping money to Saudi Arabia by the supertanker-load, 2) put people to work here in the US building, installing, maintaining and operating renewable/nuclear energy and fuel-efficient equipment, 3) avoiding all kinds of air pollution, and 4) substantially mitigate the risk of global warning. We don't have to pick from "stfu" and living in a cave.
I think you are placing too large a value on those biological things. It's just an oil leak, not the end of the world. It's not even doing anything really serious like contaminating drinking water.
Is my sarcasm detector broken today, or are you serious? You know, right, that the tourism and fishing industries in the Gulf are worth billions of dollars annually, and that "those biological things" are pretty critical for that piece of the economy to continue to function, right?
In one of the many previous threads on this topic, this was brought up. It turns out (not too surprisingly) that the opportunity cost to BP of losing the remaining oil in the well is trivial compared to what they're paying in cleanup costs. Especially when you consider that they can just go a few miles away, redrill, and get to the same oilfield (it's the I drink your milkshake theory). No doubt they'd be happy to cap this thing as quickly as they could, but the nuclear option is not particularly practical.
The first being, obviously, political: if the US government were to seriously propose to detonate a nuke in the GOMEX, everyone from Greenpeace to your grandma would go bananas, as would the government of Mexico. You can say that politics shouldn't interfere in a decision like this if nuking is the technically correct thing to do, but... this is the real world.
The second issue is technical. You can't just drop the nuke on top of the well - the explosion would just produce a giant volume of steam (mixed with radioactive byproducts - uncool), would generate a good sized tsunami, and wouldn't necessarily even stop the flow of oil. To make this work, you'd have to emplace the bomb in a tube drilled in the ocean floor. The location, orientation, bomb size, etc, would have to be correct, and to get that right you'd need need a bunch of geological surveys, run a bunch of sims, and then drill and emplace the bomb. By the time you do all that, you could have just gone ahead with the conventional plan.
The net effect is that a nuke probably doesn't offer any real advantage over more "conventional" means of dealing with the problem, and the political and technical problems involved make it a non-starter.
Of course, no one cares what fonts you have installed. The issue, which would be clear if you so much as RTFS, is that this information can uniquely identify you. Still not the greatest injustice since they got rid of red M&Ms, but honestly. You're either deliberately ignoring the central point of the posting, or you didn't bother to read it. I know, I must be new here.
I thought the point of the NoScript part of the prescription was that it blocked the site from retrieving your plug-in list (because surely that's done via script).
... nobody particularly cares if website operators find out what fonts and plugins you use. You might, however, care if website operators can look at those things and be able to say "hey, it's flintmecha again". Some people (I'm one of them) don't necessarily want every company on the internet building dossiers on their online behavior. But some people might be happy to let such companies do so - it's not like there are no advantages. When a website knows who you are, it can personalize your experience with the site. I personally am happy to see a generic site and not feel like I'm being snooped on. YMMV.
I think the Sugar Daddy site is WORSE than Cougar Life. The former is explicitly about young girls hooking up with old guys in exchange for money. It's barely camouflaged prostitution. Cougar Life, at least, isn't explicitly about money changing hands.
The key issue here isn't what's going on in the collective heads of the bureaucracy of the Google AdWords team. I'm sure they're all very fine people who love their mothers and volunteer for the poor, etc. The issue is that the effects of this policy are sexist.
It's much the same story as for racism. I don't know what people really think about members of minority groups, and I honestly don't particularly care. But I do care about their actions and words. It honestly doesn't make any sense to say to a person or organization "you are racist/sexist". But it's totally sensible to say "this behavior is racist/sexist". It's about the effects.
But even for an iPhone, you can't remote wipe it if the device is powered down, right? I would think even putting it in airplane mode would be sufficient, as the phone stops, well, "phoning home". And if the Secret Service can't even manage to remember to turn off the phone, well, yeah. My heart bleeds for them.
There was an article in Salon that addressed this, and several commenters there brought up the point that to achieve the concentrations found harmful to corals would require an enormous amount of dispersant. In fact, they'd have to be pumping as much dispersant into the water at roughly the same rate the well is discharging oil into the water. Which seems pretty unlikely.
I read elsewhere on the internets that they've done oxygen testing near the plumes (sorry, can't find the link again), and dissolved O2 levels are down by like 30% in the vicinity of the plumes. The theory is exactly what you say - microbes are busy devouring the oil, and using up oxygen in the process. There's a real fear that in addition to all the other bad effects of the oil, it will also increase the already growing "dead zones" - areas in which low oxygen concentration is destroying all animal life - in the Gulf.
I find it sad in this day and age of supposed equality that men's treatment of women is closely watched and critiqued, but men against men or women against men isn't even given credence once it's been brought to light. That combined with many people believing allegations and not questioning accusers or waiting for evidence, especially when it's a woman or child making the accusations (or as likely someone making allegations on behalf of a child) makes it a dangerous time to be a man.
While I certainly agree that it's terrible when any claim of sexual harassment is blown off, the fact is that people are more on the lookout for harassment claims by men against women because... the overwhelming majority of sexual harassment cases are committed by men against women. And "a dangerous time to be a man"? Right. Clearly, the experience of female workers, including harassment, intimidation, stalking, and in some cases, outright rape on the job is nothing compared to horrors of having your tenure application denied. How about getting a sense of perspective here. A dangerous time to be a man? I got news for you, buddy - it's ALWAYS been a dangerous time to be a woman.
The concept of Texas secession later became of increasing importance around the time of the Civil War, and a token permission had been allowed for that provided that if such occurred, the state of Texas would do so not as a single bloc, but as at least 5 seperate entities, supposedly as a consequence for their participation in the Civil War?
Not quite. The mechanism for Texas's admission to the Union was a joint resolution of Congress. The terms of the resolution included language to the effect that it may be convenient at some future time to create up to 5 states out of the territory of the then Republic of Texas. However, this language is pretty much meaningless - per the US Constitution, you can't merge or split states without the consent of both the state(s) involved and Congress. The constitutional language would obviously trump anything in the joint resolution, and the prospect of both houses of Congress and the Texas state government agreeing to such a division is more or less nil. It appears as if the intent was to allow Texas to split into several states at the time of annexation, but Texas did not take the US up on that offer.
For more fun facts, see the main Texas article in Wikipedia. It's pretty much true that annexation to the US was the plan of the Texas revolutionaries all along, and the only reason it took so long was that the addition of a huge new slave state was vastly destabilizing to the delicate political balance between north and south... so it took 10 years to get Congress to approve of annexation.
You're kidding, right? Find me one example where anyone has taken offense at the use of the words "black" or "gay". Those terms are totally PC.
or perhaps saying that some act or sexual orientation is a "sin"
Totally different animal. This isn't about using a word that someone finds offensive in itself. This is about insulting people. If someone got in your face about how you were a sinner for eating pork because the Prophet Muhammad said so, you'd no doubt be offended, and rightly so. No one should have someone else's religious beliefs flung in their face.
For example, while the word "fanny" is a perfectly acceptable word in the US to refer to one's posterior, it's my understanding that in the UK, using that expression is frowned upon in polite society (and I believe has a somewhat different meaning). Same deal with "bloody", which isn't really used in the US except among people trying to sound British, but in the actual UK is considered borderline obscene. Or at least used to be.
May be apocryphal, but the story went like this: the British Navy warrant officer, when asked what the problem was with his non-working engine, replied "fuckin' fuckers' fucked". Of course, being a RN warrant officer, this came out more like "fookin' fookers' fooked", but you get the idea.
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Once you distill beer to achieve higher alcohol content, it's... not beer anymore. This is freaking ridiculous.
The steaming pile of poo that was Mobile Safari in its earlier versions. I bought an iPhone 3G - you know, iPhone v. 2.0 - and I literally could not browse the web for more than five minutes at a time without Mobile Safari locking up. Sure, they ultimately corrected the problem (mostly - I still have a few problems with it), but still - this was the freaking web browser on a product line that had been out for over a year by the time I bought it, and almost a year and a half before it was finally fixed. And it was almost completely unusable. And I know it wasn't just me, because the web was full of fixes/work-arounds for the problem (which amounted to clearing caches and rebooting the phone).
Microsoft may be the worst at this sort of thing, but Apple is hardly immune to it.
I was in grad school, taking some kind of moderately advanced math (PDE's? can't remember which course). The prof was working through some proof on the board, when it became apparent that he had made a mistake somewhere. I finally pointed at one of the steps and said "I think you lost an i back there. He was about to look at it when some wiseass in the back chimed in with "it's always funny until someone loses an i. Class had to stop for a few minutes until we all finished laughing.
Mac user here (and not much of a gamer either). And although I agree with a lot of what you're saying, the quoted bit... not so much. The point is that a gamers don't care whose FAULT it is that the game selection in the world of Mac isn't that great (not being a gamer, I'm taking it on faith that this assertion is true). They care that the games aren't available. So they rationally choose Windows. The fact that it's not Apple's fault that game developers gravitate to Windows is pretty much not even relevant here.
Not so much. I own a late-model G4 Powerbook, which I ended up passing on to my wife. I'd still be using it today, but it can only run 10.5.x... and the latest versions of various bits of the iLife suite require 10.6.x. I suppose technically this is a problem of compatibility with older versions of operating systems, but still. I (am forced to) run Windows at work, and Win XP runs office 2007 just fine, and in fact, I'm not aware of any programs that won't run on XP but do run on Vista/Win 7 - if there are such programs, I haven't had any use for them.
So, the bottom line: I love Macs myself, but it's not like there are no issues in the Mac world. There are some rational use cases for Windows.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
So all they have to do is PROVE the cop didn't pick them up based on the color of their skin? That should be no problem. And racial profiling is actually the least of the issues here. Go out for a run and leave your wallet behind? You might have just earned yourself a trip uptown.
The fact of the matter is that the Arizona legislature just gave the police the authority and more importantly, the responsibility, to try to make a determination whether someone might be an illegal alien, even though there's no earthly way to detect someone's immigration status by looking at them. Unless, of course, you somehow happen to notice that the "suspect" is swarthy and has a Hispanic accent. Think you've been discriminated against? You get to prove it based on what's going on in the head of the guy arresting you. Good luck with that.
In fact, my understanding is that a lot of Arizona police hate this law, because it puts them in a no-win situation. They're REQUIRED to make a determination of whether someone with whom they have some kind of interaction is a potential undocumented immigrant, PROHIBITED from using any racial characteristic, and not given any other plausible method of making such a determination. So their choices are: 1) blow off enforcement of the law (which some departments have already announced they plan to do) or 2) check people more or less at random. Either way, this law is a big fat mess.
Although I'm betting that cost alone was a sufficient driver of the decision. Why spend the extra money to use RTG when solar is all you need? I'm all in favor of using nuclear power when it's called for, but I'll never understand this "nuclear uber alles" viewpoint that some people seem to have.
If we don't get our greenhouse gas emissions under control, it could be the end of more than humanity - the existence of multi-cellular life could be at stake. Some of the worst-case scenarios for global warming predict summertime highs in the eastern US to hit 130+ degrees within the next hundred years. The probability of that is not very high, but still - I guarantee that there is not a single vascular plant species east of the Mississippi that could survive it. It's not out of the question that we could end up producing a runaway warming effect with an end result that rivals Venus for unhospitality to life.
This is serious business. The possibility of terraforming other planets is much discussed on Slashdot. But there's a non-zero probability that we're actually "veneraforming" the earth - which would obviously have very serious consequences to those living here.
Here's a news flash: there are more choices for going forward than to keep doing what we're doing and live with the accompanying environmental devastation, or living in the stone age. We could begin moving to a so-called "bright green" economy today, and in addition to avoiding these fun instances of ecological Armageddon, we could 1) stop shipping money to Saudi Arabia by the supertanker-load, 2) put people to work here in the US building, installing, maintaining and operating renewable/nuclear energy and fuel-efficient equipment, 3) avoiding all kinds of air pollution, and 4) substantially mitigate the risk of global warning. We don't have to pick from "stfu" and living in a cave.
Is my sarcasm detector broken today, or are you serious? You know, right, that the tourism and fishing industries in the Gulf are worth billions of dollars annually, and that "those biological things" are pretty critical for that piece of the economy to continue to function, right?
In one of the many previous threads on this topic, this was brought up. It turns out (not too surprisingly) that the opportunity cost to BP of losing the remaining oil in the well is trivial compared to what they're paying in cleanup costs. Especially when you consider that they can just go a few miles away, redrill, and get to the same oilfield (it's the I drink your milkshake theory). No doubt they'd be happy to cap this thing as quickly as they could, but the nuclear option is not particularly practical.
The first being, obviously, political: if the US government were to seriously propose to detonate a nuke in the GOMEX, everyone from Greenpeace to your grandma would go bananas, as would the government of Mexico. You can say that politics shouldn't interfere in a decision like this if nuking is the technically correct thing to do, but... this is the real world.
The second issue is technical. You can't just drop the nuke on top of the well - the explosion would just produce a giant volume of steam (mixed with radioactive byproducts - uncool), would generate a good sized tsunami, and wouldn't necessarily even stop the flow of oil. To make this work, you'd have to emplace the bomb in a tube drilled in the ocean floor. The location, orientation, bomb size, etc, would have to be correct, and to get that right you'd need need a bunch of geological surveys, run a bunch of sims, and then drill and emplace the bomb. By the time you do all that, you could have just gone ahead with the conventional plan.
The net effect is that a nuke probably doesn't offer any real advantage over more "conventional" means of dealing with the problem, and the political and technical problems involved make it a non-starter.
Of course, no one cares what fonts you have installed. The issue, which would be clear if you so much as RTFS, is that this information can uniquely identify you. Still not the greatest injustice since they got rid of red M&Ms, but honestly. You're either deliberately ignoring the central point of the posting, or you didn't bother to read it. I know, I must be new here.
I thought the point of the NoScript part of the prescription was that it blocked the site from retrieving your plug-in list (because surely that's done via script).
... nobody particularly cares if website operators find out what fonts and plugins you use. You might, however, care if website operators can look at those things and be able to say "hey, it's flintmecha again". Some people (I'm one of them) don't necessarily want every company on the internet building dossiers on their online behavior. But some people might be happy to let such companies do so - it's not like there are no advantages. When a website knows who you are, it can personalize your experience with the site. I personally am happy to see a generic site and not feel like I'm being snooped on. YMMV.
I think the Sugar Daddy site is WORSE than Cougar Life. The former is explicitly about young girls hooking up with old guys in exchange for money. It's barely camouflaged prostitution. Cougar Life, at least, isn't explicitly about money changing hands.
The key issue here isn't what's going on in the collective heads of the bureaucracy of the Google AdWords team. I'm sure they're all very fine people who love their mothers and volunteer for the poor, etc. The issue is that the effects of this policy are sexist.
It's much the same story as for racism. I don't know what people really think about members of minority groups, and I honestly don't particularly care. But I do care about their actions and words. It honestly doesn't make any sense to say to a person or organization "you are racist/sexist". But it's totally sensible to say "this behavior is racist/sexist". It's about the effects.
But even for an iPhone, you can't remote wipe it if the device is powered down, right? I would think even putting it in airplane mode would be sufficient, as the phone stops, well, "phoning home". And if the Secret Service can't even manage to remember to turn off the phone, well, yeah. My heart bleeds for them.
There was an article in Salon that addressed this, and several commenters there brought up the point that to achieve the concentrations found harmful to corals would require an enormous amount of dispersant. In fact, they'd have to be pumping as much dispersant into the water at roughly the same rate the well is discharging oil into the water. Which seems pretty unlikely.
I read elsewhere on the internets that they've done oxygen testing near the plumes (sorry, can't find the link again), and dissolved O2 levels are down by like 30% in the vicinity of the plumes. The theory is exactly what you say - microbes are busy devouring the oil, and using up oxygen in the process. There's a real fear that in addition to all the other bad effects of the oil, it will also increase the already growing "dead zones" - areas in which low oxygen concentration is destroying all animal life - in the Gulf.
While I certainly agree that it's terrible when any claim of sexual harassment is blown off, the fact is that people are more on the lookout for harassment claims by men against women because... the overwhelming majority of sexual harassment cases are committed by men against women. And "a dangerous time to be a man"? Right. Clearly, the experience of female workers, including harassment, intimidation, stalking, and in some cases, outright rape on the job is nothing compared to horrors of having your tenure application denied. How about getting a sense of perspective here. A dangerous time to be a man? I got news for you, buddy - it's ALWAYS been a dangerous time to be a woman.
Not quite. The mechanism for Texas's admission to the Union was a joint resolution of Congress. The terms of the resolution included language to the effect that it may be convenient at some future time to create up to 5 states out of the territory of the then Republic of Texas. However, this language is pretty much meaningless - per the US Constitution, you can't merge or split states without the consent of both the state(s) involved and Congress. The constitutional language would obviously trump anything in the joint resolution, and the prospect of both houses of Congress and the Texas state government agreeing to such a division is more or less nil. It appears as if the intent was to allow Texas to split into several states at the time of annexation, but Texas did not take the US up on that offer.
For more fun facts, see the main Texas article in Wikipedia. It's pretty much true that annexation to the US was the plan of the Texas revolutionaries all along, and the only reason it took so long was that the addition of a huge new slave state was vastly destabilizing to the delicate political balance between north and south... so it took 10 years to get Congress to approve of annexation.
You're kidding, right? Find me one example where anyone has taken offense at the use of the words "black" or "gay". Those terms are totally PC.
Totally different animal. This isn't about using a word that someone finds offensive in itself. This is about insulting people. If someone got in your face about how you were a sinner for eating pork because the Prophet Muhammad said so, you'd no doubt be offended, and rightly so. No one should have someone else's religious beliefs flung in their face.
For example, while the word "fanny" is a perfectly acceptable word in the US to refer to one's posterior, it's my understanding that in the UK, using that expression is frowned upon in polite society (and I believe has a somewhat different meaning). Same deal with "bloody", which isn't really used in the US except among people trying to sound British, but in the actual UK is considered borderline obscene. Or at least used to be.
May be apocryphal, but the story went like this: the British Navy warrant officer, when asked what the problem was with his non-working engine, replied "fuckin' fuckers' fucked". Of course, being a RN warrant officer, this came out more like "fookin' fookers' fooked", but you get the idea.