He didn't leave because he wanted to, he left because he was the most hated guy in the industry.
You're right about the revisionist history. Bill made their bed and now they are lying in it. But he didn't have to leave. Despite his negative charisma and the brutality of his methods, his leadership was better than what followed. I don't even think he was personally hated so much as the fruits of his reign were hated. I personally don't hate Bill. Hitchens describes some dictatorship (Romania?) where it was said that the fear was so thick you could not just cut it, but actually eat it. My contempt for what His Billness stands for is so thick I could eat it, but I don't actually hate the man.
Slow decline? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard since Windows Me, a brisk decline by any rational standard. In a Warner Brothers cartoon, Windows Me would be represented as a piano in free fall attached to a coil of rope rapidly unwinding. The rope is attached to a cotter pin in the trellis work supporting a Saturn V rocket ship, which threatens to tip over and launch sideways into a colossal machine works with a 50,000 tonne Alcoa press hard at work stamping out giant Fabrige ostrich eggs.
I've got Amis's The War Against Cliche on hold at my local library. If I had written Harry Potter, anyone describing the arc of Microsoft as "slow decline" would be at risk of having the owls arrive to carry off their beards and toupees, or any other device of attire designed to conceal the bare chin wattles or shiny pate of thoughtless word selection. Instead of Muggles, there would be Paters: universal objects of titters and ridicule. Instead of Defence Against the Dark Arts, cautious use of hair-stealing adjectives would prevail among the cognoscenti.
The early Latin version of Phaedrus begins with the reflection that "Partnership with the mighty is never trustworthy".
But wait, there's more.
It then relates how a cow, a goat and a sheep go hunting together with a lion. When it comes to dividing the spoil, the lion says, "I take the first portion because of my title, since I am addressed as king; the second portion you will assign to me, since I'm your partner; then because I am the stronger, the third will follow me; and an accident will happen to anyone who touches the fourth"
Welcome to the Soprano sandbox.
the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software
You've read the earnings reports and you're still thinking Puma concolor and not Panthera yeti?
At the end of day, it doesn't matter how it works as long as it gives us the ability to build devices with really high density storage.
Goldman Sachs creams their jeans over this kind of IQ-dismissive pragmatism among the puntocrats.
At the end of day, it doesn't matter how much it costs to ship a 50lb bucket of roofing nails as long as it gives us the ability to shop in our pyjamas; nor does it matter whether the business model has ever flirted with a profitable quarter, so long as it garners eyeballs.
If Onity had been willing to replace all it's locks over a short period of time (say, 6 months) at massive cost to itself - but nevertheless done it to protect it's long term reputation, it makes a lot of sense to give Onity that opportunity without outing the flaw.
Responsible disclosure is a fair response to a responsible failure. Few of these that make the news are responsible failures. Chisellers dressed up in security theatre profiting from their faux contrivances while playing this stupid game of harassing the bearer of bad news, as if the bearer of bad news is an indentured, unpaid employee.
I understand the source of this faux reverence for charlatans much better after reading God is not Great. Scientology was a crock from day one, but now that so many gentle and naive souls have absorbed this crockery and imbued it with deep personal meaning, those of us who are deeply offended by the shitbag Hubbard are supposed to subside into polite silence. I asked myself after reading Hitchens: Why do I sit around keeping a respectfully stiff upper lip about xemufascism? To hell with that.
Banks should not be bailed out of bad loans, and security professionals should not be bailed out for chrome-plating obscurity. When the mistake is subtle enough to make a patent examiner's head explode, I'm all for responsible disclosure. Either pass the bar, or don't let the door hit you on the way out.
In my clusterfart rage I missed the obvious connection to Spirit and Opportunity. When you're designing for the harsh frontier guidance and reality are widely divergent.
Does long term neutron absorption make metals stronger or weaker? Just yesterday I read this:
Electron radiation is not harmful to KEVLAR. In fact, filaments of KEVLAR 49 exposed to 200 megarads show a very slight increase in tenacity and modulus...
I would have put the real link in, but copy link location in a Google results page to a PDF document captures the Google link as decked out in crotchless panties, and their supplemental visual rendition is redacted with the three dot fig leaf in the middle. Into every Eden an asshole must grow. I thought I had a Firefox extensions to nuke the link scramble, but it must have broken over some upgrade cycle, and my aging bone marrow is too coagulated to hunt this down.
U.S. reactors were originally licensed for 40 years of operation, but the majority have already received extensions to keep them going until the age of 60.
It would have been damn stupid to license them for any other duration. Forty years is about the minimum for the operators to feel confident about the horizon to recover their capital cost, and it gives you a long time to gain experience (which was thin on the ground in the 1960s) about how long this kind of facility actually lasts.
The forty year original term had ZERO absolutely ZERO implications on whether anyone back then believed these reactors would run another zero to fifty years after the original license term, and I'm sure many suspected that even making it to forty years was something to be hoped for and not necessarily expected, no matter what was stated in the original design guidance.
In engineering terms, there's no other way to do it. The problems begin when graft enters the license extension process, and when the expensive process of monitoring how well your facility is holding up is forsaken in exchange for a corporate jet and a lot of fancy dinners in Washington.
These sorts of ads have become much more popular recently and I can only conclude it's because they work.
There's a scene in Schindler's List where Amon Goeth sizes up Schindler's strange request remarking, "Whatever you do, there's always money in it, but this one I can't figure out." For some reason, I didn't spot this one in the usual movie quote compilations. Probably because the point is sharp but the language is dull.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly. Fortunately for his Jews, Schindler was able to mutter in his getaway car "there are more motives in heaven and earth, Amon, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Ultimately the problem here is that advertising tends not to be such a huge value add, unless you value the convenience of shopping at Margins-R-Us a whole lot.
Step 1: Identify the desired product. Step 2: Find a vendor with "flow through" pricing. Step 2a: s/Trademark\$*/generic_name
Just an hour ago I was looking for cut resistant gloves to handle glass carboys: s/Kevlar/aramid/ Bingo! On the plus side, a partially severed tendon would cut down no my posting obsession, with a coefficient of about 20wpm/mm. I'm also going to wrap the bottles in bundling tape to coral shards. I'm a gloves and suspenders type of guy.
Hopefully, my two Pebbles will someday exist. One is mostly for development. If you can scorch the firmware, you need two.
I've never really wanted a cell phone, unfortunately my Pebble won't be too useful without one. I share a crap Samsung with my squeeze. I wear it about once a month. We're on the cheapest plan we could find in British Columbia: a moderate chunk of pre-paid minutes that last for a year without expiring. Technically the minutes are billed at something like $0.30/minute, 24x7 but in actual fact we rarely exceed the bundled minutes, so we regard 100% of the fee as a fixed price for maintaining network connectivity. Huge incentive to keep calls short. The one situation that burns my biscuits is the extra phone company golden dulcet help menu that puts your call over a minute before you even reach the place where you can leave your five word "hey, it's me, I called" voice message. The annoying complication is that not all phone systems take the # key as "go straight to message". For some of my dial-dates the # key takes you to the "please enter your password to access your mailbox" voice menu. Then you have to burn another minute knowing better. The phone companies are so not on your side I prefer to keep my exposure to their business practices to a dead minimum. Would it take an act of god to get a phone that only bills when you turn it on? Apparently, yes: an act of god... or moving down under. (Note to Tel-holes: Bulk minutes with an expiry date don't count, unless the expiry dates use the decade as the baseline pint. If five years corresponds to a half-pint, then a half-pint is a moderately acceptable compromise.)
But anyway, I had reasons for wanting the Pebble, and one can only resist a rising red tide for so long.
I'm OK with a large phone. I made a cut-out from stiff cardboard of a Galaxy Note and left it on my desk for a week. Just a bit too big for regular phone use. I'd certainly have a headset of some kind. Fits just fine in my 36x36 jeans. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid the low-slung overgrown Gandalf-with-a-muffin-top look (but not so high it covers my nipple chain, should I suddenly wish to have one). At the compromise tide line around the top of the pelvic bones, the thing positively vanishes into my giant pockets.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to phone shop again for another three to five years, so it will be at least a dual core A15 with LTE enabled and the latest Android confection. The stylus shovelware will probably leave me cold, but you never know.
Lugging this beast around every day to talk to my amazing Pebble watch, I might even suck it up and activate a data plan. If it weren't for Pebble, I probably would have waited it out another year.
So in all of technology, only Apple users ever upgrade?
The magic of compound interest. Those of us who didn't buy any overpriced OS 8 or earlier Macs can upgrade our PCs for the rest of our days on compound interest alone. Interest rates have fallen, but my average purchase is less than 1/3 as much and the obsolescence curve is graceful, so I can pick my spots. Unfortunately, my Linux loyalties haven't worked out half so well. The African Queen mutated into an ayeSauron.
Of course, there must be a few old-timey Apple owners out there who purchased an early Mac as an inexpensive downgrade from a Sun Workstation, and who can therefore write-off future upgrades on the perpetual interest stream accruing to outrageous expense averted. And to think that people once complained about the New Math.
No, but it plays one on TV. In the Sack of Rome in 546, perhaps if they had burned all their valuables they could have discouraged the Totila's starvation effort. Actually kind of hard to do if your wealth is in golden metal. If you see a wood and rock structure with a lot of gold inside, burn it down, the gold will almost surely survive when little else does. I'm guessing that your average siege general wants a little more flesh on the bone than Calista Flockhart in week 16 of Biggest Loser, so what incentive would they have left?
... there have been no new methods for extinguishing and/or manipulating fire in almost 50 years...
I'm guessing this has been true for the vast majority of 100,000 non-overlapping intervals. Once a society begins to make progress on Vulcan hand gestures, you're expected to be a little beyond Roasted Chestnuts 101. I do concede some innovation to Peter Jackson in the category of six-minute kerosene mile. As Gandalf put it: "Fire really is an amazing creation. You can learn all there is to know about rubbing twigs in a month, and yet after a hundred thousand years the licking flames can still surprise you. " Truth be told, he felt this way about a lot of things.
Note to Jimmy Wales: resist the UX-groupthink mob who would tell you to make Wikipedia more tablet friendly. If it's ugly, it's ugly the way the old White Pages were ugly. Ugly and informative. The way a real newspaper used to be ugly (especially the front sections up to where the editorials, letters and Op-Ed pieces lay): ugly, information rich and informative.
Even better, visualize this request as Michael Jackson returned from the grave to recommend his favorite cosmetic surgeon.
There's a lot of people who seem to have trouble distinguishing aesthetics from anaesthesia. I'm guessing what many of these people want is a presentation layer designed by Normal Rockwell on Quaaludes to subjugate any perception of the complexity or messiness of the real world that might disrupt the internal forgetting contract.
Why should Wikipedia be more beautiful than the world it describes? Wikipedia is only ugly if it fails to describe the world in a way that is quickly intelligible as a workable first hypothesis.
Beauty is fragile. Beauty announces: Keep off the Flowers.
Normally I at least skim a few posts bearing a well-earned moderation bonus--or at least having accrued one or two after being thrown in the wash with the sick-day coveralls where no-one was brave enough to check the pockets--to pick up the tone.
The point of fact is that the speed "limit" is a social construct of a bygone era: The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed. Dumb humans presume that enforcement activity is centered around something real. It's buried deep in our psyche in the same place that getting a gold star on a grade 3 spelling bee as a predictor of future life accomplishment.
A real speed limit is where a road is physically unsafe under common conditions (early spring rain) for the bulk of the existing rolling stock. A local university has a ring road where the merge lane was built off camber. This slowed people down until someone died. That's a real speed limit, wrong-headed or not.
I don't read Gravity's Rainbow at the same speed as Harry Potter. Speed limits are a monument to acontextuality. Don't think for yourselves, we'll think for you. Alpha wolves, sort yourself to the front of the traffic jam, as your just deserts.
I drive in relation to the speed limit at all times. Other people are free to drive as if I'm actually obeying the speed limit, and I take this fully into account. It's the same language that the C++ standard is written in: implement it however you like, but it had better appear to work the way the standard requires, and no-one who counts on this can be criticised under any circumstance. It's called the "as if" rule IIRC.
I wouldn't mind at all if Thag's old "speed limit" is updated to a far more flexible "speed profile". But it will scare the politicians senseless if this new spirit of flexibility carries over into the polls.
The problem is it hurts employment across the board.
As much as I agree with Stiglitz that the price of inequality can't be understated, I'm not from the "dig a hole, fill a hole school" of employment nirvana. If Amazon can delivery better goods cheaper and sooner with less grunt labour, more power to them.
I suspect one of their major consumer targets are people in the commuter belt who bought Ford Explorers when gasoline was half the current price. People who have small cars and free time off peak, not so much. $5 premiums to get something a day sooner when you could have ordered it two weeks ago soon adds up to a fair chunk of change.
So if you're willing to risk 10G I think you can stop pretty darn quick.
Thanks for that. I actually snorted out loud. Trained marines in pressure suits with the force vector compacting the spine are reduced to peering through a constricting black tunnel in their field of vision in the desperate attempt to not black out before the missile passes.
I've heard -3g (e.g. non-inverted power dive) described as having an 800lb gorilla sitting on your shoulders squeezing your head between his thighs as if he's nearing his moment. Pilots rarely try this twice.
If people are facing forward wearing lap belts, they will all be praying to Allah with outstretched hands the size of dinner plates while bleeding from ruptured eyeballs. Roller coasters are limited to about +5g for short duration in optimal seating conditions. The nearest such coaster to my location is the one in West Edmonton Mall.
On the evening of June 14, 1986, after the yellow train (train #1) completed the second inverted loop, it encountered one of three areas of uplift before the third and final loop. Missing bolts on the left inside wheel assembly of the last car of the four car train caused the bogey assembly to disengage the track with a full load of riders. This caused the final car to fishtail wildly, disengaging the lap bars as it collided with support structures, thereby throwing off passengers and losing speed. The train entered the third and final inverted loop, but did not have the speed to complete the loop. The train stalled at the top, then slid backwards, crashing into a concrete pillar. Three people were killed during the accident and a fourth man was almost killed.
Not to worry. I'm sure those powerful magnetic fields in evacuated tunnels are magically convex--at least on paper--after a little problem with the Swiss-made magnet contacts is sorted out.
At the time of the accident the park was packed with people who were attending a concert. The ride had shut down twice, as the operator had heard a metallic noise from the train prior to the accident. Despite running the trains empty, the source of the problem could not be located by the maintenance staff, and the regular operation of the ride resumed until the accident occurred.
If a train squeaks in an evacuated tunnel, does anyone hear it?
An investigation and inquiry was launched that revealed that there were problems in the translation from German to English of operational and maintenance information from Schwarzkopf, the German coaster manufacturer. Additional issues with quality control were found as a result of the manufacturer going bankrupt during delivery of the ride, and portions of the ride being finished by the receiver of the firm.
I had forgotten all about Canary Wharf. An ever popular business model: dream big, or go home. These kinds of projects never attract the feeble of heart.
Anyone who feels the need to correct me can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned.
You can't correct a statement like that. You can mock, but not correct.
Sure, define a long string of dental floss as a "one piece" because it's physically contiguous, if that fills your love glove. Your other topological suggestion I'll not take up.
One small question though: if the string bikini top and the string bikini bottom are connected together only at brass rings, does it still count as a one piece, or is continuity beginning to crumble? What if the brass rings pierce the belly skin, so that the two halves are difficult to remove ensemble? Still a one piece? Now I've seen some arrangements of brass rings I'd have to classify as a three piece, if the rings were water soluble. So many categories, so little time.
This is like me breaking into someone's house, pissing and shitting all over the place, then paying a 5 dollar fine for doing so. Would that stop me in the future? Hell no.
That why credit rating agencies were granted an exemption from prosecution for liability and slander, even if their files contain shit information, and they spread it around to anyone who asks, even after they've being pointedly informed that the information is false.
You underestimate the power of a black eye well deserved, which is almost so great as s/Tuttle/Buttle.
I don't let that out often (it's unbecoming), so let's finish the scene.
Suppose Steve Supremo sits down with Tony Soprano and starts to impose Steve's aesthetic imperative on the fat clown with Steve's characteristic insistence and charm? Well, the bite out of the Apple logo would quickly come to represent the nut sack of his former masculinity mumping his jowls.
Those of us who generate, rather than borrow, our force of being all feel that way about the ways and customs of the Old Country. There's an investment in where you've been and who you are that digital technology just can't wait to castrate, casting us adrift as the nomads of cool.
I had fun writing that, but you know what's so pathetic about the mere existence of this discussion thread it makes me puke? The fucking elephant in the GUI circus tent? It's that I don't carry around some digital fob declaring my PERSONAL investments in digital skills which I've acquired through hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of hours of diligence and rote. Not my favorite fucking colour or background wallpaper. The fact that before the IBM PC arrived I had mastered the CTRL key positioned beside the A key as god intended. What's the Caps Lock key for, huh? To express anger (if you're an idiot) or TO BECOME ANGRY if you're not an idiot and you strike it by accident. No Caps Lock key was depressed in the previous sentence. It hardly slowed me down AT FUCKING ALL. The buggering of the CTRL key was my first experience with a level of outrage surpassed in intensity only by the despair and agony of the hard landing that followed my first hopelessly naive love affair. Both of these were major life lessons in learned helplessness. In my relationships with women, after much work, I managed to restore balance to the force. In my relationship with technology the situation is as bleak as ever. I'm composing this abortion from the void on Ubuntu fucking 10.10, the fat multimonitor GUI of which has absorbed some minor chunk of thousands (thankfully not yet tens of thousands) of hours of my life and energy. I've thrown away more, so many times I've lost count. Yet still something inside me protests. I've not yet met my personal Room 101. I still dare to dream. Dare to dream that I will someday sit down in front of a system that queries first MY FUCKING INVESTMENTS before flaunting Steve's superior personal aesthetic.
What else do I convey with my GUI fob? That arrays are ZERO ORIGIN as god intended (fucking up the integers is the work of man). Any computer language I sit down to use which supports ZERO ORIGIN had better switch it on, automatically, if the option exists. How many times do I need to repeat myself with every goddam console I approach?
And how about hidden file extensions in file browsers? Inside my fob of personal decree, written in blood letters of eternal wrath, DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN if you value your digital signals.
This is why after a hard day on the keyboard we sit around watching the Sopranos. People don't mess with Tony (or his counterparts in New York) without counting their gunships. Pretty much every human being in a David Chase universe is a loathsome creature, but we have such a hideous subjugated lust for something to take us seriously that we sit around and lap it up.
My electrogadgets have uniformly trained me to be too terrified to care. I take what I need, form no attachments by choice, and end up regretting any attachment I can't help though baseline Pavlovian reflex. Thank you, Canonical, for driving the final stake through my heart. I can die now, leaving nothing behind.
People's biggest hurdle learning to type is that qwerty jumbles up the established order of the alphabet.
When the going gets tough, the tough change the order of the alphabet. I've got 50,000 hours invested in the Qwerty layout (minus 50 hours when I strayed into Dvorak in the last 1970s in a text processor I wrote myself). All I've got invested in alphabetical order is a couple of weeks when I was four years old, and scattered painful minutes with printed dictionaries and phonebooks I'd really like to forget.
But no, I jest. It really would suck going to my favorite DVD rental outlet (with 10,000 titles in the back catalog) if they scrambled the drama shelves into Qwertical order. Us old farts just can't be pleased. Hell, why don't be just blow it all up and instigate ETAOIN SHRDLU? (I've been carrying around half of a different Romanji collation since Winograd without hardly knowing it.) This would have the added benefit of making any young person who ever walked into a physical DVD rental outlet familiar with power law distributions, and that can't be overrated as a cognitive boon.
etaoin shrdlu gvymp bjfxck qwz
There, I think I can remember that after a half hour. I was going to sort the back half into Qwghlmian order, not wanting to invent something arbitrary, but I can't find the full 16 on the internet. It's a sad day for geekhood.
Is it even legal to link a cartoon here lacking a tooltip bish-boom? I even enabled cookies for dilbert.com and still no yellow cake. Then it dawned on me... I've been had.
No, they're mainly the recipients of charity, public charity, but not often, since they can't be bothered to lift a sack for mere billions.
It's not just me. I see you took flak from numerous parties over this post. Well, surprise, slashdot hasn't yet descended to the level of FOX News where "abracadabra private sector sweat equity hocus pocus confiscatory government alacazam redistributive charity" completely shuts done brain blood supply to the critical faculties.
(Seriously Slashdot? 2012 and I can't use even basic HTML entities, never mind Unicode???).
I've been substituting "(slashcode fuckup)" wherever Slashdot mangles basic character sets for a long while now, but it hasn't caught on. Maybe the problem is that I'm not spelling it out in backslash octal.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about the revisionist history. Bill made their bed and now they are lying in it. But he didn't have to leave. Despite his negative charisma and the brutality of his methods, his leadership was better than what followed. I don't even think he was personally hated so much as the fruits of his reign were hated. I personally don't hate Bill. Hitchens describes some dictatorship (Romania?) where it was said that the fear was so thick you could not just cut it, but actually eat it. My contempt for what His Billness stands for is so thick I could eat it, but I don't actually hate the man.
Slow decline? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard since Windows Me, a brisk decline by any rational standard. In a Warner Brothers cartoon, Windows Me would be represented as a piano in free fall attached to a coil of rope rapidly unwinding. The rope is attached to a cotter pin in the trellis work supporting a Saturn V rocket ship, which threatens to tip over and launch sideways into a colossal machine works with a 50,000 tonne Alcoa press hard at work stamping out giant Fabrige ostrich eggs.
I've got Amis's The War Against Cliche on hold at my local library. If I had written Harry Potter, anyone describing the arc of Microsoft as "slow decline" would be at risk of having the owls arrive to carry off their beards and toupees, or any other device of attire designed to conceal the bare chin wattles or shiny pate of thoughtless word selection. Instead of Muggles, there would be Paters: universal objects of titters and ridicule. Instead of Defence Against the Dark Arts, cautious use of hair-stealing adjectives would prevail among the cognoscenti.
Aesop weeps.
But wait, there's more.
Welcome to the Soprano sandbox.
You've read the earnings reports and you're still thinking Puma concolor and not Panthera yeti?
Goldman Sachs creams their jeans over this kind of IQ-dismissive pragmatism among the puntocrats.
FTFY.
Responsible disclosure is a fair response to a responsible failure. Few of these that make the news are responsible failures. Chisellers dressed up in security theatre profiting from their faux contrivances while playing this stupid game of harassing the bearer of bad news, as if the bearer of bad news is an indentured, unpaid employee.
I understand the source of this faux reverence for charlatans much better after reading God is not Great. Scientology was a crock from day one, but now that so many gentle and naive souls have absorbed this crockery and imbued it with deep personal meaning, those of us who are deeply offended by the shitbag Hubbard are supposed to subside into polite silence. I asked myself after reading Hitchens: Why do I sit around keeping a respectfully stiff upper lip about xemufascism? To hell with that.
Banks should not be bailed out of bad loans, and security professionals should not be bailed out for chrome-plating obscurity. When the mistake is subtle enough to make a patent examiner's head explode, I'm all for responsible disclosure. Either pass the bar, or don't let the door hit you on the way out.
In my clusterfart rage I missed the obvious connection to Spirit and Opportunity. When you're designing for the harsh frontier guidance and reality are widely divergent.
Does long term neutron absorption make metals stronger or weaker? Just yesterday I read this:
From http://www2.dupont.com/Kevlar/en_US/.../KEVLAR_Technical_Guide.pdf
I would have put the real link in, but copy link location in a Google results page to a PDF document captures the Google link as decked out in crotchless panties, and their supplemental visual rendition is redacted with the three dot fig leaf in the middle. Into every Eden an asshole must grow. I thought I had a Firefox extensions to nuke the link scramble, but it must have broken over some upgrade cycle, and my aging bone marrow is too coagulated to hunt this down.
It would have been damn stupid to license them for any other duration. Forty years is about the minimum for the operators to feel confident about the horizon to recover their capital cost, and it gives you a long time to gain experience (which was thin on the ground in the 1960s) about how long this kind of facility actually lasts.
The forty year original term had ZERO absolutely ZERO implications on whether anyone back then believed these reactors would run another zero to fifty years after the original license term, and I'm sure many suspected that even making it to forty years was something to be hoped for and not necessarily expected, no matter what was stated in the original design guidance.
In engineering terms, there's no other way to do it. The problems begin when graft enters the license extension process, and when the expensive process of monitoring how well your facility is holding up is forsaken in exchange for a corporate jet and a lot of fancy dinners in Washington.
There's a scene in Schindler's List where Amon Goeth sizes up Schindler's strange request remarking, "Whatever you do, there's always money in it, but this one I can't figure out." For some reason, I didn't spot this one in the usual movie quote compilations. Probably because the point is sharp but the language is dull.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly. Fortunately for his Jews, Schindler was able to mutter in his getaway car "there are more motives in heaven and earth, Amon, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Ultimately the problem here is that advertising tends not to be such a huge value add, unless you value the convenience of shopping at Margins-R-Us a whole lot.
Step 1: Identify the desired product.
Step 2: Find a vendor with "flow through" pricing.
Step 2a: s/Trademark\$*/generic_name
Just an hour ago I was looking for cut resistant gloves to handle glass carboys: s/Kevlar/aramid/ Bingo! On the plus side, a partially severed tendon would cut down no my posting obsession, with a coefficient of about 20wpm/mm. I'm also going to wrap the bottles in bundling tape to coral shards. I'm a gloves and suspenders type of guy.
Oh, fuck off. This is News for Nerds, not Masturbation for Voluble Twats.
Hopefully, my two Pebbles will someday exist. One is mostly for development. If you can scorch the firmware, you need two.
I've never really wanted a cell phone, unfortunately my Pebble won't be too useful without one. I share a crap Samsung with my squeeze. I wear it about once a month. We're on the cheapest plan we could find in British Columbia: a moderate chunk of pre-paid minutes that last for a year without expiring. Technically the minutes are billed at something like $0.30/minute, 24x7 but in actual fact we rarely exceed the bundled minutes, so we regard 100% of the fee as a fixed price for maintaining network connectivity. Huge incentive to keep calls short. The one situation that burns my biscuits is the extra phone company golden dulcet help menu that puts your call over a minute before you even reach the place where you can leave your five word "hey, it's me, I called" voice message. The annoying complication is that not all phone systems take the # key as "go straight to message". For some of my dial-dates the # key takes you to the "please enter your password to access your mailbox" voice menu. Then you have to burn another minute knowing better. The phone companies are so not on your side I prefer to keep my exposure to their business practices to a dead minimum. Would it take an act of god to get a phone that only bills when you turn it on? Apparently, yes: an act of god ... or moving down under. (Note to Tel-holes: Bulk minutes with an expiry date don't count, unless the expiry dates use the decade as the baseline pint. If five years corresponds to a half-pint, then a half-pint is a moderately acceptable compromise.)
But anyway, I had reasons for wanting the Pebble, and one can only resist a rising red tide for so long.
I'm OK with a large phone. I made a cut-out from stiff cardboard of a Galaxy Note and left it on my desk for a week. Just a bit too big for regular phone use. I'd certainly have a headset of some kind. Fits just fine in my 36x36 jeans. In fact, I go out of my way to avoid the low-slung overgrown Gandalf-with-a-muffin-top look (but not so high it covers my nipple chain, should I suddenly wish to have one). At the compromise tide line around the top of the pelvic bones, the thing positively vanishes into my giant pockets.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to phone shop again for another three to five years, so it will be at least a dual core A15 with LTE enabled and the latest Android confection. The stylus shovelware will probably leave me cold, but you never know.
Lugging this beast around every day to talk to my amazing Pebble watch, I might even suck it up and activate a data plan. If it weren't for Pebble, I probably would have waited it out another year.
The magic of compound interest. Those of us who didn't buy any overpriced OS 8 or earlier Macs can upgrade our PCs for the rest of our days on compound interest alone. Interest rates have fallen, but my average purchase is less than 1/3 as much and the obsolescence curve is graceful, so I can pick my spots. Unfortunately, my Linux loyalties haven't worked out half so well. The African Queen mutated into an ayeSauron.
Of course, there must be a few old-timey Apple owners out there who purchased an early Mac as an inexpensive downgrade from a Sun Workstation, and who can therefore write-off future upgrades on the perpetual interest stream accruing to outrageous expense averted. And to think that people once complained about the New Math.
No, but it plays one on TV. In the Sack of Rome in 546, perhaps if they had burned all their valuables they could have discouraged the Totila's starvation effort. Actually kind of hard to do if your wealth is in golden metal. If you see a wood and rock structure with a lot of gold inside, burn it down, the gold will almost surely survive when little else does. I'm guessing that your average siege general wants a little more flesh on the bone than Calista Flockhart in week 16 of Biggest Loser, so what incentive would they have left?
I'm guessing this has been true for the vast majority of 100,000 non-overlapping intervals. Once a society begins to make progress on Vulcan hand gestures, you're expected to be a little beyond Roasted Chestnuts 101. I do concede some innovation to Peter Jackson in the category of six-minute kerosene mile. As Gandalf put it: "Fire really is an amazing creation. You can learn all there is to know about rubbing twigs in a month, and yet after a hundred thousand years the licking flames can still surprise you. " Truth be told, he felt this way about a lot of things.
Even better, visualize this request as Michael Jackson returned from the grave to recommend his favorite cosmetic surgeon.
There's a lot of people who seem to have trouble distinguishing aesthetics from anaesthesia. I'm guessing what many of these people want is a presentation layer designed by Normal Rockwell on Quaaludes to subjugate any perception of the complexity or messiness of the real world that might disrupt the internal forgetting contract.
Why should Wikipedia be more beautiful than the world it describes? Wikipedia is only ugly if it fails to describe the world in a way that is quickly intelligible as a workable first hypothesis.
Beauty is fragile. Beauty announces: Keep off the Flowers.
Normally I at least skim a few posts bearing a well-earned moderation bonus--or at least having accrued one or two after being thrown in the wash with the sick-day coveralls where no-one was brave enough to check the pockets--to pick up the tone.
The point of fact is that the speed "limit" is a social construct of a bygone era: The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed. Dumb humans presume that enforcement activity is centered around something real. It's buried deep in our psyche in the same place that getting a gold star on a grade 3 spelling bee as a predictor of future life accomplishment.
A real speed limit is where a road is physically unsafe under common conditions (early spring rain) for the bulk of the existing rolling stock. A local university has a ring road where the merge lane was built off camber. This slowed people down until someone died. That's a real speed limit, wrong-headed or not.
I don't read Gravity's Rainbow at the same speed as Harry Potter. Speed limits are a monument to acontextuality. Don't think for yourselves, we'll think for you. Alpha wolves, sort yourself to the front of the traffic jam, as your just deserts.
I drive in relation to the speed limit at all times. Other people are free to drive as if I'm actually obeying the speed limit, and I take this fully into account. It's the same language that the C++ standard is written in: implement it however you like, but it had better appear to work the way the standard requires, and no-one who counts on this can be criticised under any circumstance. It's called the "as if" rule IIRC.
I wouldn't mind at all if Thag's old "speed limit" is updated to a far more flexible "speed profile". But it will scare the politicians senseless if this new spirit of flexibility carries over into the polls.
As much as I agree with Stiglitz that the price of inequality can't be understated, I'm not from the "dig a hole, fill a hole school" of employment nirvana. If Amazon can delivery better goods cheaper and sooner with less grunt labour, more power to them.
I suspect one of their major consumer targets are people in the commuter belt who bought Ford Explorers when gasoline was half the current price. People who have small cars and free time off peak, not so much. $5 premiums to get something a day sooner when you could have ordered it two weeks ago soon adds up to a fair chunk of change.
Thanks for that. I actually snorted out loud. Trained marines in pressure suits with the force vector compacting the spine are reduced to peering through a constricting black tunnel in their field of vision in the desperate attempt to not black out before the missile passes.
I've heard -3g (e.g. non-inverted power dive) described as having an 800lb gorilla sitting on your shoulders squeezing your head between his thighs as if he's nearing his moment. Pilots rarely try this twice.
If people are facing forward wearing lap belts, they will all be praying to Allah with outstretched hands the size of dinner plates while bleeding from ruptured eyeballs. Roller coasters are limited to about +5g for short duration in optimal seating conditions. The nearest such coaster to my location is the one in West Edmonton Mall.
Not to worry. I'm sure those powerful magnetic fields in evacuated tunnels are magically convex--at least on paper--after a little problem with the Swiss-made magnet contacts is sorted out.
If a train squeaks in an evacuated tunnel, does anyone hear it?
I had forgotten all about Canary Wharf. An ever popular business model: dream big, or go home. These kinds of projects never attract the feeble of heart.
You can't correct a statement like that. You can mock, but not correct.
Sure, define a long string of dental floss as a "one piece" because it's physically contiguous, if that fills your love glove. Your other topological suggestion I'll not take up.
One small question though: if the string bikini top and the string bikini bottom are connected together only at brass rings, does it still count as a one piece, or is continuity beginning to crumble? What if the brass rings pierce the belly skin, so that the two halves are difficult to remove ensemble? Still a one piece? Now I've seen some arrangements of brass rings I'd have to classify as a three piece, if the rings were water soluble. So many categories, so little time.
That why credit rating agencies were granted an exemption from prosecution for liability and slander, even if their files contain shit information, and they spread it around to anyone who asks, even after they've being pointedly informed that the information is false.
You underestimate the power of a black eye well deserved, which is almost so great as s/Tuttle/Buttle.
I don't let that out often (it's unbecoming), so let's finish the scene.
Suppose Steve Supremo sits down with Tony Soprano and starts to impose Steve's aesthetic imperative on the fat clown with Steve's characteristic insistence and charm? Well, the bite out of the Apple logo would quickly come to represent the nut sack of his former masculinity mumping his jowls.
Those of us who generate, rather than borrow, our force of being all feel that way about the ways and customs of the Old Country. There's an investment in where you've been and who you are that digital technology just can't wait to castrate, casting us adrift as the nomads of cool.
I had fun writing that, but you know what's so pathetic about the mere existence of this discussion thread it makes me puke? The fucking elephant in the GUI circus tent? It's that I don't carry around some digital fob declaring my PERSONAL investments in digital skills which I've acquired through hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of hours of diligence and rote. Not my favorite fucking colour or background wallpaper. The fact that before the IBM PC arrived I had mastered the CTRL key positioned beside the A key as god intended. What's the Caps Lock key for, huh? To express anger (if you're an idiot) or TO BECOME ANGRY if you're not an idiot and you strike it by accident. No Caps Lock key was depressed in the previous sentence. It hardly slowed me down AT FUCKING ALL. The buggering of the CTRL key was my first experience with a level of outrage surpassed in intensity only by the despair and agony of the hard landing that followed my first hopelessly naive love affair. Both of these were major life lessons in learned helplessness. In my relationships with women, after much work, I managed to restore balance to the force. In my relationship with technology the situation is as bleak as ever. I'm composing this abortion from the void on Ubuntu fucking 10.10, the fat multimonitor GUI of which has absorbed some minor chunk of thousands (thankfully not yet tens of thousands) of hours of my life and energy. I've thrown away more, so many times I've lost count. Yet still something inside me protests. I've not yet met my personal Room 101. I still dare to dream. Dare to dream that I will someday sit down in front of a system that queries first MY FUCKING INVESTMENTS before flaunting Steve's superior personal aesthetic.
What else do I convey with my GUI fob? That arrays are ZERO ORIGIN as god intended (fucking up the integers is the work of man). Any computer language I sit down to use which supports ZERO ORIGIN had better switch it on, automatically, if the option exists. How many times do I need to repeat myself with every goddam console I approach?
And how about hidden file extensions in file browsers? Inside my fob of personal decree, written in blood letters of eternal wrath, DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN if you value your digital signals.
This is why after a hard day on the keyboard we sit around watching the Sopranos. People don't mess with Tony (or his counterparts in New York) without counting their gunships. Pretty much every human being in a David Chase universe is a loathsome creature, but we have such a hideous subjugated lust for something to take us seriously that we sit around and lap it up.
My electrogadgets have uniformly trained me to be too terrified to care. I take what I need, form no attachments by choice, and end up regretting any attachment I can't help though baseline Pavlovian reflex. Thank you, Canonical, for driving the final stake through my heart. I can die now, leaving nothing behind.
When the going gets tough, the tough change the order of the alphabet. I've got 50,000 hours invested in the Qwerty layout (minus 50 hours when I strayed into Dvorak in the last 1970s in a text processor I wrote myself). All I've got invested in alphabetical order is a couple of weeks when I was four years old, and scattered painful minutes with printed dictionaries and phonebooks I'd really like to forget.
But no, I jest. It really would suck going to my favorite DVD rental outlet (with 10,000 titles in the back catalog) if they scrambled the drama shelves into Qwertical order. Us old farts just can't be pleased. Hell, why don't be just blow it all up and instigate ETAOIN SHRDLU? (I've been carrying around half of a different Romanji collation since Winograd without hardly knowing it.) This would have the added benefit of making any young person who ever walked into a physical DVD rental outlet familiar with power law distributions, and that can't be overrated as a cognitive boon.
etaoin shrdlu gvymp bjfxck qwz
There, I think I can remember that after a half hour. I was going to sort the back half into Qwghlmian order, not wanting to invent something arbitrary, but I can't find the full 16 on the internet. It's a sad day for geekhood.
Is it even legal to link a cartoon here lacking a tooltip bish-boom? I even enabled cookies for dilbert.com and still no yellow cake. Then it dawned on me ... I've been had.
No, they're mainly the recipients of charity, public charity, but not often, since they can't be bothered to lift a sack for mere billions.
It's not just me. I see you took flak from numerous parties over this post. Well, surprise, slashdot hasn't yet descended to the level of FOX News where "abracadabra private sector sweat equity hocus pocus confiscatory government alacazam redistributive charity" completely shuts done brain blood supply to the critical faculties.
This is the emotional logic of people trapped in unhappy marriages who never paddled hard enough to replace the original-issue plastic oars.
I've been substituting "(slashcode fuckup)" wherever Slashdot mangles basic character sets for a long while now, but it hasn't caught on. Maybe the problem is that I'm not spelling it out in backslash octal.