If anyone gets warm fuzzies from MS or OO help, they need psychiatric attention.:) Both are terrible - especially the search. But Google (or Bing if you must) have tons more help available for MS than for OO. Macro programming in OO can be especially trying.
"Welfare" has moved to social security disability. And you are ignoring Medicare. True, food stamps are down, but that is only because the temporary bump from the bailout expired.
I really detest this separation courts have setup between "private" corporations and the government. The government gives corporations their charter and is the only reason they exist in the first place. So we decide that we can't trust our elected officials with certain responsibilities, and so instead we give those same responsibilities to unelected owners. Oh, and those owners can then take that taxpayer money and funnel it right back to the elected officials in the form of legal "lobbying".
I thought maybe you were on to something until you mentioned cutting off the lower class assistance. Entitlements have never gone anywhere but up. It quite obviously can't go on like that, but even suggesting that discussion gets you labeled a Teabagger.
OED says that hiccup and it's variants came firs, hiccough coming from a mistake:
hiccup (n.) 1570s, hickop, earlier hicket, hyckock, "a word meant to imitate the sound produced by the convulsion of the diaphragm" [Abram Smythe Farmer, "Folk-Etymology," London, 1882]. Cf. Fr. hoquet, Dan. hikke, etc. Modern spelling first recorded 1788; An Old English word for it was ælfsogoða, so called because hiccups were thought to be caused by elves.
hiccough 1620s, variant of hiccup (q.v.) by mistaken association with cough.
It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.
What a coincidence! I've had the same experience with MS Office! Help is by default set to "online" and the search function is so poor that I usually don't bother and instead just Google it.
In all fairness, MS Office is so popular that Google usually has the solution. Why write a decent help system when you have whole sites dedicated to sorting out how to use your software?
No, definitely the moon. Some of the calmest seas you'll see are during hurricane conditions when the ocean is protected from the moon's gravitational forces by thick cloud cover.
I didn't say that unions should be banned - I said they, along with corporations, should be banned from lobbying. I want equal treatment for corporations and for unions.
Sure, but the Greeks and Romans controlled, what, 10% of the world at their peak and were active in conquest... hardly a universal or formal definition of a state? They also were "representative democracy" so long as you were a free, landowning man.
In the history of human civilization, maybe 200 years is a long time. But in the history of a universal and formal definition of a state, let alone representative democracy, 200 years is pretty much the entirety of history.
I meant that there would likely be several hundred independent closed-source implementations. I wasn't implying that SSH would require thousands of developers to implement a single time:)
Despite the slant, I actually came away impressed at the demonstration of efficiency: 2 developers are doing the work of perhaps thousands if the tools weren't open source.
Perhaps you are right and the need for a militia still exists, but we certainly don't have one now. Personally, I think it was a very bold idea at the time, but like some other bold ideas in the constitution it just didn't really pan out the way they thought. They were smart but they weren't infallible.
The point, though, is that every country that has disarmed the citizens has had very bad things happen, much worse that any dangers listed in this thread.
I don't think that is really true. I think there is some selection bias at work. I think what you see is a tyrannical regime disarms its people when it comes into power. Make me dictator tomorrow and I'll have this whole country disarmed in a few weeks. I'll go on TV and tell everyone to drop their gun at the local police station or face summary execution if caught with a firearm. There would be some resistance at first, but a few very public demonstrations of what happens to violators and it would be over. The handguns that Americans are hoarding wouldn't really pose much of a threat to our professional army. The founders knew this, and that's why they didn't want a standing army. Well, we've had that for 200 years now and haven't had a tyrannical government.
Whatever the case history, the fact is that we are currently in a situation where we have some weapons that are allowed and some that are not. I think we can have a grown-up discussion about what this mix should be without reverting to tribal insults.
If you want to talk about constitutional violations, the whole 2nd Amendment is a mess. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was that leaders of the time were very distrustful of a standing professional army, and so preferred the idea of an armed citizenry that could be called up when needed. This whole idea was quickly proven to be unworkable (at least in the opinion of the leaders of the time). So the whole thrust of the 2nd Amendment was discarded perhaps 20 years after it was ratified, when congress started to fund standing armies. Hell, the very first time they tried to call up the militia, it was a disgrace. Even when they tried to keep some federal armories instead of relying on the militia to have their own arms, the British spanked the militias hard in the War of 1812. So now we are in this situation where we have to pretend to be honoring the constitution, but in reality we are just coming up with ways to work around the parts that don't really make any sense.
But when you come at them from the perspective of a smartphone user, they have some pretty nice attributes: much bigger screen, same or lower cost, easier typing, similar or better performance for the price, better battery life, etc.
Agreed. At no point was the Apple II more powerful than the Mac. It also looked pretty much like the Mac: keyboard, mouse, screen. Just because Apple branded their newest computer with a new name did not make it a new product category. Apple even shipped a GUI for the II series.
If life didn't have room for toys, that spot where the flatscreen is hanging would look pretty bare. So would the marina. Toys are awesome, and the main motivation for working.
Screen resolution on the iPad is better than my work computer.
The only valid arguments you are making are ideological, and those can be mitigated by purchasing one of the Android tablets instead. I wouldn't want to program on such a limited device, but I've seen people use them for everything from recording doctor's notes to logging in to remote servers via ssh. They are fantastic for certain types of casual gaming. They are great for viewing videos. And they are superior to PCs for couch surfing. Millions of people edit photos on them. They are fine for personal finance, even something like TurboTax. Stick a keyboard on there and they make fine word processors for the 95% use case.
Again, I'm not suggesting that they can replace most engineers' workstations, but they certainly can be useful tools.
You get some bookmarks for "free". Mainly, date and time are automatically preserved and unless you give all of your files names like "Untitled 1", you get some more context from the name. I'm not really up on the latest in video software, but with stills programs like iPhoto/Aperture even find faces for you.
Anyway, even if the exercise is pointless, it would still take time and effort to decide what can and can't be thrown away. I personally hate doing that enough that I simply don't throw things away. It actually came in handy recently when I found my old PGP private key on an old hard drive that I had simply imaged to my backup server rather than clean out. Sure, there are hundreds of gigabytes - maybe terabytes of crap that I don't need on there. System files, copies of obsolete programs, videos that I hated the first time I watched them, kids shows that my kids are too old for, and of course raw videos of my kids that no one will ever watch again. But I don't care - it's worth a couple hundred bucks every few years not to deal with it. All you can eat online backup further feeds my addiction. If I'm feeling cheap I'll delete some of the low-hanging fruit, but that's about it.
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If anyone gets warm fuzzies from MS or OO help, they need psychiatric attention. :) Both are terrible - especially the search. But Google (or Bing if you must) have tons more help available for MS than for OO. Macro programming in OO can be especially trying.
"Welfare" has moved to social security disability. And you are ignoring Medicare. True, food stamps are down, but that is only because the temporary bump from the bailout expired.
I really detest this separation courts have setup between "private" corporations and the government. The government gives corporations their charter and is the only reason they exist in the first place. So we decide that we can't trust our elected officials with certain responsibilities, and so instead we give those same responsibilities to unelected owners. Oh, and those owners can then take that taxpayer money and funnel it right back to the elected officials in the form of legal "lobbying".
The whole thing is batty.
"Let's build a tracking system that tracks EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME, and keeps the records FOREVER."
And even that is better than, "and only certain people can look at the data, and certain people don't get tracked."
It just sets us up for abuse of power, and for marginal returns on public good.
I thought maybe you were on to something until you mentioned cutting off the lower class assistance. Entitlements have never gone anywhere but up. It quite obviously can't go on like that, but even suggesting that discussion gets you labeled a Teabagger.
Yes, this is why you never see meteorites on cloudy nights - there is no gravity to pull them into the earth's atmosphere.
OED says that hiccup and it's variants came firs, hiccough coming from a mistake:
It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.
What a coincidence! I've had the same experience with MS Office! Help is by default set to "online" and the search function is so poor that I usually don't bother and instead just Google it.
In all fairness, MS Office is so popular that Google usually has the solution. Why write a decent help system when you have whole sites dedicated to sorting out how to use your software?
No, definitely the moon. Some of the calmest seas you'll see are during hurricane conditions when the ocean is protected from the moon's gravitational forces by thick cloud cover.
I didn't say that unions should be banned - I said they, along with corporations, should be banned from lobbying. I want equal treatment for corporations and for unions.
Sure, but the Greeks and Romans controlled, what, 10% of the world at their peak and were active in conquest... hardly a universal or formal definition of a state? They also were "representative democracy" so long as you were a free, landowning man.
Too bad you posted AC. This. Corporate lobbying (and for that matter union lobbying) is poisonous to democracy and leads to just this sort of thing.
[sigh] I meant "maybe 200 years isn't a long time". Use the preview, use the preview.
In the history of human civilization, maybe 200 years is a long time. But in the history of a universal and formal definition of a state, let alone representative democracy, 200 years is pretty much the entirety of history.
Satan was obviously a Perl programmer, and he just shot a $[ = 1; at the beginning.
I meant that there would likely be several hundred independent closed-source implementations. I wasn't implying that SSH would require thousands of developers to implement a single time :)
Despite the slant, I actually came away impressed at the demonstration of efficiency: 2 developers are doing the work of perhaps thousands if the tools weren't open source.
Perhaps you are right and the need for a militia still exists, but we certainly don't have one now. Personally, I think it was a very bold idea at the time, but like some other bold ideas in the constitution it just didn't really pan out the way they thought. They were smart but they weren't infallible.
The point, though, is that every country that has disarmed the citizens has had very bad things happen, much worse that any dangers listed in this thread.
I don't think that is really true. I think there is some selection bias at work. I think what you see is a tyrannical regime disarms its people when it comes into power. Make me dictator tomorrow and I'll have this whole country disarmed in a few weeks. I'll go on TV and tell everyone to drop their gun at the local police station or face summary execution if caught with a firearm. There would be some resistance at first, but a few very public demonstrations of what happens to violators and it would be over. The handguns that Americans are hoarding wouldn't really pose much of a threat to our professional army. The founders knew this, and that's why they didn't want a standing army. Well, we've had that for 200 years now and haven't had a tyrannical government.
But I don't think anyone anywhere is making a claim that iPads can replace PCs completely.
Whatever the case history, the fact is that we are currently in a situation where we have some weapons that are allowed and some that are not. I think we can have a grown-up discussion about what this mix should be without reverting to tribal insults.
If you want to talk about constitutional violations, the whole 2nd Amendment is a mess. The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was that leaders of the time were very distrustful of a standing professional army, and so preferred the idea of an armed citizenry that could be called up when needed. This whole idea was quickly proven to be unworkable (at least in the opinion of the leaders of the time). So the whole thrust of the 2nd Amendment was discarded perhaps 20 years after it was ratified, when congress started to fund standing armies. Hell, the very first time they tried to call up the militia, it was a disgrace. Even when they tried to keep some federal armories instead of relying on the militia to have their own arms, the British spanked the militias hard in the War of 1812. So now we are in this situation where we have to pretend to be honoring the constitution, but in reality we are just coming up with ways to work around the parts that don't really make any sense.
But when you come at them from the perspective of a smartphone user, they have some pretty nice attributes: much bigger screen, same or lower cost, easier typing, similar or better performance for the price, better battery life, etc.
Agreed. At no point was the Apple II more powerful than the Mac. It also looked pretty much like the Mac: keyboard, mouse, screen. Just because Apple branded their newest computer with a new name did not make it a new product category. Apple even shipped a GUI for the II series.
If life didn't have room for toys, that spot where the flatscreen is hanging would look pretty bare. So would the marina. Toys are awesome, and the main motivation for working.
Screen resolution on the iPad is better than my work computer.
The only valid arguments you are making are ideological, and those can be mitigated by purchasing one of the Android tablets instead. I wouldn't want to program on such a limited device, but I've seen people use them for everything from recording doctor's notes to logging in to remote servers via ssh. They are fantastic for certain types of casual gaming. They are great for viewing videos. And they are superior to PCs for couch surfing. Millions of people edit photos on them. They are fine for personal finance, even something like TurboTax. Stick a keyboard on there and they make fine word processors for the 95% use case.
Again, I'm not suggesting that they can replace most engineers' workstations, but they certainly can be useful tools.
You get some bookmarks for "free". Mainly, date and time are automatically preserved and unless you give all of your files names like "Untitled 1", you get some more context from the name. I'm not really up on the latest in video software, but with stills programs like iPhoto/Aperture even find faces for you.
Anyway, even if the exercise is pointless, it would still take time and effort to decide what can and can't be thrown away. I personally hate doing that enough that I simply don't throw things away. It actually came in handy recently when I found my old PGP private key on an old hard drive that I had simply imaged to my backup server rather than clean out. Sure, there are hundreds of gigabytes - maybe terabytes of crap that I don't need on there. System files, copies of obsolete programs, videos that I hated the first time I watched them, kids shows that my kids are too old for, and of course raw videos of my kids that no one will ever watch again. But I don't care - it's worth a couple hundred bucks every few years not to deal with it. All you can eat online backup further feeds my addiction. If I'm feeling cheap I'll delete some of the low-hanging fruit, but that's about it.