This was my first thought, though I was specifically thinking that all of my iPhone photos get synched up to iCloud within seconds, and there's not a damn thing our friends in blue can do about it. Unless, of course, they take precautions to jam wifi and cellular signals, but that would never happen in America, would it? Would it?
There's no reason corporations need to be immortal
Nor, if they're well managed, do they need to die. There's no reason that they couldn't have found a way to evolve to better embrace the digital photography economy, even if they did not own it.
That being said, I'm mostly going to miss it for the nostalgia value. I grew up in a world where "Kodak" was the "Kleenex" of photography. Everyone I know who is my age or older has owned at least one Kodak camera, and to me, it's a little sad to see the guard change.
Karma, rebirth, samsara, the four noble truths, ans so on are all dogmatic, absolute "truths".
No talk I have ever attended has ever treated rebirth/samsara as anything but metaphors for the cycles of life. Karma, similarly, is, in my experience, treated more as a guideline than as a black-and-white fact. Growing up in a more Ju-Ch environment, I definitely heard "you will go to hell if you do x", and "when the savior returns, y will happen". But with regards to karma, it's more like, you have an effect on your surroundings, and your surroundings have an effect on you; you can choose to make your world a better or worse place to live in.
The four noble truths aren't dogma, but a foundation for a practice, something that you may pause and consider, and maybe decide for yourself if they are true.
The difference here is that while some modern Buddhists are certainly smug mofos, they're not likely to tell you that you're a sinner or that you're going to hell if you don't agree with them.
As exemplified by the first noble truth: Life is suffering. Couldn't get more happy than that. I know, I don't "understand" it.
That's one interpretation. I prefer, "Life is bittersweet." The idea is that life is not just one thing; at least at this point, we haven't figured out immortality, and so as eternal (from a human perspective) as life itself is, it contains death and destruction as much as it contains growth and new beginnings. Joy and pain are all part of a full life.
The whole idea is one of acceptance over denial, the idea that you will be able to live a fuller life if you are able to experience even your deepest pains, and then move on, rather than running from them and have that act of avoision (trust me, it's a cromulent word) be a defining factor in your life.
Nice. Already posted, so I can't mod, but I think this dovetails nicely into my own feelings about faith's role in modern society. I wrote about it elsewhere in this thread--tl;dr: faith can certainly be a backstop for those things that we can not yet understand--and the main thing I left out is the personal aspect of it.
This is one of the reasons that--to me--of all of the formal religions, Buddhism is most pleasing to me. There are teachers and there are texts, but it's core is around experience rather than absolute truths. One of the things you'll hear a Buddhist saying is, "If you find the Buddha, kill the Buddha." There are, of course, a lot of ways to interpret this, but one which fits with your comment is that it's an inoculation against demagoguery; if someone goes around claiming to know everything, i.e. to be the Buddha, that person should be removed from your spiritual practice because he (or she) is by definition not the Buddha.
And yes, I do appreciate your Bokononism references. Bokononism, to me, is simply Buddhism with a little bit of an angry edge, or conversely, Buddhism is a happier, more hopeful version of Bokononism.
Science is the product of a particular philosophy, and that philosophy stands in opposition to most of the world's religions.
It has not always been thus. For quite a lot of human history, the greatest religious leaders were also the greatest scientists, and they did not see a rift twixt the two. For some, it was studying the universe in order to better see the glory of their God or Gods; for others, it was a means of using knowledge not available to most people in order to exert control over the masses. You better believe, for instance, that when a Maya religious leader spoke of blocking out the sun--and it happened--his study of the Solar system paid off in spades.
I'm western-civ-centric, so I cite the era of Galileo and Kepler as the time when science really diverged from religion. What with all the Earth-isn't-flat-isms and humans-aren't-the-center-of-the-universe-isms, the religious leadership got their collective panties in a bunch and doubled down on what had worked for them. In 1610, chanting "Faith! Faith! Faith!" was a lot like chanting "USA! USA! USA!" during the Bush administration, unless you were doing it ironically.
But I understand the sentiment behind the GGP's post: if I were to rephrase it, I'd say that he is suggesting that he believes that there is something greater than us, that God is a nice, convenient way to describe for whatever that is--the unifying field theory?--and that many of the stories in the bible are convenient shorthand for those things that we don't have understanding. Faith isn't necessarily a self-riteous thumping of a book, but rather an acceptance of those stories as a good-enough framework for those times when, "I just don't know" isn't good enough.
Hell, our own intelligence is just a collection of chemical reactions and electrical impulses moving around in bags of flesh. Who are we to say that we are not some sort of functional cogs in a much greater device which we have not yet even begun to perceive? I'd suggest anyone that denies that possibility out of hand is themselves a sort of a zealot; if you accept that it's a possibility even though you don't believe it yourself without proof, what do you care if someone calls that greater device "God"?
Me, I like to invent my own mythology and orthodoxies, and adhere to them zealously until my next idea comes along. The best part is the number of religious holidays I get to take. "No boss, it's Kal-el's birthday, and that is sacred to my people!"
French spelling is easy. Write out the first syllable phonetically, and then put 5-20 additional characters on the end which are silent. Bam. My handle, for example, is pronounced "Ben".
If you know anyone who is superstitious, give them a two dollar bill and watch them squirm. The types of folks who throw salt over their shoulder feel compelled to get rid of a two dollar bill as soon as they get it. I don't know why, but in terms of bad luck, two dollar bill is like a black cat crossing your path.
Even with only 20 different sizes, if there is enough variation between neighboring tiles, the groupings could still provide enough information to narrow things down significantly.
I think "cranberry" refers to the cranberry sauce that some people eat at Thanksgiving. Some people make it themselves, and that's relatively labor intensive, but most people just buy the canned stuff. And of the people who buy the canned stuff, it's pretty common for them to simply put it on a plate, maybe slicing it for some kind of presentation, but it still clearly looks like it came from a can.
It's a stretch--and don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting the insult, just explaining it--but I think the GP is using that term to underscore his/her assertion that your post was canned. It's almost worth it not to get first post just to avoid this sort of attention. Me, I avoid it by posting phenomenally stupid and uninformed pieces on a regular basis so that nobody could accuse me of being a shill. Nobody would ever pay me for what I post on slashdot.
What city are you in? I've been to a few Apple stores and if anything, have to fend off the help. Last time I was at the local store, to get my iPad a few months ago, three people asked if I needed help in the five minutes it took for them to get my iPad from the back room. And the place was totally packed.
I understand that my experience is just an anecdote, but it's been consistent enough that I assumed that it was an artifact of how they train their staff; I'd be interested to know where it's different.
Honestly, what you are describing sounds more like my experience when they had the "store within a store" experiment at CompUSA. I remember not being able to drag the one salesperson away from his Tomb Raider session.
I don't know, man, if they're recording and editing multi-track audio in Garage Band or doing video editing in iMovie or Avid's new deal, I'll bet they could kill the battery during a pretty short hop.
Joking aside, there are other solutions too, such as pre-charging some of those third party external battery packs and keeping them on hand.
Huh? Basically everyone there can check you out. What's impossible to find is cash registers because they don't have them. Or maybe they have one tucked away. But most transactions are done via credit card, and every employee has mobile devices which can help you check out.
Not to mention the fact that if you have an iTunes account and their store app, you can actually self-check-out without talking to anyone, except to maybe show the electronic receipt to someone on the way out the door.
It's easy to shit on Apple, and clearly it's fun, because lots of people do it. But to say something like "actual sales are secondary" in the face of outrageous success on their part is just pure silliness. It's not like people are just pointing to foot traffic and calling them a success for that--although that is one of the metrics getting played up--it's about dollars per square foot, and love them or hate them, they are indeed making more dollars per square foot than pretty much any other retail establishment.
If actual sales are secondary, then their success at whatever you think their primary goal is must be absolutely stellar.
I think the point is that if there are any power ports available--and I don't know if there are, but if they are--it shouldn't be difficult to make an adaptor that can peel off 5V DC and spit it out of a USB-shaped plug.
Thanks for the follow-up. I certainly understand how that would be the right way to go if a component vendor is effectively acting as a dumb foundry, just making things to spec. But it seems to me that a *lot* of end-manufacturers (e.g., Apple et al) use the same or nearly identical components. For example, I had thought that Qualcomm was the component vendor of note for a huge portion of 3G and Wifi radios. Since that's their business--making 3G radios, even if they're maybe customizing them in terms of size and shape for a particular end-manufacturer, that they are indeed profiting off of those patents.
I guess it's all about who is actually putting the product into the customer's hands.
And then OTOH, all 3G compatible devices must infringe the Samsung patent.
What I don't understand about this is that Apple (and likely most 3G device manufacturers) don't make their own 3G radios. Rather, they source components which use those radios. Isn't it up to the component manufacturer who creates their 3G implementation and sells it to the device manufacturer to cover these sorts of patent fees?
To use a ham-handed example, I'm sure there are lots of patented technologies in automotive tires. If Goodyear makes a tire which relies on a licensed patent from Pirelli, I'd assume that Goodyear provides all the licensing fees and passes the costs along to their customers. If one of those customers is, say Ford, who exclusively uses Goodyear tires on all of it's Festiva cars, does Ford have to pay that licensing fee as well?
There's clearly something that I don't understand, but it seems to me that a 3G radio should be like that tire, in that it's got an interface, and while the device may be designed around the features and functionality of the interface, the implementation of 3G technology is basically embedded within the component.
The only way I could see Apple or other device vendors being held responsible for the licensing would be if they are asking the component vendors to make custom versions of the radios as work-for-hire, i.e. the component manufacturers are just foundries doing the labor on Apple's designs which themselves infringe on the 3G patents. Is that what's going on here?
Slashdot Mirror
This was my first thought, though I was specifically thinking that all of my iPhone photos get synched up to iCloud within seconds, and there's not a damn thing our friends in blue can do about it. Unless, of course, they take precautions to jam wifi and cellular signals, but that would never happen in America, would it? Would it?
I'm here from the Grammar Police. That should have been "Arrested by whom?"
This time around, they're hoping to get iPad factories. I'll bet they stick to their agreements.
There's no reason corporations need to be immortal
Nor, if they're well managed, do they need to die. There's no reason that they couldn't have found a way to evolve to better embrace the digital photography economy, even if they did not own it.
That being said, I'm mostly going to miss it for the nostalgia value. I grew up in a world where "Kodak" was the "Kleenex" of photography. Everyone I know who is my age or older has owned at least one Kodak camera, and to me, it's a little sad to see the guard change.
Karma, rebirth, samsara, the four noble truths, ans so on are all dogmatic, absolute "truths".
No talk I have ever attended has ever treated rebirth/samsara as anything but metaphors for the cycles of life. Karma, similarly, is, in my experience, treated more as a guideline than as a black-and-white fact. Growing up in a more Ju-Ch environment, I definitely heard "you will go to hell if you do x", and "when the savior returns, y will happen". But with regards to karma, it's more like, you have an effect on your surroundings, and your surroundings have an effect on you; you can choose to make your world a better or worse place to live in. The four noble truths aren't dogma, but a foundation for a practice, something that you may pause and consider, and maybe decide for yourself if they are true. The difference here is that while some modern Buddhists are certainly smug mofos, they're not likely to tell you that you're a sinner or that you're going to hell if you don't agree with them.
As exemplified by the first noble truth: Life is suffering. Couldn't get more happy than that. I know, I don't "understand" it.
That's one interpretation. I prefer, "Life is bittersweet." The idea is that life is not just one thing; at least at this point, we haven't figured out immortality, and so as eternal (from a human perspective) as life itself is, it contains death and destruction as much as it contains growth and new beginnings. Joy and pain are all part of a full life.
The whole idea is one of acceptance over denial, the idea that you will be able to live a fuller life if you are able to experience even your deepest pains, and then move on, rather than running from them and have that act of avoision (trust me, it's a cromulent word) be a defining factor in your life.
LOL, whoops.
Real men swallow the flesh of their pray while it is still kicking and trying to escape.
What? I just figured it needed to be taken to its logical extreme...
Nice. Already posted, so I can't mod, but I think this dovetails nicely into my own feelings about faith's role in modern society. I wrote about it elsewhere in this thread--tl;dr: faith can certainly be a backstop for those things that we can not yet understand--and the main thing I left out is the personal aspect of it.
This is one of the reasons that--to me--of all of the formal religions, Buddhism is most pleasing to me. There are teachers and there are texts, but it's core is around experience rather than absolute truths. One of the things you'll hear a Buddhist saying is, "If you find the Buddha, kill the Buddha." There are, of course, a lot of ways to interpret this, but one which fits with your comment is that it's an inoculation against demagoguery; if someone goes around claiming to know everything, i.e. to be the Buddha, that person should be removed from your spiritual practice because he (or she) is by definition not the Buddha.
And yes, I do appreciate your Bokononism references. Bokononism, to me, is simply Buddhism with a little bit of an angry edge, or conversely, Buddhism is a happier, more hopeful version of Bokononism.
Science is the product of a particular philosophy, and that philosophy stands in opposition to most of the world's religions.
It has not always been thus. For quite a lot of human history, the greatest religious leaders were also the greatest scientists, and they did not see a rift twixt the two. For some, it was studying the universe in order to better see the glory of their God or Gods; for others, it was a means of using knowledge not available to most people in order to exert control over the masses. You better believe, for instance, that when a Maya religious leader spoke of blocking out the sun--and it happened--his study of the Solar system paid off in spades.
I'm western-civ-centric, so I cite the era of Galileo and Kepler as the time when science really diverged from religion. What with all the Earth-isn't-flat-isms and humans-aren't-the-center-of-the-universe-isms, the religious leadership got their collective panties in a bunch and doubled down on what had worked for them. In 1610, chanting "Faith! Faith! Faith!" was a lot like chanting "USA! USA! USA!" during the Bush administration, unless you were doing it ironically.
But I understand the sentiment behind the GGP's post: if I were to rephrase it, I'd say that he is suggesting that he believes that there is something greater than us, that God is a nice, convenient way to describe for whatever that is--the unifying field theory?--and that many of the stories in the bible are convenient shorthand for those things that we don't have understanding. Faith isn't necessarily a self-riteous thumping of a book, but rather an acceptance of those stories as a good-enough framework for those times when, "I just don't know" isn't good enough.
Hell, our own intelligence is just a collection of chemical reactions and electrical impulses moving around in bags of flesh. Who are we to say that we are not some sort of functional cogs in a much greater device which we have not yet even begun to perceive? I'd suggest anyone that denies that possibility out of hand is themselves a sort of a zealot; if you accept that it's a possibility even though you don't believe it yourself without proof, what do you care if someone calls that greater device "God"?
Me, I like to invent my own mythology and orthodoxies, and adhere to them zealously until my next idea comes along. The best part is the number of religious holidays I get to take. "No boss, it's Kal-el's birthday, and that is sacred to my people!"
French spelling is easy. Write out the first syllable phonetically, and then put 5-20 additional characters on the end which are silent. Bam. My handle, for example, is pronounced "Ben".
So you're British too, then?
Apparently, at least some of you Brits make up for your extraneous U's with a profound lack of humour.
If you know anyone who is superstitious, give them a two dollar bill and watch them squirm. The types of folks who throw salt over their shoulder feel compelled to get rid of a two dollar bill as soon as they get it. I don't know why, but in terms of bad luck, two dollar bill is like a black cat crossing your path.
Or, as we say in America, "forty". You Brits and your crazy use of the letter "u"! "Colour" indeed!
Yo dawg, I heard you liked AC posts, so I put an AC post in your AC post, so you could post AC while you post AC!
Even with only 20 different sizes, if there is enough variation between neighboring tiles, the groupings could still provide enough information to narrow things down significantly.
I think "cranberry" refers to the cranberry sauce that some people eat at Thanksgiving. Some people make it themselves, and that's relatively labor intensive, but most people just buy the canned stuff. And of the people who buy the canned stuff, it's pretty common for them to simply put it on a plate, maybe slicing it for some kind of presentation, but it still clearly looks like it came from a can.
It's a stretch--and don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting the insult, just explaining it--but I think the GP is using that term to underscore his/her assertion that your post was canned. It's almost worth it not to get first post just to avoid this sort of attention. Me, I avoid it by posting phenomenally stupid and uninformed pieces on a regular basis so that nobody could accuse me of being a shill. Nobody would ever pay me for what I post on slashdot.
What city are you in? I've been to a few Apple stores and if anything, have to fend off the help. Last time I was at the local store, to get my iPad a few months ago, three people asked if I needed help in the five minutes it took for them to get my iPad from the back room. And the place was totally packed.
I understand that my experience is just an anecdote, but it's been consistent enough that I assumed that it was an artifact of how they train their staff; I'd be interested to know where it's different.
Honestly, what you are describing sounds more like my experience when they had the "store within a store" experiment at CompUSA. I remember not being able to drag the one salesperson away from his Tomb Raider session.
I don't know, man, if they're recording and editing multi-track audio in Garage Band or doing video editing in iMovie or Avid's new deal, I'll bet they could kill the battery during a pretty short hop.
Joking aside, there are other solutions too, such as pre-charging some of those third party external battery packs and keeping them on hand.
Huh? Basically everyone there can check you out. What's impossible to find is cash registers because they don't have them. Or maybe they have one tucked away. But most transactions are done via credit card, and every employee has mobile devices which can help you check out.
Not to mention the fact that if you have an iTunes account and their store app, you can actually self-check-out without talking to anyone, except to maybe show the electronic receipt to someone on the way out the door.
It's easy to shit on Apple, and clearly it's fun, because lots of people do it. But to say something like "actual sales are secondary" in the face of outrageous success on their part is just pure silliness. It's not like people are just pointing to foot traffic and calling them a success for that--although that is one of the metrics getting played up--it's about dollars per square foot, and love them or hate them, they are indeed making more dollars per square foot than pretty much any other retail establishment.
If actual sales are secondary, then their success at whatever you think their primary goal is must be absolutely stellar.
enfeebled
I think the word you were looking for is de-embiggened.
I think the point is that if there are any power ports available--and I don't know if there are, but if they are--it shouldn't be difficult to make an adaptor that can peel off 5V DC and spit it out of a USB-shaped plug.
Thanks for the follow-up. I certainly understand how that would be the right way to go if a component vendor is effectively acting as a dumb foundry, just making things to spec. But it seems to me that a *lot* of end-manufacturers (e.g., Apple et al) use the same or nearly identical components. For example, I had thought that Qualcomm was the component vendor of note for a huge portion of 3G and Wifi radios. Since that's their business--making 3G radios, even if they're maybe customizing them in terms of size and shape for a particular end-manufacturer, that they are indeed profiting off of those patents.
I guess it's all about who is actually putting the product into the customer's hands.
And then OTOH, all 3G compatible devices must infringe the Samsung patent.
What I don't understand about this is that Apple (and likely most 3G device manufacturers) don't make their own 3G radios. Rather, they source components which use those radios. Isn't it up to the component manufacturer who creates their 3G implementation and sells it to the device manufacturer to cover these sorts of patent fees?
To use a ham-handed example, I'm sure there are lots of patented technologies in automotive tires. If Goodyear makes a tire which relies on a licensed patent from Pirelli, I'd assume that Goodyear provides all the licensing fees and passes the costs along to their customers. If one of those customers is, say Ford, who exclusively uses Goodyear tires on all of it's Festiva cars, does Ford have to pay that licensing fee as well?
There's clearly something that I don't understand, but it seems to me that a 3G radio should be like that tire, in that it's got an interface, and while the device may be designed around the features and functionality of the interface, the implementation of 3G technology is basically embedded within the component.
The only way I could see Apple or other device vendors being held responsible for the licensing would be if they are asking the component vendors to make custom versions of the radios as work-for-hire, i.e. the component manufacturers are just foundries doing the labor on Apple's designs which themselves infringe on the 3G patents. Is that what's going on here?
Except they did pay Xerox, and even hired some of the engineers who led the way on PARC's GUI initiatives. Don't reinvent history.