It's not. I am in an office full of Macs right now, and not a single one of them is running iOS. It's all "keyboard and mouse" edition Mac OS X. This is Apple fanboy territory and even here, there is little evidence of iOS popularity.
Part of the reason for this is that iOS ala cart is not for sale; you can't put it on your desktop computer even if you want to. And part of the reason is that it would be stupid to even if you could.
Once you understand why Mac OS X users would consider iOS to be a downgrade, I think you'll understand why Ubuntu users consider Unity to be a downgrade.
Pick one that doesn't produce CO2 and has enough power to handle base load which leaves out solar and wind because the sun doesn't shine constantly
Sorry, but if you really want to solve the problem, then you're going to need to fix two (or three, depending on how you look at it) strategic mistakes in that one sentence fragment!
First, lose the "pick one" part. It's ok if you use different techs in different places. Hudson Bay area residents and Sahara dwellers probably should be using totally different approaches.
Second, don't specify "doesn't produce CO2." What you want is less CO2. Or at least specify that the CO2 is not allowed to be an externality, then you deal with the CO2 and whatever it costs to do that, you make sure people pay for it whenever they draw on the power plant.
Third (or a variation on the first), lose the requirement for solutions to always handle the base load. Yes, that makes them be only partial solutions, but mitigation, rather than elimination, is a damn worthy thing to pursue. If you get your daytime power from clean good magic tech and nighttime power from bad tech, you've still half-fixed the problem. That's something to be happy about. We win and lose by degrees.
Why do I keep having to say this? If you think that there are no problems with nuclear power,
Nobody's saying there are no problems with nuclear power. The position is usually that there are fewer problems with nuclear power, compared to its most popular alternatives. If you think nuclear power's rivals are so great, move to Earth and live within its poisoned atmosphere, changing weather patterns, and torn-off mountain peaks.
Can India, China or Viet Nam build one reactor and keep it safe? Perhaps. Can they build dozens and have them all work without a disaster?
Can any wealthy first-world country build even one coal plant and keep it safe? Coal has been given a much longer chance and massively more investment, and as of 2011 the very latest and most expensive and competently-constructed designs still pollute and still kill people and destroy mountains just to get the fuel.
The point isn't that some particular energy harvesting process is absolutely "safe," but that it's safer and/or makes better tradeoffs in other areas. You can talk about nuclear-related costs all you want, but it's meaningless unless you compare those costs to other techs. And once you look at it that way, Chernobyl and Fukushima change from horrors to "blips" showing a worse-case (so far, I'll admit) which is still pretty good-looking when held next to its most popular rival. And those were both atypical fuckups, which we're comparing to coal's typical routine.
Perhaps coal is the strawman that keeps nuclear in the game -- as long as you only have to beat coal, any tech, no matter how bad, unfairly receives a get-out-of-jail-free card. (Slaughtering childrens' puppies in front of their owners and capturing the tears' gravitational potential energy as they start to fall, might beat coal.) So where are the solar plants?
the fact that iOS expressly forbids people from releasing apps that compete with Apple's own software barely gets a mention
People bitch about Apple's interference in that tiny market all the time. The difference is that it's a tiny market. If you go buy a smartphone, it is pretty unlikely you will end up with one that has Apple's software on it, so Apple's shitty behavior won't end up affecting to you.
Now go buy an already-assembled x86 machine and see what happens. You can avoid Microsoft there too, but unlike Apple avoidance, you'll have to work at it. And that's you, Slashdot poster; what about non-geek children? Please, think of the non-geek children and how UEFI may prevent their first computer, which they buy not realizing that it can't ever be upgraded, from ever having a decent OS, and how that will end up influencing browser market share.
So Microsoft should specify in its contracts with OEMs that they have to..
If Microsoft weren't making contracts with OEMs, we wouldn't even be talking about this. This is the shit that originally caused the problem. 99.99% of software companies get by without ever doing anything like that; unlike Microsoft, they have to convince users that their software has merit.
Why does this really matter anymore? First off, every OS nowadays comes with a Web browser.
The subject isn't "every OS." It's The One OS which comes preloaded on 90% of computers regardless of what the purchaser wants, in order to prevent the purchaser from making a choice about what OS to run, so that a market doesn't develop or if one does, at least it will remain stunted and distorted.
Of course a man should be allowed to take a walk in the park whenever he wants to. You and I are allowed to, so it's an outrage that the government restricts this one man's freedom, as this is ultimately a threat to every man's freedom.
That really does make sense, until I tell you that the man in question lives at the penitentiary because he shot a convenience store clerk to avoid having to pay for a case of Keystone Light. And he did it in front of many horrified witnesses who were pleading with him up until that moment, "don't shoot! Don't shoot! Somebody, stop this guy! He is about to shoot the clerk! Dude, please don't do it! That clerk has a wife and kids! Please don-- shit, I have convenience store clerk brains all over my shirt, anyone got a towel? Keystone? You did this for Keystone?!"
Second, true IE removal hasn't been possible since Windows 95.
Agreed. Keeping prisoners in the penitentiary has never really caused any dead convenience store clerks to become alive.
this should have been obvious from the moment Microsoft announced that Metro apps would use HTML5 and JavaScript.
I agree. The moment the man said he wanted to take artistic photos of people enjoying their time at the park, it was obvious that the criminal intended to leave the penitentiary. How did people think he intended to take the photos? When they say he shouldn't be allowed to leave, WTF are they thinking? Not letting him go is totally going to interfere with the photo project.
If this criminal can reasonably assure the public that he's never again going to kill another convenience store clerk, I think most of the public might be accepting of his leaving the prison. By analogy, the public might be less alarmed by Microsoft's plan to eliminate application competition within Windows, if Microsoft would stop making Windows preload deals with the hardware OEMs. If the system doesn't manipulate more people into running Windows than want to, no one will care that Windows manipulates more Windows users into running IE than want to.
Maybe Little Johnny shouldn't borrow $100,000 if he doesn't have a reasonable plan for a career after graduation... It's hard to feel a lot of sympathy
TFA presents it as a request for sympathy, but if you see the situation like that, then you're not scared enough, or (as GP suggests) seeing the parallel with other financial fuckups.
Don't forget to also advise people, "Maybe you shouldn't lend $100k to Little Johnny if he doesn't show a reasonable plan to pay it back," or by extension, "Maybe you shouldn't invest in any institution that itself invests through someone who lends out $100k to people who aren't reasonably likely to pay it back." Or let's just go whole-hog with "Maybe you shouldn't share a politician's constituency with someone who has an investment that is in any way connected to someone who lent $100k to someone without a reasonable expectation that it would be paid back."
Chaos and more expensive government intervention may be looming on the horizon. Whomever Little Johnny owes $100k to, has more of Congress' ear than you do. In the end, they aren't going to be out $100k, so if Johnny can't pay it, then guess who will.
(OPTIMISM MODE ON! BEGIN HAPPY SMILEY FUN TIME!) The way this relates to OWS, if you take a very optimistic view of them, is that our current Congress and White House are nearly unanimously filled by parties who would, without hesitation, support sticking you with that bill. If OWS is serious or becomes serious, and they "take action" not just in the protest sense but in the voting sense, to end the corruption which ends up offending both left-wing and right-wing idealists, then this could still possibly be avoided. Sticking you with the bill would be undoubtably bipartison, but it might not be quadpartison.
Well of course. Otherwise we would have nothing to talk about, friend.:)
Anything relying on magic is de facto fantasy. Anything relying on 'unknown forces' completely under control is fantasy.
I think you're treading dangerously close to a definition that's going to give you a nasty conclusion: that it's all fantasy and no work of hard SF has ever been written.
For example: got space colonies? Then you must have some magical economic force in your story.
Got highly-accurate genetic predictions? Oh please, your characters have magically accurate embryology models and magically powerful computers to run simulations of those models in better-than-real-time.
My point being, you're going to always be drawing a line somewhere, saying that isn't believable enough to be anything other than magic, whereas this is believable enough so that it doesn't need to be explained in detail. And yet ultimately, that lack of detail is what makes it fiction rather than a patent application. Somewhere within those glossed-over details, there is very likely a Devil. The position of the line is subjectively intuitive.
Let's say we have a 600-page story with apparent telekinesis in it.
In one version of the story, on the last page, the "telekinetic" character finally confesses his fraud to another character and shows the gullible fool the electromagnet under the table and the control switches under the toes of his shoe. The gullible character exclaims, "Damn, you sure fooled me! I'm a little angry, but since the same trick bluffed the spacebugs and ultimately saves all our lives, I guess I ought to be glad." You'd agree this story could be hard SF, right? (Could be, as long as I don't mention the spacebugs are actually dragons and that one of them was slain with a "laser sword.")
In another version of the story, everything is the same, except the fraud is never revealed. The gullible character, and the reader, never find out about the electromagnet. It's left unexplained. Not hard SF? It's the same story!
In a third version of the story, the author is a total bastard. He doesn't reveal the fraud or leave it unexplained. Instead, he lies! And not just to the character, but to you the reader. "Oligonicella looked under the table, and to his surprise, there was no electromagnet. 'It was real magic all along!' he exclaimed with amazement." Damn, what a fucking lie. Fortunately, you the reader don't believe it (even if the gullible character did), because you know there's no such thing as telekinesis. Does the author's damn lie make his story not hard SF? Well, maybe. That's a tough one. What if he sprinkles in a clue or two, such as somebody noticing on page 532 that the table had a scratch mark, as though possibly from the end of a wire?
Shit. That scratch mark could have been left by anything.
My first time through the interactive version, it pointed me at "Cryptonomicon." I took another spin and it suggested "Neuromancer." I tried one more time and went through a much longer maze and eventually landed on "I, Robot." 2/3 ain't bad. I agree with you that modern SF is underrated, but from what I've seen so far, these guys aren't guilty of that.
Very few people care, and even fewer would buy ECC memory. It would be an insanely lame thing to brag about. I'm not going to spend 3X the amount on memory so my game doesn't crash.
Context, my dear fellow.
If you're thinking "so my game doesn't crash" then you probably also don't have a problem with the already-absurdly-high amount of RAM that you can put on these motherboards. You are not asking for more RAM slots.
If you had needs where 64GB isn't enough RAM, then it's a lot more likely you'd be interested in ECC too.
That's one of the most frustrating aspects of Android phones - the manufacturers do not upgrade the phones.
It's starting to look like one of Android's greatest weaknesses is that people flame manufacturers, but don't mention their name yet do mention Android's name in spite of the fact that Android had nothing to do with the problem they had.
Dude: name names. Someone sold you an un-upgradable phone and you won't say who? Thanks, now they will be free to pull the same bullshit on me.
If we were talking about desktop computers instead of phones, you wouldn't be talking shit about the OS not being upgradable; you'd be warning the world against the desktop computer manufacturer and their user-hostile BIOS.
Why does every distro but Debian have this weird hangup where the GUI cannot be decoupled from the OS?
Because many distros have different goals than Debian.
Consider one of the more extreme examples of a Unix coupled with an UI: Mac OS X. In that instance, the UI is practically defined as part of the OS. If you're a techie or otherwise take a reductionist view, you know that's not really how things are (there are various different components, such as the Darwin kernel), yet conflating all the components into something you call an "OS" isn't an error: it's an insight. Or if you don't accept that, then let's call it a decision: you have decided to lump all that stuff together and call it Mac OS X.
That holistic decision, interestingly, is part of what makes Mac OS X popular.
Consider the possibility that want your mom to end up with a computer (let's keep things very high-level, and not think about what's an OS; we're talking about the big picture here, so "computer") where she "never has to edit config files." (If you don't see this as a desirable goal, then you won't be able to continue this thought experiment, sorry.) You're going to add GUI front ends that express the same meaning as the text in the config files (and very likely translates to those config files. Now you're writing GUIs. You might end up saving some time, by deciding to use one toolkit, thus marrying your overall project to one particular overall GUI system.
It's not stupid; it just maybe isn't for you.
Debian doesn't take this view, because "not having to edit config files" isn't one of its goals. That gives it more freedom. Now look at Mint's web page and imagine what its goal are. It's not the same as Debian's.
They can write you a personal letter about how your job at Foocorp is stressing you out and not only leaving you with less energy at the end of the day, but that the stupid meeting Johnson scheduled for Monday morning has you discouraged and feeling down all weekend, and that this is why you can't get it up, so you might want to at least stop taking everything so seriously, and most importantly, quit worrying about things that are beyond your control and you'll find your sex life has improved. But what they do is send you a misspelling-filled ad for Viagra.
I'm looking for a fun motorcycles that makes lots of noise and impresses the chicks.
Try Harley-Davidson.
You're not doing Harley-Davidson or drivers any favors by recommending them. Harley-Davison isn't for someone who wants an SUV in which to load up the whole family and big-ass tent for a week-long campign trip.
You might want to re-read the post you replied to, including the question it quotes and answers.
Because it often involves price discrimination, restrictions on free trade or trying to prevent your customers from re-selling their property which is detrimental to a free market.
You:
Do you even know the term "free market" means? Because it really doesn't sound like you do. Hint: regulation forcing companies to do business with people they don't want to do business with is the antithesis of a free market.
Do you know what "regulation" and "forcing" mean? Hint: those terms have nothing to do with reshipping centers. (Unless, of course, you were to suggest a law to ban reshipping centers.)
Reshipping centers are a symptom of a free market. Someone doesn't want sell goods to a certain area where goods are wanted (demand is greater than supply) so the market (not government) finds a way to get things to where they're desired.
This was a camera that was never supposed to come back anyway. They never could have inventoried it.
Let's assume I'm an idiot. Can you explain that to me?
(No, I mean explain your statement that it couldn't be inventoried. I don't want you to explain how I became an idiot; nobody needs to hear that story again.)
According to a pre-inventory list, a widget isn't there. Someone looks through what is there, and sees widget. It doesn't appear on the post-we-took-inventory list?
Do I just not understand what the verb "inventory" means?
Your programs are almost certainly not compiled with the optimizations.
That's sort of a tautology, because we don't have the compiler optimizations yet. Some people probably said the same thing about P6 and later AMD64/IA64, but when the compilers came along, people were running entirely recompiled systems within days.
Whether Gentoo ricers would find Bulldozer-optimized CFLAGS to make much a difference, let along make Bulldozer competitive, I have no idea. But it's silly (especially given history) to say it would be "more accurate" to test without it, after it were to become available. If you care enough about your computer's speed that you're looking at benchmarks and fretting over percentages anyway, of course you're going to have your compiler target the hardware that you have.
Is this a joke? The integrated graphics are the whole fucking point! If you don't want 'em, you can get a Phenom II (or maybe even an Athlon II) that uses less power and runs faster.
If you don't use it as a car, the Honda Civic isn't really all that great a value, comparing slightly unfavorably to Stone Ruination IPA in most video compression benchmarks.
I think the idea is that blind people are more likely to buy "no more eye for an eye" laws. The entire industry is suffering due to patents, so it's a good thing that the biggest players, who have the most power to change things, start experiencing a larger portion of that suffering.
Another good thing about what's happening, is that it's high-profile. Thousands of people can be blinded and nobody cares, but should it happen to even one single celebrity, suddenly it's important. Joe Schmoe doesn't give a fuck that it's illegal for you to encode or decode h264 without permission, but he cares that he's not allowed to buy an iPad.
You don't have to celebrate the injustice, but yes, if it's going to happen anyway, celebrate the venue in which it's happening. It's not a good thing, but it's an improvement.
It sounds like you're suggesting there's something unfair or unjust about taking the fruits of people's labor away from them.
If so, then I agree.
I wonder, though, when that unfairness happened. We have, for many generations in a row now, commanded our government to overspend. We punished, at the polls, any political candidate who said they would not overspend. If someone ran on the platform of not taking short-terms gains at the expense of people in the future, we voted against them by a wide margin.
Welcome to the future. We always voted for either you, or your descendants, to be the final sucker who pays the price. Either be the leaf node on the Ponzi tree, or find a way to be an interior node, so you can laugh and point at the leaf below, hopefully dying before any retribution. But please, don't ever say you didn't want anything unfair to happen, or for there to not be any final victim who has the fruits of their labors taken away. We all did want something unfair to happen.
I think it's fine to complain about the relative efficacy of various strategies for facing the debt and unsustainability, but let's not ever cast the debate in terms of someone being a victim or unfair things happening, because those things are certainties beyond debate. The debt undenably exists and somebody is going to pay for it. Will dead people pay for it? I think not. Therefore, injustice must happen.
IMO most of social is done and over, which is a good thing...it's now integrated into peoples lives and there are plenty of players in the game with no pressing need for another.
If ad viewers are sending id+preferences to your competitors instead of to you, then social isn't done. There is always pressing need for another, if you're the "another."
Don't view social networking as just another application. If it were just another application, then all these fucking web companies wouldn't be doing it; it would just be something users run instead of central nodes that they upload to; indeed, it would be something they already had (email+IRC+other stuff), because the older tools actually work better for users, but don't work worth a shit for customers.
Google is right in wanting to get into it. So is Facebook and Microsoft and anyone else. It's a good pie to have a piece of.
How do you know what terms the GP AC put on the purchase, which Sony apparently agreed to since they accepted his money anyway, after the negotiation?
(And don't say Sony wasn't a party to any negotiation, unless you're saying there were no terms and all and it was just a regular retail sale like buying a loaf of bread.)
"Apollo in 1969. Shuttle in 1981. Nothing in 2011. Our space program would look awesome to anyone living backwards thru time."
Nothing in 2011? I thought we launched two rockets to the moon just a few days ago, and it was ho-hum routine! Look at the stuff crawling around on Mars right now, and think of how lame they would be by comparison, had the mission occured in 1969 or 1981.
Maybe we ought to be happy we don't need to impress cold war rivals anymore. Imagine if in the 1960s, you told someone that 3000 deaths would be considered a big deal that would shake up international affairs for a decade. They probably misunderstand you. They'd think you were talking about the death toll per some kind of futurist micro-nuke MIRV, which would fit into individual ICBMs by the hundreds.
Play the tape forward, Tyson, not backward. See through the special effects and pay attention to the plot.
If you've ever seen what a snapping turtle can do to a broomstick handle
One of the things that I have recently learned about turtles, is that they are most often seen whenever people are sweeping. If I were a turtle hunter, I would use an audio track of sweeping and an iron bar disguised as a broom, as bait.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not. I am in an office full of Macs right now, and not a single one of them is running iOS. It's all "keyboard and mouse" edition Mac OS X. This is Apple fanboy territory and even here, there is little evidence of iOS popularity.
Part of the reason for this is that iOS ala cart is not for sale; you can't put it on your desktop computer even if you want to. And part of the reason is that it would be stupid to even if you could.
Once you understand why Mac OS X users would consider iOS to be a downgrade, I think you'll understand why Ubuntu users consider Unity to be a downgrade.
Sorry, but if you really want to solve the problem, then you're going to need to fix two (or three, depending on how you look at it) strategic mistakes in that one sentence fragment!
First, lose the "pick one" part. It's ok if you use different techs in different places. Hudson Bay area residents and Sahara dwellers probably should be using totally different approaches.
Second, don't specify "doesn't produce CO2." What you want is less CO2. Or at least specify that the CO2 is not allowed to be an externality, then you deal with the CO2 and whatever it costs to do that, you make sure people pay for it whenever they draw on the power plant.
Third (or a variation on the first), lose the requirement for solutions to always handle the base load. Yes, that makes them be only partial solutions, but mitigation, rather than elimination, is a damn worthy thing to pursue. If you get your daytime power from clean good magic tech and nighttime power from bad tech, you've still half-fixed the problem. That's something to be happy about. We win and lose by degrees.
Nobody's saying there are no problems with nuclear power. The position is usually that there are fewer problems with nuclear power, compared to its most popular alternatives. If you think nuclear power's rivals are so great, move to Earth and live within its poisoned atmosphere, changing weather patterns, and torn-off mountain peaks.
Can any wealthy first-world country build even one coal plant and keep it safe? Coal has been given a much longer chance and massively more investment, and as of 2011 the very latest and most expensive and competently-constructed designs still pollute and still kill people and destroy mountains just to get the fuel.
The point isn't that some particular energy harvesting process is absolutely "safe," but that it's safer and/or makes better tradeoffs in other areas. You can talk about nuclear-related costs all you want, but it's meaningless unless you compare those costs to other techs. And once you look at it that way, Chernobyl and Fukushima change from horrors to "blips" showing a worse-case (so far, I'll admit) which is still pretty good-looking when held next to its most popular rival. And those were both atypical fuckups, which we're comparing to coal's typical routine.
Perhaps coal is the strawman that keeps nuclear in the game -- as long as you only have to beat coal, any tech, no matter how bad, unfairly receives a get-out-of-jail-free card. (Slaughtering childrens' puppies in front of their owners and capturing the tears' gravitational potential energy as they start to fall, might beat coal.) So where are the solar plants?
People bitch about Apple's interference in that tiny market all the time. The difference is that it's a tiny market. If you go buy a smartphone, it is pretty unlikely you will end up with one that has Apple's software on it, so Apple's shitty behavior won't end up affecting to you.
Now go buy an already-assembled x86 machine and see what happens. You can avoid Microsoft there too, but unlike Apple avoidance, you'll have to work at it. And that's you, Slashdot poster; what about non-geek children? Please, think of the non-geek children and how UEFI may prevent their first computer, which they buy not realizing that it can't ever be upgraded, from ever having a decent OS, and how that will end up influencing browser market share.
If Microsoft weren't making contracts with OEMs, we wouldn't even be talking about this. This is the shit that originally caused the problem. 99.99% of software companies get by without ever doing anything like that; unlike Microsoft, they have to convince users that their software has merit.
The subject isn't "every OS." It's The One OS which comes preloaded on 90% of computers regardless of what the purchaser wants, in order to prevent the purchaser from making a choice about what OS to run, so that a market doesn't develop or if one does, at least it will remain stunted and distorted.
Of course a man should be allowed to take a walk in the park whenever he wants to. You and I are allowed to, so it's an outrage that the government restricts this one man's freedom, as this is ultimately a threat to every man's freedom.
That really does make sense, until I tell you that the man in question lives at the penitentiary because he shot a convenience store clerk to avoid having to pay for a case of Keystone Light. And he did it in front of many horrified witnesses who were pleading with him up until that moment, "don't shoot! Don't shoot! Somebody, stop this guy! He is about to shoot the clerk! Dude, please don't do it! That clerk has a wife and kids! Please don-- shit, I have convenience store clerk brains all over my shirt, anyone got a towel? Keystone? You did this for Keystone?!"
Agreed. Keeping prisoners in the penitentiary has never really caused any dead convenience store clerks to become alive.
I agree. The moment the man said he wanted to take artistic photos of people enjoying their time at the park, it was obvious that the criminal intended to leave the penitentiary. How did people think he intended to take the photos? When they say he shouldn't be allowed to leave, WTF are they thinking? Not letting him go is totally going to interfere with the photo project.
If this criminal can reasonably assure the public that he's never again going to kill another convenience store clerk, I think most of the public might be accepting of his leaving the prison. By analogy, the public might be less alarmed by Microsoft's plan to eliminate application competition within Windows, if Microsoft would stop making Windows preload deals with the hardware OEMs. If the system doesn't manipulate more people into running Windows than want to, no one will care that Windows manipulates more Windows users into running IE than want to.
TFA presents it as a request for sympathy, but if you see the situation like that, then you're not scared enough, or (as GP suggests) seeing the parallel with other financial fuckups.
Don't forget to also advise people, "Maybe you shouldn't lend $100k to Little Johnny if he doesn't show a reasonable plan to pay it back," or by extension, "Maybe you shouldn't invest in any institution that itself invests through someone who lends out $100k to people who aren't reasonably likely to pay it back." Or let's just go whole-hog with "Maybe you shouldn't share a politician's constituency with someone who has an investment that is in any way connected to someone who lent $100k to someone without a reasonable expectation that it would be paid back."
Chaos and more expensive government intervention may be looming on the horizon. Whomever Little Johnny owes $100k to, has more of Congress' ear than you do. In the end, they aren't going to be out $100k, so if Johnny can't pay it, then guess who will.
(OPTIMISM MODE ON! BEGIN HAPPY SMILEY FUN TIME!) The way this relates to OWS, if you take a very optimistic view of them, is that our current Congress and White House are nearly unanimously filled by parties who would, without hesitation, support sticking you with that bill. If OWS is serious or becomes serious, and they "take action" not just in the protest sense but in the voting sense, to end the corruption which ends up offending both left-wing and right-wing idealists, then this could still possibly be avoided. Sticking you with the bill would be undoubtably bipartison, but it might not be quadpartison.
OH MY FUCKING GOD. You have just given me the best gag gift idea, ever.
Well of course. Otherwise we would have nothing to talk about, friend. :)
I think you're treading dangerously close to a definition that's going to give you a nasty conclusion: that it's all fantasy and no work of hard SF has ever been written.
For example: got space colonies? Then you must have some magical economic force in your story.
Got highly-accurate genetic predictions? Oh please, your characters have magically accurate embryology models and magically powerful computers to run simulations of those models in better-than-real-time.
My point being, you're going to always be drawing a line somewhere, saying that isn't believable enough to be anything other than magic, whereas this is believable enough so that it doesn't need to be explained in detail. And yet ultimately, that lack of detail is what makes it fiction rather than a patent application. Somewhere within those glossed-over details, there is very likely a Devil. The position of the line is subjectively intuitive.
Let's say we have a 600-page story with apparent telekinesis in it.
In one version of the story, on the last page, the "telekinetic" character finally confesses his fraud to another character and shows the gullible fool the electromagnet under the table and the control switches under the toes of his shoe. The gullible character exclaims, "Damn, you sure fooled me! I'm a little angry, but since the same trick bluffed the spacebugs and ultimately saves all our lives, I guess I ought to be glad." You'd agree this story could be hard SF, right? (Could be, as long as I don't mention the spacebugs are actually dragons and that one of them was slain with a "laser sword.")
In another version of the story, everything is the same, except the fraud is never revealed. The gullible character, and the reader, never find out about the electromagnet. It's left unexplained. Not hard SF? It's the same story!
In a third version of the story, the author is a total bastard. He doesn't reveal the fraud or leave it unexplained. Instead, he lies! And not just to the character, but to you the reader. "Oligonicella looked under the table, and to his surprise, there was no electromagnet. 'It was real magic all along!' he exclaimed with amazement." Damn, what a fucking lie. Fortunately, you the reader don't believe it (even if the gullible character did), because you know there's no such thing as telekinesis. Does the author's damn lie make his story not hard SF? Well, maybe. That's a tough one. What if he sprinkles in a clue or two, such as somebody noticing on page 532 that the table had a scratch mark, as though possibly from the end of a wire?
Shit. That scratch mark could have been left by anything.
My first time through the interactive version, it pointed me at "Cryptonomicon." I took another spin and it suggested "Neuromancer." I tried one more time and went through a much longer maze and eventually landed on "I, Robot." 2/3 ain't bad. I agree with you that modern SF is underrated, but from what I've seen so far, these guys aren't guilty of that.
Context, my dear fellow.
If you're thinking "so my game doesn't crash" then you probably also don't have a problem with the already-absurdly-high amount of RAM that you can put on these motherboards. You are not asking for more RAM slots.
If you had needs where 64GB isn't enough RAM, then it's a lot more likely you'd be interested in ECC too.
It's starting to look like one of Android's greatest weaknesses is that people flame manufacturers, but don't mention their name yet do mention Android's name in spite of the fact that Android had nothing to do with the problem they had.
Dude: name names. Someone sold you an un-upgradable phone and you won't say who? Thanks, now they will be free to pull the same bullshit on me.
If we were talking about desktop computers instead of phones, you wouldn't be talking shit about the OS not being upgradable; you'd be warning the world against the desktop computer manufacturer and their user-hostile BIOS.
Because many distros have different goals than Debian.
Consider one of the more extreme examples of a Unix coupled with an UI: Mac OS X. In that instance, the UI is practically defined as part of the OS. If you're a techie or otherwise take a reductionist view, you know that's not really how things are (there are various different components, such as the Darwin kernel), yet conflating all the components into something you call an "OS" isn't an error: it's an insight. Or if you don't accept that, then let's call it a decision: you have decided to lump all that stuff together and call it Mac OS X.
That holistic decision, interestingly, is part of what makes Mac OS X popular.
Consider the possibility that want your mom to end up with a computer (let's keep things very high-level, and not think about what's an OS; we're talking about the big picture here, so "computer") where she "never has to edit config files." (If you don't see this as a desirable goal, then you won't be able to continue this thought experiment, sorry.) You're going to add GUI front ends that express the same meaning as the text in the config files (and very likely translates to those config files. Now you're writing GUIs. You might end up saving some time, by deciding to use one toolkit, thus marrying your overall project to one particular overall GUI system.
It's not stupid; it just maybe isn't for you.
Debian doesn't take this view, because "not having to edit config files" isn't one of its goals. That gives it more freedom. Now look at Mint's web page and imagine what its goal are. It's not the same as Debian's.
They can write you a personal letter about how your job at Foocorp is stressing you out and not only leaving you with less energy at the end of the day, but that the stupid meeting Johnson scheduled for Monday morning has you discouraged and feeling down all weekend, and that this is why you can't get it up, so you might want to at least stop taking everything so seriously, and most importantly, quit worrying about things that are beyond your control and you'll find your sex life has improved. But what they do is send you a misspelling-filled ad for Viagra.
You might want to re-read the post you replied to, including the question it quotes and answers.
You:
Do you know what "regulation" and "forcing" mean? Hint: those terms have nothing to do with reshipping centers. (Unless, of course, you were to suggest a law to ban reshipping centers.)
Reshipping centers are a symptom of a free market. Someone doesn't want sell goods to a certain area where goods are wanted (demand is greater than supply) so the market (not government) finds a way to get things to where they're desired.
Let's assume I'm an idiot. Can you explain that to me?
(No, I mean explain your statement that it couldn't be inventoried. I don't want you to explain how I became an idiot; nobody needs to hear that story again.)
According to a pre-inventory list, a widget isn't there. Someone looks through what is there, and sees widget. It doesn't appear on the post-we-took-inventory list?
Do I just not understand what the verb "inventory" means?
That's sort of a tautology, because we don't have the compiler optimizations yet. Some people probably said the same thing about P6 and later AMD64/IA64, but when the compilers came along, people were running entirely recompiled systems within days.
Whether Gentoo ricers would find Bulldozer-optimized CFLAGS to make much a difference, let along make Bulldozer competitive, I have no idea. But it's silly (especially given history) to say it would be "more accurate" to test without it, after it were to become available. If you care enough about your computer's speed that you're looking at benchmarks and fretting over percentages anyway, of course you're going to have your compiler target the hardware that you have.
Is this a joke? The integrated graphics are the whole fucking point! If you don't want 'em, you can get a Phenom II (or maybe even an Athlon II) that uses less power and runs faster.
If you don't use it as a car, the Honda Civic isn't really all that great a value, comparing slightly unfavorably to Stone Ruination IPA in most video compression benchmarks.
Fuck Yeah! This! I am so glad someone finally put into words the problem we secular speakers have been experiencing.
I think the idea is that blind people are more likely to buy "no more eye for an eye" laws. The entire industry is suffering due to patents, so it's a good thing that the biggest players, who have the most power to change things, start experiencing a larger portion of that suffering.
Another good thing about what's happening, is that it's high-profile. Thousands of people can be blinded and nobody cares, but should it happen to even one single celebrity, suddenly it's important. Joe Schmoe doesn't give a fuck that it's illegal for you to encode or decode h264 without permission, but he cares that he's not allowed to buy an iPad.
You don't have to celebrate the injustice, but yes, if it's going to happen anyway, celebrate the venue in which it's happening. It's not a good thing, but it's an improvement.
It sounds like you're suggesting there's something unfair or unjust about taking the fruits of people's labor away from them.
If so, then I agree.
I wonder, though, when that unfairness happened. We have, for many generations in a row now, commanded our government to overspend. We punished, at the polls, any political candidate who said they would not overspend. If someone ran on the platform of not taking short-terms gains at the expense of people in the future, we voted against them by a wide margin.
Welcome to the future. We always voted for either you, or your descendants, to be the final sucker who pays the price. Either be the leaf node on the Ponzi tree, or find a way to be an interior node, so you can laugh and point at the leaf below, hopefully dying before any retribution. But please, don't ever say you didn't want anything unfair to happen, or for there to not be any final victim who has the fruits of their labors taken away. We all did want something unfair to happen.
I think it's fine to complain about the relative efficacy of various strategies for facing the debt and unsustainability, but let's not ever cast the debate in terms of someone being a victim or unfair things happening, because those things are certainties beyond debate. The debt undenably exists and somebody is going to pay for it. Will dead people pay for it? I think not. Therefore, injustice must happen.
If ad viewers are sending id+preferences to your competitors instead of to you, then social isn't done. There is always pressing need for another, if you're the "another."
Don't view social networking as just another application. If it were just another application, then all these fucking web companies wouldn't be doing it; it would just be something users run instead of central nodes that they upload to; indeed, it would be something they already had (email+IRC+other stuff), because the older tools actually work better for users, but don't work worth a shit for customers.
Google is right in wanting to get into it. So is Facebook and Microsoft and anyone else. It's a good pie to have a piece of.
How do you know what terms the GP AC put on the purchase, which Sony apparently agreed to since they accepted his money anyway, after the negotiation?
(And don't say Sony wasn't a party to any negotiation, unless you're saying there were no terms and all and it was just a regular retail sale like buying a loaf of bread.)
Nothing in 2011? I thought we launched two rockets to the moon just a few days ago, and it was ho-hum routine! Look at the stuff crawling around on Mars right now, and think of how lame they would be by comparison, had the mission occured in 1969 or 1981.
Maybe we ought to be happy we don't need to impress cold war rivals anymore. Imagine if in the 1960s, you told someone that 3000 deaths would be considered a big deal that would shake up international affairs for a decade. They probably misunderstand you. They'd think you were talking about the death toll per some kind of futurist micro-nuke MIRV, which would fit into individual ICBMs by the hundreds.
Play the tape forward, Tyson, not backward. See through the special effects and pay attention to the plot.
One of the things that I have recently learned about turtles, is that they are most often seen whenever people are sweeping. If I were a turtle hunter, I would use an audio track of sweeping and an iron bar disguised as a broom, as bait.