Yeah, we despise them because they were to a large extent the unknowing tools of evil men (and in one case, the tool of his poppa and his golf buddies).
I think this dichotomy is common in politics - you have the attractive front men, who are probably most useful if they *believe* the trickle-down rhetoric. And you have the guys who don't believe a word of it all but find it furthers their interests.
I wonder which group David Cameron is in. I'm fairly certain he can't be that good an actor. A bit like Reagan.
In the age of the smartphone it could be so much easier - instead of having the menu on your phone system, have the menu on your website, in a format that's more useful, and have the phone directly call the relevant department at the end of it.
Don't knock old software too much - the oldest stuff is probably the fastest.
The best airline systems are still based on terminals. Because even though they have a learning curve, they were really, really, well designed for maximum throughput. Many of them are probably either still running ancient mainframes or virtualizing them if they are smart.
Systems with GUIs often concentrate on presentation to the detriment of usability. I've seen systems that don't even make any provision for keyboard usage patterns - where the tab order on the form was in an apparently random order, to the point where the people using it would despair because they'd have to mouse between each field instead of the age-old data entry staple - hitting tab. When we ported our terminal-era app to GUI, this was the number one design stipulation - that it would remain key stream compatible with the old version. Alas, this lead to some really painful code...
What would be faster in McD's - the current hunt and peck through little icons of the food on a touch screen, or a real keyboard where the server enters the unique code for each food item? The latter - but alas, only after they'd been trained. Training = skill and skill = higher wages, so they don't want to do that.
I'd have no problem moving on to a machine, if the machine was good at dealing with my problem.
Say :
Menu : three confusing options, fourth option for a human operator Human : You explain your problem and then... they direct you to Machine : The correct piece of software tailored for your issue
This : telling a machine to fuck off (with a cancel button) because they are are dumbo-know-nothing is much easier than doing the same to a human dumbo-know-nothing.
Alas, no-one encourages people to be good at their job anymore. Franchise places want consistency - the same experience in every location. Which means you have to reduce the skills to do the job to a three-ring binder that even a dumbo-know-nothing can read, meaning the only people who will stay in that job are the ones who found their level.
When was the last time someone raved to you about how great a particular McDonald's or Subway joint was? Never.
I used to eat meatball subs in a place that had people who cared. They cost £0.50 more than Subway, but you got a bowl of soup as well, and the sub was heaven - real cheese, meatballs that weren't scorched and dried up from sitting in the pan, bread made from dough instead of foam. They guy behind the counter knew me, knew what I liked, brought me my sandwich while I sat in the window and indulged in a little people watching. That kind of service you don't want to automate away. *
KFC? I prefer to use the auto-till because it reduces the number of chances they have to fuck up your order.
* alas, this lovely deli died because Subway opened 7 locations within half a mile of it
I make a point of only using human checkouts. If everyone did this, they would be perceived as an expensive waste of hardware, rather than a convenient money saver for the supermarket.
Human checkouts are faster. I can concentrate on my task (packing), the checkout person can do theirs (scanning). Specialization is what all efficient production lines are about. So robot checkouts are not superior for the customer, they are superior for the store.
People still use them. Because the line at them is shorter. Probably because people hate using them... UNLESS they are running late with only a few items in the basket, when a short line outweighs the throughput efficiency of a human operator. And the store can cram 4 of them into the same area that 2 humans used to occupy, making up for the reduced throughput AND enabling them to fire an employee (they have 1 person supervise the 4 robo-checkouts).
If they don't read them, how do they deliver them?
At the least, they have a 50% chance of looking at the side with the content on instead of the address. Are you saying that NONE of that information enters a postman's brain? Most modern postal systems also have OCR looking for postal sorting codes. They are almost certainly reading your postcards, in some fraction of the way that Google reads your Gmail. They may not act on it, but I suspect regulation is the only thing preventing them from attempting to monetize this data.
With a letter, this information is on the inside. With a postcard or email, it's on the outside.
If you're so comfortable that no-one at the post office reads your postcards, would you be comfortable receiving a test result from an STD clinic on the back of one? (hypothetically, your residence has no other occupants who could read the card - the only people who can lay eyes on it are the people who are involved in conveying it to you via the mail). I'm guessing no, because we draw a line where our sense of privacy outweighs our confidence in postal worker discretion.
I make a similar judgement about using GMail. I am, so far, comfortable with the benefits I receive from my agreement with Google in exchange for the benefits they receive. In my case, I suspect I am doing better than they are out of the deal. I still wouldn't want to receive an unencrypted email with STD clinic results via their service - but that stands for ANY SMTP service. If my SMTP service was provided by a local company I would trust it even less - the local sysadmin would be far more likely to know me, far more likely to be able to blackmail me with any compromising information. With Google the worst that happens (so far) is I see more advertisements for stuff I might be interested in.
The way I see it is that MS are exploiting the very nature of email itself to try and score points against Google. Basically everything they accuse Google of doing - they are either doing it themselves, or wish they thought of that first. If they were *really* thinking ahead, they would poison the well for ALL free webmail providers and point out that it's an intrinsic problem with the technology. And then maybe clean up selling secure mail service. Maybe they are thinking that far ahead, but I wouldn't bet on it, or their ability to capitalize on it. And they'd be killing the Golden Goose of consumer/political intelligence - the fact that people buy into the global village and perceive their communications as relatively private - even on the likes of Twitter - produces a huge reservoir of data that everyone with power wants to tap into. They'd face opposition from Google, government, and themselves as well.
It's a conversation worth having, but the problem is not what Google are doing - everyone with a GMail account agreed to let them do it. The problem is educating people to the point where they can make that decision in an informed manner. In that respect, Microsoft might be doing people a favour - but implying that only Google do these things is disingenuous. MS do it, Amazon do it, anyone with a large online presence does it, and not just with email, with tweets, browser history, etc.
With some of the costs paid by the UK taxpayer and the BBC license fee payers, Tesla really got lots of mileage (see what I did there?) out of this one.
I agree that the amount of pecuniary harm this did them is probably zero - they were already selling out their full production capacity of Roadster vehicles. Top Gear was not limiting their profits, their production capacity was.
But now their product and brand has had a great deal more exposure.
Mail has an expectation of privacy. You send it in an envelope.
Email does not have an expectation of privacy. The envelope icon on all the major GUI programs for email is incredibly misleading. Email is more like a postcard - the content is in the open, it can be read by all the postmen and guys at the sorting office. It's always been like this.
Google have always been open about processing your mail. It's right there in the agreement you click through when you sign up. People acting all shocked and shaken about it just reveal that they don't understand the technology and also enter into agreements they don't understand... perhaps they'd like to buy an iPhone?
This is one of the manifold problems with people not receiving an education about the technology they use.
If you want private email, now, as always, you need to hide it, which for email, means you encrypt it. None of the large commercial players, or the government, are going to educate you about this, because it threatens their power over you.
I think one of the biggest hurdles is the language barrier.
As a software developer, your job is converting the truth into software. If you can't communicate fluently with the source of the truth for that software, then you can't do your job well. Many of the foreign workers that are my peers speak broken English. *I* find it harder to understand them, and I'm their colleague, working on the same subject matter, so I have concerns about their ability to gather requirements and produce software for the laymen who are our customers.
Mind you, I think the same way about the youth of today. I value precision and concision in English the same way I value it in any programming language.
Most people never mention this for fear of being labelled racist - it's not about that. Language is the software developers primary tool, and it behoves you to be able to use it well. Because the history of computing has it's roots firmly in English-speaking nations, English has become the lingua franca of programming. I happen to have been born in an English-speaking nation, so I have a natural bias.
There's an interest in meat substitutes because companies recognise there is a market for them, because we are animals that like eating meat, but some people are squeamish enough about the source of meat to want to avoid it.
If it's perfectly possible to eat a meat-free diet and be healthy (and it is), then all things being equal, there would be no demand for meat, because a vegetarian diet is cheaper. This reveals that all things are not equal - meat is more enjoyable than tofu.
In terms of efficiency, meat substitutes are close to actual meat in terms of energy consumption. In terms of quality, current meat substitutes do not match up to meat. It may be possible to make meat that is just as good as actual animal chunks, but more efficiently, but that's a way off.
Most of us Westerners could stand to eat a lot less meat though, and still eat it every day.
Food may be getting less plentiful, but there's still plenty. Maybe we're just doing stupid things with it. Maize prices are up because Americans insist on making alcohol out of it and putting it in their gasoline, to the detriment of the engine, it's mileage, and of course, the hungry Mexicans for whom maize forms the cornerstone of their diet.
These laws suited the corn lobby just fine in years with better harvests, because they produced far too much corn - even for the feed market, where over 70% of American corn goes to feed those inefficient meat animals (10 kg of corn in, 1 kg of meat out).
If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd probably be screwing around trying to make fusion reactors. Or something.
If I failed? Well, I probably funded more jobs in the scientific instrumentation and technology sector than the average millionaire.
If I succeeded? It's possible. I've got the right combination of intelligence and obsessive tendencies. "Success" might just be as simple as finding a way that doesn't work and eliminating it for the other guys.
Right now I'm bored stupid. Literally, I can feel my brain getting weaker. Because I have to work to put food on the table, because our economic system says so...
The corporation run prisons don't want lower crime. They want more crime, to the point where they'll bribe judges to convict more people.
Medical bills? Corporations don't want less medicalisation, they want more. Depressed? Screw dealing with your problems, take pills!
Fewer traffic accidents? Hey, I'll sell fewer cars and parts... and less medical services. That sounds doubly bad.
More education? People might make informed choices instead of believing all the adverts... can't have that.
FREE education? But how will we get wage slaves to fill the few remaining non-robot jobs we have left? Don't you know that student debt is GREAT for keeping the wages down?
A smart investment for humans, but not so much for corporations. If the state provides a service, they can't get any action.
Much better to have the Australia Project scenario in Manna - the entire nation essentially made into a cruise ship crewed by robots.
Some people love to create. I'm currently bored stiff, spinning my wheels at work, because I have no projects that interest me on my plate. I have some projects I'm *obsessed* with to the point of I wake up thinking about ways to implement them, but I'm not paid to do these things. I resent the idea of doing them in my spare time, because I won't receive any kind of reward for them - they'd probably just be ignored by my employer, but my employer would probably lay claim to it the instant it looked commercially successful.
That's all kind of fucked up. I know that my project has uses in many spheres. But it's actually got to the point now where my feelings of resentment to my employer are what I associate with it more than the interest in doing it. If I worked in a place like Valve (maybe not one which is games-oriented), I could get my idea out in the open and start enjoying my work again. Instead, I've taken a promotion to management, primarily because of frustration with the inability to get anything done - and discovered that it's pretty much the same in my new post as well. Now I have more money, but I still hate my job.
And it's pretty much the same for a lot of other people I know - they gave up. Because they can't get a job that they love that pays enough to keep a roof over their head. They can't even create such a job for themselves because they have financial responsibilities. And that's sad, especially in a society that's more productive per-person than EVER before. All the resources are going to the top, because that's what serves the people at the top best.
IMHO the human race has 3 possible futures - extinction at their own hand, a society which manages to get this stuff right and provide for people, whether they want to work or not, or a boot, stamping on a human face, forever. I really hope it's the middle path.
No, you'd have natural runaway NATURAL global warming ; after all the plants died, there would be nothing keeping the corrosive, highly reactive oxygen in the atmosphere topped up. It would rapidly combine with all the decaying organic matter, etc, and produce a huge amount of CO2.
Fortunately, it's a hypothetical scenario that can't occur - long before the CO2 level dropped low enough to kill ALL the plants, the human race would be dead.
Oxygen used to be a pollutant, produced by photosynthesis, poisoning the other forms of life - until some enterprising life form managed to use it metabolically.
Until photosynthesis, everything used non-renewable chemical resources to get their energy... hey, that sounds familiar...
Oil, being a product of life, *is* renewable, but only in geological time frames.
It has landing gear / extending legs. I'd like to think that what happens is you stop, deploy the landing gear, and the power management electronics divert the remaining spin from the gyros back into the battery.
Not MythTV boxes. TiVo and the like. Basically any computer-based set-top box with a back channel and software that you don't control. It used to be that part of the contract was that you connect the thing to a phone line - now with broadband more common it's ethernet (wireless or otherwise), and they probably just hobble the thing so it doesn't work without it, rather than insisting on it in a contract (gives it away, y'see).
It's more that programmers have a respect for truth that borders on pathological. Our job is to ensure that the truth is known in it's fullest detail to a machine. We have little spare capacity for the complex web of lies that seem to be essential to most executive careers.
When we first had the Wii, a total stranger saw us playing through our front window, and knocked on the door to ask if it was as good as it looked. Which is an unheard-of breakdown of the rules of normal British Reserve.
But possibly not ALL their modifications. We have no way of knowing. And that's fine - the license supports that.
Contributing back has positive value for the contributor as well ; rather than the burden being on yourselves to maintain your patches in line with everyone else, as a part of the official kernel, everyone else has to accommodate your patches.
Mute the sound that application is making - that's actually a really good idea. Applications do have individual volume controls on both Windows and Linux (PulseAudio) now, so not having to enter the detailed sound mixer as you do now would seem useful.
Flash video understands you would like to mute often and provides a button.
Always-on-top is in the context menu for Unity, along with Always on Visible Workspace.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we despise them because they were to a large extent the unknowing tools of evil men (and in one case, the tool of his poppa and his golf buddies).
I think this dichotomy is common in politics - you have the attractive front men, who are probably most useful if they *believe* the trickle-down rhetoric. And you have the guys who don't believe a word of it all but find it furthers their interests.
I wonder which group David Cameron is in. I'm fairly certain he can't be that good an actor. A bit like Reagan.
In the age of the smartphone it could be so much easier - instead of having the menu on your phone system, have the menu on your website, in a format that's more useful, and have the phone directly call the relevant department at the end of it.
Hmm. I'm sure there's an app in that.
Don't knock old software too much - the oldest stuff is probably the fastest.
The best airline systems are still based on terminals. Because even though they have a learning curve, they were really, really, well designed for maximum throughput. Many of them are probably either still running ancient mainframes or virtualizing them if they are smart.
Systems with GUIs often concentrate on presentation to the detriment of usability. I've seen systems that don't even make any provision for keyboard usage patterns - where the tab order on the form was in an apparently random order, to the point where the people using it would despair because they'd have to mouse between each field instead of the age-old data entry staple - hitting tab. When we ported our terminal-era app to GUI, this was the number one design stipulation - that it would remain key stream compatible with the old version. Alas, this lead to some really painful code...
What would be faster in McD's - the current hunt and peck through little icons of the food on a touch screen, or a real keyboard where the server enters the unique code for each food item? The latter - but alas, only after they'd been trained. Training = skill and skill = higher wages, so they don't want to do that.
I'd have no problem moving on to a machine, if the machine was good at dealing with my problem.
Say :
Menu : three confusing options, fourth option for a human operator
Human : You explain your problem and then... they direct you to
Machine : The correct piece of software tailored for your issue
This : telling a machine to fuck off (with a cancel button) because they are are dumbo-know-nothing is much easier than doing the same to a human dumbo-know-nothing.
Alas, no-one encourages people to be good at their job anymore. Franchise places want consistency - the same experience in every location. Which means you have to reduce the skills to do the job to a three-ring binder that even a dumbo-know-nothing can read, meaning the only people who will stay in that job are the ones who found their level.
When was the last time someone raved to you about how great a particular McDonald's or Subway joint was? Never.
I used to eat meatball subs in a place that had people who cared. They cost £0.50 more than Subway, but you got a bowl of soup as well, and the sub was heaven - real cheese, meatballs that weren't scorched and dried up from sitting in the pan, bread made from dough instead of foam. They guy behind the counter knew me, knew what I liked, brought me my sandwich while I sat in the window and indulged in a little people watching. That kind of service you don't want to automate away. *
KFC? I prefer to use the auto-till because it reduces the number of chances they have to fuck up your order.
* alas, this lovely deli died because Subway opened 7 locations within half a mile of it
I make a point of only using human checkouts. If everyone did this, they would be perceived as an expensive waste of hardware, rather than a convenient money saver for the supermarket.
Human checkouts are faster. I can concentrate on my task (packing), the checkout person can do theirs (scanning). Specialization is what all efficient production lines are about. So robot checkouts are not superior for the customer, they are superior for the store.
People still use them. Because the line at them is shorter. Probably because people hate using them... UNLESS they are running late with only a few items in the basket, when a short line outweighs the throughput efficiency of a human operator. And the store can cram 4 of them into the same area that 2 humans used to occupy, making up for the reduced throughput AND enabling them to fire an employee (they have 1 person supervise the 4 robo-checkouts).
If they don't read them, how do they deliver them?
At the least, they have a 50% chance of looking at the side with the content on instead of the address. Are you saying that NONE of that information enters a postman's brain? Most modern postal systems also have OCR looking for postal sorting codes. They are almost certainly reading your postcards, in some fraction of the way that Google reads your Gmail. They may not act on it, but I suspect regulation is the only thing preventing them from attempting to monetize this data.
With a letter, this information is on the inside. With a postcard or email, it's on the outside.
If you're so comfortable that no-one at the post office reads your postcards, would you be comfortable receiving a test result from an STD clinic on the back of one? (hypothetically, your residence has no other occupants who could read the card - the only people who can lay eyes on it are the people who are involved in conveying it to you via the mail). I'm guessing no, because we draw a line where our sense of privacy outweighs our confidence in postal worker discretion.
I make a similar judgement about using GMail. I am, so far, comfortable with the benefits I receive from my agreement with Google in exchange for the benefits they receive. In my case, I suspect I am doing better than they are out of the deal. I still wouldn't want to receive an unencrypted email with STD clinic results via their service - but that stands for ANY SMTP service. If my SMTP service was provided by a local company I would trust it even less - the local sysadmin would be far more likely to know me, far more likely to be able to blackmail me with any compromising information. With Google the worst that happens (so far) is I see more advertisements for stuff I might be interested in.
The way I see it is that MS are exploiting the very nature of email itself to try and score points against Google. Basically everything they accuse Google of doing - they are either doing it themselves, or wish they thought of that first. If they were *really* thinking ahead, they would poison the well for ALL free webmail providers and point out that it's an intrinsic problem with the technology. And then maybe clean up selling secure mail service. Maybe they are thinking that far ahead, but I wouldn't bet on it, or their ability to capitalize on it. And they'd be killing the Golden Goose of consumer/political intelligence - the fact that people buy into the global village and perceive their communications as relatively private - even on the likes of Twitter - produces a huge reservoir of data that everyone with power wants to tap into. They'd face opposition from Google, government, and themselves as well.
It's a conversation worth having, but the problem is not what Google are doing - everyone with a GMail account agreed to let them do it. The problem is educating people to the point where they can make that decision in an informed manner. In that respect, Microsoft might be doing people a favour - but implying that only Google do these things is disingenuous. MS do it, Amazon do it, anyone with a large online presence does it, and not just with email, with tweets, browser history, etc.
With some of the costs paid by the UK taxpayer and the BBC license fee payers, Tesla really got lots of mileage (see what I did there?) out of this one.
I agree that the amount of pecuniary harm this did them is probably zero - they were already selling out their full production capacity of Roadster vehicles. Top Gear was not limiting their profits, their production capacity was.
But now their product and brand has had a great deal more exposure.
The post office could read every postcard I send through the mail to figure out which junkmail I'd like best.
Fixed that for you. Email is a postcard, not a letter. If you want electronic letters instead of postcards, you use encryption.
Mail has an expectation of privacy. You send it in an envelope.
Email does not have an expectation of privacy. The envelope icon on all the major GUI programs for email is incredibly misleading. Email is more like a postcard - the content is in the open, it can be read by all the postmen and guys at the sorting office. It's always been like this.
Google have always been open about processing your mail. It's right there in the agreement you click through when you sign up. People acting all shocked and shaken about it just reveal that they don't understand the technology and also enter into agreements they don't understand... perhaps they'd like to buy an iPhone?
This is one of the manifold problems with people not receiving an education about the technology they use.
If you want private email, now, as always, you need to hide it, which for email, means you encrypt it. None of the large commercial players, or the government, are going to educate you about this, because it threatens their power over you.
I think one of the biggest hurdles is the language barrier.
As a software developer, your job is converting the truth into software. If you can't communicate fluently with the source of the truth for that software, then you can't do your job well. Many of the foreign workers that are my peers speak broken English. *I* find it harder to understand them, and I'm their colleague, working on the same subject matter, so I have concerns about their ability to gather requirements and produce software for the laymen who are our customers.
Mind you, I think the same way about the youth of today. I value precision and concision in English the same way I value it in any programming language.
Most people never mention this for fear of being labelled racist - it's not about that. Language is the software developers primary tool, and it behoves you to be able to use it well. Because the history of computing has it's roots firmly in English-speaking nations, English has become the lingua franca of programming. I happen to have been born in an English-speaking nation, so I have a natural bias.
There's an interest in meat substitutes because companies recognise there is a market for them, because we are animals that like eating meat, but some people are squeamish enough about the source of meat to want to avoid it.
If it's perfectly possible to eat a meat-free diet and be healthy (and it is), then all things being equal, there would be no demand for meat, because a vegetarian diet is cheaper. This reveals that all things are not equal - meat is more enjoyable than tofu.
In terms of efficiency, meat substitutes are close to actual meat in terms of energy consumption. In terms of quality, current meat substitutes do not match up to meat. It may be possible to make meat that is just as good as actual animal chunks, but more efficiently, but that's a way off.
Most of us Westerners could stand to eat a lot less meat though, and still eat it every day.
Food may be getting less plentiful, but there's still plenty. Maybe we're just doing stupid things with it. Maize prices are up because Americans insist on making alcohol out of it and putting it in their gasoline, to the detriment of the engine, it's mileage, and of course, the hungry Mexicans for whom maize forms the cornerstone of their diet.
These laws suited the corn lobby just fine in years with better harvests, because they produced far too much corn - even for the feed market, where over 70% of American corn goes to feed those inefficient meat animals (10 kg of corn in, 1 kg of meat out).
If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd probably be screwing around trying to make fusion reactors. Or something.
If I failed? Well, I probably funded more jobs in the scientific instrumentation and technology sector than the average millionaire.
If I succeeded? It's possible. I've got the right combination of intelligence and obsessive tendencies. "Success" might just be as simple as finding a way that doesn't work and eliminating it for the other guys.
Right now I'm bored stupid. Literally, I can feel my brain getting weaker. Because I have to work to put food on the table, because our economic system says so...
A smart investment for who?
The corporation run prisons don't want lower crime. They want more crime, to the point where they'll bribe judges to convict more people.
Medical bills? Corporations don't want less medicalisation, they want more. Depressed? Screw dealing with your problems, take pills!
Fewer traffic accidents? Hey, I'll sell fewer cars and parts... and less medical services. That sounds doubly bad.
More education? People might make informed choices instead of believing all the adverts... can't have that.
FREE education? But how will we get wage slaves to fill the few remaining non-robot jobs we have left? Don't you know that student debt is GREAT for keeping the wages down?
A smart investment for humans, but not so much for corporations. If the state provides a service, they can't get any action.
Much better to have the Australia Project scenario in Manna - the entire nation essentially made into a cruise ship crewed by robots.
Some people love to create. I'm currently bored stiff, spinning my wheels at work, because I have no projects that interest me on my plate. I have some projects I'm *obsessed* with to the point of I wake up thinking about ways to implement them, but I'm not paid to do these things. I resent the idea of doing them in my spare time, because I won't receive any kind of reward for them - they'd probably just be ignored by my employer, but my employer would probably lay claim to it the instant it looked commercially successful.
That's all kind of fucked up. I know that my project has uses in many spheres. But it's actually got to the point now where my feelings of resentment to my employer are what I associate with it more than the interest in doing it. If I worked in a place like Valve (maybe not one which is games-oriented), I could get my idea out in the open and start enjoying my work again. Instead, I've taken a promotion to management, primarily because of frustration with the inability to get anything done - and discovered that it's pretty much the same in my new post as well. Now I have more money, but I still hate my job.
And it's pretty much the same for a lot of other people I know - they gave up. Because they can't get a job that they love that pays enough to keep a roof over their head. They can't even create such a job for themselves because they have financial responsibilities. And that's sad, especially in a society that's more productive per-person than EVER before. All the resources are going to the top, because that's what serves the people at the top best.
IMHO the human race has 3 possible futures - extinction at their own hand, a society which manages to get this stuff right and provide for people, whether they want to work or not, or a boot, stamping on a human face, forever. I really hope it's the middle path.
No, you'd have natural runaway NATURAL global warming ; after all the plants died, there would be nothing keeping the corrosive, highly reactive oxygen in the atmosphere topped up. It would rapidly combine with all the decaying organic matter, etc, and produce a huge amount of CO2.
Fortunately, it's a hypothetical scenario that can't occur - long before the CO2 level dropped low enough to kill ALL the plants, the human race would be dead.
Oxygen used to be a pollutant, produced by photosynthesis, poisoning the other forms of life - until some enterprising life form managed to use it metabolically.
Until photosynthesis, everything used non-renewable chemical resources to get their energy... hey, that sounds familiar...
Oil, being a product of life, *is* renewable, but only in geological time frames.
It has landing gear / extending legs. I'd like to think that what happens is you stop, deploy the landing gear, and the power management electronics divert the remaining spin from the gyros back into the battery.
Not MythTV boxes. TiVo and the like. Basically any computer-based set-top box with a back channel and software that you don't control. It used to be that part of the contract was that you connect the thing to a phone line - now with broadband more common it's ethernet (wireless or otherwise), and they probably just hobble the thing so it doesn't work without it, rather than insisting on it in a contract (gives it away, y'see).
It's more that programmers have a respect for truth that borders on pathological. Our job is to ensure that the truth is known in it's fullest detail to a machine. We have little spare capacity for the complex web of lies that seem to be essential to most executive careers.
Why not just go the whole hog and have The Rod from God
(ok, they're not very cost-efficient).
Indeed - it really had that wow factor.
When we first had the Wii, a total stranger saw us playing through our front window, and knocked on the door to ask if it was as good as it looked. Which is an unheard-of breakdown of the rules of normal British Reserve.
It's not an implication they are gay. It's an implication that they are interesting in serving Microsoft in ways that do not serve the Linux kernel.
It's a metaphor.
But possibly not ALL their modifications. We have no way of knowing. And that's fine - the license supports that.
Contributing back has positive value for the contributor as well ; rather than the burden being on yourselves to maintain your patches in line with everyone else, as a part of the official kernel, everyone else has to accommodate your patches.
Mute the sound that application is making - that's actually a really good idea. Applications do have individual volume controls on both Windows and Linux (PulseAudio) now, so not having to enter the detailed sound mixer as you do now would seem useful.
Flash video understands you would like to mute often and provides a button.
Always-on-top is in the context menu for Unity, along with Always on Visible Workspace.