Actually I meant the assumption that all users are idiots (usually by 'user interface experts') is what leads to guis/tools that are largely useless and inflexible. they're pretty enough I suppose, but that's small consolation when the new version of a program is actually less functional than the old one, which is a common experience nowadays.
where the carbon comes from is largely a non issue here. burning all that carbon to extract energy from it pumps it into the environment, which is the primary complaint with it..
even if the power plants were as efficient, the TRANSPORT is where the problem lies. oil or not, the context of this discussion was that carbon based fuel sources are damaging the environment.
Yes..and how long does it take to switch over? if we started today, it would be what? 5-10 years to build plants assuming they were funded, designed, insured (this is a big one), constructed in parallel, and with a massive country-wide push. this is a best case scenario which will never happen.. in reality it'll take half a century or more to do something like this as, like you suggest, it has to happen in stages. meanwhile, all the marketing and hype surrounding electrics will simply result in them having their tailpipes extrapolated back through a vastly less efficient delivery system (energy wise) compared with petroleum shipping and storage, causing us to burn more carbon per car than we were doing before, with lower performance and range as well.
people don't do certain things with electricity that they could in theory because of cost. it's easy to generate electricity, but hard to store it, which is key here. bottom line: if we're gonna burn the carbon anyway, lets use it as efficiently as possible until we find other systems.. one tank of gasoline has immense amounts of energy..to get that equivalent in batteries, the car would have to weigh twice what it does now. (no these are not calculated figures, they are meant to make a point). to get that equivalent charge INTO those batteries as charge will take a lot more carbon than simply burning the carbon onsite as needed.
I don't have a problem with being 'green', but a lot of the hippie-types involved will not see reason.. they don't like nuclear either..they scream chernobyl every time someone suggests it.
it's still petroleum..and from a green standpoint it still pumps carbon into the environment. this is the primary green activist reason.. the whole thing about foreign dependence is a stab at convincing americuh-fuk-yah style right wingers of the validity of their argument.. a nice fallacy-stack, but that is the mentality behind it.
Yes, because that's what the greens need to do. Listen to biased liars like you trying to sabotage the movement for what they "should" do. Tactics like that work great and gave us the World Class healthcare bill we now live under. Always give more attention to the opposing side than your supporters.
where did I lie? I stated the truth.. running electric cars on a petroleum powered electric grid is even worse for the environment than the status quo.. maybe we should convert to nuclear first, then worry about electric cars? have you considered the costs of charging all these vehicles? there's a reason people don't use electric heat either.
uhh until we're not burning petroleum to generate electricity, using electric cars INCREASES our dependence due to their inefficiency.
gasoline car pump out of ground -> ship -> crack/process -> ship to station / pump into tank -> burn -> kinetic energy.
electric car pump out of ground -> ship -> crack/process -> ship to power plant -> burn -> phase change water -> kinetic energy -> electrical energy AC -> multiple step up and step down transformers -> AC to DC and voltage stepdown conversion -> chemical change in battery -> second chemical change -> electricity -> kinetic energy.
The greens need to accept something like ubiquitous nuclear energy before electric cars become feasible and more environmentally friendly than ICE based cars.
this is the mentality that's breeding all these inane GUIs nowadays.. sorry but good software design isn't a race to the bottom..it's about designing good tools. good tools have learning curves.
requisite car analogy: a single gear transmission is easier to drive than a 5speed, and it's peppy, but you aren't getting much over 30mph with it...
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
I fail to see how this simple realization requires intellectual abilities above the norm.. it's not 'that' amazing a concept.
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
you know who else was good at this? L Ron Hubbard. It also speaks volumes about the intellectual abilities (reason, self awareness, critical thinking) for these groups of people.
Woz without Jobs would have been happy to stay in his garage and solder. Linus Torvalds would probably still have been inspired to create an open-source OS for geeks to play with and build upon. Bill Gates would have gone ahead and put business machines on the desks of every cubicle drone in the corporate world. But without Steve Jobs, personal computers would never have become personal.
personal computer means a computer a single person uses for whatever he needs it for. windows machines are no more or less personal than apple machines. why should we bow to jobs but then think negatively of these others? woz and the other engineers were the ones designing apple's stuff. they deserve at least as much praise.
Much of Slashdot hates him for this, of course. They hate the lack of choice, the warm and fuzzy design, the drool-proof UI and the high prices. But what they really hate is that he took this wonderful world of powerful technology, a world where they are kings, and turned the keys over to the unwashed masses of housewives, schoolkids, artists, and, yes, hipsters.
..causing a dumbing down of the potential of these devices so that said open-mouth droolers can have some music to flap their harelips to..meanwhile they choose to miss out on the potential capability they could tap if the device would allow them to.. try selling a car with a single gear transmission equivalent to first gear in most cars.. it'd be peppy and easy to drive but you can't get much over 30 with it.
vendors have always made stuff that 'does what we want.' The differences lie in how the product is pitched, how the user is 'allowed' to make use of said features, and how intrinsically a continued relationship with the vendor is tied to said functionality..
I haven't found a single portable player that 'requires' editing of text files and such, nor have I had a problem ripping cds.. Perhaps the shitty laptop dvd drives apple uses in their desktops do a bad job reading audio at speed? At least other platforms offer a choice.. copying over a directory shouldn't be a process..and it's not...except with itunes. that error prone process of 'syncing' music every time is a pain in the ass, esp when the failure requires a reset of the whole device...and please spare me the 'that never happens to me and my friends' routine. it does happen...to lots of people. apple really does fail at KISS because it hides complexity behind a simplistic looking facade that fails when circumstances require more access to that complexity than it provides and/or there's a bug in that wondrous interface.
argumentum ad populum. argumentum ad opes.
you fucking hipster. keep stroking that androgynous mound between your legs.
the problem with your date rape example is that the definition of it keeps expanding...if you were to believe an extrapolation (no I'm not saying you should necessarily), by 2030, 'date rape' will be asking a girl to a date, and her feeling 'uncomfortable.' to parallel your other examples of kids being kids, it's about time the girls started taking some of the responsibility for the outcome of the evening... ie saying 'no' halfway through drunken intercourse should be thrown out of court.
..and just because someone is thin skinned doesn't mean everyone else should silence themselves down to that persons' unrealistic expectations... rewarding ultrasensitivity is just as bad for society as rewarding chronic abuse. it cramps expression, causing it to out in more insidious ways which continue to harm the target. it also gives the police state groupies another bogey man to justify even more draconian trampling of speech and prevents the target from learning to deal with adversity.
what these politicians are doing is selectively choosing what law is 'axiomatic' (what supports their political bias) and what isn't. they think that shielding peoples' feelings from reality is more important than protecting their rights.
this report you linked to is full of generalities like 'emotional distress' and it places the choices of the victim (ie to hurt himself or commit suicide) on the person who sent the supposedly 'offensive' message. that's just fucked up. this is the very antithesis of personal responsibility. how the 'offender' is supposed to 'reasonably know' that such comment is 'hurtful' is beyond me. you can't legislate in such away to guarantee that no one ever gets their feelings hurt...even with a precrime style police state.
this bill will just encourage schools to write policies that legally indemnifies it from parental lawsuits...ie more 'zero tolerance' policy that dictates student behaviors from a very subjective list of behaviors that have multiple contexts, many of which the older generations (teachers/administration) aren't aware of.
ah the intelligent people who make the same broad cultural insinuations about said 'anti-intellectuals' (people who don't agree with their selectively biased quackery), while wearing said quackery as chips on their shoulders and clamoring for 'hate speech' style laws to shield them from criticism.
the left biased intelligentsia coming out of today's universities needs to learn that facts (all of them) and the resulting truth matters more than what they feel about it. true rapport doesn't come from shielding the truth whenever it hurts someone's feelings...whether it's a parent talking to a tweenager or a bunch of yale graduate politicians writing legislation. in fact, people who suffer selection bias based on feelings should not be considered especially intelligent or of good character.
initially there'd be some people doing that, but the novelty would wear off and they'd show up in whatever they're comfortable in...and yes I can complain. I refuse to work for places that make me dress up in some idiotic costume because some overpaid marketer wants to push an 'image.' This goes well beyond marketing and into things like 'extreme grooming.' these days people get hit for having 5oclock shadows.
Some places really abuse the dress code rules as an excuse to push their stylistic expectations on you. The argument could be made that outside of safety concerns, dictating dress is discriminatory because it does not have relevance to skillsets or abilities... People who think like this tend to believe the converse, that dictating dress will somehow 'reform' employee mindsets... it doesn't. It breeds contempt.
ahh yes.. you're the geezer stereotype that clings to every new thing that comes along without any balance or perspective for critical analysis because he's so desperately trying to stay socially relevant.
the whole ipad on pc trend is shit..plain and simple.
I don't see anyone claiming they're in a vacuum here. you proceeded from a false assumption so you could launch a tirade at a strawman - the contextually driven implication being that resistance to being tracked by car = irrational idiot. Also, you can make all those arguments you listed for just about anything.. Apparently the only way to keep people like yourself happy is to preemptively lock everyone into concrete dorms from cradle to grave so that no one ever does anything self-serving that somehow 'harms' the 'common good.' I'm sorry, but that devalues the point of life to 'not worth living' status in my book. Just to keep you on track, no I never once implied I'm an anarchist, though if society did embrace anarchism and remained stable, it would be a testament to true progress of humanity.. we would've completely outgrown the baby sitter you so dearly cling to.
Your complaints about extremists expose your own extremism. Cars ARE personal possessions (for argument sake I'll assume you're a US resident like me), and they should be considering how much they cost to buy and operate (a lot of that being artificially imposed by the state under the guise of environmental impact, yet most of the money does not go to recoup environmental damage). I'm sorry you are deluded about where your tax dollars go.. it would be nice if they actually went towards the things they were supposed to fund, and those agencies receiving the money actually did their jobs like their continued salaries depended on it, but it's just not true...anywhere in the world.
I have no ulterior motive other than to protect myself from public and private organizations that have known track records for collecting information about people and placing it in warchests for future conflicts.
Not all surrender of privacy and anonymity amounts to being treated like a criminal; not all systems will inevitably and automatically be used in most seditious, conspiracy-oriented ways.
Never said this.. However, that's the current trend nowadays. This is accelerating due to nonlinear increases in technical capability over time. Do you really want law enforced by machine augmented bureaucracies?
The "complete truth" you want me to speak is not an objective, independent truth; it's a personal, hypothetical fear of yours, and every bit as much of an "agenda" as what I'm talking about.
a lot more objective evidence supports mine than it does yours. your hypothetical fear of people doing terrible things should they have some power in their personal lives besides choosing which fast food restaurant they go to before/after work, and what corporate-whitewashed dreck to watch on tv when they get home is what concerns me. people like you are the reason authoritarian socialism will become the next ideology of tyranny.
except property rights aren't absolute in this era of pervasive policing... try shooting someone who invades your home.. it isn't a foregone conclusion that you won't join him in prison.... unless of course you're a wealthy businessman who owns whole chains of malls and outlets throughout the country whose government you have in your pocket. the end result is that such policing hurts the little people....just another example of business and government cooperating to ensure your trip-up at some point so that they (one, the other, or both) may profit financially or politically.
so when some entity uses said information about your car to back you into a corner, you're a-ok with that?
you're cherry picking statistics which is a red flag indicator for someone who'd rather push his favorite social agenda than speak the complete truth. there are LOTS of things which are 'extremely expensive in multiple ways, for the individual, the society, and the human race at large.' that doesn't justify being treated like criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I meant the assumption that all users are idiots (usually by 'user interface experts') is what leads to guis/tools that are largely useless and inflexible. they're pretty enough I suppose, but that's small consolation when the new version of a program is actually less functional than the old one, which is a common experience nowadays.
where the carbon comes from is largely a non issue here. burning all that carbon to extract energy from it pumps it into the environment, which is the primary complaint with it..
even if the power plants were as efficient, the TRANSPORT is where the problem lies. oil or not, the context of this discussion was that carbon based fuel sources are damaging the environment.
Yes..and how long does it take to switch over? if we started today, it would be what? 5-10 years to build plants assuming they were funded, designed, insured (this is a big one), constructed in parallel, and with a massive country-wide push. this is a best case scenario which will never happen.. in reality it'll take half a century or more to do something like this as, like you suggest, it has to happen in stages. meanwhile, all the marketing and hype surrounding electrics will simply result in them having their tailpipes extrapolated back through a vastly less efficient delivery system (energy wise) compared with petroleum shipping and storage, causing us to burn more carbon per car than we were doing before, with lower performance and range as well.
people don't do certain things with electricity that they could in theory because of cost. it's easy to generate electricity, but hard to store it, which is key here. bottom line: if we're gonna burn the carbon anyway, lets use it as efficiently as possible until we find other systems.. one tank of gasoline has immense amounts of energy..to get that equivalent in batteries, the car would have to weigh twice what it does now. (no these are not calculated figures, they are meant to make a point). to get that equivalent charge INTO those batteries as charge will take a lot more carbon than simply burning the carbon onsite as needed.
I don't have a problem with being 'green', but a lot of the hippie-types involved will not see reason.. they don't like nuclear either. .they scream chernobyl every time someone suggests it.
it's still petroleum..and from a green standpoint it still pumps carbon into the environment. this is the primary green activist reason.. the whole thing about foreign dependence is a stab at convincing americuh-fuk-yah style right wingers of the validity of their argument.. a nice fallacy-stack, but that is the mentality behind it.
Yes, because that's what the greens need to do. Listen to biased liars like you trying to sabotage the movement for what they "should" do. Tactics like that work great and gave us the World Class healthcare bill we now live under. Always give more attention to the opposing side than your supporters.
where did I lie? I stated the truth.. running electric cars on a petroleum powered electric grid is even worse for the environment than the status quo.. maybe we should convert to nuclear first, then worry about electric cars? have you considered the costs of charging all these vehicles? there's a reason people don't use electric heat either.
uhh until we're not burning petroleum to generate electricity, using electric cars INCREASES our dependence due to their inefficiency.
gasoline car
pump out of ground -> ship -> crack/process -> ship to station / pump into tank -> burn -> kinetic energy.
electric car
pump out of ground -> ship -> crack/process -> ship to power plant -> burn -> phase change water -> kinetic energy -> electrical energy AC -> multiple step up and step down transformers -> AC to DC and voltage stepdown conversion -> chemical change in battery -> second chemical change -> electricity -> kinetic energy.
The greens need to accept something like ubiquitous nuclear energy before electric cars become feasible and more environmentally friendly than ICE based cars.
this is the mentality that's breeding all these inane GUIs nowadays.. sorry but good software design isn't a race to the bottom..it's about designing good tools. good tools have learning curves.
requisite car analogy: a single gear transmission is easier to drive than a 5speed, and it's peppy, but you aren't getting much over 30mph with it...
judge based on correctness, not based on title.
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
I fail to see how this simple realization requires intellectual abilities above the norm.. it's not 'that' amazing a concept.
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
you know who else was good at this? L Ron Hubbard. It also speaks volumes about the intellectual abilities (reason, self awareness, critical thinking) for these groups of people.
Woz without Jobs would have been happy to stay in his garage and solder. Linus Torvalds would probably still have been inspired to create an open-source OS for geeks to play with and build upon. Bill Gates would have gone ahead and put business machines on the desks of every cubicle drone in the corporate world. But without Steve Jobs, personal computers would never have become personal.
personal computer means a computer a single person uses for whatever he needs it for. windows machines are no more or less personal than apple machines. why should we bow to jobs but then think negatively of these others? woz and the other engineers were the ones designing apple's stuff. they deserve at least as much praise.
Much of Slashdot hates him for this, of course. They hate the lack of choice, the warm and fuzzy design, the drool-proof UI and the high prices. But what they really hate is that he took this wonderful world of powerful technology, a world where they are kings, and turned the keys over to the unwashed masses of housewives, schoolkids, artists, and, yes, hipsters.
..causing a dumbing down of the potential of these devices so that said open-mouth droolers can have some music to flap their harelips to..meanwhile they choose to miss out on the potential capability they could tap if the device would allow them to.. try selling a car with a single gear transmission equivalent to first gear in most cars.. it'd be peppy and easy to drive but you can't get much over 30 with it.
vendors have always made stuff that 'does what we want.' The differences lie in how the product is pitched, how the user is 'allowed' to make use of said features, and how intrinsically a continued relationship with the vendor is tied to said functionality..
I haven't found a single portable player that 'requires' editing of text files and such, nor have I had a problem ripping cds.. Perhaps the shitty laptop dvd drives apple uses in their desktops do a bad job reading audio at speed? At least other platforms offer a choice.. copying over a directory shouldn't be a process..and it's not...except with itunes. that error prone process of 'syncing' music every time is a pain in the ass, esp when the failure requires a reset of the whole device. ..and please spare me the 'that never happens to me and my friends' routine. it does happen...to lots of people. apple really does fail at KISS because it hides complexity behind a simplistic looking facade that fails when circumstances require more access to that complexity than it provides and/or there's a bug in that wondrous interface.
argumentum ad populum. argumentum ad opes.
you fucking hipster. keep stroking that androgynous mound between your legs.
can you explain the cause effect here? how can this behavior cause an illness like his? ..and how are you sure it is true in his case?
can't vote the idiots out of a system that only allows idiots to be voted in.
the problem with your date rape example is that the definition of it keeps expanding...if you were to believe an extrapolation (no I'm not saying you should necessarily), by 2030, 'date rape' will be asking a girl to a date, and her feeling 'uncomfortable.' to parallel your other examples of kids being kids, it's about time the girls started taking some of the responsibility for the outcome of the evening... ie saying 'no' halfway through drunken intercourse should be thrown out of court.
..and just because someone is thin skinned doesn't mean everyone else should silence themselves down to that persons' unrealistic expectations... rewarding ultrasensitivity is just as bad for society as rewarding chronic abuse. it cramps expression, causing it to out in more insidious ways which continue to harm the target. it also gives the police state groupies another bogey man to justify even more draconian trampling of speech and prevents the target from learning to deal with adversity.
what these politicians are doing is selectively choosing what law is 'axiomatic' (what supports their political bias) and what isn't. they think that shielding peoples' feelings from reality is more important than protecting their rights.
this report you linked to is full of generalities like 'emotional distress' and it places the choices of the victim (ie to hurt himself or commit suicide) on the person who sent the supposedly 'offensive' message. that's just fucked up. this is the very antithesis of personal responsibility. how the 'offender' is supposed to 'reasonably know' that such comment is 'hurtful' is beyond me. you can't legislate in such away to guarantee that no one ever gets their feelings hurt...even with a precrime style police state.
this bill will just encourage schools to write policies that legally indemnifies it from parental lawsuits...ie more 'zero tolerance' policy that dictates student behaviors from a very subjective list of behaviors that have multiple contexts, many of which the older generations (teachers /administration) aren't aware of.
and of course the democrats voted 'no', right? ..and obama vetoed it when it came up for renewal...oh wait no that didn't happen.
ah the intelligent people who make the same broad cultural insinuations about said 'anti-intellectuals' (people who don't agree with their selectively biased quackery), while wearing said quackery as chips on their shoulders and clamoring for 'hate speech' style laws to shield them from criticism.
the left biased intelligentsia coming out of today's universities needs to learn that facts (all of them) and the resulting truth matters more than what they feel about it. true rapport doesn't come from shielding the truth whenever it hurts someone's feelings...whether it's a parent talking to a tweenager or a bunch of yale graduate politicians writing legislation. in fact, people who suffer selection bias based on feelings should not be considered especially intelligent or of good character.
initially there'd be some people doing that, but the novelty would wear off and they'd show up in whatever they're comfortable in...and yes I can complain. I refuse to work for places that make me dress up in some idiotic costume because some overpaid marketer wants to push an 'image.' This goes well beyond marketing and into things like 'extreme grooming.' these days people get hit for having 5oclock shadows.
In terms of government, anything that can be used to wield power is 'very harmful' and must be controlled by the state.
Some places really abuse the dress code rules as an excuse to push their stylistic expectations on you. The argument could be made that outside of safety concerns, dictating dress is discriminatory because it does not have relevance to skillsets or abilities... People who think like this tend to believe the converse, that dictating dress will somehow 'reform' employee mindsets... it doesn't. It breeds contempt.
ahh yes.. you're the geezer stereotype that clings to every new thing that comes along without any balance or perspective for critical analysis because he's so desperately trying to stay socially relevant.
the whole ipad on pc trend is shit..plain and simple.
I don't see anyone claiming they're in a vacuum here. you proceeded from a false assumption so you could launch a tirade at a strawman - the contextually driven implication being that resistance to being tracked by car = irrational idiot. Also, you can make all those arguments you listed for just about anything.. Apparently the only way to keep people like yourself happy is to preemptively lock everyone into concrete dorms from cradle to grave so that no one ever does anything self-serving that somehow 'harms' the 'common good.' I'm sorry, but that devalues the point of life to 'not worth living' status in my book. Just to keep you on track, no I never once implied I'm an anarchist, though if society did embrace anarchism and remained stable, it would be a testament to true progress of humanity.. we would've completely outgrown the baby sitter you so dearly cling to.
Your complaints about extremists expose your own extremism. Cars ARE personal possessions (for argument sake I'll assume you're a US resident like me), and they should be considering how much they cost to buy and operate (a lot of that being artificially imposed by the state under the guise of environmental impact, yet most of the money does not go to recoup environmental damage). I'm sorry you are deluded about where your tax dollars go.. it would be nice if they actually went towards the things they were supposed to fund, and those agencies receiving the money actually did their jobs like their continued salaries depended on it, but it's just not true...anywhere in the world.
I have no ulterior motive other than to protect myself from public and private organizations that have known track records for collecting information about people and placing it in warchests for future conflicts.
Not all surrender of privacy and anonymity amounts to being treated like a criminal; not all systems will inevitably and automatically be used in most seditious, conspiracy-oriented ways.
Never said this.. However, that's the current trend nowadays. This is accelerating due to nonlinear increases in technical capability over time. Do you really want law enforced by machine augmented bureaucracies?
The "complete truth" you want me to speak is not an objective, independent truth; it's a personal, hypothetical fear of yours, and every bit as much of an "agenda" as what I'm talking about.
a lot more objective evidence supports mine than it does yours. your hypothetical fear of people doing terrible things should they have some power in their personal lives besides choosing which fast food restaurant they go to before/after work, and what corporate-whitewashed dreck to watch on tv when they get home is what concerns me. people like you are the reason authoritarian socialism will become the next ideology of tyranny.
except property rights aren't absolute in this era of pervasive policing... try shooting someone who invades your home.. it isn't a foregone conclusion that you won't join him in prison.... unless of course you're a wealthy businessman who owns whole chains of malls and outlets throughout the country whose government you have in your pocket. the end result is that such policing hurts the little people. ...just another example of business and government cooperating to ensure your trip-up at some point so that they (one, the other, or both) may profit financially or politically.
that convenience > abuse potential attitude will end up enslaving us all, a little bit at a time..
so when some entity uses said information about your car to back you into a corner, you're a-ok with that?
you're cherry picking statistics which is a red flag indicator for someone who'd rather push his favorite social agenda than speak the complete truth. there are LOTS of things which are 'extremely expensive in multiple ways, for the individual, the society, and the human race at large.' that doesn't justify being treated like criminals.