Didn't finish reading the summary, eh? "'While we can't blame climate change for any one event, we can certainly see its fingerprint." This story is about a trend, not the weather on a given day. A crucial difference.
"The report, which will be released in full in February, finds that climate change is having a key influence on a trend that has seen the number of hot days in Australia double and the duration and frequency of heatwaves increase in the period between 1971 and 2008."
Actually it's not just XCode either... every day it is nagging me to update iPhoto, iMovie, and so on, which require a big intrusive profile creation to do. And of course there is no way to say NO to the update, only "remind me later."
Yes, I finally broke down and created a new phony ID and got my XCode and my updates without entering any CC info. But it shouldn't be like this in the first place. I resent it.
And coming back to Microsoft, actually the XBox is adopting all these same spam-ridden tactics. I finally just unplugged our 360 from the Internet because every time we just wanted to play a game it would cajole and threaten us to download more updates and agree to yet another new TOS, change the interface around, and push spam at us. So I guess they are getting with the times as well.
A spam black hole is exactly the same thing, and so is gmail's spam filter. If some things are in and some are out, then somebody somewhere made that call.
I am actually appreciating more and more, in retrospect, how non-intrusive Microsoft was for all those years and still is. Compared to today's Internet, and the PowerBook that wants a credit card number before I can even do a software update or download XCode (since it's all linked to the App Store now), Microsoft was/is a model of responsibility.
Look at dogs, we've churned out lots of species that aren't so good and surviving or reproducing, in order to emphasize cuteness or uniqueness or whatever.
the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year
Actually the IRS scandal is a myth. There's nothing behind it. It started with a self-serving selection of evidence and was confirmed only by multiple levels of management practicing CYA.
Even Core 2 Quad bare CPUs still go for $65-$185. I'm still waiting for them to come down before I put another $50 into making my Core 2 duo system viable for another few years.
I agree with you as far as saving money, but it's no solution for privacy. Do you not realize that just carrying a cellphone (even if you don't use maps, and even it doesn't have GPS) gives your carrier a record of where you've been, how fast you travelled, etc.? Granted the precision is somewhat less than GPS.
We just need to choose for them not to exist and they won't.
I disagree. At some point a civilian smartphone, or self-driving car, will contain practically all the technology to be weaponized. (E.g. "avoid people" becomes "pursue people"!) Once you have the sensors, pattern recognition, and mobility, there's no way to control all the possible applications.
You are still insisting that communism vs. capitalism is an issue of black vs white, whereas in the real world there are no perfect examples of either one. I agree that history has ruled out the success of anything much to the left of, say, France. But I find it hard to imagine America going even half that far. I won't defend the Rolling Stone article, other than pointing out it would have seemed tepid on many college campuses in the mid-to-late 1960s.
Education: "In 1987, public colleges and universities received 3.3 times as much in revenue from state and local governments as they did from students. They now receive about 1.1 times as much from states and localities as from students." cite
Pay: "The minimum wage of $1.60 an hour in 1968 would be $10.56 today when adjusted for inflation (cite).
Federal Benefits: "As one can see, even single men, who get back the lowest amount of benefits for their Medicare contributions, receive almost three times what they pay in..." cite.
And finally, the Bottom Line: "The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt. The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.
While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation." (cite)
I just googled the Rolling Stone article you alluded to, and I admit it is more leftist than I expected to see. That said, the pendulum swings back and forth. The people pushing the policies leading to todays out-of-control inequality should have looked at some history themselves, and the traction that outright communism was gaining after the Great Depression until some fairly mild measures in that direction (the New Deal) were adopted. Boomers enjoyed the benefits without acknowledging them, and dismantled them (through inadequate funding) in order to line their own pockets, at the expense of the millenials. Now the pendulum is going to swing back a bit. But we aren't going to become the USSR, regardless of anything Rolling Stone says.
Arguably that pressure-cooker is present in any group of political elite, from the Politburo to the King's Court.
Are you intentionally limiting this to politics for some reason? I wonder what Larry Ellison and Donald Trump have to pay their secretaries to put up with them. The fact that we have any separation of power at all between the economic, political, and religious realms is a relatively recent and welcome innovation IMHO. The natural state of humanity is a bunch of slaves under a hierarchy of masters with one at the top. That is what things revert to unless we work continually against it.
It boils down to whether you think Virtual Reality is a viable concept - whether it will displace the ways we currently accomplish things that we deem to be worthwhile.
The immediate appeal of Oculus Rift to me is that I like racing and flight simulators, and I think it will be perfect for that. But the immediate barrier to my buying one is that I have a 15 year old son who already disappears into the Minecraft world for as many hours per day as he is allowed to do so. "Gaming" doesn't even quite cover it; the other day we were trying to get him off Minecraft to come to dinner, and when he came to the table he said he'd been chatting for an hour with another kid because their mutual online friend had just committed suicide. That is very "real" stuff - both because he never would have known these kids outside the game world, and also the role that immersive gaming might have played in a kid's disassociation and depression leading to suicide in the first place (I emphasize "might.")
Already I watch the kids sitting there at the computers like zombies, snacking and picking their noses, not looking up when I enter the room to say "hi." And I dislike the thought that I look just the same way sitting and frittering time away on the computer. Then I imagine the same thing plus an Oculus Rift, so they literally can't see what's happening in the room, and I can't see what they're doing. To me it seems not unlikely, but all too inevitable.
I can't help seeing a huge similarity between what you are saying and what people said about smartphones, when I was such a geek for carrying around a HP28s / Psion IIIa / Palm Pilot / PocketPC. After decades of slow improvement, something can reach a threshold a suddenly take off.
We asked Panasonic why it agreed to go with Firefox OS. âoeThere are no other alternatives that are truly open,â Merwan Mereby, Panasonicâ(TM)s US Vice President Interactive Content & Services Group, told us.
That is interesting, because I thought a bunch of handset makers are using Android while giving nothing at all back to google.
CES is just the physical manifestation of the market in general, which is tough to crack wherever you go. If you think CES is noisy, try hanging out a shingle on the WWW, or hawking your stuff on ebay. The economy is a big casino with not that many big winners.
Slashdot Mirror
"The report, which will be released in full in February, finds that climate change is having a key influence on a trend that has seen the number of hot days in Australia double and the duration and frequency of heatwaves increase in the period between 1971 and 2008."
So, yes, it's global warming.
Yes, I finally broke down and created a new phony ID and got my XCode and my updates without entering any CC info. But it shouldn't be like this in the first place. I resent it.
And coming back to Microsoft, actually the XBox is adopting all these same spam-ridden tactics. I finally just unplugged our 360 from the Internet because every time we just wanted to play a game it would cajole and threaten us to download more updates and agree to yet another new TOS, change the interface around, and push spam at us. So I guess they are getting with the times as well.
I don't see how your description contradicts what she said, and it sounds like CODE PINKs gambit may actually work.
I am actually appreciating more and more, in retrospect, how non-intrusive Microsoft was for all those years and still is. Compared to today's Internet, and the PowerBook that wants a credit card number before I can even do a software update or download XCode (since it's all linked to the App Store now), Microsoft was/is a model of responsibility.
The summary implies physical access is needed. But if they have remote (root) readout they could still get a ram dump and go at it, couldn't they?
Look at dogs, we've churned out lots of species that aren't so good and surviving or reproducing, in order to emphasize cuteness or uniqueness or whatever.
The XBox One and PS4 have given us a preview of AMDs technology in this area, haven't they?
Actually the IRS scandal is a myth. There's nothing behind it. It started with a self-serving selection of evidence and was confirmed only by multiple levels of management practicing CYA.
Even Core 2 Quad bare CPUs still go for $65-$185. I'm still waiting for them to come down before I put another $50 into making my Core 2 duo system viable for another few years.
Nuh nuh!
Out on the freeway it certainly can.
I agree with you as far as saving money, but it's no solution for privacy. Do you not realize that just carrying a cellphone (even if you don't use maps, and even it doesn't have GPS) gives your carrier a record of where you've been, how fast you travelled, etc.? Granted the precision is somewhat less than GPS.
I disagree. At some point a civilian smartphone, or self-driving car, will contain practically all the technology to be weaponized. (E.g. "avoid people" becomes "pursue people"!) Once you have the sensors, pattern recognition, and mobility, there's no way to control all the possible applications.
You are still insisting that communism vs. capitalism is an issue of black vs white, whereas in the real world there are no perfect examples of either one. I agree that history has ruled out the success of anything much to the left of, say, France. But I find it hard to imagine America going even half that far. I won't defend the Rolling Stone article, other than pointing out it would have seemed tepid on many college campuses in the mid-to-late 1960s.
I just googled the Rolling Stone article you alluded to, and I admit it is more leftist than I expected to see. That said, the pendulum swings back and forth. The people pushing the policies leading to todays out-of-control inequality should have looked at some history themselves, and the traction that outright communism was gaining after the Great Depression until some fairly mild measures in that direction (the New Deal) were adopted. Boomers enjoyed the benefits without acknowledging them, and dismantled them (through inadequate funding) in order to line their own pockets, at the expense of the millenials. Now the pendulum is going to swing back a bit. But we aren't going to become the USSR, regardless of anything Rolling Stone says.
Are you intentionally limiting this to politics for some reason? I wonder what Larry Ellison and Donald Trump have to pay their secretaries to put up with them. The fact that we have any separation of power at all between the economic, political, and religious realms is a relatively recent and welcome innovation IMHO. The natural state of humanity is a bunch of slaves under a hierarchy of masters with one at the top. That is what things revert to unless we work continually against it.
The immediate appeal of Oculus Rift to me is that I like racing and flight simulators, and I think it will be perfect for that. But the immediate barrier to my buying one is that I have a 15 year old son who already disappears into the Minecraft world for as many hours per day as he is allowed to do so. "Gaming" doesn't even quite cover it; the other day we were trying to get him off Minecraft to come to dinner, and when he came to the table he said he'd been chatting for an hour with another kid because their mutual online friend had just committed suicide. That is very "real" stuff - both because he never would have known these kids outside the game world, and also the role that immersive gaming might have played in a kid's disassociation and depression leading to suicide in the first place (I emphasize "might.")
Already I watch the kids sitting there at the computers like zombies, snacking and picking their noses, not looking up when I enter the room to say "hi." And I dislike the thought that I look just the same way sitting and frittering time away on the computer. Then I imagine the same thing plus an Oculus Rift, so they literally can't see what's happening in the room, and I can't see what they're doing. To me it seems not unlikely, but all too inevitable.
Why are you here? Just sit over at walmart.com clicking reload.
I can't help seeing a huge similarity between what you are saying and what people said about smartphones, when I was such a geek for carrying around a HP28s / Psion IIIa / Palm Pilot / PocketPC. After decades of slow improvement, something can reach a threshold a suddenly take off.
Didn't you see the news the other day that Oculus Rift got $75M from a VC firm to bring it to market? They are going to want that money back plus a hefty return, Real Soon Now.
You should get lasik anyways. I did a couple years ago, and it was some of the best money I've ever spent.
Some games will be ruined latency. But then there are others, like Final Fantasy, where you only press a button every five minutes anyways.
That is interesting, because I thought a bunch of handset makers are using Android while giving nothing at all back to google.
CES is just the physical manifestation of the market in general, which is tough to crack wherever you go. If you think CES is noisy, try hanging out a shingle on the WWW, or hawking your stuff on ebay. The economy is a big casino with not that many big winners.