I rather think writing to my senator did help make a difference on the PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA). One of my senators, Cornyn, sponsored PIPA. When Wikipedia went dark, I emailed his office, blaming the outage squarely on SOPA and PIPA. I was surprised and pleased when I heard he backed away, saying it needed more study. Apparently so many people wrote about the issue that he felt it was safer to disappoint his backers than tempt the wrath of that many people.
Checking on this, it seems he even tried to rewrite history, suggesting that he opposed PIPA all along. At any rate, on the Wikipedia entry about SOPA and PIPA, he's listed as "opposed" and his former position in support is not mentioned. There's something ironic about that.
This punishment is typical of the fearful reaction the powerful and established have to the new. They know very well that new things can disrupt existing power structures. They persuade themselves that the status quo is good and must be defended vigorously. They practically go on a holy crusade against evil, and this justifies the ridiculously harsh punishments. There's hardly any group worse than a pack of powerful idiots thinking they've been wronged and getting all worked up with righteous wrath.
More should be done to check this kind of extremity. But what?
I don't buy this notion of forcing the accused to pay $183,000 because that's what the victim spent on security consultation. Apart from the thought that the accused shouldn't be responsible for actions not under his control, how is anyone to know if that's a fair price, and hasn't been padded and run up? And, shouldn't they have spent some money anyway on security? If a burglar enters a home that doesn't have locks, should he have to pay for locks and a lifetime of security system monitoring at $30/month?
I don't see that a DoS attack is a matter for the law at all. Maybe it should be treated as a technical issue, something that can be resolved with a few tweaks to the server configurations of the targets, or maybe improvements to Internet Protocol. Also, people have a right to protest, and a right to gather. Maybe a DDoS could be viewed as a form of gathering.
There's a biomechanical difference in play. Women have wider hips, presumably so they can better bear children with big heads. Or perhaps it's part of the adaptations necessary for a fully upright walking gait, or both and more. This comes with a compromise. Women's running stride is not as efficient.
Another curious difference between the sexes is the elbow joint. Women can bend their arms further back than men. It may be that women can hold and carry items for longer times. Maybe it's to better hold babies to breasts. Men, on the other hand, are better at throwing objects, Women use a side arm throwing motion, men tend to overhand. If something not directly related to male and female reproductive roles can differentiate, something like elbow joints, why not the parts of brains not directly involved with sex? No reason I can think of. And it seems brains may have a differentiation to go with the elbow joints. Men are better at hitting distant targets with thrown objects, because men's brains are better wired to compute the spatial relationships necessary to accurately target. This comes with some price, perhaps greater energy requirements for the male brain, or deficient thinking abilities in other areas. something. If there was no price, if it was free, women would be just as good at throwing. At any rate, a consequence of this could be that men really are slightly better at the sort of abstract thinking that CS requires.
And a lot of us are victims. When faced with a problem in which there a very few good choices and a thousand bad ones, with marketing doing its utmost to bury the good ones, even smart people sometimes miss. Also, do not discount the power of display. People do the most crazy things to get attention. If it works, and doesn't kill them or destroy the future, was it dumb?
I'll give you some examples.
I used to drink soft drinks. Seeing that the vending machine was twice as expensive as a good deal on a six pack at the grocery, I got a small cube refrigerator. Saved several times the cost of the fridge. And the grocery had a larger selection than the vending machines. Good thinking, maybe? At the time, I thought so, and was pleased I'd outfoxed the evil vending machine operators. But, not the best. Now I drink water. Tap water, not bottled. No juice either. I still like soft drinks and juice, but now I am no longer willing to pay the price-- health, more than money. I do not take soft drinks even when they are free. I am saving far more than that cute little fridge idea saved me, and being healthier. I am amazed at how well brainwashing works on matters like this. Seems like it shouldn't take any great intelligence to see that soft drinks are a terrible waste of money, but the brainwashing worked on me for years. Amazingly, others still occasionally push me on this matter, accusing me of being cheap, as if being frugal is bad. Why?? Is it that I'm making them look bad? Misery loves company? Enjoy your soft drinks. I'm not stopping anyone.
Another example is lawn care. You can have a "beautiful" (meaning, monocultured) lawn if you spend gobs of money and/or time fertilizing, watering, weeding, spraying, raking leaves, and mowing. Very profitable for the lawn care industry, not so good for the home owner. to say nothing of the environment. Why are we so hung up on lawns, even to the point of many cities having made it illegal to have a natural lawn? It's an infraction to let the grass get too high! If not, some neighbors will be quick to let you know what a lazy, cheap loser you are if you don't mow often enough. Judged by your lawn. Cities and corporations are guilty of this same lawn care mania. Can't have the vegetation impeding drivers' view of the road, as if constant mowing is the only way to deal with that problem.
Then there's feminine beauty. The latest craze, so I understand, is shaving off all body hair, except the top where if you are bald you should add hair. What for?? Legs was bad enough, but now shaving even the pubic hair is the in thing to do. I can only think this is an appeal to childhood. Innocently wanting to remember the good old days when life was easier with parents around to take care of things, or perhaps it's also to appeal more to those with pedophilic tendencies. Whatever, it sells more shavers and creams, and the like. On a related note, honest sweat and dirt is now socially unacceptable, and we must cover that up with deodorants, daily showers, etc. Before indoor plumbing, most people did not take a bath every day. That was done once a week, and everyone used the same water, with the baby going last. Was way too much effort to do it every day. Now there is a suspicion that our desire to be clean, clean, clean has led us astray, and may be responsible for the rise in allergies.
There are plenty more. Do you use a clothes dryer, instead of a line or a rack? Buy cars new, instead of used? Try to keep the house at 75F all year? (Are you aware that it is healthier to let the temperature vary a bit with the seasons?) Pay interest on credit card debt, instead of paying it off in full every month? Pay for cable TV? Bought a class ring or directory? Seen a doctor for a mere cold? Bought extreme health care for an elderly pet, something like cancer treatment that was much more than a quick and easy removal of a skin tumor, or hip surgery? If you've ever done any of those, or other similar things, fallen for any
Gotta love how these recruiters and employers screen so badly and allow office politics, greed, and silly prejudices to blind them to what's right in front of their noses. This insistence on "top" talent is one of the prejudices.
Then, as you say, they drive talent away with ridiculously harsh and thoughtless demands, threats, pushing, and bullying.
They could find talent, if they wanted to. They're good at coming up with excuses why they can't do it. They can't be bothered to train people either, not even allow 2 measly weeks for self training, no, they demand that developers "hit the ground running". Their complaint that schools aren't teaching the skills they need, as if the skills they think they need now will still be hot 5 years down the road, totally misses the point that education isn't about memorizing the specialized knowledge needed for any one or two petty little skills, it's about learning how to think and study so one can solve problems and acquire skills outside the classroom, without a teacher holding one's hand. "Hit the ground running" is a philosophy better suited to indentured servitude and menial labor, not careers in technology and science.
Play the odds. Participate, and don't sweat about it.
You have a greater chance of being killed in an auto accident, or struck by lightning, than ever being hit with one of those infamous copyright shakedown notices. They've abused the John Doe suit process too often, as well as several other legal avenues, and the courts have gotten tired of that. There's growing recognition that piracy is not something the law can stop, and that trying to do so is a waste of the public's money and time. There are even whispers that piracy shouldn't be considered a crime, and realization that it is certainly not theft and that it was an error to try to frame copying as a form of theft or go along with that thinking when others tried to do so. Many of us have realized for some time that the real problem is not the entire body public, but rather their business model, and that there are other ways to profit from artistic endeavor It's not our fault that they refuse to even acknowledge that these other ways exist and can work.
They are cowardly terrorists anyway. They are less likely to pick on you if you belong to a demographic that is more likely or able to fight back, that is, you aren't a helpless old lady or a teenage delinquent from a broken household. They've been trying to score easy wins by carefully picking their targets, then using these wins in their campaign of terror, to "send a message". We should continue to send back the message that we won't be scared into not sharing.
Scheme has a number of problems. A big one can be summed up with this backronym: Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses. The language could have really used a way to consolidate lots of closing parentheses.
The prefix notation is another problem. Or, rather, that LISP uses prefix, and grade school math is taught in infix.
Recursion is yet another problem. Children are going to have a very hard time grasping recursion, rather than using explicit loop constructs such as "for next" and "while".
The I/O of many languages tends towards the Zen like, and LISP is worse than average on that. Just not well connected to system calls for things like getting mouse positions from the GUI.
LISP simply isn't procedural and linear enough. Sequential parts of a LISP program can be separated by large stretches of details, things like lambda functions, monster eval calls, and ugly list manipulation routines full of the obscurely named "car" and "cdr" functions.
I tried introducing my nieces to a bit of programming. The older was about 7 when I tried it, and she hated it. The younger took her sister's lead and wouldn't even try it. Settled on SVG with reservations, thinking that drawing pretty pictures that a browser can display might interest them. Hoped SVG might be a little like LOGO in a browser.
A big part of the problem was unnecessary complexity. Doesn't seem like any language does well on that. C or Pascal? Can't just dive in to those. Have to have some boilerplate (the "int main() {... return 0; }" stuff), and a bit of command line training to run the compiler (make is right out) and the executable, or some training to use an integrated environment. A "scripting" language like Perl does better on the boilerplate, but still need to learn extra stuff to get going.
One of the problems with SVG is the underlying XML syntax. XML is horrible. It's not just verbose, but verbose in a redundant, cluttered way. Maybe syntax highlighting for XML like languages should set the names of closing tags to white on white or black on black, anything to reduce eye clutter. SVG isn't a true programming language anyway, have to at the least drag in JavaScript for that. Then you're into the whole mode mess, very much the same sort of thing with C and makefiles, and the C preprocessing directives.
Cleaner, simpler syntax might not have been enough to make the difference. The girls are, I think, a bit prejudiced against the nerdy. But it would have helped.
You can't even be sure reputable sites won't be gamed, and fall for it. And not just astroturfing either. Been a while since I've seen the old switcheroo, but that's still done. Manufacturers aren't above lying on occasion.
You think you're getting a great product, but what you didn't know was that the manufacturer totally revised it and cheapened quality everywhere. I'm thinking especially of the venerable Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Revision 4 was a great router with a great reputation. When I bought one, unknown to me was that Linksys had just rolled out revision 5 with totally changed insides. They replaced Linux with VXWorks, and cut the RAM in half. It was total crap, and it was so different it should have been given a different model number. As it was, you couldn't tell which revision was in the box until you'd opened it. After struggling with it for a day, I took it back, it was that bad. Couldn't even reliably ping through it. Later, Linksys put the good one back on the shelves under a slightly different model number, the WRT54GL.
There was also a stunt TEAC (think it was them) once pulled with a CD burner. The version they sent out for review was not the version that got put on the shelves, though it had the same model number and specs. They deliberately deceived the reviewers, and gave them a much higher quality version than consumers got. Not surprisingly, it received rave reviews. But it wasn't long before the deception was uncovered.
Whole classes of hardware are pretty junky. For instance, many consumer grade routers fail early because they are so marginally designed they easily overheat and burn out. DVD burners are another troublesome piece of hardware. On both of those on several occasions, I've had to try several brands and models before I found one that would just work adequately. Ink jet printers are of course infamous for being not only high maintenance and expensive to operate, but programmed to give the users FUD as if they weren't troublesome enough without that. There have been many low end economy hardware ideas that were just too cheap, not worth taking home. Pretty much any Intel CPU designated as SX had such reduced performance that they weren't worth the savings over the DX version. Integrated graphics that co-opt some of the main memory became quite notorious for awful performance. Recently, Intel has finally made some decent integrated graphics chipsets, but they have 10 plus years of bad reputation to overcome. Then there was the junk known as the Winmodem.
Even if all that's avoided, can still be caught by systemic defects. Remember the Capacitor Plague? Many devices made in the early 2000s-- motherboards, graphic cards, monitors, even power supplies-- were built with flawed capacitors that failed in under 5 years. Manufacturers were saved from big trouble on that front by the typical rapid obsolescence of technology, though they didn't escape entirely. The poor review site simply has no means of catching a problem like that.
As a rule, mechanical devices simply aren't going to be as reliable no matter what's done to improve their quality. Even when manufacturers aren't trying to pull something, mechanical will never be as good as solid state.
We already had a Rube Goldberg solution in place. It is called the private insurance industry, and Big Pharma. That conglomerate has made profit off of not serving the public and fulfilling its purpose, but by screwing the most vulnerable. No one is more vulnerable than those in need of health care. It was a dumb idea from the start, as the founders should have realized. People who need health care are not in a good position to hunt for bargains or fight back when denied coverage. The injured and the ill can't devote themselves to that. Can't. They're trying to stay alive, they can't haggle over what that's worth. Have to trust that the doctors won't screw you over too hard, knowing full well that they are seriously conflicted and pushed hard to do just that so drug companies and related parasites can profit more. Even when well enough, most of us are not experts in medicine and lack the knowledge and training to evaluate medical propositions. We do a fair job of judging these using other means like reading about others' experiences with specific procedures, organizations, and doctors, but it's not enough. Markets cannot function properly when half the participants aren't in a position to evaluate deals and turn down bad ones.
Another area of denial and dishonesty is death. Medical practitioners make money from providing care, not from making people well. No one needs more care than the terminally ill. It is in medical practitioners' interest to help the dying cling to life as long as possible. Many don't scruple to play upon our guilt and horror. You wouldn't deny that heart bypass operation to your parents who are dying of cancer, would you? You wouldn't say no to a therapy that is hideously expensive but has a 20% chance of holding off the inevitable for another 2 years, would you? You're a heartless, murderering, low life, ungrateful scum if you so much as suggest it. Death panels! Death panels!
Mr. Slippery has it right. The US doesn't have much of a left these days. It has a right (D) and a more extreme right (R). To wit, who do I vote for if I want the law upheld, no one above the law, none of this Too Big To Fail or Too Big To Jail, and those Wall Street thieves and destroyers of our prosperity brought to justice? And who do I vote for if I want sanity, facts, and truth on unpleasant matters, not propaganda? Maybe healthcare can help increase the sanity level. But on the whole, not Obama, and definitely not Romney. Maybe Elizabeth Warren?
If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want to avoid Climate Change, prepare for it. But no, we can't even arrive at a consensus that Climate Change is real and not liberal scientist propaganda, and that if we make no changes it will get very bad for everyone. Many aren't hard changes to make, and are good to do even if there is no climate change problem. Like, with electric cars. I don't know about you, but I don't like breathing exhaust fumes. Maybe we should work on batteries more before making the big switch, that's a valid debate to have. But as to the motors themselves, there is no question that electric motors are far, far superior to internal combustion engines. Then there are traffic lights. Who could possibly not want traffic lights to get some brains and cut the amount of time we all spend sitting at the red light? But people fight such ideas anyway. It's almost like we're deliberately making life harder for ourselves because we're bored or something.
They get to divert attention from their own crimes and failures. Don't think they don't spy too. And have other problems they wish to go unremarked. The US is a great whipping boy. Blame every domestic problem on the US. Say the US bullied them into it. Works most of the time. Helps that it is true some of the time too.
But that's not the diversion that I find most troubling. Yes, this spying is problematic, but that's not the biggest issue we face. While we're busy swilling down scandalous headlines about spying and massive financial fraud on Wall Street that has gone largely unpunished, the Earth wobbles ever closer to a disastrous climate shift. We're rocking the Earth, and it will be a hell of an ugly train wreck if it goes off the rails. The most insane part of it all is that we have concentrations of idle wealth and idle, unemployed hands that aren't being put together to get moving on the urgently needed work we could do to head this problem off. Those who've done all they could to seize power with entirely too much success have no vision, no sense of responsiblity, they seem only to want to enjoy continuing to satisfy their control freak natures and indulge in their odious and very wrong fantasies of their innate superiority to the rest of us that of course justifies thenselves in their own minds if no one else's. They're frighteningly foolish. To see this, consider the propaganda they spew, trying to paint Global Warming as propaganda no different really than their own brands of lies. And the rest of us? Grumble under their heels and live with it because it's not bad enough to be intolerable.
You think Zuckerberg and Bill Gates just were lucky?
They were hardworking, lucky, had help, and took advantage of others, but that's beside the point. If they hadn't struck it rich, others would have. We'd just be dealing with different assholes. Our capitalist system is set up to reward the pathologically antisocial greedy, making them even worse people, as well as bad examples for our children, rather than guide them into more humane behavior.
The very best businessmen, the likes of Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison, have very mixed records. They weren't saints, far from it. They did some good, but they also played cutthroat. In contrast, our best scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, and political leaders are plain better people than the business leaders our capilatist society adulates. Wozniak is a better man than Jobs. Even our best generals, men whose job was to kill the enemy, come across as more humane than these vicious business leaders.
I have a '67 and a '59. Been in the family since '72 and '64 respectively. We commuted in them for many years, but I don't consider them practical cars anymore. They are now for car shows, and the occasional fun drive or commute if the daily driver is down for whatever reason. There are simply too many improvements over the years.
Just between the '59 and '67 are a host of significant improvements. 1st gear in the '59 is not syncronized and there is no front seal on the transmission so one should not park it facing downhill or oil will leak out, it has drum brakes with 2 cylinders on all 4 wheels, the clutch and brake pedals must be manually adjusted periodically to compensate for the wear, the trunk has a big handle and a slider with a catch to prop it open, it has no sound absorption whatsoever so is quite loud in spite of having a tiny engine, the manifolds are real basic straight pipe designs with 90 degree bends, the air cleaner is an oil bath type, the radiator is a cheap design of straight fins which doesn't exchange heat as well so that the car will overheat if sitting and idling on a hot day, the starter motor disengages at the slightest kick from the engine making it extra difficult to start on cold days, the rear shocks are these "lever action" type rather than direct action which is just more points of wear and failure, and of course the car is totally unsafe having come with no seatbeats and a bare metal dash. The '67 addresses all those issues, but still has a long list of shortcomings compared to modern vehicles. For instance, it has seatbelts, but no headrests, and the stock manifolds have gentler curves but are still untuned and much inferior to aftermarket options. We've backported some improvements, in particular replacing the generators with alternators when the former wore out and dumping the points for electronic ignition, tires have gotten better, and that all helps, but these cars are still hopelessly obsolete.
I treat 1996 as a cutoff year. That's the year the OBDII became standard on all cars. Another good cutoff year is about 1983, when fuel injection was starting to go mainstream, and the Japanese cars had been present and good enough quailty for enough years for American manufacturers to respond and stop fobbing customers off with total lemons with the damdest stupid defects, as they did so often up through the 1970s. Like, there was the Chevy Vega with that aluminum engine that wore out in under 10,000 miles. The Ford Fairmont was another poor quality car of the late 70's and early 80's. Distributors still had points, windshields were not easily replaced if cracked, same with disc brake rotors if they got warped, and the style of metalworking guaranteed your car would rust to pieces in as little as 3 years if you drove in winter weather.
You think they could score as often as 2%? The success rate of spam is much lower than that. As I recall, I've heard it is as bad as 0.0002%. Phone operations have to do better than that to be worthwhile. The success rate of a constantly tried scam can only decline over time as more people get wise to it.
A tiny part of the blame for this is on the phone company's business practices. I refuse to pay more money per month for a service on my land line like caller ID that costs them practically nothing to provide. It could be to their benefit to freely provide every available tool to help screen calls. Connecting calls eats up capacity, and that could be valuable if they're still using switching networks in places.
I'd say about 4 out of 5 calls I get are scams and charities. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
I've received around a dozen of these calls from "Windows Technical Support" and similar names, including 2 just this month. They're laughably inept, but no doubt a few among the clueless users would fall for it. They've taken to hanging up on me when I play with them a bit. Don't know why my number got on their lists at all.
What baffles me about the whole thing is how can this scam be worth the expense of running a call center? Is it really that successful that it can turn a profit after paying for a call center? And the call centers themselves, and their employees-- I've heard call center businesses are notoriously unscrupulous, but the employees manning the phones would have to be very dim not to figure out that they are involved in a scam. Maybe they don't care as long as they get a paycheck. But since the whole thing is a scam, why not cheat the employees too? It's hard to credit another possibility, that it's actually just a one or two person operation with the scammers themselves working the phones. Doesn't seem like they could call enough people that way to have reached everyone as many times as they have.
One of the most obnoxiously intrusive three-letter government agencies is the HOA. It's stunning what those petty little organizations think they have the right to dictate. You shall not have the right to paint your own house whatever color you please, let your lawn go unmowed, repair cars in your driveway, use a clothesline, or quite a few other things. Why? Because it might commit the grievous sin of Lowering the Neighbors' Property Values. Never know when a neighbor will notice something and make a mental note to complain about it while they wait for their dog to leave a deposit in your yard.
These days, purchasing consumer electronics feels like you got a lawn that will be very nice as soon as you've finished cleaning up after someone else's dog or figured out where not to step.
you just degraded her under the guise of a compliment
I don't agree, and think you're putting on airs and being prudish. Sexuality is part of life. You can pretend, you can try to ignore it and act with "respect" and "decency", but it will be noticed regardless. Women, and men too, want to be noticed, however much we demure, profess to desire proper behavior, and try to stay strictly platonic and professional. If women want to be appreciated for everything except looks, why don't they all wear burqas, instead of low cut blouses and tight short skirts? To some of us, geeky is hugely attractive, as are good personalities, kindness and fairness to others, competence, good health, and, yes, looks and youth. Men are especially suckers for looks. To the detriment of everyone, many of us will hook up in haste with a hot looking young woman who is a total bitch and soon come to regret it. Bad attitudes should not be excused for the sake of good looks. Maybe women do better on that, aren't blinded by the skin deep, yet they too have a reputation for making less than stellar choices but on money more than looks.
The world could be a better place if more of us focused on what is truly important. Lady Ada does more than politely accept geekiness, more than lead cheers for geeks. That's nice when girls do that, rather than spit on us for being nerdy, tell us how clumsy and socially inept we are, and declare that intellilgence is of little to no value. Nice to have more acceptance, but still grating when they refuse to explore interesting subjects because they claim not to have any head for that. But Lady Ada does more than accept, she is a geek herself! I have never seen a picture of her and have no idea what she looks like. I don't know how nice she is, but unless she's some kind of hyper agressive, cut-throat competitive ugly act, I know I would like her. I am not accustomed to women showing brains. Wanting to be educated, like Malala Yousufzai. Sure would be nice. Have you all bought into the notion that men don't really like smart women, and actually made efforts to dumb down? And then blame and hate all men for that?
Anti-intellectualism is alive and strong. So is prudishness. Sad that typical high school trash talk from students who in reality are jealous of academic achievement and are just looking for any and every way to take the geeks down a few pegs, doesn't end in high school. This finger wagging for a wolf whistle or two seems to me to be another cunning way for anti-intellectuals to keep us down. For them, perhaps looks is the only thing that matters, but not for us. Where and how are we to meet interesting people, learn about each other, and communicate that interest? Bars? Dance clubs? Grocery stores? All those places are terrible for learning much of importance about others. You can extrapolate to a certain extent from observing what is in their grocery cart, but it's still judging a book by its cover. On-line profiles at least typically have an essay section, answers to open ended questions, which can be revealing, if they are honest. The work place is an excellent environment to see what a person is really like. This moralizing that work place relationships are somehow inappropriate is garbage. There's nothing wrong with that. The problems occur when people handle that poorly, for instance by making advances on married people or attempting to cheat on their spouses. How can we be any good at it, learn the boundaries, if we have no experience?
Justification-- for downloading? No, you have it backwards. Natural law is the justification. Copying should not be a crime, copying should be encouraged because it is good for us all. Rather, those who seek to block us all from using our technology are the ones who should justify their position.
We've all heard their justifications. They claim that poor starving artists can't make money without copyright, that copyright is the only way or only fair way to compensate artists. They are wrong. How can they ask that we all forego the enormous flowering of cooperation and culture that the Internet, computers, hard drives, writable optical media, and flash drives has made possible? We could have the entire Library of Congress online, for free downloading, without risking a single precious physical copy. We could have research that we already paid for freely available. That perhaps is the most galling of all, that these thieves of our most valuable works, works of science that are important for our future and which we already pay for through grants, really believe they should have the right to lock it all away behind paywalls.
You should also recall their history. The media moguls fought the player piano, AM radio, cassette tape, VCR, and DAT, to name a few of the big ones. Their business grew despite the losses they suffered. No, these guys have shown that they aren't friends of art and artists, they are public enemies seeking control and rent monies that they do not deserve.
The kinds of stoves and fireplaces that the EPA is banning are the bullcrap kinds that builders put in new homes. These are not serious devices for heating homes, they are purely entertainment, so people can watch the pretty flames. Some fireplaces are so poor that they actually have negative efficiency. The house would stay warmer if the fireplace was not used.
Most people don't understand how bad a typical fireplace is. They're hung up on the romance of it. People don't remember what it was like 100 years ago, before we had central heating and A/C. Heating a home with a wood burning iron stove in the kitchen and fireplaces in half the rooms was hugely labor intensive. Takes a lot of wood to keep all that going. Have to gather wood and chop it into small pieces. Have to clean the ashes out regularly, and check on the fires frequently, make sure they are under control. There's nothing romantic about all that labor to those who lived that way. They were glad to be done with fires when alternatives became available. And fire is dangerous. An accident can easily burn the house down. Burns from accidentally brushing against the stove were another danger. Finally, they don't heat a house that well. Heat doesn't circulate that readily. The iron stove can keep the kitchen too hot while the bedrooms remain freezing cold.
I find the Intel HD4000 quite capable of handling modern games. It can do a reasonable job on 3D accelerated graphics. I find it about equivalent or maybe a bit faster than older low end stuff like the Radeon HD5450. Games won't have the fastest frame rates, and will want to tune the graphics options to the least demanding settings, but they work. And the drivers may be buggy with DirectX 11, but DirectX 9 works.
The point of a chipset like Intel's HD line is low power usage, not high performance. A system with a power sipping CPU like the I5-3317U and the HD4000 graphics needs only 30 watts to run the most demanding 3D accelerated graphics it can handle. Playing videos on Youtube takes only 20 watts, and just running an office program in a GUI takes a mere 10 watts. If you want more performance, you'll have to burn more power.
Wish more people were like you. Seems most people can't be bothered to fight oppression, as long as it seems mild or remote.
There's all this government hate, yet people will not fight government abuse of law enforcement to raise revenue. I'm talking things like speed traps, red light camera tickets, parking meter programs, as well as the many schemes not involving cars. Then the local governments get scammed themselves when they float bonds and can't manage to secure a competitive interest rate, thanks to big banks having rigged that market. Throw the book at the little person, but Too Big To Fail is also Too Big To Jail.
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I rather think writing to my senator did help make a difference on the PROTECT IP ACT (PIPA). One of my senators, Cornyn, sponsored PIPA. When Wikipedia went dark, I emailed his office, blaming the outage squarely on SOPA and PIPA. I was surprised and pleased when I heard he backed away, saying it needed more study. Apparently so many people wrote about the issue that he felt it was safer to disappoint his backers than tempt the wrath of that many people.
Checking on this, it seems he even tried to rewrite history, suggesting that he opposed PIPA all along. At any rate, on the Wikipedia entry about SOPA and PIPA, he's listed as "opposed" and his former position in support is not mentioned. There's something ironic about that.
This punishment is typical of the fearful reaction the powerful and established have to the new. They know very well that new things can disrupt existing power structures. They persuade themselves that the status quo is good and must be defended vigorously. They practically go on a holy crusade against evil, and this justifies the ridiculously harsh punishments. There's hardly any group worse than a pack of powerful idiots thinking they've been wronged and getting all worked up with righteous wrath.
More should be done to check this kind of extremity. But what?
I don't buy this notion of forcing the accused to pay $183,000 because that's what the victim spent on security consultation. Apart from the thought that the accused shouldn't be responsible for actions not under his control, how is anyone to know if that's a fair price, and hasn't been padded and run up? And, shouldn't they have spent some money anyway on security? If a burglar enters a home that doesn't have locks, should he have to pay for locks and a lifetime of security system monitoring at $30/month?
I don't see that a DoS attack is a matter for the law at all. Maybe it should be treated as a technical issue, something that can be resolved with a few tweaks to the server configurations of the targets, or maybe improvements to Internet Protocol. Also, people have a right to protest, and a right to gather. Maybe a DDoS could be viewed as a form of gathering.
There's a biomechanical difference in play. Women have wider hips, presumably so they can better bear children with big heads. Or perhaps it's part of the adaptations necessary for a fully upright walking gait, or both and more. This comes with a compromise. Women's running stride is not as efficient.
Another curious difference between the sexes is the elbow joint. Women can bend their arms further back than men. It may be that women can hold and carry items for longer times. Maybe it's to better hold babies to breasts. Men, on the other hand, are better at throwing objects, Women use a side arm throwing motion, men tend to overhand. If something not directly related to male and female reproductive roles can differentiate, something like elbow joints, why not the parts of brains not directly involved with sex? No reason I can think of. And it seems brains may have a differentiation to go with the elbow joints. Men are better at hitting distant targets with thrown objects, because men's brains are better wired to compute the spatial relationships necessary to accurately target. This comes with some price, perhaps greater energy requirements for the male brain, or deficient thinking abilities in other areas. something. If there was no price, if it was free, women would be just as good at throwing. At any rate, a consequence of this could be that men really are slightly better at the sort of abstract thinking that CS requires.
And a lot of us are victims. When faced with a problem in which there a very few good choices and a thousand bad ones, with marketing doing its utmost to bury the good ones, even smart people sometimes miss. Also, do not discount the power of display. People do the most crazy things to get attention. If it works, and doesn't kill them or destroy the future, was it dumb?
I'll give you some examples.
I used to drink soft drinks. Seeing that the vending machine was twice as expensive as a good deal on a six pack at the grocery, I got a small cube refrigerator. Saved several times the cost of the fridge. And the grocery had a larger selection than the vending machines. Good thinking, maybe? At the time, I thought so, and was pleased I'd outfoxed the evil vending machine operators. But, not the best. Now I drink water. Tap water, not bottled. No juice either. I still like soft drinks and juice, but now I am no longer willing to pay the price-- health, more than money. I do not take soft drinks even when they are free. I am saving far more than that cute little fridge idea saved me, and being healthier. I am amazed at how well brainwashing works on matters like this. Seems like it shouldn't take any great intelligence to see that soft drinks are a terrible waste of money, but the brainwashing worked on me for years. Amazingly, others still occasionally push me on this matter, accusing me of being cheap, as if being frugal is bad. Why?? Is it that I'm making them look bad? Misery loves company? Enjoy your soft drinks. I'm not stopping anyone.
Another example is lawn care. You can have a "beautiful" (meaning, monocultured) lawn if you spend gobs of money and/or time fertilizing, watering, weeding, spraying, raking leaves, and mowing. Very profitable for the lawn care industry, not so good for the home owner. to say nothing of the environment. Why are we so hung up on lawns, even to the point of many cities having made it illegal to have a natural lawn? It's an infraction to let the grass get too high! If not, some neighbors will be quick to let you know what a lazy, cheap loser you are if you don't mow often enough. Judged by your lawn. Cities and corporations are guilty of this same lawn care mania. Can't have the vegetation impeding drivers' view of the road, as if constant mowing is the only way to deal with that problem.
Then there's feminine beauty. The latest craze, so I understand, is shaving off all body hair, except the top where if you are bald you should add hair. What for?? Legs was bad enough, but now shaving even the pubic hair is the in thing to do. I can only think this is an appeal to childhood. Innocently wanting to remember the good old days when life was easier with parents around to take care of things, or perhaps it's also to appeal more to those with pedophilic tendencies. Whatever, it sells more shavers and creams, and the like. On a related note, honest sweat and dirt is now socially unacceptable, and we must cover that up with deodorants, daily showers, etc. Before indoor plumbing, most people did not take a bath every day. That was done once a week, and everyone used the same water, with the baby going last. Was way too much effort to do it every day. Now there is a suspicion that our desire to be clean, clean, clean has led us astray, and may be responsible for the rise in allergies.
There are plenty more. Do you use a clothes dryer, instead of a line or a rack? Buy cars new, instead of used? Try to keep the house at 75F all year? (Are you aware that it is healthier to let the temperature vary a bit with the seasons?) Pay interest on credit card debt, instead of paying it off in full every month? Pay for cable TV? Bought a class ring or directory? Seen a doctor for a mere cold? Bought extreme health care for an elderly pet, something like cancer treatment that was much more than a quick and easy removal of a skin tumor, or hip surgery? If you've ever done any of those, or other similar things, fallen for any
Gotta love how these recruiters and employers screen so badly and allow office politics, greed, and silly prejudices to blind them to what's right in front of their noses. This insistence on "top" talent is one of the prejudices.
Then, as you say, they drive talent away with ridiculously harsh and thoughtless demands, threats, pushing, and bullying.
They could find talent, if they wanted to. They're good at coming up with excuses why they can't do it. They can't be bothered to train people either, not even allow 2 measly weeks for self training, no, they demand that developers "hit the ground running". Their complaint that schools aren't teaching the skills they need, as if the skills they think they need now will still be hot 5 years down the road, totally misses the point that education isn't about memorizing the specialized knowledge needed for any one or two petty little skills, it's about learning how to think and study so one can solve problems and acquire skills outside the classroom, without a teacher holding one's hand. "Hit the ground running" is a philosophy better suited to indentured servitude and menial labor, not careers in technology and science.
Play the odds. Participate, and don't sweat about it.
You have a greater chance of being killed in an auto accident, or struck by lightning, than ever being hit with one of those infamous copyright shakedown notices. They've abused the John Doe suit process too often, as well as several other legal avenues, and the courts have gotten tired of that. There's growing recognition that piracy is not something the law can stop, and that trying to do so is a waste of the public's money and time. There are even whispers that piracy shouldn't be considered a crime, and realization that it is certainly not theft and that it was an error to try to frame copying as a form of theft or go along with that thinking when others tried to do so. Many of us have realized for some time that the real problem is not the entire body public, but rather their business model, and that there are other ways to profit from artistic endeavor It's not our fault that they refuse to even acknowledge that these other ways exist and can work.
They are cowardly terrorists anyway. They are less likely to pick on you if you belong to a demographic that is more likely or able to fight back, that is, you aren't a helpless old lady or a teenage delinquent from a broken household. They've been trying to score easy wins by carefully picking their targets, then using these wins in their campaign of terror, to "send a message". We should continue to send back the message that we won't be scared into not sharing.
Scheme has a number of problems. A big one can be summed up with this backronym: Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses. The language could have really used a way to consolidate lots of closing parentheses.
The prefix notation is another problem. Or, rather, that LISP uses prefix, and grade school math is taught in infix.
Recursion is yet another problem. Children are going to have a very hard time grasping recursion, rather than using explicit loop constructs such as "for next" and "while".
The I/O of many languages tends towards the Zen like, and LISP is worse than average on that. Just not well connected to system calls for things like getting mouse positions from the GUI.
LISP simply isn't procedural and linear enough. Sequential parts of a LISP program can be separated by large stretches of details, things like lambda functions, monster eval calls, and ugly list manipulation routines full of the obscurely named "car" and "cdr" functions.
I tried introducing my nieces to a bit of programming. The older was about 7 when I tried it, and she hated it. The younger took her sister's lead and wouldn't even try it. Settled on SVG with reservations, thinking that drawing pretty pictures that a browser can display might interest them. Hoped SVG might be a little like LOGO in a browser.
A big part of the problem was unnecessary complexity. Doesn't seem like any language does well on that. C or Pascal? Can't just dive in to those. Have to have some boilerplate (the "int main() {... return 0; }" stuff), and a bit of command line training to run the compiler (make is right out) and the executable, or some training to use an integrated environment. A "scripting" language like Perl does better on the boilerplate, but still need to learn extra stuff to get going.
One of the problems with SVG is the underlying XML syntax. XML is horrible. It's not just verbose, but verbose in a redundant, cluttered way. Maybe syntax highlighting for XML like languages should set the names of closing tags to white on white or black on black, anything to reduce eye clutter. SVG isn't a true programming language anyway, have to at the least drag in JavaScript for that. Then you're into the whole mode mess, very much the same sort of thing with C and makefiles, and the C preprocessing directives.
Cleaner, simpler syntax might not have been enough to make the difference. The girls are, I think, a bit prejudiced against the nerdy. But it would have helped.
If ease of sharing is an issue, then perhaps they aren't so skilled at piracy. Same can be said of price.
You can't even be sure reputable sites won't be gamed, and fall for it. And not just astroturfing either. Been a while since I've seen the old switcheroo, but that's still done. Manufacturers aren't above lying on occasion.
You think you're getting a great product, but what you didn't know was that the manufacturer totally revised it and cheapened quality everywhere. I'm thinking especially of the venerable Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Revision 4 was a great router with a great reputation. When I bought one, unknown to me was that Linksys had just rolled out revision 5 with totally changed insides. They replaced Linux with VXWorks, and cut the RAM in half. It was total crap, and it was so different it should have been given a different model number. As it was, you couldn't tell which revision was in the box until you'd opened it. After struggling with it for a day, I took it back, it was that bad. Couldn't even reliably ping through it. Later, Linksys put the good one back on the shelves under a slightly different model number, the WRT54GL.
There was also a stunt TEAC (think it was them) once pulled with a CD burner. The version they sent out for review was not the version that got put on the shelves, though it had the same model number and specs. They deliberately deceived the reviewers, and gave them a much higher quality version than consumers got. Not surprisingly, it received rave reviews. But it wasn't long before the deception was uncovered.
Whole classes of hardware are pretty junky. For instance, many consumer grade routers fail early because they are so marginally designed they easily overheat and burn out. DVD burners are another troublesome piece of hardware. On both of those on several occasions, I've had to try several brands and models before I found one that would just work adequately. Ink jet printers are of course infamous for being not only high maintenance and expensive to operate, but programmed to give the users FUD as if they weren't troublesome enough without that. There have been many low end economy hardware ideas that were just too cheap, not worth taking home. Pretty much any Intel CPU designated as SX had such reduced performance that they weren't worth the savings over the DX version. Integrated graphics that co-opt some of the main memory became quite notorious for awful performance. Recently, Intel has finally made some decent integrated graphics chipsets, but they have 10 plus years of bad reputation to overcome. Then there was the junk known as the Winmodem.
Even if all that's avoided, can still be caught by systemic defects. Remember the Capacitor Plague? Many devices made in the early 2000s-- motherboards, graphic cards, monitors, even power supplies-- were built with flawed capacitors that failed in under 5 years. Manufacturers were saved from big trouble on that front by the typical rapid obsolescence of technology, though they didn't escape entirely. The poor review site simply has no means of catching a problem like that.
As a rule, mechanical devices simply aren't going to be as reliable no matter what's done to improve their quality. Even when manufacturers aren't trying to pull something, mechanical will never be as good as solid state.
We already had a Rube Goldberg solution in place. It is called the private insurance industry, and Big Pharma. That conglomerate has made profit off of not serving the public and fulfilling its purpose, but by screwing the most vulnerable. No one is more vulnerable than those in need of health care. It was a dumb idea from the start, as the founders should have realized. People who need health care are not in a good position to hunt for bargains or fight back when denied coverage. The injured and the ill can't devote themselves to that. Can't. They're trying to stay alive, they can't haggle over what that's worth. Have to trust that the doctors won't screw you over too hard, knowing full well that they are seriously conflicted and pushed hard to do just that so drug companies and related parasites can profit more. Even when well enough, most of us are not experts in medicine and lack the knowledge and training to evaluate medical propositions. We do a fair job of judging these using other means like reading about others' experiences with specific procedures, organizations, and doctors, but it's not enough. Markets cannot function properly when half the participants aren't in a position to evaluate deals and turn down bad ones.
Another area of denial and dishonesty is death. Medical practitioners make money from providing care, not from making people well. No one needs more care than the terminally ill. It is in medical practitioners' interest to help the dying cling to life as long as possible. Many don't scruple to play upon our guilt and horror. You wouldn't deny that heart bypass operation to your parents who are dying of cancer, would you? You wouldn't say no to a therapy that is hideously expensive but has a 20% chance of holding off the inevitable for another 2 years, would you? You're a heartless, murderering, low life, ungrateful scum if you so much as suggest it. Death panels! Death panels!
Mr. Slippery has it right. The US doesn't have much of a left these days. It has a right (D) and a more extreme right (R). To wit, who do I vote for if I want the law upheld, no one above the law, none of this Too Big To Fail or Too Big To Jail, and those Wall Street thieves and destroyers of our prosperity brought to justice? And who do I vote for if I want sanity, facts, and truth on unpleasant matters, not propaganda? Maybe healthcare can help increase the sanity level. But on the whole, not Obama, and definitely not Romney. Maybe Elizabeth Warren?
If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want to avoid Climate Change, prepare for it. But no, we can't even arrive at a consensus that Climate Change is real and not liberal scientist propaganda, and that if we make no changes it will get very bad for everyone. Many aren't hard changes to make, and are good to do even if there is no climate change problem. Like, with electric cars. I don't know about you, but I don't like breathing exhaust fumes. Maybe we should work on batteries more before making the big switch, that's a valid debate to have. But as to the motors themselves, there is no question that electric motors are far, far superior to internal combustion engines. Then there are traffic lights. Who could possibly not want traffic lights to get some brains and cut the amount of time we all spend sitting at the red light? But people fight such ideas anyway. It's almost like we're deliberately making life harder for ourselves because we're bored or something.
They get to divert attention from their own crimes and failures. Don't think they don't spy too. And have other problems they wish to go unremarked. The US is a great whipping boy. Blame every domestic problem on the US. Say the US bullied them into it. Works most of the time. Helps that it is true some of the time too.
But that's not the diversion that I find most troubling. Yes, this spying is problematic, but that's not the biggest issue we face. While we're busy swilling down scandalous headlines about spying and massive financial fraud on Wall Street that has gone largely unpunished, the Earth wobbles ever closer to a disastrous climate shift. We're rocking the Earth, and it will be a hell of an ugly train wreck if it goes off the rails. The most insane part of it all is that we have concentrations of idle wealth and idle, unemployed hands that aren't being put together to get moving on the urgently needed work we could do to head this problem off. Those who've done all they could to seize power with entirely too much success have no vision, no sense of responsiblity, they seem only to want to enjoy continuing to satisfy their control freak natures and indulge in their odious and very wrong fantasies of their innate superiority to the rest of us that of course justifies thenselves in their own minds if no one else's. They're frighteningly foolish. To see this, consider the propaganda they spew, trying to paint Global Warming as propaganda no different really than their own brands of lies. And the rest of us? Grumble under their heels and live with it because it's not bad enough to be intolerable.
You think Zuckerberg and Bill Gates just were lucky?
They were hardworking, lucky, had help, and took advantage of others, but that's beside the point. If they hadn't struck it rich, others would have. We'd just be dealing with different assholes. Our capitalist system is set up to reward the pathologically antisocial greedy, making them even worse people, as well as bad examples for our children, rather than guide them into more humane behavior.
The very best businessmen, the likes of Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison, have very mixed records. They weren't saints, far from it. They did some good, but they also played cutthroat. In contrast, our best scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, and political leaders are plain better people than the business leaders our capilatist society adulates. Wozniak is a better man than Jobs. Even our best generals, men whose job was to kill the enemy, come across as more humane than these vicious business leaders.
I have a '67 and a '59. Been in the family since '72 and '64 respectively. We commuted in them for many years, but I don't consider them practical cars anymore. They are now for car shows, and the occasional fun drive or commute if the daily driver is down for whatever reason. There are simply too many improvements over the years.
Just between the '59 and '67 are a host of significant improvements. 1st gear in the '59 is not syncronized and there is no front seal on the transmission so one should not park it facing downhill or oil will leak out, it has drum brakes with 2 cylinders on all 4 wheels, the clutch and brake pedals must be manually adjusted periodically to compensate for the wear, the trunk has a big handle and a slider with a catch to prop it open, it has no sound absorption whatsoever so is quite loud in spite of having a tiny engine, the manifolds are real basic straight pipe designs with 90 degree bends, the air cleaner is an oil bath type, the radiator is a cheap design of straight fins which doesn't exchange heat as well so that the car will overheat if sitting and idling on a hot day, the starter motor disengages at the slightest kick from the engine making it extra difficult to start on cold days, the rear shocks are these "lever action" type rather than direct action which is just more points of wear and failure, and of course the car is totally unsafe having come with no seatbeats and a bare metal dash. The '67 addresses all those issues, but still has a long list of shortcomings compared to modern vehicles. For instance, it has seatbelts, but no headrests, and the stock manifolds have gentler curves but are still untuned and much inferior to aftermarket options. We've backported some improvements, in particular replacing the generators with alternators when the former wore out and dumping the points for electronic ignition, tires have gotten better, and that all helps, but these cars are still hopelessly obsolete.
I treat 1996 as a cutoff year. That's the year the OBDII became standard on all cars. Another good cutoff year is about 1983, when fuel injection was starting to go mainstream, and the Japanese cars had been present and good enough quailty for enough years for American manufacturers to respond and stop fobbing customers off with total lemons with the damdest stupid defects, as they did so often up through the 1970s. Like, there was the Chevy Vega with that aluminum engine that wore out in under 10,000 miles. The Ford Fairmont was another poor quality car of the late 70's and early 80's. Distributors still had points, windshields were not easily replaced if cracked, same with disc brake rotors if they got warped, and the style of metalworking guaranteed your car would rust to pieces in as little as 3 years if you drove in winter weather.
You think they could score as often as 2%? The success rate of spam is much lower than that. As I recall, I've heard it is as bad as 0.0002%. Phone operations have to do better than that to be worthwhile. The success rate of a constantly tried scam can only decline over time as more people get wise to it.
A tiny part of the blame for this is on the phone company's business practices. I refuse to pay more money per month for a service on my land line like caller ID that costs them practically nothing to provide. It could be to their benefit to freely provide every available tool to help screen calls. Connecting calls eats up capacity, and that could be valuable if they're still using switching networks in places.
I'd say about 4 out of 5 calls I get are scams and charities. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
I've received around a dozen of these calls from "Windows Technical Support" and similar names, including 2 just this month. They're laughably inept, but no doubt a few among the clueless users would fall for it. They've taken to hanging up on me when I play with them a bit. Don't know why my number got on their lists at all.
What baffles me about the whole thing is how can this scam be worth the expense of running a call center? Is it really that successful that it can turn a profit after paying for a call center? And the call centers themselves, and their employees-- I've heard call center businesses are notoriously unscrupulous, but the employees manning the phones would have to be very dim not to figure out that they are involved in a scam. Maybe they don't care as long as they get a paycheck. But since the whole thing is a scam, why not cheat the employees too? It's hard to credit another possibility, that it's actually just a one or two person operation with the scammers themselves working the phones. Doesn't seem like they could call enough people that way to have reached everyone as many times as they have.
One of the most obnoxiously intrusive three-letter government agencies is the HOA. It's stunning what those petty little organizations think they have the right to dictate. You shall not have the right to paint your own house whatever color you please, let your lawn go unmowed, repair cars in your driveway, use a clothesline, or quite a few other things. Why? Because it might commit the grievous sin of Lowering the Neighbors' Property Values. Never know when a neighbor will notice something and make a mental note to complain about it while they wait for their dog to leave a deposit in your yard.
These days, purchasing consumer electronics feels like you got a lawn that will be very nice as soon as you've finished cleaning up after someone else's dog or figured out where not to step.
you just degraded her under the guise of a compliment
I don't agree, and think you're putting on airs and being prudish. Sexuality is part of life. You can pretend, you can try to ignore it and act with "respect" and "decency", but it will be noticed regardless. Women, and men too, want to be noticed, however much we demure, profess to desire proper behavior, and try to stay strictly platonic and professional. If women want to be appreciated for everything except looks, why don't they all wear burqas, instead of low cut blouses and tight short skirts? To some of us, geeky is hugely attractive, as are good personalities, kindness and fairness to others, competence, good health, and, yes, looks and youth. Men are especially suckers for looks. To the detriment of everyone, many of us will hook up in haste with a hot looking young woman who is a total bitch and soon come to regret it. Bad attitudes should not be excused for the sake of good looks. Maybe women do better on that, aren't blinded by the skin deep, yet they too have a reputation for making less than stellar choices but on money more than looks.
The world could be a better place if more of us focused on what is truly important. Lady Ada does more than politely accept geekiness, more than lead cheers for geeks. That's nice when girls do that, rather than spit on us for being nerdy, tell us how clumsy and socially inept we are, and declare that intellilgence is of little to no value. Nice to have more acceptance, but still grating when they refuse to explore interesting subjects because they claim not to have any head for that. But Lady Ada does more than accept, she is a geek herself! I have never seen a picture of her and have no idea what she looks like. I don't know how nice she is, but unless she's some kind of hyper agressive, cut-throat competitive ugly act, I know I would like her. I am not accustomed to women showing brains. Wanting to be educated, like Malala Yousufzai. Sure would be nice. Have you all bought into the notion that men don't really like smart women, and actually made efforts to dumb down? And then blame and hate all men for that?
Anti-intellectualism is alive and strong. So is prudishness. Sad that typical high school trash talk from students who in reality are jealous of academic achievement and are just looking for any and every way to take the geeks down a few pegs, doesn't end in high school. This finger wagging for a wolf whistle or two seems to me to be another cunning way for anti-intellectuals to keep us down. For them, perhaps looks is the only thing that matters, but not for us. Where and how are we to meet interesting people, learn about each other, and communicate that interest? Bars? Dance clubs? Grocery stores? All those places are terrible for learning much of importance about others. You can extrapolate to a certain extent from observing what is in their grocery cart, but it's still judging a book by its cover. On-line profiles at least typically have an essay section, answers to open ended questions, which can be revealing, if they are honest. The work place is an excellent environment to see what a person is really like. This moralizing that work place relationships are somehow inappropriate is garbage. There's nothing wrong with that. The problems occur when people handle that poorly, for instance by making advances on married people or attempting to cheat on their spouses. How can we be any good at it, learn the boundaries, if we have no experience?
Students usualy want to hide F's. Don't want to look stupid.
Wonder what these conservatives are trying to hide? Not much point trying to hide their stupidity. Everyone already knows that about them.
Justification-- for downloading? No, you have it backwards. Natural law is the justification. Copying should not be a crime, copying should be encouraged because it is good for us all. Rather, those who seek to block us all from using our technology are the ones who should justify their position.
We've all heard their justifications. They claim that poor starving artists can't make money without copyright, that copyright is the only way or only fair way to compensate artists. They are wrong. How can they ask that we all forego the enormous flowering of cooperation and culture that the Internet, computers, hard drives, writable optical media, and flash drives has made possible? We could have the entire Library of Congress online, for free downloading, without risking a single precious physical copy. We could have research that we already paid for freely available. That perhaps is the most galling of all, that these thieves of our most valuable works, works of science that are important for our future and which we already pay for through grants, really believe they should have the right to lock it all away behind paywalls.
You should also recall their history. The media moguls fought the player piano, AM radio, cassette tape, VCR, and DAT, to name a few of the big ones. Their business grew despite the losses they suffered. No, these guys have shown that they aren't friends of art and artists, they are public enemies seeking control and rent monies that they do not deserve.
The kinds of stoves and fireplaces that the EPA is banning are the bullcrap kinds that builders put in new homes. These are not serious devices for heating homes, they are purely entertainment, so people can watch the pretty flames. Some fireplaces are so poor that they actually have negative efficiency. The house would stay warmer if the fireplace was not used.
Most people don't understand how bad a typical fireplace is. They're hung up on the romance of it. People don't remember what it was like 100 years ago, before we had central heating and A/C. Heating a home with a wood burning iron stove in the kitchen and fireplaces in half the rooms was hugely labor intensive. Takes a lot of wood to keep all that going. Have to gather wood and chop it into small pieces. Have to clean the ashes out regularly, and check on the fires frequently, make sure they are under control. There's nothing romantic about all that labor to those who lived that way. They were glad to be done with fires when alternatives became available. And fire is dangerous. An accident can easily burn the house down. Burns from accidentally brushing against the stove were another danger. Finally, they don't heat a house that well. Heat doesn't circulate that readily. The iron stove can keep the kitchen too hot while the bedrooms remain freezing cold.
What does AD stand for?
After Disgrace. It's the period of time that follows Before Commercialization.
I find the Intel HD4000 quite capable of handling modern games. It can do a reasonable job on 3D accelerated graphics. I find it about equivalent or maybe a bit faster than older low end stuff like the Radeon HD5450. Games won't have the fastest frame rates, and will want to tune the graphics options to the least demanding settings, but they work. And the drivers may be buggy with DirectX 11, but DirectX 9 works.
The point of a chipset like Intel's HD line is low power usage, not high performance. A system with a power sipping CPU like the I5-3317U and the HD4000 graphics needs only 30 watts to run the most demanding 3D accelerated graphics it can handle. Playing videos on Youtube takes only 20 watts, and just running an office program in a GUI takes a mere 10 watts. If you want more performance, you'll have to burn more power.
Wish more people were like you. Seems most people can't be bothered to fight oppression, as long as it seems mild or remote.
There's all this government hate, yet people will not fight government abuse of law enforcement to raise revenue. I'm talking things like speed traps, red light camera tickets, parking meter programs, as well as the many schemes not involving cars. Then the local governments get scammed themselves when they float bonds and can't manage to secure a competitive interest rate, thanks to big banks having rigged that market. Throw the book at the little person, but Too Big To Fail is also Too Big To Jail.