These past two to three years congress seemed like it couldn't agree on neither the weather nor further funding of the US even if you put a gun to their head. But a vote that increases their dick size seems just to be something even the Teabaggers are actually quite desperate for. Even the women.
Yes, the pen is what you play most with all of the time.
I'm in the market of a new phone but a Note is a bit too big for my liking. As a tablet it is too small and as a phone it is too big. I do quite a lot of productivity stuff on my tablet and I can't fathom how I would be able to accomplish that on a Note.
The main reason for the small presence of Android tablets in the web is that web browsing on Android sucks. They all take ages to render. They are unresponsive until they have rendered. And those that I use(the Android browser named "Browser" and Chrome, gave up on Firefox on Android a year ago) can't remember to request the desktop version of the web page. You still have to open a new tab, tell it to request the desktop page and then go wherever you want. Why would I want to see the mobile version of a web page on a 10.1" screen?
Because the browser takes ages to render them.
Are all browsers on Android single-thread monstrosities? Is a tablet that is able to render 3D games with last-gen console quality too slow? Is this some kind of joke I don't understand because I'm too old? I have no clue if iFondleslabs have the same problem because I don't care.
Another reason why Android tablets not seem to be very present in the web is that you can actually change the browser identification on the browsers. I doubt you can do that on iApple fruity stuff.
A lot of tablets charge at 15V while USB only supplies 5V.
Those tablets need 15V to charge. Here's what ASUS did:
They have a charger/USB cable and a charger that has a USB socket in it. Those silly buggers crossed a couple of wires in their USB cable. If they are crossed, the charger will supply 15V. If they aren't, then it will supply 5V. But you sure can't connet the ASUS tablet to an USB port on your PC and expect it to charge from that.
The XOOM is at least a bit more honest in that. And it has a dedicated charging port that does not do anything but charge. So it isn't a 30pin monstrosity as you get on other devices. I do love me a simple plug as is used by any other 15V charger out there.
I second that. I do read a lot of comics on my tablet and frankly, the standard 10.1" things are too small for that. No amount of increasing DPI will change this. An A4 sized tablet is exactly what I would like to have on my coffee table.
And while we are at it: stop wasting so much space around the borders of tablets. You need to put your fingers somewhere, true. And touch screens trigger very quickly when having fingers close to them. But does it have to be THAT much border? We could hae a lot more screen real estate by simply shrinking that.
It is the single most expandable tablet on the makret ATM. I have a 64GB microSDHX in the tablet itsself(simply because I haven't found a 128GB on yet) and a full sized 128GB SDHX in the keyboard/reserve battery/mobile docking station. Add to that the 64GB already in the machine and you get a lot. Also attaching an external HD via USB on the keyboard works beautifully. To add insult to injury there also is an HDMI port on the tablet. Which transfers sound and that NVidia 3D stuff if your screen can cope with that. Which also works nicely where supported.
The tablet is as thin as it needs to be. I can't see how being any thinner would be useful on a 10'' tablet.
It does have a lot of flaws. The most painful one being sloooooow IO. Really slow. If it updates apps everything will crawl to a halt. Seems like IO is being handled by the CPU. Also internal memory is slow, too. The proprietary connector on the tablet is a pain to deal with if you want to connect anything USB directly to the tablet and not the keyboard. Which actually doesn't bother me a lot. WIFI reception isn't stellar. And GPS is nonexistant. If you buy one of these bad boys it would be adviseable to have a WIFI hub in the same room. Especially in an urban environment. But that is more a flaw in WIFI itsself than anything else. Web browsing is as good/bad as on my Motorola XOOM. That could be due to the XOOM being a very good tablet for its day or the Prime being bogged down by its IO issues. Either was, no progress had been made on this front.
The most redeeming factor of this machine is how well the keydock clamshells the device. If you can stomach the price then I can wholeheartedly recommend it. The tablet with keydock attached weighs about as much as my XOOM and is about as thick as the XOOM with the Motorola protective cover. It successfully shows how the hybrid netbook/tablet approach can work. But by god is this thing flawed. And beautiful. But flawed.
There have been reports that the keydock attachment mechanism manages to crack the screen on the TF300 and TF700 line. Don't have those so I can't tell.
Yes, but data transfer of any kind is bloody awful. And how come that web browsing is actually as slow as on my Motorola Xoom?
I love this tablet to bits and think that the keydock is what makes this thing. There hardly is any need for lugging a laptop around anymore. But by Jove, this thing is flawed. And I'm not talking about GPS because I knew about that when I bought that thing.
But the battery life even without the keydock attached(which when fully charged seems be able to recharge the tablet itsself quite substantially) is actually good. Very good. Hardware capabilities apart from IO are great. Build quality is stellar. I will only replace it when ASUS decides to make a Tegra4 tablet that has the same form factor as the Prime. Extra battery, SD Card slot and full USB in the decent extra keyboard that clamshells so nicely you don't need an extra protective sleeve for the thing is a very good thing indeed.
My wishlist is a bit shorter:
-make web browsing on Android not suck
-make multitasking actually possible in the UI(Win8 seems to have an inkling how one might start to achieve that)
-let me decide where to install apps without rooting the bloody thing
-increase screen size and reduce the border
I will not buy your tablet if it can't read 128GB SDHX cards. I will not buy your tablet if it has no HDMI port of any description. I will not buy your tablet if it is impossible to connect via USB. I will not buy your tablet if I can't connetc a PS3 controller via Bluetooth. Those features are given to even get me remotely interested. Since I also use the tablet to read comics I'm quite interested in something that has a bigger screen. All tablets seem to waste a lot of space around the border.
I feel we are nearly there.
The Diamond Jubilee speach of HRM The Queen on Her Most Royal own Youtube channel was blocked by Bertelsmann in Germany due HRM the Queen not getting her royalties cut due to the royalties not being yet sorted out in Germany.
It is refreshing that GEMA looks after starving artists like HRM The Queen in Germany.
I find it more and more difficult to approach this matter with any seriousness whatsoever.
I think you will find that you confuse the scientific method with popular vote.
Peer reviews look for faulty reasoning, wrong premises and falsified results. Peer reviews based solely on opinion get the benefit of not being published by scientific press and are relegated to the popular press.
What we are talking about here has even lower standards and makes the Daily Fail shine like a beacon of enlightenment.
Now that I have -alas!- finished this rather lengthy book I can take it upon myself to give you a complete account of my experiences rooted in fact.
The battle scenes contain factual errors, the order of events has been changed for no discernable purposes, characters were omitted, characters were added and character characteristics were changed.
It remains a mystery why the author deviated from the excellently documented historical facts. Each and every bit of the entire occurrence had been documented on publicly available film. Clearly the author hadn't done his proper research.
Even worse, the character of Tom Bombadil has no basis in the historic film documents. Did the author want to include his own personal J Jar Binks in what is a well know narrative? And for what reason? If you are truly interested in that part of our shared history you should wath the excellent documentary edited by Peter Jackson.
I am also quite wary of anecdotal reviews. If the review consists of more than just a short blurb then I can tell if the author is actually a person who's opinion I would value. Also I take into account that somebody might describe a bad day.
A review system still is far better than some single digit rating.
Take for instance one-star rating on Amazon for stuff arriving on the wrong day. In the wrong colour. With the wrong packaging. You get the gist. Sometimes I wished I could simply filter out that type of idiocy.
Also a single digit review system is flatout useless when there are no standards. Two persons experiencing the same thing should rate it equally. They don't. A person exepiencing the same thing at two separate occasions should rate it the same way. That also doesn't always happen. People should rate independently of the already accumulated score based on their own experiences. That also doesn't happen.
What you basically get is a popular vote based on no standards whatsoever. The narrative is much better way to base your decision on. Dunces are not that hard to spot.
The key issue here is that with a manned flight of death you have an actual person in a plane relatively close to the crater-gonna-be. The fallacy here is that with modern bombs you actually see the Red Crescent emblem on the orphanage you are about to bomb because the CIA held the street map upside down. In truth as a pilot you propably won't be even close enough.
But there is always the immense satisfaction of giving thepilot a ticker tape parade when he returns.
What really irks me is how our language gets polluted by political spin. What's all about this calling dropping explosives "surgical strikes". there's nothing surgical about an explosion. It doesn't magically go around people you'd rather not kill. Meticulously planning and sending a bunch of highly trained people with guns to place a bullet between the eyes of an actually worthy target is surgical. Dropping a bomb so that the target might or might not be within the blast radius is a bloody mess.
Yet somehow we buy this as a political "I win" button. And the man who is a huge fan of this is actually a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
People wonder why by now even allies and friendly nations wonder if it weren't better to remove the US from the planet to a remote place somewhere beyond the solar system. With dynamite if neccessary.
The men in charge of this are a fucking disgrace to all of humanity. In that respect Clinton and everybody who came after him made Reagan look like an appeasement softie. Finger always hovering above a button that doesn't release a nuke.
So acute and immediate information about the weather is important to farmers and Midwesterners.
That still is pretty niche and doesn't explain why THIS OMG IS THE WEATHER is shoved into the face of people who live in the habitable parts of our planet.
If the meterological equivalent of a marauding axe murderer is headed your way then you will get quite a lot of warning by other shouty media things. The rest of us has to deal with slightly rampaging drizzle and some snow.
Sorry, that still doesn't explain why the first app anything internetworthy ever gets is a weather app. At this very moment Japanese engineers are building A Better Toilet. With a weather app.
I found that after adjusting my haircut accordingly my brain would get first hand knowledge of my being rained on status. First hand experience! A real push service! Know the current weather within nanoseconds! Now with being snowed on status updates! BETA sunshine app is in the works. Subscribe now!
All you need is a shaver. And a keen sense of observation. And my keen sense of observation tells me it is currently raining outside.
If you are at your local Starbucks and have settled down for a nice afternoon and getting some work done you may have to make do with what you've got. Personally I hate trackpads and those Thinkpad clits. So I usually bring a mouse. But I can understand why somebody would expect a trackpad to behave like it usually does. You can't break conventions like that and expect people to be fine with it.
Trackpads need getting used to. Changing that without a nice and easy way to change the way it behaves WHILE NOT HAVING A POINTING DEVICE SINCE YOU JUST BROKE IT is going to leave a bad taste in anyones mouth.
Also why does everybody put weather apps so prominently on his devices? Google did it with Google Now, Microsoft did it with their Metro thing. I know a much more relyable way to figure out if I will get rained on than looking at a computer screen. Also I'm not a farmer, I don't grow crops and I'm not obsessed with weather. Thankfully my smalltalk skills go beyond talking about the weather. I do not live and die by knowing what the weather is going to be. Why is everybody acting as if I were. Same goes with sports results, current stock performance or what Christina Bloody Aguilera or any other popular airhead is currently up to. Yet that is what you get shoved into your face by default. Just last weekend I spent two hours to get rid of inane crap on my tablet so I wouldn't be bothered by it again. Yet vital information, like when the next part of the Batman Nomans Land collections will be available for Kindle on Amazon in my region is amazingly omitted.
We really do need multi tasking. That's something I find is the single most hideous obstacle when working with tablets.
I've mostly ditched my laptop when I go to meetings. Taking notes on a tablet with a mind mapping tool is quite nice. And since my Transformer Prime comes with a keyboard one would think I could also write texts with it.
But I can't bring up my text application and my mindmapper on the same screen on the same time. So when I travel back from a meeting by train I can't really get any writing done unless I also brought my laptop.
My tablet would be perfectly suited to multi tasking yet the UI isn't.
Or just the other day I was playing Machinarium on my tablet. And as in any point&click adventure I got horribly stuck with some mind-bending logic puzzle I wasn't inclined to solve on my own. So I broke out the old web browser and found a solution to it. It was a handy sequence of 20 actions. I didn't want to memorize that but I also couldn't have both the browser with the solution and the game on the same screen. So I had to drag my carcass over to my desktop, boot it up, open a web browser and look at the solution on that thing while playing the game. I HAD TO GET UP FROM THE COUCH! Again, the machine would have been perfectly capable of doing so but the UI wasn't. My task was to get my cute little robot from screen A to screen B and I needed two applications for that task. The UI got in the way.
And now you are telling me they brought the same idiocy to the desktop? As if it weren't bad enough that you have to jump through hoops to get two Excel sheets open up in two separate windows so you can have distribute them over two screens.
Emacs can do that out of the box. Why can't modern desktop UIs? Is that some kind of joke I'm too old to understand?
Somebody in the UI department must have had a clown for breakfast.
Madness! I tell you MAAAADNESS!
Also these kinds of killing sprees are highly contagious.
If you take a look at who gets a gun and mows down as many unarmed, non-threatening people as possible you will find they are mostly pathetic figures. People with no name and no face. They kill a lot of people and they get a name, a face. Media reports on them. They do not only get a name but also a middle name. Why have so many spree-killing madmen and assassins got a middle name? Just about everybody has one but nobody really bothers with it unless they become famous.
The 24/7 coverage of this thing by CNN is a bigger problem than gun laws(which are a bit mad) or video games(of which there are quite a few disgusting ones). Our media showing interest in those pathetic, gun-toting losers who didn't stand a chance in fair competition is what makes this kind of spree killing so common place.
Stop feeding the ego trips of madmen.
That being said the situation of how we deal with mental deficiencies is a bit idiotic. It seems like there is only a choice of limited institutionalization and prison. I do understand why a free society has problems to lock away and treat without consent individuals who need separation from society and treatment against their will. That this even is an issue is what makes our modern society worth protecting. But at least we have to make treatment available. For free. Not for profit. And we have to make provisions to enforce said treatment.
Or we could continue to scrape the perpetrators off the pavements after the fact and blame gun laws and video games for the sprees.
And for dog's sake don't give them a name or a face. Don't compare their body count to other morons. And leave their motivation to academic circles. People who are actually trained to have an informed opinion on that particular blend of madness. Not some CNN talking head who is using this story to sell you tooth paste and women hygiene products. They have been warned about this kind of reporting time and again.
I want you to remember that famous CCTV still of that pair of Columbine spree killers. Imagine them without guns and without a body count. Dressed in black. Adolescents wthout any personal achievement, charisma or any outstanding intersting property. Nt precious beautiful snowflakes by any means. Dressed in black. Wearing trenchcoats in summer. If you remove all that you see two pathetic, personally ridiculous young men/oldish boys. And that's how we should remember them. Or that moron that shot up a cinema thinking he was The Joker? Or that other guy who started shooting in some politicians office? Did they even read The Catcher in The Rye? Were they even literate? Do we care? Piss on their graves once you can be bothered to memorize their names and tend to the victims.
If we are talking about custom software made for a customer it most often is the customer who needs to be kept in line. If you are writing a mass marketed bit of code then you have to reign in marketing. Also one of your worst problems is to communicate real requirements to your devs. Or to get the customer or marketing to be precse about what they want.
A lot of kKickstarter projects are games. Games are highly iterative and derivative. If during your development cycle somebody comes up with a nifty and highly popular mechanic/idea/trick then there is a lot of pressure to also include it into your thing lest it sell like white dog turds.
Upper management has no mechanism but spreadsheets to stem the idiocy that is feature creep. If marketing/the customer tells them, feature X is absolutely needed then it will be thrown onto the already ample pile. Upper management can only call the sky blue and water wet. Otherwise they'd need to educate themselves to contribute to the solution instead of the problem. But they operate at a level where it doesn't make a difference wether they managed production of brown, fizzy sugar water or a computer manufacturer. Or does it?
Quite a lot of Kickstarter projects seem to be run off a shoestring budget and by people with a day job. Those which aren't are big enough to run into the usual problems.
This is not news. It is just some information.
Ok, since a corporation has decided to act outside national boundaries, let's treat it like it.
Send bills for using publicly funded infrastructure.
Disallow participating in the political process.
Be bombed at your own expenses
Police will not patrol your front lawn. Better hire your own security.
Don't expect a bailout if going gets tough.
Lawmakers not taking you into account? Tough. You decided to not have any part in this.
All you can get is wanking Ayn Randers giving you a parade with the usual result of a pearl necklace.
Paying your employees is not the same as paying taxes. Your employees paying taxes doesn't magically make your national duties vanish.
Depends on who you ask. Taiwan happily will not provoke China in any further way. What this could lead to would make Tibet look like a Sunday afternoon picknick.
Diplomacy with NK only works via China. Best pick diplomats who can actually negotiate with them.
Actually NK is a bit of an emabrrassment to China.
China had sided with NK in a proxy war in the 50ies making it somewhat their baby. Think of it as their Pinochet regime. China has reigned NK in a couple of times. In fact, they are the only thing that keeps them sorta in control.
The US and China have absolutely no interest of Korea having a go at it anytime soon. The situation is much worse than divided Germany ever was. If China were to collapse we'd have a very ugly war at our hands. Not a peaceful reunification.
I'm afraid NK is suffering from a madness that has to run its course since the cure might be much, much worse. China or no.
I don't understand what the problem is? Shooting satellites into space and keeping them in orbit has been a solved problem for decades.
North Korea should be able to do this. Rocket and satellite tech isn't that secret anymore. It's only a matter of engineering and money. They surely have the engineers and they have shown they can scrape together the money at the expense of their own people.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be onto something.
These past two to three years congress seemed like it couldn't agree on neither the weather nor further funding of the US even if you put a gun to their head. But a vote that increases their dick size seems just to be something even the Teabaggers are actually quite desperate for. Even the women.
Yes, the pen is what you play most with all of the time.
I'm in the market of a new phone but a Note is a bit too big for my liking. As a tablet it is too small and as a phone it is too big. I do quite a lot of productivity stuff on my tablet and I can't fathom how I would be able to accomplish that on a Note.
The main reason for the small presence of Android tablets in the web is that web browsing on Android sucks. They all take ages to render. They are unresponsive until they have rendered. And those that I use(the Android browser named "Browser" and Chrome, gave up on Firefox on Android a year ago) can't remember to request the desktop version of the web page. You still have to open a new tab, tell it to request the desktop page and then go wherever you want. Why would I want to see the mobile version of a web page on a 10.1" screen?
Because the browser takes ages to render them.
Are all browsers on Android single-thread monstrosities? Is a tablet that is able to render 3D games with last-gen console quality too slow? Is this some kind of joke I don't understand because I'm too old? I have no clue if iFondleslabs have the same problem because I don't care.
Another reason why Android tablets not seem to be very present in the web is that you can actually change the browser identification on the browsers. I doubt you can do that on iApple fruity stuff.
A lot of tablets charge at 15V while USB only supplies 5V.
Those tablets need 15V to charge. Here's what ASUS did:
They have a charger/USB cable and a charger that has a USB socket in it. Those silly buggers crossed a couple of wires in their USB cable. If they are crossed, the charger will supply 15V. If they aren't, then it will supply 5V. But you sure can't connet the ASUS tablet to an USB port on your PC and expect it to charge from that.
The XOOM is at least a bit more honest in that. And it has a dedicated charging port that does not do anything but charge. So it isn't a 30pin monstrosity as you get on other devices. I do love me a simple plug as is used by any other 15V charger out there.
I second that. I do read a lot of comics on my tablet and frankly, the standard 10.1" things are too small for that. No amount of increasing DPI will change this. An A4 sized tablet is exactly what I would like to have on my coffee table.
And while we are at it: stop wasting so much space around the borders of tablets. You need to put your fingers somewhere, true. And touch screens trigger very quickly when having fingers close to them. But does it have to be THAT much border? We could hae a lot more screen real estate by simply shrinking that.
It is the single most expandable tablet on the makret ATM. I have a 64GB microSDHX in the tablet itsself(simply because I haven't found a 128GB on yet) and a full sized 128GB SDHX in the keyboard/reserve battery/mobile docking station. Add to that the 64GB already in the machine and you get a lot. Also attaching an external HD via USB on the keyboard works beautifully. To add insult to injury there also is an HDMI port on the tablet. Which transfers sound and that NVidia 3D stuff if your screen can cope with that. Which also works nicely where supported.
The tablet is as thin as it needs to be. I can't see how being any thinner would be useful on a 10'' tablet.
It does have a lot of flaws. The most painful one being sloooooow IO. Really slow. If it updates apps everything will crawl to a halt. Seems like IO is being handled by the CPU. Also internal memory is slow, too. The proprietary connector on the tablet is a pain to deal with if you want to connect anything USB directly to the tablet and not the keyboard. Which actually doesn't bother me a lot. WIFI reception isn't stellar. And GPS is nonexistant. If you buy one of these bad boys it would be adviseable to have a WIFI hub in the same room. Especially in an urban environment. But that is more a flaw in WIFI itsself than anything else.
Web browsing is as good/bad as on my Motorola XOOM. That could be due to the XOOM being a very good tablet for its day or the Prime being bogged down by its IO issues. Either was, no progress had been made on this front.
The most redeeming factor of this machine is how well the keydock clamshells the device. If you can stomach the price then I can wholeheartedly recommend it. The tablet with keydock attached weighs about as much as my XOOM and is about as thick as the XOOM with the Motorola protective cover. It successfully shows how the hybrid netbook/tablet approach can work. But by god is this thing flawed. And beautiful. But flawed.
There have been reports that the keydock attachment mechanism manages to crack the screen on the TF300 and TF700 line. Don't have those so I can't tell.
Yes, but data transfer of any kind is bloody awful. And how come that web browsing is actually as slow as on my Motorola Xoom?
I love this tablet to bits and think that the keydock is what makes this thing. There hardly is any need for lugging a laptop around anymore. But by Jove, this thing is flawed.
And I'm not talking about GPS because I knew about that when I bought that thing.
But the battery life even without the keydock attached(which when fully charged seems be able to recharge the tablet itsself quite substantially) is actually good. Very good. Hardware capabilities apart from IO are great. Build quality is stellar. I will only replace it when ASUS decides to make a Tegra4 tablet that has the same form factor as the Prime. Extra battery, SD Card slot and full USB in the decent extra keyboard that clamshells so nicely you don't need an extra protective sleeve for the thing is a very good thing indeed.
My wishlist is a bit shorter:
-make web browsing on Android not suck
-make multitasking actually possible in the UI(Win8 seems to have an inkling how one might start to achieve that)
-let me decide where to install apps without rooting the bloody thing
-increase screen size and reduce the border
I will not buy your tablet if it can't read 128GB SDHX cards. I will not buy your tablet if it has no HDMI port of any description. I will not buy your tablet if it is impossible to connect via USB. I will not buy your tablet if I can't connetc a PS3 controller via Bluetooth. Those features are given to even get me remotely interested. Since I also use the tablet to read comics I'm quite interested in something that has a bigger screen. All tablets seem to waste a lot of space around the border.
I feel we are nearly there.
The Diamond Jubilee speach of HRM The Queen on Her Most Royal own Youtube channel was blocked by Bertelsmann in Germany due HRM the Queen not getting her royalties cut due to the royalties not being yet sorted out in Germany.
It is refreshing that GEMA looks after starving artists like HRM The Queen in Germany.
I find it more and more difficult to approach this matter with any seriousness whatsoever.
I think you will find that you confuse the scientific method with popular vote.
Peer reviews look for faulty reasoning, wrong premises and falsified results. Peer reviews based solely on opinion get the benefit of not being published by scientific press and are relegated to the popular press.
What we are talking about here has even lower standards and makes the Daily Fail shine like a beacon of enlightenment.
Now that I have -alas!- finished this rather lengthy book I can take it upon myself to give you a complete account of my experiences rooted in fact.
The battle scenes contain factual errors, the order of events has been changed for no discernable purposes, characters were omitted, characters were added and character characteristics were changed.
It remains a mystery why the author deviated from the excellently documented historical facts. Each and every bit of the entire occurrence had been documented on publicly available film. Clearly the author hadn't done his proper research.
Even worse, the character of Tom Bombadil has no basis in the historic film documents. Did the author want to include his own personal J Jar Binks in what is a well know narrative? And for what reason? If you are truly interested in that part of our shared history you should wath the excellent documentary edited by Peter Jackson.
One Star.
23rd of Duncember, RE Salvatore.
Total score 3.0 Stars.
I am also quite wary of anecdotal reviews. If the review consists of more than just a short blurb then I can tell if the author is actually a person who's opinion I would value. Also I take into account that somebody might describe a bad day.
A review system still is far better than some single digit rating.
Take for instance one-star rating on Amazon for stuff arriving on the wrong day. In the wrong colour. With the wrong packaging. You get the gist. Sometimes I wished I could simply filter out that type of idiocy.
Also a single digit review system is flatout useless when there are no standards. Two persons experiencing the same thing should rate it equally. They don't. A person exepiencing the same thing at two separate occasions should rate it the same way. That also doesn't always happen. People should rate independently of the already accumulated score based on their own experiences. That also doesn't happen.
What you basically get is a popular vote based on no standards whatsoever. The narrative is much better way to base your decision on. Dunces are not that hard to spot.
The key issue here is that with a manned flight of death you have an actual person in a plane relatively close to the crater-gonna-be. The fallacy here is that with modern bombs you actually see the Red Crescent emblem on the orphanage you are about to bomb because the CIA held the street map upside down. In truth as a pilot you propably won't be even close enough.
But there is always the immense satisfaction of giving thepilot a ticker tape parade when he returns.
What really irks me is how our language gets polluted by political spin. What's all about this calling dropping explosives "surgical strikes". there's nothing surgical about an explosion. It doesn't magically go around people you'd rather not kill. Meticulously planning and sending a bunch of highly trained people with guns to place a bullet between the eyes of an actually worthy target is surgical. Dropping a bomb so that the target might or might not be within the blast radius is a bloody mess.
Yet somehow we buy this as a political "I win" button. And the man who is a huge fan of this is actually a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
People wonder why by now even allies and friendly nations wonder if it weren't better to remove the US from the planet to a remote place somewhere beyond the solar system. With dynamite if neccessary.
The men in charge of this are a fucking disgrace to all of humanity. In that respect Clinton and everybody who came after him made Reagan look like an appeasement softie. Finger always hovering above a button that doesn't release a nuke.
So acute and immediate information about the weather is important to farmers and Midwesterners.
That still is pretty niche and doesn't explain why THIS OMG IS THE WEATHER is shoved into the face of people who live in the habitable parts of our planet.
If the meterological equivalent of a marauding axe murderer is headed your way then you will get quite a lot of warning by other shouty media things. The rest of us has to deal with slightly rampaging drizzle and some snow.
Sorry, that still doesn't explain why the first app anything internetworthy ever gets is a weather app. At this very moment Japanese engineers are building A Better Toilet. With a weather app.
I found that after adjusting my haircut accordingly my brain would get first hand knowledge of my being rained on status. First hand experience! A real push service! Know the current weather within nanoseconds! Now with being snowed on status updates! BETA sunshine app is in the works. Subscribe now!
All you need is a shaver. And a keen sense of observation. And my keen sense of observation tells me it is currently raining outside.
If you are at your local Starbucks and have settled down for a nice afternoon and getting some work done you may have to make do with what you've got. Personally I hate trackpads and those Thinkpad clits. So I usually bring a mouse. But I can understand why somebody would expect a trackpad to behave like it usually does. You can't break conventions like that and expect people to be fine with it.
Trackpads need getting used to. Changing that without a nice and easy way to change the way it behaves WHILE NOT HAVING A POINTING DEVICE SINCE YOU JUST BROKE IT is going to leave a bad taste in anyones mouth.
Also why does everybody put weather apps so prominently on his devices? Google did it with Google Now, Microsoft did it with their Metro thing. I know a much more relyable way to figure out if I will get rained on than looking at a computer screen. Also I'm not a farmer, I don't grow crops and I'm not obsessed with weather. Thankfully my smalltalk skills go beyond talking about the weather. I do not live and die by knowing what the weather is going to be. Why is everybody acting as if I were. Same goes with sports results, current stock performance or what Christina Bloody Aguilera or any other popular airhead is currently up to. Yet that is what you get shoved into your face by default. Just last weekend I spent two hours to get rid of inane crap on my tablet so I wouldn't be bothered by it again. Yet vital information, like when the next part of the Batman Nomans Land collections will be available for Kindle on Amazon in my region is amazingly omitted.
End of rant.
We really do need multi tasking. That's something I find is the single most hideous obstacle when working with tablets.
I've mostly ditched my laptop when I go to meetings. Taking notes on a tablet with a mind mapping tool is quite nice. And since my Transformer Prime comes with a keyboard one would think I could also write texts with it.
But I can't bring up my text application and my mindmapper on the same screen on the same time. So when I travel back from a meeting by train I can't really get any writing done unless I also brought my laptop.
My tablet would be perfectly suited to multi tasking yet the UI isn't.
Or just the other day I was playing Machinarium on my tablet. And as in any point&click adventure I got horribly stuck with some mind-bending logic puzzle I wasn't inclined to solve on my own. So I broke out the old web browser and found a solution to it. It was a handy sequence of 20 actions. I didn't want to memorize that but I also couldn't have both the browser with the solution and the game on the same screen. So I had to drag my carcass over to my desktop, boot it up, open a web browser and look at the solution on that thing while playing the game. I HAD TO GET UP FROM THE COUCH! Again, the machine would have been perfectly capable of doing so but the UI wasn't. My task was to get my cute little robot from screen A to screen B and I needed two applications for that task. The UI got in the way.
And now you are telling me they brought the same idiocy to the desktop? As if it weren't bad enough that you have to jump through hoops to get two Excel sheets open up in two separate windows so you can have distribute them over two screens.
Emacs can do that out of the box. Why can't modern desktop UIs? Is that some kind of joke I'm too old to understand? Somebody in the UI department must have had a clown for breakfast.
Madness! I tell you MAAAADNESS!
You may find that the map material is where it is at. And that is not free.
Also these kinds of killing sprees are highly contagious.
If you take a look at who gets a gun and mows down as many unarmed, non-threatening people as possible you will find they are mostly pathetic figures. People with no name and no face. They kill a lot of people and they get a name, a face. Media reports on them. They do not only get a name but also a middle name. Why have so many spree-killing madmen and assassins got a middle name? Just about everybody has one but nobody really bothers with it unless they become famous.
The 24/7 coverage of this thing by CNN is a bigger problem than gun laws(which are a bit mad) or video games(of which there are quite a few disgusting ones). Our media showing interest in those pathetic, gun-toting losers who didn't stand a chance in fair competition is what makes this kind of spree killing so common place.
Stop feeding the ego trips of madmen.
That being said the situation of how we deal with mental deficiencies is a bit idiotic. It seems like there is only a choice of limited institutionalization and prison. I do understand why a free society has problems to lock away and treat without consent individuals who need separation from society and treatment against their will. That this even is an issue is what makes our modern society worth protecting. But at least we have to make treatment available. For free. Not for profit. And we have to make provisions to enforce said treatment.
Or we could continue to scrape the perpetrators off the pavements after the fact and blame gun laws and video games for the sprees.
And for dog's sake don't give them a name or a face. Don't compare their body count to other morons. And leave their motivation to academic circles. People who are actually trained to have an informed opinion on that particular blend of madness. Not some CNN talking head who is using this story to sell you tooth paste and women hygiene products. They have been warned about this kind of reporting time and again.
I want you to remember that famous CCTV still of that pair of Columbine spree killers. Imagine them without guns and without a body count. Dressed in black. Adolescents wthout any personal achievement, charisma or any outstanding intersting property. Nt precious beautiful snowflakes by any means. Dressed in black. Wearing trenchcoats in summer. If you remove all that you see two pathetic, personally ridiculous young men/oldish boys. And that's how we should remember them. Or that moron that shot up a cinema thinking he was The Joker? Or that other guy who started shooting in some politicians office? Did they even read The Catcher in The Rye? Were they even literate? Do we care? Piss on their graves once you can be bothered to memorize their names and tend to the victims.
If we are talking about custom software made for a customer it most often is the customer who needs to be kept in line. If you are writing a mass marketed bit of code then you have to reign in marketing. Also one of your worst problems is to communicate real requirements to your devs. Or to get the customer or marketing to be precse about what they want.
A lot of kKickstarter projects are games. Games are highly iterative and derivative. If during your development cycle somebody comes up with a nifty and highly popular mechanic/idea/trick then there is a lot of pressure to also include it into your thing lest it sell like white dog turds.
Upper management has no mechanism but spreadsheets to stem the idiocy that is feature creep. If marketing/the customer tells them, feature X is absolutely needed then it will be thrown onto the already ample pile. Upper management can only call the sky blue and water wet. Otherwise they'd need to educate themselves to contribute to the solution instead of the problem. But they operate at a level where it doesn't make a difference wether they managed production of brown, fizzy sugar water or a computer manufacturer. Or does it?
It is above average of any biggish projects.
Quite a lot of Kickstarter projects seem to be run off a shoestring budget and by people with a day job. Those which aren't are big enough to run into the usual problems.
This is not news. It is just some information.
I'm Jack's total lack of surprise.
Ok, since a corporation has decided to act outside national boundaries, let's treat it like it.
Send bills for using publicly funded infrastructure.
Disallow participating in the political process.
Be bombed at your own expenses
Police will not patrol your front lawn. Better hire your own security.
Don't expect a bailout if going gets tough.
Lawmakers not taking you into account? Tough. You decided to not have any part in this.
All you can get is wanking Ayn Randers giving you a parade with the usual result of a pearl necklace.
Paying your employees is not the same as paying taxes. Your employees paying taxes doesn't magically make your national duties vanish.
While we really don't use 112- as a prefix in the US, I could see how someone might use 911- as a prefix elsewhere.
Yes. We already use it. It's a Porsche. Nice one, too.
Depends on who you ask. Taiwan happily will not provoke China in any further way. What this could lead to would make Tibet look like a Sunday afternoon picknick.
Diplomacy with NK only works via China. Best pick diplomats who can actually negotiate with them.
Actually NK is a bit of an emabrrassment to China.
China had sided with NK in a proxy war in the 50ies making it somewhat their baby. Think of it as their Pinochet regime. China has reigned NK in a couple of times. In fact, they are the only thing that keeps them sorta in control.
The US and China have absolutely no interest of Korea having a go at it anytime soon. The situation is much worse than divided Germany ever was. If China were to collapse we'd have a very ugly war at our hands. Not a peaceful reunification.
I'm afraid NK is suffering from a madness that has to run its course since the cure might be much, much worse. China or no.
I don't understand what the problem is? Shooting satellites into space and keeping them in orbit has been a solved problem for decades.
North Korea should be able to do this. Rocket and satellite tech isn't that secret anymore. It's only a matter of engineering and money. They surely have the engineers and they have shown they can scrape together the money at the expense of their own people.