Some years back I stopped for a meal at a restaurant in the historical district of a small town here in California. The restaurant was a converted barn of some sort and had two large double doors for an entrance. During business hours, those doors were left open, as were another set of interior doors that led to an open air patio outside. Hanging on the wall by each sets of doors was a large 1-quart ziplock bag. The bag was filled with water.
Noticing the bags, I asked the owner about them. She told me they were there to keep the flies from coming into the restaurant. I asked how a water-filled bag worked to keep flies away, and she said, "No idea, but do you see any flies in here?" Indeed, there were no flies to be seen (though there were some outside). She went on to tell me that that they had a regular fly problem years back, and one day a local immigrant gardner suggested the bags. The rest, as they say, is history.
I'd guess an entomologist might be the one to ask, but have you heard of this technique being used?
The BC court had it exactly right.... links are analogous to footnotes...
It's an apt analogy, but I expect laws regarding hyperlinks will evolve in such a way so as to consider instances where hyperlinks are not considered analogous to footnotes. Or don't you see the problem with a bibliography consisting entirely of such things as child pornography, Windows ISOs, or something that could be construed to provide material or support for terrorist organisations?
I'd agree that it's best to leave the web as it is, but people are known to clamour "There oughta be a law!" from time to time. When they do, legislatures are as happy to comply and write new laws into the books as prosecutors are to make use of those laws.
Religion is nothing more than a reality distortion field and the sooner we clear it away from the mind of man, the sooner we can become more than we are today and stop holding ourselves back.
Fair enough. But don't you find it odd (as evidenced by the posts thus far, for example) to see those advocating a rationalist point of view often do so with vehemence and hostility? Seems to me that's the flip side of the same coin. Or put another way, irrational.
No doubt there are scientific explanations for near death or otherwise seemingly mystical experiences, just like there are for workings of the world around us. On the other hand, science can not, nor will not for in the foreseeable future, be able to provide satisfactory answers to very basic questions, questions every individual ever born has had and wrestled with. Until that time, the rational approach you advocate has nothing to say.
Hardly a novel observation, but it merits being repeated. Some of us, hell, all of us, need to make sense of our lives, and the universe we inhabit. If you aren't prepared to offer answers, then what purpose does it serve berating others for whatever they've chosen to believe? Seems to me that the path lies elsewhere. Or as the doctor who is asked "What do I do now?" by a terminally ill patient might suggest, "Try talking to a priest." Before turning away nervously.
If people saw reality more often, I think reality would become less grim as people realize how eggshell life really is.
I wonder to what degree the views that underly this ruling exist outside the US. Photographs of tragedies when published in American newspapers and magazines (or broadcast on TV) are typically from the sanitized category. The reasoning behind that is we don't need to see what happened to know what happened (or less charitably, people prefer human interest stories).
Consider something like a bus bombing. In the US, if a photograph is included it will typically show grief-stricken onlookers, or alternatively, the charred remains of the bus after everything has been cleaned up. Elsewhere, it's not at all uncommon to see multiple photographs showing the blood-spattered carnage in the immediate aftermath.
Granted, the sensibilities of the newsreading public weren't at issue in the case, but still, the ruling does appear to reflect points of view that may not apply elsewhere. And if those views aren't universally held, it stands to reason that decisions related to the publishing of those images (self censorship among them) merit a re-examination. Fragility of life? I think we'd all agree that's an important lesson that needs to be learned. But consider this: the US has been engaged in two wars for years, and I've yet to see anything in the American press that reinforces that lesson, provides evidence of what is really happening, or more generally, reflects the true nature of war.
Is the news coverage of violence and tragedy too sanitized for our own good? If the box office numbers for the "Action-Adventure" genre meant to satisfy the puerile tastes of the movie going public are any indication, I'd suggest it is. How else to explain the attraction and repeated desire to view dramatic re-enactments of something that, according to this judge, is morbid and doesn't deserve to be seen?
My condolences on the loss of your friend. Drive safe and hope for the best. It's the most any of us can do.
Come on, if God was such a freaking fantastic engineer, why the hell did he put a sewage outlet right in the middle of a recreational zone?
A recent (non-scientific) sampling I made of the cultural practices depicted in a certain category of popular films would suggest that for many, both are recreational and the placement is considered a feature. Then, of course, there's the Germans.
As for the article, if you think patenting genes is outrageous, consider the patenting of turmeric.
Worth pointing out that some of the larger usenet providers also index their content and make it available for searches. Hell, even the makers of Newsbin (the client program of a similar name) does it and sells it to customers for a $5/month.
I guess Rule No. 1 for usenet providers is don't base your business model on a tarted-up search. For everyone else, terrabytes of "data" will continue to be posted to usenet on a daily basis. Finding what you want may be a little less convenient.
A few weeks back I bought my dog a new toy to play with (a rubber ball thingy that bounces and squeaks when squeezed/bitten). Decided I'd take the opportunity to venture out of my Command Center and spend a few hours playing with him. So off we go into the backyard.
As a warmup, I throw the ball so it lands a few feet from him. He looks where it landed, looks at me, looks again at where it landed, then spends the next 15 minutes circling the yard trying to find it. Then it occurred to me -- a red ball, green grass, and a colourblind animal... duh.
He found it eventually, of course, but each time I threw it, he'd circle the yard nose to the ground before finding it.. Poor guy must have thought I brought home a magic ball.
I agree with what your basic points, but the final cost using your rate isn't the same as what it would cost for someone else to do it. Here in California, for example, there's plenty of companies that make their money re-selling old computers on eBay. Walk into a typical operation and you'll see a large warehouse with pallets upon pallets of computers and peripherals, and a few guys doing repairs. Picture a Mexican labourer doing things like POST tests and swapping RAM and used hard drives, and you'll get the picture.
My personal interpretation of "recycling" is that if it can go in the garden, then it should be plowed under. If it can't, chances are high then it should never have been made in the first place. I say that to point out that while I deliberately make a (dishonest) exception for computer equipment, I'm both embarrassed and alarmed at the amount and kind of junk this industry generates, an industry in which I enthusiastically participate.
Eithe way, the entire subject is a complex one that involves everyone all down the supply chain to the customer. Government initiatives can be good, as are steps taken by the manufacturers. For my part, I find it difficult resolving simple questions like "Is it better to re-use old (and free) power-inefficient computers, or buy new ones?" If I can't resolve that, why should I object when the likes of Dell or Microsoft continue to sell and promote the "new shiny" and people want to buy it?
Over the last few years I've bought a number of Soekris boxes to replace aging PIIIs and P4s that I was using, but I did that mostly for aesthetic reasons. The trip to the recycling center certainly made me feel good, but it's highly likely that everything went either into a local landfill, or ended up somewhere in a slum in India.
I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.
I was the same. A lot of that was due to staying up into the wee hours working on school projects. Unlike many of my classmates, I actually enjoyed school work, and I found most all my classes interesting.
But here's the funny bit. After staying up late to, say, do some work on a term paper, I *would* show up late to school. Picture this kid walking into school several times a week at 11:00 a.m. for the better part of school year, and that's me.
How did I get away with it? Well, the teachers rarely complained (I was typically a favourite pupil, and then, I'd never interrupt a class by showing up late but instead skip it), but the school administrators certainly raised a few objections. The visits to the principal's office did little to change my habits (nor did the occasional detention I received as punishment), so they started calling my parents at home.
When the principal or vice-principal would call, my mum (God rest her soul) would be the one to answer the phone, and she would, I shit you not, tell him matter-of-factly, "He's sleeping." He'd raise a fuss, and an argument ensued. She'd start yelling "How dare you accuse my son of being a... he's a good boy... he works and studies hard..." The phone calls eventually stopped (a good thing because they often woke me up), and I carried on as before.
It wasn't until long after I graduated that I realised what I had gotten away with. The really weird thing about all this is that even though I was always a night owl for most of my life, I now find myself getting up early. How early? My neighbour keeps (illegally) a few chickens. I'm on my second or third cup of coffee by the time the rooster starts crowing. I've found that if nightclubs aren't your thing or getting laid isn't on top of your agenda, the early morning hours are a lot like the really late ones.
It's probably true that most would prefer to be getting up later. Most don't get enough sleep as it is.
The German government seems to be being quite responsible here. There is an issue with Firefox, and most users probably don't know about it because they don't regularly read tech news sites.
No, it's an attempted government takeover of the IT sector. Do you really want a government bureaucrat telling you what you can or can't do, what sites you can visit, or what browser you should use? I say let the free market decide. This country was founded on the ideas of personal responsibility, freedom and liberty, ideas that were enshrined by the Founding Fathers in the...
Paper systems lack almost all of the features you requested... So clearly do do not NEED this stuff and thus we came around full circle to requirement overload.
It's entirely possible that most of the features requested will never be used and is someone's idea of an ideal scenario. What's being described sounds, at least to me, like the functioning of a court or parts of a large law firm. The legal field has traditionally relied on paper (lots of it, along with multiple copies for everyone), but I'm sure even they've moved on to computerised record keeping. Maybe someone else an chime in.
Rather than complain about the current usage of "begs the question" how about re-translating "petito principii"?
You expect Latin to evolve in the same way English evolves? Sorry, mate. Latin and the people who wrote and spoke it have been dead a long time. You'll have as much luck changing their minds as you would removing the nail from that dead parrot and getting him to perch more comfortably.
Stop buying into the hype. Do people work in offices on e-paper displays all day? No. Eye strain does not occur if you take frequent breaks and work in a well lit environment.
Hype? I think most people are referring to comments from end users, not the manufacturers. The end users are reporting their observations based on personal experiences. No hype involved.
As for people in offices going about their daily tasks, here's an observation. None of them is reading, unless it's a published newspaper, periodical or book they're holding. To the extent anyone is staring at a computer monitor for a length of time, they're doing so in a way that only resembles reading.
Here's a simple test for you. Put a copy of something challenging on your monitor. I'd suggest a FCC filing like a prospectus, or if literature is your thing, Cervantes or Milton. Be sure it has none of that benefits that the form or typography of books offers (aka "mile long lines on a big screen with lame computer fonts"). Now try reading like a person accustomed to reading books: no breaks or interruptions for hours on end. See how many chapters you get through before you "tire" of the experience, and ask yourself if you could pass a pop quiz based on what you've read. I'll guarantee you'll fail to demonstrate anything other than limited reading comprehension, and you'll be in a shitty mood.
An LCD computer monitor is a far improvement over the flickering monstrosities that sat on the everyone's desks once upon a time, but it still flickers (however imperceptibly), and it's still requires looking directly into a light source. You don't notice or don't mind? Good for you. The rest of us know the difference and won't/can't settle for less, irrespective of our ambient lighting conditions.
I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.
Wow. Just wow.
Did you get that from reading some bullet point list of Windows "features" somewhere, or come up with those conclusions yourself? Despite your other points being fairly valid albeit mundane facts most people should know, you really have no idea what you're talking about.
Next up: Windows notepad is a text editor just like emacs, and can function as an IDE because it can read program code and perform search and replace.
You would have been done better by mentioning Powershell. Its bullet-list of features are extensive. Notwithstanding the fact that it's a clumsy, slow, and verbose monstrosity.
Lets just hope the money gets to the struggling artists!
I'd have guess that it would be spent on either donuts or hockey tickets, but Wikipedia offers a different take:
The private copying levy is distributed as per the Copyright Board's allocation as: 66% to eligible authors and publishers,18.9% to eligible performers and 15.1% to eligible record companies.
Maybe my Canadian friends can elaborate as to how effective this scheme is.
Allow people to better see in fog and they will drive faster.
I watched a documentary some time ago that investigated the cause of multi-car ("multi" being hundreds of cars) pileups in heavy fog conditions that occur every few years. Turns out that when people are driving and lose sense of their surroundings, they actually accelerate. Counter-intuitive to be sure, but the evidence (simulated driving tests, interviews with witnesses, psychologists, etc.) presented in the documentary was fairly convincing.
Maybe someone else can chime in with more specific information.
As to why people refuse to slow down in low visibility or other adverse conditions like rain, well, that's a no-brainer. People are idiots. Or expressed more generously, over-estimating or otherwise mis-judging a vehicle's or one's own capabilities is easy unless there is experience (professional training, a bad accident, etc.) to show you otherwise.
C-SPAN is a private non-profit and receives no government funding.
True enough, but that's not really the whole story. I'll quote Wikepedia's summary:
Uncommonly for a television network, C-SPAN is operated as a non-profit organization by the National Cable Satellite Corporation, whose board of directors consists primarily of representatives of the largest cable companies. C-SPAN accepts no advertising; instead, it receives nearly all its funding from subscriber fees charged to cable and DBS operators. Contrary to popular perception, C-SPAN receives no funding from government sources.
Put crudely, everyone with a cable-TV feed is paying for it. But wait, there's more..
It receives no funding from any government source, has no contract with the government, and does not sell sponsorships or advertising. It strives for neutrality and a lack of bias in its public affairs programming.
I doubt anyone would quibble with the above. I sleep comfortably knowing that consumers of (mostly) mindless entertainment along with viewers of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all help pay for what's routinely offered on C-SPAN. That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
It's quite possible that if you live in the sprawl called Southern California, a trip to the cleaners would make you pine for the days when New York cabbies overcharged you with out-of-city rates..
Hell, when I lived in Chicago, I'd often take a limo (no, not the stretch kind) to work, and that was on a fairly ordinary salary. When I moved to LA, I was dumbfounded to learn the extent to which car and car-related expenses eat up your budget. A cab ride to the cleaners? If I could afford the trip, I doubt I could pay the cleaners.
If Apple were a person he would be a total douche, but of course we again see some Apple fanboys coming to defend this douchebag.
What I didn't know and was surprised to learn was the following:
Apple [has a] market capitalisation of close to $US200 billion, making it the fourth largest publicly traded American company
If Apple's a douchebag, then it's a Really Big Douchebag. On the other hand, with only a handful of consumer products from which they seem to make most of their money, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that they'd be so aggressive at protecting their names and associations in the mind of consumers. Or from a pure business sense, faulted for doing so.
Good business sense or not, I'd agree they qualify as a douchebag. But then, so do the Beatles (for some, purveyors of simililary overrated products) for suing Apple way back when.
There is nothing intrinsic to Windows which makes client software more susceptible to these things - or, for that matter, that makes client software in Linux less susceptible.
I'd suggest the reason why the parent comment routinely gets modded up is that the truth of it is demonstrated repeatedly, as it has been for years (modulo "The latest version is better").
When you say "nothing intrinsic", you're limiting the scope of the discussion to narrow point-by-point, feature-by-feature comparisons, commonly found in "The Windows method to elevate privileges is the same as sudo" discussions. Underlying such discussions, and what gets lost in the periphery, is that one method has, irrespective of a bullet list of features, proven itself to be more reliable and secure (for any number of reasons that can be articulated). Put simply, when you take into account the the why's and where's and how's of sudo (its implementation included), sudo wins.
Take file permissions as another example. NTFS offers an extensive set of granular options that exceed what's found on a typical Linux or BSD system, yes? So, intrinsic to Windows is a better, and therefore arguably more secure, feature set. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a Windows user (or admin, for that matter) that really grasps how they work, makes the most effective use of them, or otherwise could get through a day without taking advantage of the "feature" that everything being executable by default. By contrast, a *nix user or admin learns how chmod works and what it does, and are repeatedly reminded in every directory listing what those permissions are.
So if you want to argue instrinsic, I'd offer the observation that instrinsic to Windows and using Windows are methods, habits, perceptions, assumptions and implementations (as complex as they are non-transparent) that have the effect of making Windows insecure. And to make matters worse, many of those are deliberately encouraged by Microsoft.
"Educate your users", you cry. Really? You'd be lucky if you could win them over (or the folks in Redmond) on the need to see file extensions. In fairness to Microsoft, though, they're probably too busy adding features and maintaining backward compatibility to bother with such (intrinsic) problems.
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
LOL. Nice to see someone point this out for a change. And for those non-residents reading along at home, most Hollywood execs (from agents to production houses to studio heads) have political philosophies more in line with rural Kansas or Texas than those associated with our liberal enclaves. You heard it right, folks. Most of "Hollywood" is conservative. Shouldn't be a surprise, given the amount of money at stake in a given deal or project. The paeons working in the industry, on the other hand, well, creative types invariably and almost by definition espouse (often quite vocally) philosophies different from the mainstream.
I'd even go farther. There's parts of Kansas, Texas and other states in the deep South are more hip, liberal and/or progressive than what's here in California. I'm fortunate to live in a bohemian-ish enclave, but it's surrounded by miles of working-class, blue-collar neighbourhoods with American flags flying in their front yards, and Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars and trucks. In the wealthier communities, the Bush/Cheney stickers are on SUVs.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're the person to ask ...
Some years back I stopped for a meal at a restaurant in the historical district of a small town here in California. The restaurant was a converted barn of some sort and had two large double doors for an entrance. During business hours, those doors were left open, as were another set of interior doors that led to an open air patio outside. Hanging on the wall by each sets of doors was a large 1-quart ziplock bag. The bag was filled with water.
Noticing the bags, I asked the owner about them. She told me they were there to keep the flies from coming into the restaurant. I asked how a water-filled bag worked to keep flies away, and she said, "No idea, but do you see any flies in here?" Indeed, there were no flies to be seen (though there were some outside). She went on to tell me that that they had a regular fly problem years back, and one day a local immigrant gardner suggested the bags. The rest, as they say, is history.
I'd guess an entomologist might be the one to ask, but have you heard of this technique being used?
The BC court had it exactly right.... links are analogous to footnotes ...
It's an apt analogy, but I expect laws regarding hyperlinks will evolve in such a way so as to consider instances where hyperlinks are not considered analogous to footnotes. Or don't you see the problem with a bibliography consisting entirely of such things as child pornography, Windows ISOs, or something that could be construed to provide material or support for terrorist organisations?
I'd agree that it's best to leave the web as it is, but people are known to clamour "There oughta be a law!" from time to time. When they do, legislatures are as happy to comply and write new laws into the books as prosecutors are to make use of those laws.
Religion is nothing more than a reality distortion field and the sooner we clear it away from the mind of man, the sooner we can become more than we are today and stop holding ourselves back.
Fair enough. But don't you find it odd (as evidenced by the posts thus far, for example) to see those advocating a rationalist point of view often do so with vehemence and hostility? Seems to me that's the flip side of the same coin. Or put another way, irrational.
No doubt there are scientific explanations for near death or otherwise seemingly mystical experiences, just like there are for workings of the world around us. On the other hand, science can not, nor will not for in the foreseeable future, be able to provide satisfactory answers to very basic questions, questions every individual ever born has had and wrestled with. Until that time, the rational approach you advocate has nothing to say.
Hardly a novel observation, but it merits being repeated. Some of us, hell, all of us, need to make sense of our lives, and the universe we inhabit. If you aren't prepared to offer answers, then what purpose does it serve berating others for whatever they've chosen to believe? Seems to me that the path lies elsewhere. Or as the doctor who is asked "What do I do now?" by a terminally ill patient might suggest, "Try talking to a priest." Before turning away nervously.
If people saw reality more often, I think reality would become less grim as people realize how eggshell life really is.
I wonder to what degree the views that underly this ruling exist outside the US. Photographs of tragedies when published in American newspapers and magazines (or broadcast on TV) are typically from the sanitized category. The reasoning behind that is we don't need to see what happened to know what happened (or less charitably, people prefer human interest stories).
Consider something like a bus bombing. In the US, if a photograph is included it will typically show grief-stricken onlookers, or alternatively, the charred remains of the bus after everything has been cleaned up. Elsewhere, it's not at all uncommon to see multiple photographs showing the blood-spattered carnage in the immediate aftermath.
Granted, the sensibilities of the newsreading public weren't at issue in the case, but still, the ruling does appear to reflect points of view that may not apply elsewhere. And if those views aren't universally held, it stands to reason that decisions related to the publishing of those images (self censorship among them) merit a re-examination. Fragility of life? I think we'd all agree that's an important lesson that needs to be learned. But consider this: the US has been engaged in two wars for years, and I've yet to see anything in the American press that reinforces that lesson, provides evidence of what is really happening, or more generally, reflects the true nature of war.
Is the news coverage of violence and tragedy too sanitized for our own good? If the box office numbers for the "Action-Adventure" genre meant to satisfy the puerile tastes of the movie going public are any indication, I'd suggest it is. How else to explain the attraction and repeated desire to view dramatic re-enactments of something that, according to this judge, is morbid and doesn't deserve to be seen?
My condolences on the loss of your friend. Drive safe and hope for the best. It's the most any of us can do.
Come on, if God was such a freaking fantastic engineer, why the hell did he put a sewage outlet right in the middle of a recreational zone?
A recent (non-scientific) sampling I made of the cultural practices depicted in a certain category of popular films would suggest that for many, both are recreational and the placement is considered a feature. Then, of course, there's the Germans.
As for the article, if you think patenting genes is outrageous, consider the patenting of turmeric.
Newzbin are an indexing site; one of many.
Worth pointing out that some of the larger usenet providers also index their content and make it available for searches. Hell, even the makers of Newsbin (the client program of a similar name) does it and sells it to customers for a $5/month.
I guess Rule No. 1 for usenet providers is don't base your business model on a tarted-up search. For everyone else, terrabytes of "data" will continue to be posted to usenet on a daily basis. Finding what you want may be a little less convenient.
Indeed. It was an insult to pediphiles everywhere.
It's not all puppies and kittens.
Speaking of which ...
A few weeks back I bought my dog a new toy to play with (a rubber ball thingy that bounces and squeaks when squeezed/bitten). Decided I'd take the opportunity to venture out of my Command Center and spend a few hours playing with him. So off we go into the backyard.
As a warmup, I throw the ball so it lands a few feet from him. He looks where it landed, looks at me, looks again at where it landed, then spends the next 15 minutes circling the yard trying to find it. Then it occurred to me -- a red ball, green grass, and a colourblind animal ... duh.
He found it eventually, of course, but each time I threw it, he'd circle the yard nose to the ground before finding it.. Poor guy must have thought I brought home a magic ball.
What I would like to know is what are the best resources to learn math?
I doubt whether this addresses your needs, but I stumbled across the following some time ago and was impressed by the guy and what he's trying to do:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
I agree with what your basic points, but the final cost using your rate isn't the same as what it would cost for someone else to do it. Here in California, for example, there's plenty of companies that make their money re-selling old computers on eBay. Walk into a typical operation and you'll see a large warehouse with pallets upon pallets of computers and peripherals, and a few guys doing repairs. Picture a Mexican labourer doing things like POST tests and swapping RAM and used hard drives, and you'll get the picture.
My personal interpretation of "recycling" is that if it can go in the garden, then it should be plowed under. If it can't, chances are high then it should never have been made in the first place. I say that to point out that while I deliberately make a (dishonest) exception for computer equipment, I'm both embarrassed and alarmed at the amount and kind of junk this industry generates, an industry in which I enthusiastically participate.
Eithe way, the entire subject is a complex one that involves everyone all down the supply chain to the customer. Government initiatives can be good, as are steps taken by the manufacturers. For my part, I find it difficult resolving simple questions like "Is it better to re-use old (and free) power-inefficient computers, or buy new ones?" If I can't resolve that, why should I object when the likes of Dell or Microsoft continue to sell and promote the "new shiny" and people want to buy it?
Over the last few years I've bought a number of Soekris boxes to replace aging PIIIs and P4s that I was using, but I did that mostly for aesthetic reasons. The trip to the recycling center certainly made me feel good, but it's highly likely that everything went either into a local landfill, or ended up somewhere in a slum in India.
I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.
I was the same. A lot of that was due to staying up into the wee hours working on school projects. Unlike many of my classmates, I actually enjoyed school work, and I found most all my classes interesting.
But here's the funny bit. After staying up late to, say, do some work on a term paper, I *would* show up late to school. Picture this kid walking into school several times a week at 11:00 a.m. for the better part of school year, and that's me.
How did I get away with it? Well, the teachers rarely complained (I was typically a favourite pupil, and then, I'd never interrupt a class by showing up late but instead skip it), but the school administrators certainly raised a few objections. The visits to the principal's office did little to change my habits (nor did the occasional detention I received as punishment), so they started calling my parents at home.
When the principal or vice-principal would call, my mum (God rest her soul) would be the one to answer the phone, and she would, I shit you not, tell him matter-of-factly, "He's sleeping." He'd raise a fuss, and an argument ensued. She'd start yelling "How dare you accuse my son of being a ... he's a good boy ... he works and studies hard..." The phone calls eventually stopped (a good thing because they often woke me up), and I carried on as before.
It wasn't until long after I graduated that I realised what I had gotten away with. The really weird thing about all this is that even though I was always a night owl for most of my life, I now find myself getting up early. How early? My neighbour keeps (illegally) a few chickens. I'm on my second or third cup of coffee by the time the rooster starts crowing. I've found that if nightclubs aren't your thing or getting laid isn't on top of your agenda, the early morning hours are a lot like the really late ones.
It's probably true that most would prefer to be getting up later. Most don't get enough sleep as it is.
The German government seems to be being quite responsible here. There is an issue with Firefox, and most users probably don't know about it because they don't regularly read tech news sites.
No, it's an attempted government takeover of the IT sector. Do you really want a government bureaucrat telling you what you can or can't do, what sites you can visit, or what browser you should use? I say let the free market decide. This country was founded on the ideas of personal responsibility, freedom and liberty, ideas that were enshrined by the Founding Fathers in the ...
Oops. Sorry. Wrong country.
I'll come in again.
Paper systems lack almost all of the features you requested... So clearly do do not NEED this stuff and thus we came around full circle to requirement overload.
It's entirely possible that most of the features requested will never be used and is someone's idea of an ideal scenario. What's being described sounds, at least to me, like the functioning of a court or parts of a large law firm. The legal field has traditionally relied on paper (lots of it, along with multiple copies for everyone), but I'm sure even they've moved on to computerised record keeping. Maybe someone else an chime in.
Me, I've alway liked carbon paper. ;-)
Rather than complain about the current usage of "begs the question" how about re-translating "petito principii"?
You expect Latin to evolve in the same way English evolves? Sorry, mate. Latin and the people who wrote and spoke it have been dead a long time. You'll have as much luck changing their minds as you would removing the nail from that dead parrot and getting him to perch more comfortably.
Kudos to the OP for an intelligent post.
Stop buying into the hype. Do people work in offices on e-paper displays all day? No. Eye strain does not occur if you take frequent breaks and work in a well lit environment.
Hype? I think most people are referring to comments from end users, not the manufacturers. The end users are reporting their observations based on personal experiences. No hype involved.
As for people in offices going about their daily tasks, here's an observation. None of them is reading, unless it's a published newspaper, periodical or book they're holding. To the extent anyone is staring at a computer monitor for a length of time, they're doing so in a way that only resembles reading.
Here's a simple test for you. Put a copy of something challenging on your monitor. I'd suggest a FCC filing like a prospectus, or if literature is your thing, Cervantes or Milton. Be sure it has none of that benefits that the form or typography of books offers (aka "mile long lines on a big screen with lame computer fonts"). Now try reading like a person accustomed to reading books: no breaks or interruptions for hours on end. See how many chapters you get through before you "tire" of the experience, and ask yourself if you could pass a pop quiz based on what you've read. I'll guarantee you'll fail to demonstrate anything other than limited reading comprehension, and you'll be in a shitty mood.
An LCD computer monitor is a far improvement over the flickering monstrosities that sat on the everyone's desks once upon a time, but it still flickers (however imperceptibly), and it's still requires looking directly into a light source. You don't notice or don't mind? Good for you. The rest of us know the difference and won't/can't settle for less, irrespective of our ambient lighting conditions.
I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.
Wow. Just wow.
Did you get that from reading some bullet point list of Windows "features" somewhere, or come up with those conclusions yourself? Despite your other points being fairly valid albeit mundane facts most people should know, you really have no idea what you're talking about.
Next up: Windows notepad is a text editor just like emacs, and can function as an IDE because it can read program code and perform search and replace.
You would have been done better by mentioning Powershell. Its bullet-list of features are extensive. Notwithstanding the fact that it's a clumsy, slow, and verbose monstrosity.
Lets just hope the money gets to the struggling artists!
I'd have guess that it would be spent on either donuts or hockey tickets, but Wikipedia offers a different take:
Maybe my Canadian friends can elaborate as to how effective this scheme is.
Allow people to better see in fog and they will drive faster.
I watched a documentary some time ago that investigated the cause of multi-car ("multi" being hundreds of cars) pileups in heavy fog conditions that occur every few years. Turns out that when people are driving and lose sense of their surroundings, they actually accelerate. Counter-intuitive to be sure, but the evidence (simulated driving tests, interviews with witnesses, psychologists, etc.) presented in the documentary was fairly convincing.
Maybe someone else can chime in with more specific information.
As to why people refuse to slow down in low visibility or other adverse conditions like rain, well, that's a no-brainer. People are idiots. Or expressed more generously, over-estimating or otherwise mis-judging a vehicle's or one's own capabilities is easy unless there is experience (professional training, a bad accident, etc.) to show you otherwise.
C-SPAN is a private non-profit and receives no government funding.
True enough, but that's not really the whole story. I'll quote Wikepedia's summary:
Put crudely, everyone with a cable-TV feed is paying for it. But wait, there's more ..
I doubt anyone would quibble with the above. I sleep comfortably knowing that consumers of (mostly) mindless entertainment along with viewers of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all help pay for what's routinely offered on C-SPAN. That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
XML was "founded"? What is it, a city? An institution?
A proposition.
+1 Funny mod points for completing the following:
XML was founded as a proposition dedicated to the idea that ...
This is like the Streisand effect ...
We're talking about Germany. I'd suggest "Hasselhoff Effect" instead.
It's quite possible that if you live in the sprawl called Southern California, a trip to the cleaners would make you pine for the days when New York cabbies overcharged you with out-of-city rates..
Hell, when I lived in Chicago, I'd often take a limo (no, not the stretch kind) to work, and that was on a fairly ordinary salary. When I moved to LA, I was dumbfounded to learn the extent to which car and car-related expenses eat up your budget. A cab ride to the cleaners? If I could afford the trip, I doubt I could pay the cleaners.
If Apple were a person he would be a total douche, but of course we again see some Apple fanboys coming to defend this douchebag.
What I didn't know and was surprised to learn was the following:
If Apple's a douchebag, then it's a Really Big Douchebag. On the other hand, with only a handful of consumer products from which they seem to make most of their money, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that they'd be so aggressive at protecting their names and associations in the mind of consumers. Or from a pure business sense, faulted for doing so.
Good business sense or not, I'd agree they qualify as a douchebag. But then, so do the Beatles (for some, purveyors of simililary overrated products) for suing Apple way back when.
There is nothing intrinsic to Windows which makes client software more susceptible to these things - or, for that matter, that makes client software in Linux less susceptible.
I'd suggest the reason why the parent comment routinely gets modded up is that the truth of it is demonstrated repeatedly, as it has been for years (modulo "The latest version is better").
When you say "nothing intrinsic", you're limiting the scope of the discussion to narrow point-by-point, feature-by-feature comparisons, commonly found in "The Windows method to elevate privileges is the same as sudo" discussions. Underlying such discussions, and what gets lost in the periphery, is that one method has, irrespective of a bullet list of features, proven itself to be more reliable and secure (for any number of reasons that can be articulated). Put simply, when you take into account the the why's and where's and how's of sudo (its implementation included), sudo wins.
Take file permissions as another example. NTFS offers an extensive set of granular options that exceed what's found on a typical Linux or BSD system, yes? So, intrinsic to Windows is a better, and therefore arguably more secure, feature set. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a Windows user (or admin, for that matter) that really grasps how they work, makes the most effective use of them, or otherwise could get through a day without taking advantage of the "feature" that everything being executable by default. By contrast, a *nix user or admin learns how chmod works and what it does, and are repeatedly reminded in every directory listing what those permissions are.
So if you want to argue instrinsic, I'd offer the observation that instrinsic to Windows and using Windows are methods, habits, perceptions, assumptions and implementations (as complex as they are non-transparent) that have the effect of making Windows insecure. And to make matters worse, many of those are deliberately encouraged by Microsoft.
"Educate your users", you cry. Really? You'd be lucky if you could win them over (or the folks in Redmond) on the need to see file extensions. In fairness to Microsoft, though, they're probably too busy adding features and maintaining backward compatibility to bother with such (intrinsic) problems.
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
LOL. Nice to see someone point this out for a change. And for those non-residents reading along at home, most Hollywood execs (from agents to production houses to studio heads) have political philosophies more in line with rural Kansas or Texas than those associated with our liberal enclaves. You heard it right, folks. Most of "Hollywood" is conservative. Shouldn't be a surprise, given the amount of money at stake in a given deal or project. The paeons working in the industry, on the other hand, well, creative types invariably and almost by definition espouse (often quite vocally) philosophies different from the mainstream.
I'd even go farther. There's parts of Kansas, Texas and other states in the deep South are more hip, liberal and/or progressive than what's here in California. I'm fortunate to live in a bohemian-ish enclave, but it's surrounded by miles of working-class, blue-collar neighbourhoods with American flags flying in their front yards, and Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars and trucks. In the wealthier communities, the Bush/Cheney stickers are on SUVs.