I'm genuinely surprised that most of the replies here are just denials, minimizations, etc. I'm telling you - I WAS taught about the IDEA of a possible Ice Age in the very near future - at a public school, by an everyday school teacher. And we read about it in a Weekly Reader.
And it wasn't some quack teacher, either. Remember - we didn't have the same level of standardization in school curriculums at the federal level 40 years ago, Teachers had more latitude - as long as they got good grades and generally stuck to their more lax version of the "common core" at the state level.
The idea was even reported on at the national news level for a brief time. Maybe people don't remember it as well because it wasn't being sold with the same fearmongering, ratings-driven fashion that climate change is reported on today (on both sides)?
Or he did hear that being taught, just like I did in the late 70s and heard the exact same thing being taught - even in the Weekly Reader (those under 40 or so probably have no clue what that even is). The last theory I heard before the "next Ice Age" theories died out was that cooling was going to be caused particulate pollution in the atmosphere keeping sunlight from hitting the ground. Looking back it doesn't make a lot of sense, IMO, but that was the theory.
Gateway's problem wasn't its business model; It was their complete lack of scruples. Gateway was a dirty company that tried to screw over small business owners with dirty dealing, etc. The world is a better place not having to deal with Gateway.
For those of you under 40: If you dubbed songs over from their original copies (LPs, other cassettes) or from radio broadcasts onto CrO2 tapes, it was always a sharper, brighter sound with more contrast. The CrO2 physical media was also a darker, grayer, and slightly bluer color than the standard wood-colored tape.
To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it
This is true in most cases, and Mexican Coke is definitely more expensive (50-100% more). With that said, there IS a difference - and sugarcane-based Coke from south of the border is better. It's a sharper, slightly more bitter flavor - vs. the more dulled yet more sugary sweet NFCS-sweetened stuff coming out of American plants.
It's an overreach of FCC power if it goes against his current bankroller... er, Verizon Wireless... when it comes to Net Neutrality. But the FCC can now override the 10th Amendment of the Constitution??
I find it hard to imagine any teacher in any subject before 10th grade being worth more than $50,000/year. The material isn't difficult and teaching isn't difficult.
Yet another chicken or the egg argument. If you start paying 50K+, you'll start getting (and retaining) better teachers in the teacher talent pool.
And consider the real role of teachers: They manage and train people - both ignorant children and their parents. In other words, teaching == management. Managers in the private sector get paid big bucks to manage people, but teachers in the public sector get paid a fraction of that while they manage people who really don't want to be there. And you can't fire a jerk kid or parent for being a jerk, moron, retarded, brilliant (i.e. too smart), etc. But teachers CAN be fired for relatively small infractions.
Then you add in that people having fewer kids, which leads them to care less about the long-term health of the education system. More old farts == more, "I don't want to pay property taxes to fund schools anymore!!"
Then you add in government officials who won't pay for education in GOP-controlled states.
And thus I quote directly from "The Holy GOP Bible" (or How I Learned to Let Kids Bomb).
Doucheronomy 1: -- 1. And again, the GOP Gods came together in private after their latest election victory, and they knew the public school teachers in private. 2. And they left a holy $20 bill on the night stand, thus attending to their needs, and they went privily back to their nice homes, far from the wars and violence in the land. 3. And the next day, these leaders attended a press conference, proclaiming that their oft-repeated promises to the teachers of the land had been fulfilled.
4. And the teachers rose up in anger, proclaiming that they would throw down the governors of the land, but the remainder of the people did nothing to support them; For they remained in their state of wickedness, saying, 5. We cannot afford to pay worthless teachers a fair wage, for thus far we barely have our own needs met. 6. For how could we thus afford our 3-car garaged homes, summer trips to faraway lands, and our daily Starbucks coffee while paying an extra $250/year in state income taxes for someone else's child? 7. Besides, they have the summers off while I do not - and thus it would not be fair to give more benefits to them. 8. Therefore, let the teachers eat cake until they catch on to our deception and decide to help themselves by changing careers. They will thus be working hard in the corporate wilderness as we do, for is this nor fair?
9. And Jesus heard the sayings of the conservative hypocrites - outwardly they were white vessels, but they were full of filth and bones. 10. Verily, they were unwilling to give even the slightest extra mite for the children, hoping that someone else would solve the problem while they toiled in their own prisons.
Off-topic, but is that choice (circle, square and triangle) from the Playstation symbols, or something older? The old EA logo that was shaped like those three shapes, and The Bard's Tale on the C64 had those three shapes as a key part of a puzzle, too.
...the market they helped define got filled up by better or more ubiquitous options.
Personal messaging: Texting or social media. Everybody I know has a phone now. And if you use Facebook/Twitter, you're already connected to a majority of people you know.
Work messaging: Newer apps like Slack that management settles on for everyone.
I should clarify what I meant with the comment about atheists. I wasn't making a moral judgment about religious people being more or less empathetic than atheists. I just meant that religious beliefs can play a role in why religious people act with compassion or empathy. Atheists ultimately live in a temporal world without religious fetters, while religious people have temporal and (classicly religious) spiritual concerns. "You'll go to hell if you don't treat your neighbor as thyself," can be a strong motivator for misguided Christians focusing primarily on the negatives of their dogma.
FTA: The differences in later depression indicators could not be explained away by demographics.
I wonder if they included religious belief/affiliation as a demographic because the game they played is based on economic (i.e. temporal) gains. If everyone was an atheist, this study would hit the nail on the head.
More importantly, IMO, FTA:
The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a "greater empathic concern for others," in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.
The takeaway is much more about generous people being upset about others getting screwed over than, "nice guys end up depressed more than selfish guys."
..multiple times every day. It's no surprise that we're taking a more liberal stance on testing the technology. With that said...
Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles.
That's because of our lousy state legislature (a.k.a. Ducey's rubber stamp).
The McDonald's manager's pay package ($30K/year salary for their time and trouble - it's for about 6-7 mos out of the year) keeps a lot of people out of the job. Then you get the legislators' pool watered down more by having such a strong GOP-leaning electorate. GOP candidates have a 20% margin of stupidity error, so you get some even more unqualified people in office simply because they're a member of the popular tribe.
So - What kind of results are you going to get out of that "talent pool"? A: At best: well-meaning but ultimately not-too-bright people willing to tow the Doug Ducey party line. At worst: Evan Mechams and Russell Pearces... Outright kooks with unrealistic agendas, ideologically-driven manifestos, and an SB1070 cherry on top.
If you said "flying car" to them, most would imagine "The Jetsons" cars and just say, "Cool!"
...rebrand it "Microsoft Slack", and call it innovation. I guess that model doesn't work anymore, or they just don't have the cash/prestige/fear-factor to buy whatever they want anymore?
This was the most brilliant post I've read in a long time... right up until "Bernie & Co."
If the Dems kicked their liberal social policies about forcing fringe groups and minorities to the forefront of policy out, and started REALLY helping the middle class with balanced versions of what Bernie Sanders is talking about and enforcing existing regulations (what the hell happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act??), they'd win every election for the next 1000 years.
Plastic of all shapes and sizes is literally everywhere people go. Take a walk around your neighborhood sometime and just start picking up any random garbage you see. You'll be surprised just how much you pick up in just a few hundred square feet. Plastic pieces of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Bags. Lids. Shards. Parts of toys. Unidentified stuff...
The stranger part to me is that so many educated people don't care at all about the issue, even though it is just as important as climate change and other forms of toxic pollution due to the enormous amounts of it we're putting into the environment every day. Even here, there will be many comments along the lines of, "Yeah, yeah, plastic in the water is bad - but I'm more worried about X in the water."
We could have 1TBs of fiber up to everyone's home and 10GB speeds on phones someday. None of that bandwidth will matter, however, if the only true value of the Internet - the uncensored, uninhibited flow of ALL 0s and 1s - is lost. "We need to be able to regulate what goes across our pipes because of X," in any form for any reason, is ultimately bad for the health of the internet.
Yeah, we can wrap it up in "national security", "copyright holders protections", "good business sense", etc., but it's all still the digital equivalent of wholesale, Internet-wide chemo for an Internet "cancer" that is harming specific interests.
The only cure for those Internet issues like what this Estonian douchebag wants to help "fix" is personal responsibility. Anything else will ultimately fail.
That's the honest short-term view most people feel - including myself. When ocean life starts to struggle to survive in the plastic soup we're stirring up for them, however, all so we can have water bottles and other throwaway junk to make life faster and easier so we can screw around more, it'll become everyone's short-term food problem as prices skyrocket and push your budget over the edge.
You all sounds just as whiny as the people complaining the new models only have USB-C ports...
It wasn't the inclusion USB-C ports. It was the low number of USB-C ports, as well as the lack of well-established and not yet out-of-date ports.
If Apple had put just left the HDMI port and one regular USB port, alongside the 4 USB-C ports, I would've upgraded to the new model and tried to fight my way through the inferior layout of the new keyboard. Instead, I passed up the port-short new rigs and just had my nearly full 256GB SSD swapped out for a 1TB.
The TouchBar concept is cool, but it just doesn't matter to me enough to eschew the volume of ports in my 2014 MBP.
After what Vizio pulled recently with spying on their customers and collecting data on them without telling anyone (me included), and then paying a paltry $2.2M fine, I'm going to have a hard time coming around to buying something they make again. And that's after putting up with the shoddy Vizio quality (horrible remote responsiveness, apps didn't work right, etc.)...
My first response: They're about to kill its best, remaining feature in the minds of many, and now they say, "Let me spy on you."
But I ultimately get what they're trying to do. After all this online complaining, they may finally be having to accept that they really need to know more about how people use their product. Considering how many people here have complained about how the Mozilla devs "don't know what we really want!! Why are they doing X??", this should be something they should consider doing.
Sounds like they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Maybe us complainers should look in the mirror and realize we may be one of the toughest crowd of browser users in the world to please. "No, you can't collect my data!.... Wait - Why are you removing X? I USE THAT FEATURE! Don't you know that about your users?
Maybe that's why Google Chrome has outstripped Firefox over the last several years when it comes to user base size. They KNOW what most people want, even if we don't like to admit to everything we want?
I'm a loyal Firefox user - and I'll probably still opt-out while I grumble about losing most of my add-ons. But I won't honestly be able to say that Firefox's eventual demise will be on the Mozilla Foundation alone.
There's a great video on addiction by Youtube user Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, that offers up the following: "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection." It's almost too simple to be correct, but it makes sense.
I 100% agree on time savings, but many of us don't use the antenna for watching the commercial-laden network TV shows (I pay for Hulu Plus for the no commercial versions for the 2 or 3 network shows I actually watch).
The antenna is just great for picking up network stations for local news broadcasts, the local PBS stations for the kids and occasional documentary (Frontline, etc.), and the occasional surfing across the nostalgia channels (MeTV, Heroes, JusticeTV, etc.) And for that rare, can't miss broadcast not on a cable station (the annual Super Bowl, etc.), it works great.
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I'm genuinely surprised that most of the replies here are just denials, minimizations, etc. I'm telling you - I WAS taught about the IDEA of a possible Ice Age in the very near future - at a public school, by an everyday school teacher. And we read about it in a Weekly Reader.
And it wasn't some quack teacher, either. Remember - we didn't have the same level of standardization in school curriculums at the federal level 40 years ago, Teachers had more latitude - as long as they got good grades and generally stuck to their more lax version of the "common core" at the state level.
The idea was even reported on at the national news level for a brief time. Maybe people don't remember it as well because it wasn't being sold with the same fearmongering, ratings-driven fashion that climate change is reported on today (on both sides)?
Or he did hear that being taught, just like I did in the late 70s and heard the exact same thing being taught - even in the Weekly Reader (those under 40 or so probably have no clue what that even is). The last theory I heard before the "next Ice Age" theories died out was that cooling was going to be caused particulate pollution in the atmosphere keeping sunlight from hitting the ground. Looking back it doesn't make a lot of sense, IMO, but that was the theory.
Weak trolling attempt, dude...
Gateway's problem wasn't its business model; It was their complete lack of scruples. Gateway was a dirty company that tried to screw over small business owners with dirty dealing, etc. The world is a better place not having to deal with Gateway.
For those of you under 40: If you dubbed songs over from their original copies (LPs, other cassettes) or from radio broadcasts onto CrO2 tapes, it was always a sharper, brighter sound with more contrast. The CrO2 physical media was also a darker, grayer, and slightly bluer color than the standard wood-colored tape.
To some extent the vinyl record is the Mexicoke of the music industry - the utility and benefits are arguable, but the consumers are willing to spend more on it
This is true in most cases, and Mexican Coke is definitely more expensive (50-100% more). With that said, there IS a difference - and sugarcane-based Coke from south of the border is better. It's a sharper, slightly more bitter flavor - vs. the more dulled yet more sugary sweet NFCS-sweetened stuff coming out of American plants.
It's an overreach of FCC power if it goes against his current bankroller... er, Verizon Wireless... when it comes to Net Neutrality. But the FCC can now override the 10th Amendment of the Constitution??
What balls on that FCC chairman... Unbelievable.
I find it hard to imagine any teacher in any subject before 10th grade being worth more than $50,000/year. The material isn't difficult and teaching isn't difficult.
Yet another chicken or the egg argument. If you start paying 50K+, you'll start getting (and retaining) better teachers in the teacher talent pool.
And consider the real role of teachers: They manage and train people - both ignorant children and their parents. In other words, teaching == management. Managers in the private sector get paid big bucks to manage people, but teachers in the public sector get paid a fraction of that while they manage people who really don't want to be there. And you can't fire a jerk kid or parent for being a jerk, moron, retarded, brilliant (i.e. too smart), etc. But teachers CAN be fired for relatively small infractions.
Then you add in that people having fewer kids, which leads them to care less about the long-term health of the education system. More old farts == more, "I don't want to pay property taxes to fund schools anymore!!"
Then you add in government officials who won't pay for education in GOP-controlled states.
And thus I quote directly from "The Holy GOP Bible" (or How I Learned to Let Kids Bomb).
Doucheronomy 1: -- 1. And again, the GOP Gods came together in private after their latest election victory, and they knew the public school teachers in private. 2. And they left a holy $20 bill on the night stand, thus attending to their needs, and they went privily back to their nice homes, far from the wars and violence in the land.
3. And the next day, these leaders attended a press conference, proclaiming that their oft-repeated promises to the teachers of the land had been fulfilled.
4. And the teachers rose up in anger, proclaiming that they would throw down the governors of the land, but the remainder of the people did nothing to support them; For they remained in their state of wickedness, saying,
5. We cannot afford to pay worthless teachers a fair wage, for thus far we barely have our own needs met.
6. For how could we thus afford our 3-car garaged homes, summer trips to faraway lands, and our daily Starbucks coffee while paying an extra $250/year in state income taxes for someone else's child?
7. Besides, they have the summers off while I do not - and thus it would not be fair to give more benefits to them.
8. Therefore, let the teachers eat cake until they catch on to our deception and decide to help themselves by changing careers. They will thus be working hard in the corporate wilderness as we do, for is this nor fair?
9. And Jesus heard the sayings of the conservative hypocrites - outwardly they were white vessels, but they were full of filth and bones.
10. Verily, they were unwilling to give even the slightest extra mite for the children, hoping that someone else would solve the problem while they toiled in their own prisons.
11. And He wept.
Off-topic, but is that choice (circle, square and triangle) from the Playstation symbols, or something older? The old EA logo that was shaped like those three shapes, and The Bard's Tale on the C64 had those three shapes as a key part of a puzzle, too.
Exactly. Google is allegedly making it safer by keeping everyone from reading it - except themselves, of course.
...the market they helped define got filled up by better or more ubiquitous options.
Personal messaging: Texting or social media. Everybody I know has a phone now. And if you use Facebook/Twitter, you're already connected to a majority of people you know.
Work messaging: Newer apps like Slack that management settles on for everyone.
I should clarify what I meant with the comment about atheists. I wasn't making a moral judgment about religious people being more or less empathetic than atheists. I just meant that religious beliefs can play a role in why religious people act with compassion or empathy. Atheists ultimately live in a temporal world without religious fetters, while religious people have temporal and (classicly religious) spiritual concerns. "You'll go to hell if you don't treat your neighbor as thyself," can be a strong motivator for misguided Christians focusing primarily on the negatives of their dogma.
FTA: The differences in later depression indicators could not be explained away by demographics.
I wonder if they included religious belief/affiliation as a demographic because the game they played is based on economic (i.e. temporal) gains. If everyone was an atheist, this study would hit the nail on the head.
More importantly, IMO, FTA:
The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a "greater empathic concern for others," in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.
The takeaway is much more about generous people being upset about others getting screwed over than, "nice guys end up depressed more than selfish guys."
..multiple times every day. It's no surprise that we're taking a more liberal stance on testing the technology. With that said...
Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles.
That's because of our lousy state legislature (a.k.a. Ducey's rubber stamp).
The McDonald's manager's pay package ($30K/year salary for their time and trouble - it's for about 6-7 mos out of the year) keeps a lot of people out of the job. Then you get the legislators' pool watered down more by having such a strong GOP-leaning electorate. GOP candidates have a 20% margin of stupidity error, so you get some even more unqualified people in office simply because they're a member of the popular tribe.
So - What kind of results are you going to get out of that "talent pool"?
A: At best: well-meaning but ultimately not-too-bright people willing to tow the Doug Ducey party line. At worst: Evan Mechams and Russell Pearces... Outright kooks with unrealistic agendas, ideologically-driven manifestos, and an SB1070 cherry on top.
If you said "flying car" to them, most would imagine "The Jetsons" cars and just say, "Cool!"
AT&T apparently can't afford to buy every judge out there yet - like they have likely bought every member of Congress in one way or another.
...rebrand it "Microsoft Slack", and call it innovation. I guess that model doesn't work anymore, or they just don't have the cash/prestige/fear-factor to buy whatever they want anymore?
This was the most brilliant post I've read in a long time... right up until "Bernie & Co."
If the Dems kicked their liberal social policies about forcing fringe groups and minorities to the forefront of policy out, and started REALLY helping the middle class with balanced versions of what Bernie Sanders is talking about and enforcing existing regulations (what the hell happened to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act??), they'd win every election for the next 1000 years.
Plastic of all shapes and sizes is literally everywhere people go. Take a walk around your neighborhood sometime and just start picking up any random garbage you see. You'll be surprised just how much you pick up in just a few hundred square feet. Plastic pieces of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Bags. Lids. Shards. Parts of toys. Unidentified stuff...
The stranger part to me is that so many educated people don't care at all about the issue, even though it is just as important as climate change and other forms of toxic pollution due to the enormous amounts of it we're putting into the environment every day. Even here, there will be many comments along the lines of, "Yeah, yeah, plastic in the water is bad - but I'm more worried about X in the water."
We could have 1TBs of fiber up to everyone's home and 10GB speeds on phones someday. None of that bandwidth will matter, however, if the only true value of the Internet - the uncensored, uninhibited flow of ALL 0s and 1s - is lost. "We need to be able to regulate what goes across our pipes because of X," in any form for any reason, is ultimately bad for the health of the internet.
Yeah, we can wrap it up in "national security", "copyright holders protections", "good business sense", etc., but it's all still the digital equivalent of wholesale, Internet-wide chemo for an Internet "cancer" that is harming specific interests.
The only cure for those Internet issues like what this Estonian douchebag wants to help "fix" is personal responsibility. Anything else will ultimately fail.
That's the honest short-term view most people feel - including myself. When ocean life starts to struggle to survive in the plastic soup we're stirring up for them, however, all so we can have water bottles and other throwaway junk to make life faster and easier so we can screw around more, it'll become everyone's short-term food problem as prices skyrocket and push your budget over the edge.
You all sounds just as whiny as the people complaining the new models only have USB-C ports...
It wasn't the inclusion USB-C ports. It was the low number of USB-C ports, as well as the lack of well-established and not yet out-of-date ports.
If Apple had put just left the HDMI port and one regular USB port, alongside the 4 USB-C ports, I would've upgraded to the new model and tried to fight my way through the inferior layout of the new keyboard. Instead, I passed up the port-short new rigs and just had my nearly full 256GB SSD swapped out for a 1TB.
The TouchBar concept is cool, but it just doesn't matter to me enough to eschew the volume of ports in my 2014 MBP.
After what Vizio pulled recently with spying on their customers and collecting data on them without telling anyone (me included), and then paying a paltry $2.2M fine, I'm going to have a hard time coming around to buying something they make again. And that's after putting up with the shoddy Vizio quality (horrible remote responsiveness, apps didn't work right, etc.)...
My first response: They're about to kill its best, remaining feature in the minds of many, and now they say, "Let me spy on you."
But I ultimately get what they're trying to do. After all this online complaining, they may finally be having to accept that they really need to know more about how people use their product. Considering how many people here have complained about how the Mozilla devs "don't know what we really want!! Why are they doing X??", this should be something they should consider doing.
Sounds like they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Maybe us complainers should look in the mirror and realize we may be one of the toughest crowd of browser users in the world to please. "No, you can't collect my data!.... Wait - Why are you removing X? I USE THAT FEATURE! Don't you know that about your users?
Maybe that's why Google Chrome has outstripped Firefox over the last several years when it comes to user base size. They KNOW what most people want, even if we don't like to admit to everything we want?
I'm a loyal Firefox user - and I'll probably still opt-out while I grumble about losing most of my add-ons. But I won't honestly be able to say that Firefox's eventual demise will be on the Mozilla Foundation alone.
This is exactly why Firefox is not a clone of Chrome: Privacy. On its own, I'll take that issue everytime.
There's a great video on addiction by Youtube user Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, that offers up the following: "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection." It's almost too simple to be correct, but it makes sense.
I 100% agree on time savings, but many of us don't use the antenna for watching the commercial-laden network TV shows (I pay for Hulu Plus for the no commercial versions for the 2 or 3 network shows I actually watch).
The antenna is just great for picking up network stations for local news broadcasts, the local PBS stations for the kids and occasional documentary (Frontline, etc.), and the occasional surfing across the nostalgia channels (MeTV, Heroes, JusticeTV, etc.) And for that rare, can't miss broadcast not on a cable station (the annual Super Bowl, etc.), it works great.