I'm going by stuff I heard back in the early 90s when I had friends that had Star Wars action figurines and had read every single Star Wars book ever published. You know, the people that could explain Darth Vader's origins as Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine back in 1992? There was never a book called "The Phantom Menace" except as a movie tie-in; but there was lots and lots of story, and there is lots more story left. It has to be ordered into a movie script, but that's hardly equivalent to "never coming up with the story."
Age of Misrule, by Mark Chadbourn. 9 books. Completely planned out to start. Everything in the series is important, everything sets up the rules or the characters, everything is a continuing advancement. There's like half a dozen major struggles, and whenever you think it's over they're just like "oh, no, what? The princess is in another castle." It's well-written and complete.
The Gap Cycle, Stephen R. Donaldson. Completely planned out. If it were one book, it would be a 9.5 x 6 inch hardback in small print... 2600 pages long. The first book sets up the main character; the second sets up the universe and the premise for the series. The last three are... intense.
Donaldson's series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, is pretty much from the hip. He wrote a book, expanded it to a trilogy, planned another trilogy, and is working on a planned tetralogy. It's done pretty well, but it's just more and more books being written. The story wasn't finished in Book 1; it was finished in Book 2, but a lot of shit was left unexplained. Further books have expanded the world more and more; details we knew about but didn't understand have been explained, so it seems Donaldson had envisioned a world and some details that were untenable to explain in the first stories. He will never explain it all; there is a vast collection of lore that High Lord Kevin had recorded and hidden, and for conditions to permit them to be found and explored he would need several new series. This would be like mankind being driven back into the stone age by global thermonuclear war, then discovering faster-than-light space travel... a lot of shit is going to have to happen in between. Donaldson is done writing in that series after this tetralogy.
I read a lot of good series. Lucas wrote a long, complete story when he tried to write a movie script. He worked out a lot of stuff, and before the script was ready he realized it was too much for one film... then he realized he was writing the middle of the story... a nine part story. I have not read the books because I don't care that much for Star Wars, but hey. He did not make a movie and then make more movies; he made a movie and wound up writing an epic story in the middle of trying to do a single, self-contained short story.
The rest of the star wars story (eps 7-9) is actually more interesting and deep than the crap we've got so far. George Lucas drorpped 4-6 to shove us into the center of an incomplete story, like starting The Gap Cycle on book 3. A very inferior story compared to suffering the first book and a half. Unfortunately, the depth of character development that gets explained in the first 3 episodes is... difficult to do in movies. A long-running TV series would be better; movies are horrible because they put every relevant piece of a story into an almost fixed length of about 2 hours, and nobody will tolerate 12 in the series. TV has the same problem in the US, because everyone wants a complete problem-resolution cycle in isolated episodes that don't have to be watched in exact order, as opposed to chapter-style episodic progression.
The end result is we got somewhat uninteresting action for movies 4-6, because we showed movies 1-3 as movies 4-6. The real depth of actual story starts around episode 4, so that's where the original series started. Episodes 7-9--which now will not be produced--detail much more complicated emotional struggles, as well as more subtle story progressions. There is less action and more content, which is less interesting to people than watching Neo beat up hundreds of copies of Smith for no real reason.
They have moving parts, they wear. Also, they have moving parts, they are subject to mechanical loss from air drag and bearing drag. Using maglev bearings is an excellent idea here, except that you can't just slap a magnet in the center; they're computer-controlled electromagnetic complex bearing sets.
The strategy ends up being just like a real war: attack and pick off off the soldiers, until the generals are exposed, then go after the generals.
Decapitation attacks are faster and more effective if you can manage them. Decapitation doesn't mean killing the president; a decapitation attack against the US would take out Obama, Biden, skip the cabinet (advisory), skip the secretaries of state (administration), go for Senators next, then the House if needed. The president is easily replaced by the vice president; and Congress approves everything anyway, so we can still fumble along, with the secretary of state probably running the country for a while. When you take out Congress and the top of the executive branch, though, this country can't actually function; it would drop into a pure military state, with the military either deciding top-down how to function or surrendering on terms of negotiation so that it can focus on keeping the country stable. There will be no more elections; the group that decapitated the government will dictate the terms, and the remaining administrative structure is thus dissolved.
Most of our assassinations have gone along the lines of shooting some president or dictator and letting some other asshole fill in. This doesn't work; you have to lop the head off at the neck, not cut off an ear.
Uh, more material means more CO2? Are you sure? Considering that the melting point of iron or steel or aluminum or titanium or incolnel varies by about 1200 degrees (1810F to start weakening incolnel, something like 400 to start weakening some grades of steel, various alloying will push that down to 300F or up to.. oh...1810F, like the nickel-steel-lotsofotherstuff alloy Incolnel). Glass also takes a lot of energy, thus lots of CO2, and is somewhat less dense than steel: cheap green-tint lime glass softens around 1400F, but good quality clear glass doesn't start to melt until 3000F. Then there's plastics that are easier to flow chemically or thermally, depending on composition, although they're also far lighter; but the density-to-energy-required-to-form ratio isn't constant there.
Making a battery is harder than casting an aluminum engine. Lots of funny chemicals have to be produced, not just sulfuric acid and lead. Purity is important, somehow (battery technology is pretty ugly, and relies on the innards actually melting and doing other strange things). There are waste products which must be filtered out, isolated, contained, separated, shipped, reacted, stored, and disposed of safely, all of which takes energy.
The energy cost for blasting Aluminum into a liquid puddle, casting it in a mold, machining it, polishing it, and assembling it into an engine may be quite a bit higher than the energy cost of forming and cutting sheets of lead and plastic and adding water and sulfuric acid and stabilizers and terminals, especially since lead is heavy and made from more material yet has a very low melting point and is easily worked rather cool anyway; but what about producing all those chemicals and disposing of the toxic byproducts? There are no byproducts in machining an aluminum engine part; you put a tray under the work bench, you collect the metal particles, run it past an electromagnet to draw off any steel filings from the bits, and then dump it back in the melting vat to make another part. That's less transit than running tons and tons of chemicals all over the god damn world for specialist treating and disposal.
Seriously. The power to process more raw material of greater weight is automatically bigger? You don't understand anything about the engineering complexity of one job versus another. The power to produce a material of greater purity is much higher than the back-yard-with-a-blowtorch shit you need to roughly cobble together a mixture of boiling chemical soup that roughly makes a serviceable battery or a piece of steel plate mail. A stamped sword of melted iron is going to be much different than a forged sword of quality steel--cheap iron that's been heated and blasted properly, flowing it away from carbon and impurities, leaving a low-carbon steel with little silicon and sulfur and the like in it, which of course moves to the outside during the forging process anyway so you get nice, pure steel. Of course, the refining and forging processes will take much more time at extremely elevated temperatures, burning tons of fuel.
Purity. Not material. Heavy refined steel vs crude cast iron. Refined, consistent SLA battery with proper stabilizers and salt bridges vs lead and copper sheets in a vat of acid. These are where differences in energy use come from.
It depends on what system you're looking at. Old solar panel technology took a large amount of nasty chemical pollutants to make, and produced a hell of a lot of liquid toxic waste output. I think our solution has been to dump it in the water supply... newer processes are cleaner, though.
It's like buying a fleet of electric or hybrid cars for their "environmental impact," while Toyota won't release statistics on how much energy goes into building one and how much pollution it produces. There's no total lifetime numbers for something as innocuous as CO2, which leads many to speculate that Toyota might keep such things secret because the total CO2 production for an electric hybrid exceeds the total CO2 production for a 25mpg Sedan over its expected lifetime. Less not knowing, and more not caring because the numbers in front of you support your foregone conclusions already.
The humans making the decisions don't understand Go. They're not even engineers, so they haven't seen all the numbers. Hell, even engineers look at cost comparisons, but not total impact: they may look at the CO2 output of a particular form of power generation, and the price, and see that it is manageable and cheaper and better; but they don't see that the CO2 output of building the damn thing divided by its useful lifetime is much higher than a heavy polluter coal plant that lasts much longer and is easy as hell to build.
Most people are stuck in the corner, trying to save one thing in isolation, and then wanting to have everything, and still as separate pieces. They do not back off to see the whole, and make exchanges to stay overall ahead. The whole of the board is a mystery to them, and they only jump from section to section, trying to fight small local battles without seeing how they hurt other positions.
TSA guidelines require that third party contractors conduct business exactly to TSA standards or above. If they're not as horrible as the TSA, then you're violating the rules.
In the Windows-ish type stuff, you see an X, a box, and a line. The line has always bewildered me; the X and the big box were not obvious either, but hey. If you say one of these closes, the X is the obvious choice... well, maybe the little line (lid closed?), but the X is universal for "crossing out" or whatnot in the main target audience.
I could guess that red is bad, stop, blood, kill, whatnot, and maybe means close, too. It wasn't obvious to me in any case; there's a case to be made, but it seems less so than a big X. More importantly, however, my brain is going to have a hell of a time figuring out what in the fuck these buttons are for when it's already seen this shit. An X, line, boxes, they're all geometric. Three little colored dots are geometric and colorful. You're looking for a colorful dot in a certain spatial position, with two other dots, and you want it of a given color. That's... a lot of information to relate; if your language center is tied up (you see text or hear a language you understand) when you see this, you will fail to learn it easily. Your brain won't be able to assemble a complete, usable concept from all the pieces.
Being that I can give a correct explanation of why the three colorful dots sucks, in terms of basic neuroscience, I assume that I'm correct by way of being founded in clear scientific fact. The same way I assume I'm correct in saying a machine that has a crowbar wedged in its gears is going to be less efficient and more prone to damage than a machine with perfectly well machined, properly polished, well-fitted gears with no obstructions.
The keyboards offer a better tactile feel because the keys are progressively weighted. They take progressively more force as you push, then release and click into place; and the keys under weaker fingers take less force than those under stronger fingers (hence progressive weighting). As such, they are ergonomically superior, providing your brain with more control data. You know exactly when you've punched the key fully, and you eventually start taking heavy notice if your fingers slip and hit the wrong key (it feels different enough to disrupt your brain).
Basically, it makes typing immersive. You never need to look, because you can hear and feel what's going on, you can see it on your screen, and when you typo your brain doesn't go "wait that looks wrong, what happened, that's not what I expected to happen, I punched the right thing, did I punch the right thing? Look down at the keyboard, where are my hands, is that right?" Instead you sense it by feel just before you see the mistake, and your brain has already figured everything out. This keeps typos from being disruptive, and also keeps your hands an integrated part of your typing rather than seeming to disconnect and leave the typing to your brain dictating what your eyes see.
It's really like playing a $60,000 grand piano versus a $1000 Yahoo upright. If you've never touched a $60,000 grand, you need to. Also, if you're in the market, I recommend a $4000 Kawai CA series digital piano unless you are obscenely rich (a $15000 Kawai K-9 I could still argue with but I can understand that). The keyboard is basically the same as a $180,000 9 foot concert grand, plugged into sensors instead of hammers, with a computer using all kinds of complex algorithms and tons of samples and statistical data to emulate the $180,000 9 foot Kawai EX concert grand piano. They don't have the power or presence, of course, because there's no 9 foot sound board to resonate with the booming base; but the keys feel dead on, even better than the $67,000 Kawai RX-6 I used to practice on--which is a fantastic 7 foot acoustic grand piano.
Go find one in a piano store and mess with it and you'll get it. To someone who cares about their keyboard, the bucket keys are the same way. To someone who doesn't... it's still an improvement, just one they largely ignore until they use it for a while and then swap back.
Correlation does not imply association; but correlation is interesting nonetheless. If you can predict one thing via another, more predictable or measurable thing, then you have a way to track elusive data. That it isn't a cause or an associated thing is immaterial.
Think about paid time off. Sick leave is associated with the flu; but paid time off is a condensation of sick leave, vacation time, etc. So people take a vacation day for a vacation, or a vacation day for being sick... now it's no longer associated. A day off is a day off, not a sick day or a vacation day. Go figure. Yet the amount of paid time off taken increases when the flu hits an area, thus giving a correlation. Similarly, when the flu starts to hit an area, or hits nearby areas, the amount of paid time off taken goes down as a hedge in case of sick time. Of course it also goes down when vacations are out of season, and up when vacation season rolls around; it goes down when people start planning for a vacation; etc.
Parent was saying that some had proposed taking meaningful measurements of doctors' performance and publishing their rankings, and doctors banded together and lobbied against it. Now they are facing the noisy mob of the masses, who are completely meaningless cretins that distort facts and seek to blame someone for anything that doesn't work out right, and they think it's unfair. They have no way to fight back because they willingly resisted every weapon offered to them to clear their own names in the face of mindless, rabid smear campaigners in the fear that those weapons would show that, yes, these doctors actually do suck.
Town square is the only place to go now, and the doctors' only defense is to cry that you're lying. Really now, who are you going to believe?
No, I'm calling it a minority because it's 50,000 users out of 50,000,000 users. Just like the XBox "Hardcore Gamer" noisy minority, or the Femenist noisy minority, etc etc. Gay Pride Parades embarrass most gay people I've met, and they wish to not be associated with people who are basically portraying homosexuality as ancient greek art (i.e. wandering around nearly-naked, having sex with everything that moves, etc) and shouting loudly and irritatingly at people just because they can (attention-seeking retards).
Every minority has an even smaller noisy minority. Usually the noisy people are of the noisy minority. That's why Vista didn't take off: the very visible and very much real majority didn't care for it, and it had shitty sales numbers. ME had the same problem. Nobody was demanding downgrades from Windows XP.
The "massive backlash" honestly comes from the noisy minority; and the behavior in Chrome and Firefox is actually pretty spot-on. It does everything the status bar did that I cared about (i.e. everything except displaying "Document Done") without wasting the screen space all the time.
That was my first thought, since I just got a Mozilla Labs update that changed my Firefox AwesomeBar to the Google Chrome EvenMoreAwesomeBar. Firefox is trying to be Chrome to stay relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going by stuff I heard back in the early 90s when I had friends that had Star Wars action figurines and had read every single Star Wars book ever published. You know, the people that could explain Darth Vader's origins as Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine back in 1992? There was never a book called "The Phantom Menace" except as a movie tie-in; but there was lots and lots of story, and there is lots more story left. It has to be ordered into a movie script, but that's hardly equivalent to "never coming up with the story."
I rarely read Sci-Fi; I like Fantasy better.
Age of Misrule, by Mark Chadbourn. 9 books. Completely planned out to start. Everything in the series is important, everything sets up the rules or the characters, everything is a continuing advancement. There's like half a dozen major struggles, and whenever you think it's over they're just like "oh, no, what? The princess is in another castle." It's well-written and complete.
The Gap Cycle, Stephen R. Donaldson. Completely planned out. If it were one book, it would be a 9.5 x 6 inch hardback in small print... 2600 pages long. The first book sets up the main character; the second sets up the universe and the premise for the series. The last three are ... intense.
Donaldson's series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, is pretty much from the hip. He wrote a book, expanded it to a trilogy, planned another trilogy, and is working on a planned tetralogy. It's done pretty well, but it's just more and more books being written. The story wasn't finished in Book 1; it was finished in Book 2, but a lot of shit was left unexplained. Further books have expanded the world more and more; details we knew about but didn't understand have been explained, so it seems Donaldson had envisioned a world and some details that were untenable to explain in the first stories. He will never explain it all; there is a vast collection of lore that High Lord Kevin had recorded and hidden, and for conditions to permit them to be found and explored he would need several new series. This would be like mankind being driven back into the stone age by global thermonuclear war, then discovering faster-than-light space travel ... a lot of shit is going to have to happen in between. Donaldson is done writing in that series after this tetralogy.
I read a lot of good series. Lucas wrote a long, complete story when he tried to write a movie script. He worked out a lot of stuff, and before the script was ready he realized it was too much for one film... then he realized he was writing the middle of the story ... a nine part story. I have not read the books because I don't care that much for Star Wars, but hey. He did not make a movie and then make more movies; he made a movie and wound up writing an epic story in the middle of trying to do a single, self-contained short story.
My review of Red Letter Media's review:
Fuck these guys are retarded. Who publishes content like this as a video?
Because the expertise required to create 3D effects from perfectly capable hardware and software is ridiculous.
The rest of the star wars story (eps 7-9) is actually more interesting and deep than the crap we've got so far. George Lucas drorpped 4-6 to shove us into the center of an incomplete story, like starting The Gap Cycle on book 3. A very inferior story compared to suffering the first book and a half. Unfortunately, the depth of character development that gets explained in the first 3 episodes is ... difficult to do in movies. A long-running TV series would be better; movies are horrible because they put every relevant piece of a story into an almost fixed length of about 2 hours, and nobody will tolerate 12 in the series. TV has the same problem in the US, because everyone wants a complete problem-resolution cycle in isolated episodes that don't have to be watched in exact order, as opposed to chapter-style episodic progression.
The end result is we got somewhat uninteresting action for movies 4-6, because we showed movies 1-3 as movies 4-6. The real depth of actual story starts around episode 4, so that's where the original series started. Episodes 7-9--which now will not be produced--detail much more complicated emotional struggles, as well as more subtle story progressions. There is less action and more content, which is less interesting to people than watching Neo beat up hundreds of copies of Smith for no real reason.
they may look at the CO2 output of a particular form of power generation, and the price, and see that it is manageable and cheaper and better
Most of the people reading this thread are specifying a general assertion. Also, these are power storage units, not power generation.
They have moving parts, they wear. Also, they have moving parts, they are subject to mechanical loss from air drag and bearing drag. Using maglev bearings is an excellent idea here, except that you can't just slap a magnet in the center; they're computer-controlled electromagnetic complex bearing sets.
The strategy ends up being just like a real war: attack and pick off off the soldiers, until the generals are exposed, then go after the generals.
Decapitation attacks are faster and more effective if you can manage them. Decapitation doesn't mean killing the president; a decapitation attack against the US would take out Obama, Biden, skip the cabinet (advisory), skip the secretaries of state (administration), go for Senators next, then the House if needed. The president is easily replaced by the vice president; and Congress approves everything anyway, so we can still fumble along, with the secretary of state probably running the country for a while. When you take out Congress and the top of the executive branch, though, this country can't actually function; it would drop into a pure military state, with the military either deciding top-down how to function or surrendering on terms of negotiation so that it can focus on keeping the country stable. There will be no more elections; the group that decapitated the government will dictate the terms, and the remaining administrative structure is thus dissolved.
Most of our assassinations have gone along the lines of shooting some president or dictator and letting some other asshole fill in. This doesn't work; you have to lop the head off at the neck, not cut off an ear.
Uh, more material means more CO2? Are you sure? Considering that the melting point of iron or steel or aluminum or titanium or incolnel varies by about 1200 degrees (1810F to start weakening incolnel, something like 400 to start weakening some grades of steel, various alloying will push that down to 300F or up to .. oh ...1810F, like the nickel-steel-lotsofotherstuff alloy Incolnel). Glass also takes a lot of energy, thus lots of CO2, and is somewhat less dense than steel: cheap green-tint lime glass softens around 1400F, but good quality clear glass doesn't start to melt until 3000F. Then there's plastics that are easier to flow chemically or thermally, depending on composition, although they're also far lighter; but the density-to-energy-required-to-form ratio isn't constant there.
Making a battery is harder than casting an aluminum engine. Lots of funny chemicals have to be produced, not just sulfuric acid and lead. Purity is important, somehow (battery technology is pretty ugly, and relies on the innards actually melting and doing other strange things). There are waste products which must be filtered out, isolated, contained, separated, shipped, reacted, stored, and disposed of safely, all of which takes energy.
The energy cost for blasting Aluminum into a liquid puddle, casting it in a mold, machining it, polishing it, and assembling it into an engine may be quite a bit higher than the energy cost of forming and cutting sheets of lead and plastic and adding water and sulfuric acid and stabilizers and terminals, especially since lead is heavy and made from more material yet has a very low melting point and is easily worked rather cool anyway; but what about producing all those chemicals and disposing of the toxic byproducts? There are no byproducts in machining an aluminum engine part; you put a tray under the work bench, you collect the metal particles, run it past an electromagnet to draw off any steel filings from the bits, and then dump it back in the melting vat to make another part. That's less transit than running tons and tons of chemicals all over the god damn world for specialist treating and disposal.
Seriously. The power to process more raw material of greater weight is automatically bigger? You don't understand anything about the engineering complexity of one job versus another. The power to produce a material of greater purity is much higher than the back-yard-with-a-blowtorch shit you need to roughly cobble together a mixture of boiling chemical soup that roughly makes a serviceable battery or a piece of steel plate mail. A stamped sword of melted iron is going to be much different than a forged sword of quality steel--cheap iron that's been heated and blasted properly, flowing it away from carbon and impurities, leaving a low-carbon steel with little silicon and sulfur and the like in it, which of course moves to the outside during the forging process anyway so you get nice, pure steel. Of course, the refining and forging processes will take much more time at extremely elevated temperatures, burning tons of fuel.
Purity. Not material. Heavy refined steel vs crude cast iron. Refined, consistent SLA battery with proper stabilizers and salt bridges vs lead and copper sheets in a vat of acid. These are where differences in energy use come from.
It depends on what system you're looking at. Old solar panel technology took a large amount of nasty chemical pollutants to make, and produced a hell of a lot of liquid toxic waste output. I think our solution has been to dump it in the water supply... newer processes are cleaner, though.
It's like buying a fleet of electric or hybrid cars for their "environmental impact," while Toyota won't release statistics on how much energy goes into building one and how much pollution it produces. There's no total lifetime numbers for something as innocuous as CO2, which leads many to speculate that Toyota might keep such things secret because the total CO2 production for an electric hybrid exceeds the total CO2 production for a 25mpg Sedan over its expected lifetime. Less not knowing, and more not caring because the numbers in front of you support your foregone conclusions already.
The humans making the decisions don't understand Go. They're not even engineers, so they haven't seen all the numbers. Hell, even engineers look at cost comparisons, but not total impact: they may look at the CO2 output of a particular form of power generation, and the price, and see that it is manageable and cheaper and better; but they don't see that the CO2 output of building the damn thing divided by its useful lifetime is much higher than a heavy polluter coal plant that lasts much longer and is easy as hell to build.
Most people are stuck in the corner, trying to save one thing in isolation, and then wanting to have everything, and still as separate pieces. They do not back off to see the whole, and make exchanges to stay overall ahead. The whole of the board is a mystery to them, and they only jump from section to section, trying to fight small local battles without seeing how they hurt other positions.
So, a mechanical capacitor?
I would love to see the airlines collapse and land trains become more common. Cheaper to run, safer, and thus overall cheaper.
TSA guidelines require that third party contractors conduct business exactly to TSA standards or above. If they're not as horrible as the TSA, then you're violating the rules.
Pretty much.
In the Windows-ish type stuff, you see an X, a box, and a line. The line has always bewildered me; the X and the big box were not obvious either, but hey. If you say one of these closes, the X is the obvious choice... well, maybe the little line (lid closed?), but the X is universal for "crossing out" or whatnot in the main target audience.
I could guess that red is bad, stop, blood, kill, whatnot, and maybe means close, too. It wasn't obvious to me in any case; there's a case to be made, but it seems less so than a big X. More importantly, however, my brain is going to have a hell of a time figuring out what in the fuck these buttons are for when it's already seen this shit. An X, line, boxes, they're all geometric. Three little colored dots are geometric and colorful. You're looking for a colorful dot in a certain spatial position, with two other dots, and you want it of a given color. That's ... a lot of information to relate; if your language center is tied up (you see text or hear a language you understand) when you see this, you will fail to learn it easily. Your brain won't be able to assemble a complete, usable concept from all the pieces.
Being that I can give a correct explanation of why the three colorful dots sucks, in terms of basic neuroscience, I assume that I'm correct by way of being founded in clear scientific fact. The same way I assume I'm correct in saying a machine that has a crowbar wedged in its gears is going to be less efficient and more prone to damage than a machine with perfectly well machined, properly polished, well-fitted gears with no obstructions.
The keyboards offer a better tactile feel because the keys are progressively weighted. They take progressively more force as you push, then release and click into place; and the keys under weaker fingers take less force than those under stronger fingers (hence progressive weighting). As such, they are ergonomically superior, providing your brain with more control data. You know exactly when you've punched the key fully, and you eventually start taking heavy notice if your fingers slip and hit the wrong key (it feels different enough to disrupt your brain).
Basically, it makes typing immersive. You never need to look, because you can hear and feel what's going on, you can see it on your screen, and when you typo your brain doesn't go "wait that looks wrong, what happened, that's not what I expected to happen, I punched the right thing, did I punch the right thing? Look down at the keyboard, where are my hands, is that right?" Instead you sense it by feel just before you see the mistake, and your brain has already figured everything out. This keeps typos from being disruptive, and also keeps your hands an integrated part of your typing rather than seeming to disconnect and leave the typing to your brain dictating what your eyes see.
It's really like playing a $60,000 grand piano versus a $1000 Yahoo upright. If you've never touched a $60,000 grand, you need to. Also, if you're in the market, I recommend a $4000 Kawai CA series digital piano unless you are obscenely rich (a $15000 Kawai K-9 I could still argue with but I can understand that). The keyboard is basically the same as a $180,000 9 foot concert grand, plugged into sensors instead of hammers, with a computer using all kinds of complex algorithms and tons of samples and statistical data to emulate the $180,000 9 foot Kawai EX concert grand piano. They don't have the power or presence, of course, because there's no 9 foot sound board to resonate with the booming base; but the keys feel dead on, even better than the $67,000 Kawai RX-6 I used to practice on--which is a fantastic 7 foot acoustic grand piano.
Go find one in a piano store and mess with it and you'll get it. To someone who cares about their keyboard, the bucket keys are the same way. To someone who doesn't ... it's still an improvement, just one they largely ignore until they use it for a while and then swap back.
MacOSX also gives you three colorful orbs that are completely meaningless.
Correlation does not imply association; but correlation is interesting nonetheless. If you can predict one thing via another, more predictable or measurable thing, then you have a way to track elusive data. That it isn't a cause or an associated thing is immaterial.
Think about paid time off. Sick leave is associated with the flu; but paid time off is a condensation of sick leave, vacation time, etc. So people take a vacation day for a vacation, or a vacation day for being sick... now it's no longer associated. A day off is a day off, not a sick day or a vacation day. Go figure. Yet the amount of paid time off taken increases when the flu hits an area, thus giving a correlation. Similarly, when the flu starts to hit an area, or hits nearby areas, the amount of paid time off taken goes down as a hedge in case of sick time. Of course it also goes down when vacations are out of season, and up when vacation season rolls around; it goes down when people start planning for a vacation; etc.
Parent was saying that some had proposed taking meaningful measurements of doctors' performance and publishing their rankings, and doctors banded together and lobbied against it. Now they are facing the noisy mob of the masses, who are completely meaningless cretins that distort facts and seek to blame someone for anything that doesn't work out right, and they think it's unfair. They have no way to fight back because they willingly resisted every weapon offered to them to clear their own names in the face of mindless, rabid smear campaigners in the fear that those weapons would show that, yes, these doctors actually do suck.
Town square is the only place to go now, and the doctors' only defense is to cry that you're lying. Really now, who are you going to believe?
No, I'm calling it a minority because it's 50,000 users out of 50,000,000 users. Just like the XBox "Hardcore Gamer" noisy minority, or the Femenist noisy minority, etc etc. Gay Pride Parades embarrass most gay people I've met, and they wish to not be associated with people who are basically portraying homosexuality as ancient greek art (i.e. wandering around nearly-naked, having sex with everything that moves, etc) and shouting loudly and irritatingly at people just because they can (attention-seeking retards).
Every minority has an even smaller noisy minority. Usually the noisy people are of the noisy minority. That's why Vista didn't take off: the very visible and very much real majority didn't care for it, and it had shitty sales numbers. ME had the same problem. Nobody was demanding downgrades from Windows XP.
It sounds to me like Mozilla wants to merge Ubiquity into the URL bar...
The "massive backlash" honestly comes from the noisy minority; and the behavior in Chrome and Firefox is actually pretty spot-on. It does everything the status bar did that I cared about (i.e. everything except displaying "Document Done") without wasting the screen space all the time.
That was my first thought, since I just got a Mozilla Labs update that changed my Firefox AwesomeBar to the Google Chrome EvenMoreAwesomeBar. Firefox is trying to be Chrome to stay relevant.
Except they were reading the computer logs, and the black box said, "Yep, WOT, minimal throttle, WOT, minimal throttle, engine RPM spikes..."
I don't know, but I sold 26 slaves to the Amnion for the knowledge of how to modify a data core for just this reason.