It's not magic, you know. It's called a "filibuster". Basically, you stand up and talk until you get bored, except for some reason nowadays we don't actually do the stand up and talk part. In order for the majority party to prevent this delaying tactic, they must have at least sixty votes. The Democrats had like fifty four, and one of those was an Independent who was Democrat in name only (he even caucused with the Republicans, for goodness sakes).
So what happens? The Republicans refuse to allow anything to come to a vote - there's nearly fifty of them in the Senate, and I believe they can all filibuster for several hours each if they want to. The Democrats can't do anything about it. Then the Republicans go on TV and say "Look! The Democrats are incompetent! They're not doing anything!"
Oh come on. "Obamacare", as it was passed, was something that the right had proposed themselves. Back when Clinton was president and started making noises about universal health care, "obamacare" is almost precisely what the Republicans were proposing as an alternative - including a lot of Republicans who are still in office.
If you think Obama is "THE most left-leaning" president to date, you need to recalibrate your scale. If you think he's the head of "THE most... partisan Presidency", you need to keep in mind that it takes two to be partisan.
My theory is that a large proportion of Flash "designers" are 13 years old and are "designing" on either some hand-me-down computer that's only capable of running at 800x600, max, or Dad's old work laptop that runs at 1024x800.
Exactly! Every single blog I read has, at some point, had a post about "you guys were complaining that your antiviruses would trigger at one of the ads, I've talked to the ad server and they've removed it".
I semi-trust the website I'm looking at. I do not trust content provided by some shady third party.
Also, tasteful, inoffensive ads are considered "worthless" by advertisers because they, well, they are tasteful and inoffensive, they get overlooked and are easily forgotten.
Not quite - it's the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone had tasteful, inoffensive ads, then all ads would be (roughly speaking) of roughly equal impact; if the base level is low, then there's a low consumer threshold for remembering an ad. However, in such a universe, the first advertising company to make a brash and offensive (within reason) ad would see tremendous returns, because as you say that ad would stand out more from the rest.
Basically, the reason why so many ads are annoying is because the ad company that doesn't have annoying ads will get left behind. Google is kind of a special case because they're both an ad company and a company that provides something people want, so they can enforce their own ad standards.
Yeah, well, the rule is really useful when you're on the other side of the transaction, you're paying in cash and you don't want another quarter banging around in your pocket but you also don't have the register in front of you.
The rule for that is really simple: if someone owes you 12.75, and they pay you 20.75, then just pretend they owed you 12 and paid you 20. As long as the value of the coins is exactly the same, they just cancel out and all you have to do is deal with the bills.
If the NSA broke in and stuck a small device into an empty PCI slot in your computer, would you notice?
Now here's a good reason to use an iPad or macbook.
... because then the NSA won't have to break in?
I mean, Apple almost certainly keeps track of everything you do on iTunes, the App store, and probably has all sorts of app instrumentation available that's either already on or can be turned on. And on the MacBook front, who knows what they could turn on if they were asked nicely? Almost all the software you're using is Apple's, after all.
If you can send ships to other planets, you can almost certainly create nearly self-sustaining space habitats - and I'm talking like deep space, where there's not much matter or energy besides you. After all, sending a ship to even Alpha Centauri will take hundreds of years, and most of that will be spent in space so empty it would make the Sahara desert look like Hawaii times infinity. And you'll need to be able to do this over the course of hundreds of years - basically, your little colonization capsule will have to be a sort of self-contained society of space Bedouin.
This means that somehow, one way or another, you essentially need to be able to colonize space itself in order to be able to send manned ships to another planet. At that point, why are you even bothering with this "other planet" business? Who is going to want to spend hundreds of years huddling in the most extreme, energy saving configuration imaginable when you can just bask in the Sun's profligate radiation and graze on the solar system's asteroid fields?
So that's where I think the aliens are. They've given up on the whole "colonize other stars" thing, and turned their attentions to a much more fruitful endeavor - "colonize space".
Maybe this is just me being an American, but in my opinion no number of words are equivalent to mugging someone, and thus using any number of words should always result in a lower sentence than a mugging.
I mean, we do have means in place to restrict people like this douchebag without throwing them in jail - they're called "restraining orders" or, hell, "banning from Facebook". It doesn't need to get to the level of jail time.
But rest assures, if there is proof that a CEO, Board Member, or any Manager gave orders to fleece the public, those people can and will be held criminally accountable.
Good lord, do you really think that the only way for the public to be fleeced is for a C level executive to give written orders to do it?
Here's a scenario: John the CTO goes down to the billing engineers and tells them, verbally, "we want to see a 5% increase in profits from spurious charges. Make it happen."
This isn't written down anywhere. The meeting happened, but it was just a generic meeting with the team - nothing special, nothing permanent. Other business was covered too. How do you prove he said that?
Here's an even more common scenario: Joe the CEO tell John the CTO, "We're making money hand over fist. I want to make even more. Make it happen." So John the CTO runs his billing engineers ragged, and randomly weird charges and weird discounts start cropping up in people's phone bills. He throws fits about the weird discounts, they get fixed, but the weird charges - well, nobody really cares about them in the billing department, that's accounting's job.
I mean, how do you think horribly defective products like the Ford Pinto make it to the market? Most of the time, it's not because the people engineering them suck - it's because management, up above them, is driving the engineers too hard.
This is why I, personally, think we should really start increasing the amount of personal liability that managers high up in corporations are exposed to. Right now there is basically no penalty to saying "ship it now nerdboys, who cares if it might explode?" besides perhaps tarnishing the company's reputation (and who cares about that? Reputation is a currency traded on the order of decades, and you won't be around any more by that point). If there were actual, personal penalties for your company shipping a defective product (or fraudulently billing people, or accidentally sourcing from a Chinese factory that uses lead paint), then managers would make damn sure that what they're doing is right.
I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
I seriously doubt that they're deleting the ones they don't want. Like I said, there's no reason to do that due to space considerations, and like you said, on those tiny little screens they might miss a small detail that would be obvious to someone on a big screen. They're probably just looking through them to see what they've gotten and haven't gotten.
More granular items might be more of a challenge such as thought typing and drawing on the screen
Actually I bet you anything that we'll have reliable "thought-typing" before we have reliable general "speech-typing". Once you know how to touch type, hitting an 'A' always requires twitching the same muscles, which should be a detectable "thought". This sort of consistent input => consistent output is the sort of thing computers are really good at modelling, unlike speech - take your laptop to a room with different acoustics, for instance, and all of a sudden your voice sounds completely different even with a headset microphone.
You would just wear the Bluetooth brainscanner for a week or so while it records your brain patterns as you use your computer and logs the actions you take at the same time, then runs some Bayesian learning algorithm to figure out which means what. I bet that most habitual computer actions boil down to single "thoughts" - like alt-tabbing or locking the computer or minimizing to desktop. Mousing would probbly be harder, though.
Part of the major loss with digital, however, is the amount of "thrown away" data. In the old days, photographers filming a busy scene would snap off roll after roll, then develop and check their shots later. I'm reminded of a famous basketball championship where a photographer only realized the next day, going through his rolls, that he'd captured a perfect pandemonium in which, in the midst of all the carnage, he had a perfect view of one of the coaches flipping off a ref.
What? That doesn't make any sense at all! Every single digital camera I have seen in the last few years has a three or five shot mode, where every time you press the button it takes multiple shots! Hell, my N900 will even take multiple shots and stitch them together into an HDR image!
What you're talking about is basically one of the problems with film, not digital. Sure, professional photographers who developed their own photos and bought rolls of film in bulk could afford to take multiple shots, but consumers were far more constrained - they had maybe thirty shots on their camera, and once that was done they'd have to hope there was another roll in their backpack, and then they had to pay ~$10 to get the roll processed at the end of the vacation - and they paid for all the photos, even the shitty ones.
Digital changed all that. Now you can take a bajillion pictures during the day, look at them all on your laptop at night, and take another bajillion the next day - photos take up almost zero space on modern digital storage hardware, so why delete anything ever?
In short, what you just said there makes no sense at all.
My wife took a vial of mercury on a flight once (it was for science, and the destination lab was in a third world country with no way of getting any). Mercury does this to aluminum, over the course of a long enough period of time (and this was a very long flight). TSA didn't find it.
The worst part? TSA actually went through the case she'd checked (it was a suspicious one, I have to admit) and opened some of the flasks in there. What was in those flasks? Nothing - literally. They contained high-quality vacuum, to be used for taking samples at the destination (again, lab in a third world country, not equipped to pump down those flasks). Despite opening the case, searching through the contents, and actually going in to some of the flasks the TSA actively missed something that would have been dangerous to the plane in the hands of the wrong person.
Why? Well, the vacuum flasks looked like bomb components you'd see on TV (to the point where my wife even in a nice little note saying "please don't open these, they're just vacuum flasks, we're poor scientists, here's a number to call at the university if you don't believe me"), while the vial of mercury was tightly packed in a Nalgene, the sort of hard shelled water bottle hikers use sometimes.
That all wars since WWII have been rather minor affairs argues that mutual nuclear deterrence between RATIONAL ACTORS works.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc anyone?
The fact that all wars since WWI have been minor affairs might also argue for the fact that we've realized there are other, better ways of getting what you want besides war. After all, why blow all that wealth on fighting someone when you can just sell them stuff?
A shitload of things have changed since WWII. You can't just assume that nukes (and our stockpile of them, specifically) were the cause of it.
It's a phone? You could physically lose it at any time, which would be equivalent to a permanent software freeze accompanied by data loss. If there's anything important that only lives on your phone, you're doing it wrong.
I used a trackball mouse at work for quite a while - next to my main monitors I had an extra keyboard, monitor and trackball mouse I used when setting up new computers. I put the trackball mouse there because it didn't need any space, and that was at a premium in the area.
You minions are almost as bad as using a text to speech engine - at least those things put apostrophes in the right places (assuming they get the word right) and capitalize letters properly.
Eventually, I plan on getting one of these guys, or some other cordless trackball mouse (weirdly there's only two on Newegg, and that one's the cheaper one - I guess there's not much demand for them?).
When I'm not fighting on Slashdot, I find that I spend a significant amount of time just foraging on the Internet or doing other mouse-only things; there's no reason for me to have my arm out at an unnatural angle when I could just leave it in my lap, and normally I only need a scroll wheel and enough accuracy to click a link. The best part is that I'll be able to leave my normal mouse plugged in - so when it's time to do precision work, I can just put the trackball on top of my computer or somewhere else where it's not in the way and switch over.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not magic, you know. It's called a "filibuster". Basically, you stand up and talk until you get bored, except for some reason nowadays we don't actually do the stand up and talk part. In order for the majority party to prevent this delaying tactic, they must have at least sixty votes. The Democrats had like fifty four, and one of those was an Independent who was Democrat in name only (he even caucused with the Republicans, for goodness sakes).
So what happens? The Republicans refuse to allow anything to come to a vote - there's nearly fifty of them in the Senate, and I believe they can all filibuster for several hours each if they want to. The Democrats can't do anything about it. Then the Republicans go on TV and say "Look! The Democrats are incompetent! They're not doing anything!"
Funny how that works, huh?
Oh come on. "Obamacare", as it was passed, was something that the right had proposed themselves. Back when Clinton was president and started making noises about universal health care, "obamacare" is almost precisely what the Republicans were proposing as an alternative - including a lot of Republicans who are still in office.
If you think Obama is "THE most left-leaning" president to date, you need to recalibrate your scale. If you think he's the head of "THE most ... partisan Presidency", you need to keep in mind that it takes two to be partisan.
My theory is that a large proportion of Flash "designers" are 13 years old and are "designing" on either some hand-me-down computer that's only capable of running at 800x600, max, or Dad's old work laptop that runs at 1024x800.
Why vote for the lesser of two evils?
This message brought to you by the Cthulhu/O'Donnell 2012 campaign.
Well but that only makes sense - it's still time you're at work, even if you're not working on a management-blessed project.
Exactly! Every single blog I read has, at some point, had a post about "you guys were complaining that your antiviruses would trigger at one of the ads, I've talked to the ad server and they've removed it".
I semi-trust the website I'm looking at. I do not trust content provided by some shady third party.
Not quite - it's the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone had tasteful, inoffensive ads, then all ads would be (roughly speaking) of roughly equal impact; if the base level is low, then there's a low consumer threshold for remembering an ad. However, in such a universe, the first advertising company to make a brash and offensive (within reason) ad would see tremendous returns, because as you say that ad would stand out more from the rest.
Basically, the reason why so many ads are annoying is because the ad company that doesn't have annoying ads will get left behind. Google is kind of a special case because they're both an ad company and a company that provides something people want, so they can enforce their own ad standards.
Yeah, well, the rule is really useful when you're on the other side of the transaction, you're paying in cash and you don't want another quarter banging around in your pocket but you also don't have the register in front of you.
The rule for that is really simple: if someone owes you 12.75, and they pay you 20.75, then just pretend they owed you 12 and paid you 20. As long as the value of the coins is exactly the same, they just cancel out and all you have to do is deal with the bills.
I mean, Apple almost certainly keeps track of everything you do on iTunes, the App store, and probably has all sorts of app instrumentation available that's either already on or can be turned on. And on the MacBook front, who knows what they could turn on if they were asked nicely? Almost all the software you're using is Apple's, after all.
Uhm how about this?
If you can send ships to other planets, you can almost certainly create nearly self-sustaining space habitats - and I'm talking like deep space, where there's not much matter or energy besides you. After all, sending a ship to even Alpha Centauri will take hundreds of years, and most of that will be spent in space so empty it would make the Sahara desert look like Hawaii times infinity. And you'll need to be able to do this over the course of hundreds of years - basically, your little colonization capsule will have to be a sort of self-contained society of space Bedouin.
This means that somehow, one way or another, you essentially need to be able to colonize space itself in order to be able to send manned ships to another planet. At that point, why are you even bothering with this "other planet" business? Who is going to want to spend hundreds of years huddling in the most extreme, energy saving configuration imaginable when you can just bask in the Sun's profligate radiation and graze on the solar system's asteroid fields?
So that's where I think the aliens are. They've given up on the whole "colonize other stars" thing, and turned their attentions to a much more fruitful endeavor - "colonize space".
And then long story short, Southern Methodist Episcopalian Wesleyan Church is exactly right.
Maybe this is just me being an American, but in my opinion no number of words are equivalent to mugging someone, and thus using any number of words should always result in a lower sentence than a mugging.
I mean, we do have means in place to restrict people like this douchebag without throwing them in jail - they're called "restraining orders" or, hell, "banning from Facebook". It doesn't need to get to the level of jail time.
Good lord, do you really think that the only way for the public to be fleeced is for a C level executive to give written orders to do it?
Here's a scenario: John the CTO goes down to the billing engineers and tells them, verbally, "we want to see a 5% increase in profits from spurious charges. Make it happen."
This isn't written down anywhere. The meeting happened, but it was just a generic meeting with the team - nothing special, nothing permanent. Other business was covered too. How do you prove he said that?
Here's an even more common scenario: Joe the CEO tell John the CTO, "We're making money hand over fist. I want to make even more. Make it happen." So John the CTO runs his billing engineers ragged, and randomly weird charges and weird discounts start cropping up in people's phone bills. He throws fits about the weird discounts, they get fixed, but the weird charges - well, nobody really cares about them in the billing department, that's accounting's job.
I mean, how do you think horribly defective products like the Ford Pinto make it to the market? Most of the time, it's not because the people engineering them suck - it's because management, up above them, is driving the engineers too hard.
This is why I, personally, think we should really start increasing the amount of personal liability that managers high up in corporations are exposed to. Right now there is basically no penalty to saying "ship it now nerdboys, who cares if it might explode?" besides perhaps tarnishing the company's reputation (and who cares about that? Reputation is a currency traded on the order of decades, and you won't be around any more by that point). If there were actual, personal penalties for your company shipping a defective product (or fraudulently billing people, or accidentally sourcing from a Chinese factory that uses lead paint), then managers would make damn sure that what they're doing is right.
I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
I seriously doubt that they're deleting the ones they don't want. Like I said, there's no reason to do that due to space considerations, and like you said, on those tiny little screens they might miss a small detail that would be obvious to someone on a big screen. They're probably just looking through them to see what they've gotten and haven't gotten.
Actually I bet you anything that we'll have reliable "thought-typing" before we have reliable general "speech-typing". Once you know how to touch type, hitting an 'A' always requires twitching the same muscles, which should be a detectable "thought". This sort of consistent input => consistent output is the sort of thing computers are really good at modelling, unlike speech - take your laptop to a room with different acoustics, for instance, and all of a sudden your voice sounds completely different even with a headset microphone.
You would just wear the Bluetooth brainscanner for a week or so while it records your brain patterns as you use your computer and logs the actions you take at the same time, then runs some Bayesian learning algorithm to figure out which means what. I bet that most habitual computer actions boil down to single "thoughts" - like alt-tabbing or locking the computer or minimizing to desktop. Mousing would probbly be harder, though.
What? That doesn't make any sense at all! Every single digital camera I have seen in the last few years has a three or five shot mode, where every time you press the button it takes multiple shots! Hell, my N900 will even take multiple shots and stitch them together into an HDR image!
What you're talking about is basically one of the problems with film, not digital. Sure, professional photographers who developed their own photos and bought rolls of film in bulk could afford to take multiple shots, but consumers were far more constrained - they had maybe thirty shots on their camera, and once that was done they'd have to hope there was another roll in their backpack, and then they had to pay ~$10 to get the roll processed at the end of the vacation - and they paid for all the photos, even the shitty ones.
Digital changed all that. Now you can take a bajillion pictures during the day, look at them all on your laptop at night, and take another bajillion the next day - photos take up almost zero space on modern digital storage hardware, so why delete anything ever?
In short, what you just said there makes no sense at all.
My wife took a vial of mercury on a flight once (it was for science, and the destination lab was in a third world country with no way of getting any). Mercury does this to aluminum, over the course of a long enough period of time (and this was a very long flight). TSA didn't find it.
The worst part? TSA actually went through the case she'd checked (it was a suspicious one, I have to admit) and opened some of the flasks in there. What was in those flasks? Nothing - literally. They contained high-quality vacuum, to be used for taking samples at the destination (again, lab in a third world country, not equipped to pump down those flasks). Despite opening the case, searching through the contents, and actually going in to some of the flasks the TSA actively missed something that would have been dangerous to the plane in the hands of the wrong person.
Why? Well, the vacuum flasks looked like bomb components you'd see on TV (to the point where my wife even in a nice little note saying "please don't open these, they're just vacuum flasks, we're poor scientists, here's a number to call at the university if you don't believe me"), while the vial of mercury was tightly packed in a Nalgene, the sort of hard shelled water bottle hikers use sometimes.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc anyone?
The fact that all wars since WWI have been minor affairs might also argue for the fact that we've realized there are other, better ways of getting what you want besides war. After all, why blow all that wealth on fighting someone when you can just sell them stuff?
A shitload of things have changed since WWII. You can't just assume that nukes (and our stockpile of them, specifically) were the cause of it.
Unfortunately, in order to play it you need to buy a PS3. Totally not worth it for me, unfortunately.
It's a phone? You could physically lose it at any time, which would be equivalent to a permanent software freeze accompanied by data loss. If there's anything important that only lives on your phone, you're doing it wrong.
I used a trackball mouse at work for quite a while - next to my main monitors I had an extra keyboard, monitor and trackball mouse I used when setting up new computers. I put the trackball mouse there because it didn't need any space, and that was at a premium in the area.
You minions are almost as bad as using a text to speech engine - at least those things put apostrophes in the right places (assuming they get the word right) and capitalize letters properly.
Eventually, I plan on getting one of these guys, or some other cordless trackball mouse (weirdly there's only two on Newegg, and that one's the cheaper one - I guess there's not much demand for them?).
When I'm not fighting on Slashdot, I find that I spend a significant amount of time just foraging on the Internet or doing other mouse-only things; there's no reason for me to have my arm out at an unnatural angle when I could just leave it in my lap, and normally I only need a scroll wheel and enough accuracy to click a link. The best part is that I'll be able to leave my normal mouse plugged in - so when it's time to do precision work, I can just put the trackball on top of my computer or somewhere else where it's not in the way and switch over.
Yeah, that's what quizzes, midterms and finals are for. I've never seen a professor use any of those straight out of the textbook.