The thing is, everyone complains about NIMBYs until its their back yard. You don't want a powerplant? You NIMBY! You don't want a landfill site? You NIMBY. You don't want an open-cast mine? You NIMBY!... You want to knock down my village and harvest shale oil from underneath? Over my dead body!
Here's the reality for you: industrial development has always been built on sh*tting on someone else. Our "democracies" have descended into "dictatorships of the majority, where 9 people from far off will sell another person's back yard against his wishes.
Have you ever heard of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"...? If we lived by that principle we would all be NIYBYs -- not in your back yard. Which would be better, even though we'd all have less "stuff".
Carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant on the face of the planet, you know. While I personally don't dispute the problem of CO2, I do think it has made it too easy for people to ignore the realities of other types of pollution. For example, biological detergents pollute waterways, killing animals -- in particular amphibians such as frogs and salamanders. And yet one major biological detergent now likes to sell itself as a "green" solution on the grounds that washing at 30 degrees Celsius means less carbon dioxide.....
Furthermore, while these coal fired plants undoubtedly raise C02 levels the science of climatic feedback is so poorly understood it is not known whether those will be significant compared to the most significant 'greenhouse gas' - water vapour.
...and there we have it. Eighties environmentalism turned out to be complicated and nuanced for most of the planet, so we collectively fixated on the greenhouse effect. Pollution != greenhouse effect.. Coal pollutes in many horrible ways, ejecting soot, sulfur, mercury and all sorts of nasty things into the atmosphere. These things are very well understood, unlike the greenhouse effect, and TFA is about particulate pollution, not carbon dioxide. If you argue against cutting coal usage on the grounds of the greenhouse effect, you are willfully living in ignorance of good, proper, hard science.
Duh. This is the same Hollywood that gave us the (horrible) scene in The Net where Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) does a "whois" query that results in a picture of a guy's driver's license. Sure, I get it. Day-to-day CS work is not very exciting or photogenic, but it (often) involves real work.
Have a little look back at early cinema, and you'll see lots of symbolic devices to indicate time passing, emotions and other such things that can't be easily shown literally. In many ways, modern cinema is weaker for this, as it's all too easy for time to get rather disjointed. Computers are pretty abstract, and cannot be portrayed literally in a film. It's only sensible that some artistic license be applied.
The Net was pretty crap, so I don't really recall it that well, but I only remember one proper conceptual fail in it -- the fact that killing the software magically restored all the data that had been rewritten, which makes as much sense as shooting a corrupt filing clerk in the Wild West and finding all his forged records instantly restored to their original form....
Please tell me how many minutes of audio-visual entertainment are produced each year. If it helps, you can restrict yourself to English-language film and TV. No one person can "make up [their] own mind" on all of it. There are films out that are better than this, but you haven't heard of them because they weren't made by some big soulless by-the-numbers Hollywood production house. Once you've "made up your own mind" about every DVD on sale from Amazon, then you can come back and tell everyone else to do the same....
Um, you realize that "old dog new tricks" thing is even older than the "shark jumping" thing... right?
Yes, but it doesn't refer to a single moment in pop culture when so many people had already stopped watching the bloody show that no-one actually remembers the episode in question!!!
Something different instead of the simple outdated icon grid on the home pages. Whether it be a form of widget or something completely different is up to Apple.
This is double as strong when it comes to the iPad. I remember when they launched the device they were encouraging developers to use then larger canvas instead of just making big iPhone apps. They have still not done this themselves.
I think that would be a huge mistake. If you change the look of features, people can still navigate by memory of layout. If you change the layout of features, people can still navigate by look. If you change both, everyone's completely lost, and you anger 100% of your customer base.
I would go so far as to say that Apple should change practically nothing in terms of functionality. Bug fixes, improved compatibility, speed enhancements, but don't "change" anything.
Object oriented programming is a case in point. Everybody said it was great. However, unless you were quite dedicated at designing and factoring things before you started, the end result was invariably a hideous mass of scar tissue, oozing blood and puss.
I'm with you on that. At university, I never really understood OO at all. It seemed like a pointless abstraction that was based on an oversimplification of natural principles... but that wasn't OO's fault, it was the teachers, the book authors and the whole bleedin' OO community that was at fault, as they invariably presented OO with contrived, pointless examples. Recently I started coding in Python (because I was working with NLP and there's a pretty sophisticated NLP toolkit available). Suddenly I was working in a problem domain where classes etc made perfect sense -- there are things that are materially different, but identical in usage.
You cannot learn good OO practice by using OO for its own sake -- you have to be taught to apply it where it solves a problem./P
The analogue display on the BBC clock is impossible to read accurately enough that you wouldn't be able to detect any delays or lag in the NTP->web-server->user chain. The BBC's problem is not a power-user problem, because power users will be using NTP directly, or at the very least they'll set their system clock against a digital display with seconds readout....
Erm... the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland happens to also be the Queen of Canada. The UK is an independent country with a queen. Canada is an independent country with a queen. What makes Canada with its theocratic monarchy any more "real country" than the UK with its remarkably similar theocratic monarchy?
No, my posts frequently end in a specific number of dots: four. That is ellipsis+full stop, which is the correct way to end a sentence with ellipsis according to several major manuals of style.
the public trust of the corporation extended to the time on their website.
So should the corporation not broadcast any documentaries, for fear that they might contain an inaccuracy. Or not broadcast any news reports on the offchance that one of the "facts" is untrue?
No, they should check their facts are sources before broadcast and only give out information which they have reason to believe is accurate, and if they're found to be wrong, they should broadcast a correction or retraction. And they do.
But in this case they are providing information to the user having made no attempt whatsoever to verify the accuracy of said information, contrary to what the user expects.
I didn't talk about "a constitution", though, did I? The lack of a so-titled single document doesn't mean that there is no notion of "constitutional law" in the UK. Possibly the most important documents in UK constitutional law are the acts of union, which define this term "constituent country".
You might as well claim that I'm not from the UK on the grounds that I'm not writing in Welsh, the only language in the UK that has any official recognition in law....
It wasn't intended as the name of the timezone, it was the geographical distinction between Peninsular Spain and the Canaries, and I figured a lot of Slashdotters wouldn't have understood Peninsular Spain (which is a term I wouldn't have known if I hadn't studied Spanish)...
The corporation seems to have this view of itself as being infallible
No, in this case the consumer did, and went to the BBC to check for accurate time. The Trust (correctly) concluded that the public trust of the corporation extended to the time on their website.
Believe me, every member of CS/SE teaching faculty will be adding this to their list of anecdotes as an example of use cases and unintended consequences.
It's a great example of why "nice to have" features are always more trouble than they're worth, because there will always be a use case that it isn't specced for.
That would be the same millimeter-accurate DRM that identified my office in Edinburgh, Scotland, as being in the Netherlands, then, would it? We did manage to get a specific route set up by NATting via the data centre South Wales and providing fixed IP addresses to the Beeb, but that in itself was a non-trivial process (even though a standard one documented by the Beeb's techies....)
Sometimes the HOT, SEXY LADIES are in the area of the airport I passed through a week before. Imagine waking up in Australia with jetlag after flight with a stopover in Singapore and trying to figure out what time it is!!
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, everyone complains about NIMBYs until its their back yard. You don't want a powerplant? You NIMBY! You don't want a landfill site? You NIMBY. You don't want an open-cast mine? You NIMBY! ... You want to knock down my village and harvest shale oil from underneath? Over my dead body!
Here's the reality for you: industrial development has always been built on sh*tting on someone else. Our "democracies" have descended into "dictatorships of the majority, where 9 people from far off will sell another person's back yard against his wishes.
Have you ever heard of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"...? If we lived by that principle we would all be NIYBYs -- not in your back yard. Which would be better, even though we'd all have less "stuff".
Carbon dioxide is not the only pollutant on the face of the planet, you know. While I personally don't dispute the problem of CO2, I do think it has made it too easy for people to ignore the realities of other types of pollution. For example, biological detergents pollute waterways, killing animals -- in particular amphibians such as frogs and salamanders. And yet one major biological detergent now likes to sell itself as a "green" solution on the grounds that washing at 30 degrees Celsius means less carbon dioxide.....
Furthermore, while these coal fired plants undoubtedly raise C02 levels the science of climatic feedback is so poorly understood it is not known whether those will be significant compared to the most significant 'greenhouse gas' - water vapour.
...and there we have it. Eighties environmentalism turned out to be complicated and nuanced for most of the planet, so we collectively fixated on the greenhouse effect. Pollution != greenhouse effect.. Coal pollutes in many horrible ways, ejecting soot, sulfur, mercury and all sorts of nasty things into the atmosphere. These things are very well understood, unlike the greenhouse effect, and TFA is about particulate pollution, not carbon dioxide. If you argue against cutting coal usage on the grounds of the greenhouse effect, you are willfully living in ignorance of good, proper, hard science.
You're not in a fascist state, and the boys'll be knocking on your door shortly to convince you of that.
Nope, because this time it wouldn't just work.
Duh. This is the same Hollywood that gave us the (horrible) scene in The Net where Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) does a "whois" query that results in a picture of a guy's driver's license. Sure, I get it. Day-to-day CS work is not very exciting or photogenic, but it (often) involves real work.
Have a little look back at early cinema, and you'll see lots of symbolic devices to indicate time passing, emotions and other such things that can't be easily shown literally. In many ways, modern cinema is weaker for this, as it's all too easy for time to get rather disjointed. Computers are pretty abstract, and cannot be portrayed literally in a film. It's only sensible that some artistic license be applied.
The Net was pretty crap, so I don't really recall it that well, but I only remember one proper conceptual fail in it -- the fact that killing the software magically restored all the data that had been rewritten, which makes as much sense as shooting a corrupt filing clerk in the Wild West and finding all his forged records instantly restored to their original form....
What the hell kind of a "review" was that?
It was a review aimed at Slashdotters. It picked up on points directly relevant to Slashdotters. And it was posted on Slashdot.
There are plenty of non-specialist reviews available elsewhere &mdash I fail to see the problem.
TL;DR: Critics are stupid, make up your own mind.
Please tell me how many minutes of audio-visual entertainment are produced each year. If it helps, you can restrict yourself to English-language film and TV. No one person can "make up [their] own mind" on all of it. There are films out that are better than this, but you haven't heard of them because they weren't made by some big soulless by-the-numbers Hollywood production house. Once you've "made up your own mind" about every DVD on sale from Amazon, then you can come back and tell everyone else to do the same....
I don't see the flamebait in this — isn't this a fairly accurate portrayal of the current situation?
Um, you realize that "old dog new tricks" thing is even older than the "shark jumping" thing... right?
Yes, but it doesn't refer to a single moment in pop culture when so many people had already stopped watching the bloody show that no-one actually remembers the episode in question!!!
But they'd have to make sure and spell the leading actor's name right on the award. FedEx doesn't start with a T....
Something different instead of the simple outdated icon grid on the home pages. Whether it be a form of widget or something completely different is up to Apple.
This is double as strong when it comes to the iPad. I remember when they launched the device they were encouraging developers to use then larger canvas instead of just making big iPhone apps. They have still not done this themselves.
I think that would be a huge mistake. If you change the look of features, people can still navigate by memory of layout. If you change the layout of features, people can still navigate by look. If you change both, everyone's completely lost, and you anger 100% of your customer base.
I would go so far as to say that Apple should change practically nothing in terms of functionality. Bug fixes, improved compatibility, speed enhancements, but don't "change" anything.
Object oriented programming is a case in point. Everybody said it was great. However, unless you were quite dedicated at designing and factoring things before you started, the end result was invariably a hideous mass of scar tissue, oozing blood and puss.
I'm with you on that. At university, I never really understood OO at all. It seemed like a pointless abstraction that was based on an oversimplification of natural principles... but that wasn't OO's fault, it was the teachers, the book authors and the whole bleedin' OO community that was at fault, as they invariably presented OO with contrived, pointless examples. Recently I started coding in Python (because I was working with NLP and there's a pretty sophisticated NLP toolkit available). Suddenly I was working in a problem domain where classes etc made perfect sense -- there are things that are materially different, but identical in usage.
You cannot learn good OO practice by using OO for its own sake -- you have to be taught to apply it where it solves a problem./P
The analogue display on the BBC clock is impossible to read accurately enough that you wouldn't be able to detect any delays or lag in the NTP->web-server->user chain. The BBC's problem is not a power-user problem, because power users will be using NTP directly, or at the very least they'll set their system clock against a digital display with seconds readout....
Erm... the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland happens to also be the Queen of Canada. The UK is an independent country with a queen. Canada is an independent country with a queen. What makes Canada with its theocratic monarchy any more "real country" than the UK with its remarkably similar theocratic monarchy?
No, my posts frequently end in a specific number of dots: four. That is ellipsis+full stop, which is the correct way to end a sentence with ellipsis according to several major manuals of style.
the public trust of the corporation extended to the time on their website.
So should the corporation not broadcast any documentaries, for fear that they might contain an inaccuracy. Or not broadcast any news reports on the offchance that one of the "facts" is untrue?
No, they should check their facts are sources before broadcast and only give out information which they have reason to believe is accurate, and if they're found to be wrong, they should broadcast a correction or retraction. And they do.
But in this case they are providing information to the user having made no attempt whatsoever to verify the accuracy of said information, contrary to what the user expects.
I didn't talk about "a constitution", though, did I? The lack of a so-titled single document doesn't mean that there is no notion of "constitutional law" in the UK. Possibly the most important documents in UK constitutional law are the acts of union, which define this term "constituent country".
You might as well claim that I'm not from the UK on the grounds that I'm not writing in Welsh, the only language in the UK that has any official recognition in law....
It wasn't intended as the name of the timezone, it was the geographical distinction between Peninsular Spain and the Canaries, and I figured a lot of Slashdotters wouldn't have understood Peninsular Spain (which is a term I wouldn't have known if I hadn't studied Spanish)...
The corporation seems to have this view of itself as being infallible
No, in this case the consumer did, and went to the BBC to check for accurate time. The Trust (correctly) concluded that the public trust of the corporation extended to the time on their website.
Yeah, no kidding. Why is this even a story?
Believe me, every member of CS/SE teaching faculty will be adding this to their list of anecdotes as an example of use cases and unintended consequences.
It's a great example of why "nice to have" features are always more trouble than they're worth, because there will always be a use case that it isn't specced for.
That would be the same millimeter-accurate DRM that identified my office in Edinburgh, Scotland, as being in the Netherlands, then, would it? We did manage to get a specific route set up by NATting via the data centre South Wales and providing fixed IP addresses to the Beeb, but that in itself was a non-trivial process (even though a standard one documented by the Beeb's techies....)
You have missed the point. NTP does not account for inaccurately set timezones. It's not the "tick-tock" that's the problem here, it's the timezone.
Offset would drift with time, since you are never resyncing and not correcting for local clock drift in between resyncs.
And just how long would you expect to keep a single webpage open for?
Sometimes the HOT, SEXY LADIES are in the area of the airport I passed through a week before. Imagine waking up in Australia with jetlag after flight with a stopover in Singapore and trying to figure out what time it is!!