The automobile analogy isn't apt because even though the average age of an auto on the road rose to an all time high of 11.5 years in 2015, new vehicles were still being purchased in record numbers...
Well, first I'd normally stop reading at the word "average" because the arithmetical mean is usually a lousy statistic. You don't need many 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60+ year-old cars still "on the road" (i.e. registered, even if they only ever get driven to 3 classic car rallies a year or are rented out for weddings) to drag up that average - there aren't many cars less than 0 years old to balance them out.
Second, "record numbers" compared to what? The "affordable" motor car has been a thing for a century, and if the Model T wasn't entirely practical, the basic "modern" car (that you or I would be able to hop in and drive without learning about double-declutching or advance/retard levers) was probably around by 1950, if not earlier. Developments since then have been slow and incremental - and the growth in the market has been slow and incremental, too, We buy new cars not because because our current car is obsolete, but because it is knackered (where the threshold for "knackered" varies from 'the ashtrays are full' to 'the floor just fell out' depending on your socio-economic status).
I don't think there was ever a 5 year period during which car ownership jumped from a few rich enthusiasts to 2.4 per family. Nor was there a 30 year period during which the price of a half-decent car remained the same, or lower in figures (even ignoring inflation) while the specifications of "half-decent" grew by several orders of magnitude. Yet that's exactly what's happened with personal computers/smartphones (NB: smartphones are personal computers by any definition that doesn't also exclude 90% of "real" personal computers).
If cars were personal computers, the Model T would have been out in 1979, the Mustang in 1983, the Prius in 1990 and we'd have spent New Year's Eve 1999 complaining about how we paid $800 for our Tesla Model 3 and still had to wait half an hour for the millennium bug patch to download on our 56k modems and had to buy adapters for all our old cigar-lighter powered devices.
So its not really an analogy - rather, its an example of the business model for a mature product that isn't driven by Moore's Law making 18-month old products genuinely obsolescent. The IT industry is going to have to adapt to that model - the whole mobile computing thing has served to delay that day a little, now we're seeing (finally) price inflation and blatant planned obsolescence.
Without DST you'd have less light in the evenings in the summer, and the same bleak dark winter days that you already complain about in the winter.
Assuming the solution to abolishing DST is literally to abolish DST rather than the sensible approach: make a zone-by-zone decision on whether to stay permanently on DST or non-DST.
Most of England would probably be best on permanent DST - unfortunately, Scotland probably needs its own time zone. Maybe that can be fixed if Scotland break away so they can stay in the EU... Trouble is, in the current political climate, the Daily Mail is gonna be shouting "you can take our Greenwich Mean Time from our cold dead fingers". Sigh.
Plus, even reading about someone discussing how they once looked at a picture of a piece of asparagus... makes your piss stink for 24 hours.
I mean, seriously, I could understand it if you ate a bowlful of the stuff*, but even a couple of tiny bits in a slice of quiche or mixed vegetables and, an hour later, its "I'd give that 5 minutes if I were you". Don't let the homeopaths get hold of this: a 1:10000 dilution would probably take out a city block!
(* c.f. "note to self - you had seconds of the beet salad last night so no, you're not bleeding internally - but sadly its the wrong colour to cure your malaria!")
However I have often wondered how much the world would be different had Python been used as the in-browser programming language rather than JS (ECMAscript) from the start.
Well, yes, we'd probably all be using Python, but we'd have a Microsoft preprocessor called "PyScript" that let you use curly-bracket delimited blocks instead of significant whitespace , and which automatically converted Python 3 syntax to Python 2...:-)
The general lesson may be the same as that behind the Concorde. There's not a massive market for people willing to pay a massive amount of money for travel by planes.
Except the showers, cinemas, shopping malls etc, are entirely optional on the A380, and airlines can (and do) just fit them out with regular economy, business and first sections and just carry more people for the same price - or add deluxe accommodation in first without reducing the number of cattle in the back.
I've ended up on an A380 from San Francisco to Heathrow a couple of times in premium economy - the accommodation was no different from any other plane, except everything is a bit newer. What makes it more pleasant is that it is noticeably quieter and, supposedly, higher air pressure (I'll have to take that on trust since I had to give my barometer away to some bloody architect).
Nope, I suspect the "failure" of the 380 is that the easier solution to airport capacity is to add new flights between alternative, less crowded airports...which is probably why, on my last trip, I ended up on a flight from Gatwick to Oakland on a regular plane that avoided the scrum of mega-airports, took me closer to where I needed to go and cost less.
Well, when we have a universally agreed definition of what "intelligence" is, and have shown how it can be accurately and usefully quantified as a single number (a rather extraordinary claim in itself), then maybe someone could start to design an unbiassed test for it. Wake me up when that happens. The HHGTTG joke about the ultimate answer being 42 had it right: there's no point looking for an answer until you have properly defined and understood the question.
I mean, the person at Google who thought "lets automatically, and without consent, tag the public's photos with names as identified by an untested algorithm without any checks on identifying people as animals, celebrities, famous criminals, other people's partners etc. - what could possibly go wrong?" probably aced a shitload of intelligence tests.
In which case why not launch something useful? I realise he doesn't want to risk a commercial satellite but he could launch fuel.
Pro tip: if you suspect that your launch vehicle stands a higher-than-usual chance of blowing up, don't launch stuff that is going to increase the blast radius or be unsuitable as a new artificial reef in the ocean off Florida.
Or he could get a bunch of cube sats and put those into orbit, assuming the launch works.
...but which will still leave a bunch of dissatisfied customers, sunk costs and bad publicity if it doesn't.
Even if this ends in a fireball, Musk wants to be able to present it as a "learning experience": try and launch anything useful and it looks like a failure.
But if doing something like that would delay the launch as they prepare the payload, it might not be worth it.
SpaceX are clearly half-expecting this launch to end in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - from which they will still learn a great deal - and don't want that to be seen as a failure. Any attempt to launch something useful means that someone is going to be disappointed, so better to launch some junk.
Besides, if you are launching supplies for a future space mission you do it properly or not at all - you don't want to fuck around and do it on the cheap because there's a 50% chance of it ending up in the Pacific. Plus, it needs to go into an orbit where future Mars explorers will actually be able to pick it up.
You seem to be terribly confused about the differences between playing a game, gambling on the outcome, or actually running a book on something...
Playing poker may be a game of skill, but playing it for money is gambling, just like betting on horse races, football games etc. You can play poker perfectly well with matchsticks or Monopoly money unless you are so tragically materialistic that you can't enjoy it without the prospect of winning real money.
...and yes, trading cards become a form of gambling as soon as "rare" cards start acquiring a market value. Whether they are a type of regulated gambling where you live is another matter.
So a commercial, for sale D&D game would need to give this up? What?
What? Indeed. Its D&D for fuck's sake - its all in your imagination. You acquire imaginary stuff in a RPG by completing imaginary quests - no real money needs to be involved. The only real-world money you spend is on real-world things like rulebooks or figurines. If your DM lets people acquire in-game loot by paying them real-world money then that is technically known as "completely fucking up the game" and you need to choose your friends more carefully.
The problem is that online computer games, moderated by commercially-operated servers, can create artificial scarcity - which means that "virtual" property starts acquiring real value - and then let you buy progress in the game with actual money (which is still totally fucking up the game) and this soon turns into gambling by selling "loot crates" or similar for real money.
Surprisingly, did no one actually understand the terms of this game?
What, you mean the 20 pages of dense legalese that we all scrupulously read every time we so much as install an update? Maybe the kids that many of these games are aimed at? You know - those kids that we don't let drive, vote or buy alcohol, because they might not yet have developed sound judgement? Especially in the games I've seen which deliberately muddy the waters between in-game pretend currency and real money. Of course, it is all their parents' fault for being confused by the confusing online payments systems and letting their kids spend money online (or maybe for raising felonious little brats who can remember a PIN number) so its perfectly OK to rip them off because, as we all know, two wrongs make a right.
Because you don't know what cards you get, and some are worth a lot of money while others are worthless, is this not gambling?
Magic the gathering is the prime example as cards are so much more expensive than similar games.
Do you mean (a) "is it gambling" or (b) "is it unlawful gambling according to the particular laws of my jurisdiction"?
Ans:
(a) You're paying for the pack in the hope that it contains items worth considerably more than what you paid - of course it is bloody gambling.
(b) Go pay a lawyer to give you the answer you want - and if that doesn't work, go pay a local politician to change the law.
The next question is: is it a problem - considering we've had trading cards for years - compared with the type of "stealth" gambling that is now being concealed in computer games targeted at children. Apart from any "think of the children" issues, "free to pay" (hmm. that was a genuine typo...) games are a pox on the face of gaming, since they are inevitably designed to maximise in-game revenue rather than provide a good game.
Too close to "better out than in" for comfort. (I'd give that 5 minutes if I were you!)
Meanwhile... this sounds like the UK concept of the "Motorway service station" - a car park, filling station, and a franchise-filled mini-mall. Renowned throughout the kingdom for their cuisine*.
(* Note: post from UK, may contain sarcasm**)
(** Actually, they were destination restaurants for about 5 minutes after they first appeared in the 60s)
Can't they just call the police on their hand-crank telephone?
I think (if we're talking about the USA here) they count as one of the groups with "more guns and henchmen" and are certainly one of the cases where you're in more danger if you do have a gun when you meet them (when they come to put your gold/gas/water/beans under "police protection" as per government instruction).
And a well-preserved shotgun shell will let you defend your cans of beans, assuming you have a shotgun to shoot it out of.
I was going to mention guns but didn't want to pseudo-Godwin the thread... Anyway, personally, I think that just makes it a certainty that you're gonna get shot, because there will always be someone with more guns (and henchmen) than you. As for hunting, there isn't much wilderness near where I live and I've got a little picture of me heading down to the local deer park to bag some venison and meeting 1000 other people with the same idea. Ain't gonna work.
A lot of gun fans seem to be convinced that they're movie heroes played by Chuck Norris, Clint or Arnie. I'm more realistic and just see myself ending up on the wrong end of my own gun.
That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Nah. If you're planning for the collapse of civilisation - even temporary - bottled water, canned food, gasoline etc, are king. When the lights go out, gold will suffer just as much from superinflation as anything, but a can of beans will always be worth a day's food.
No point in planning for an apocalypse after which Walmart is still open, but only takes Krugerrand.
For Windows XP. The remaining 5% of people still using XP are ones that can't upgrade due to legacy applications or too old hardware and can't afford new ones.
...and, by now, the #1 thing such systems should not be doing is connecting to the internet and risking instant pwnage, so if you need Firefox you're holding it wrong. If you do need a web browser, it will probably be IE5/6 because the "legacy application" is some old IE-only web application - and even (especially) then you need to make damn sure that's the only thing it can connect to (and that nothing can connect to it).
If COBOL Applications can run for 50 years, so should XP support.
COBOL is a programming language, not an operating system - pretty sure you can compile COBOL on Windows 10 or Linux. Also, your 50 year-old COBOL application probably doesn't rely on internet access or web-baed GUIs, doesn't have to download and render possibly suspect JPEGs etc. I never heard of any rare form of the millennium bug which replied to a date after 1999 with a memory dump containing passwords and personal data.
Windows XP really is the worst case scenario - it comes from a time when the internet was taking off and being naively integrated into everything without regard for security. Also "requires XP" often means "written for Win 3.1/MS-DOS on a kludgy 8/16/32 bit hybrid processor mode with all that near- and far- pointer malarkey, loads of hardware dependencies and the assumption that everybody was admin - good luck porting it without a total rewrite". Everything about it needs to be killed with fire - apart from the UI which was actually OK and has been the main downfall of its successors.
If you need to write for web browsers, node.js etc. (and like it or lump it, those are important platforms at the moment) Typescript is far from "Urgh".
Not only is it an improvement over Javascript (type checking for starters, plus backward compatibility for a lot of 'new' Javascript features that aren't in all browsers yet) but - unlike some other compile-to-javascript languages - outputs perfectly readable, manageable Javascript code. Transitioning a TS project to plain Javascript would be a matter of turning off 'strip comments', building, and then throwing away the Typescript sources, so you're not going to get locked in.
I'm a cyclist and want cars banned because they produce carbon dioxide, carcinogens, and rapid acceleration of my body when they hit me.
Good idea. Looking forward to the day when I can call up a self-driving electric Johnny Cab and get around without needing to grow eyes in the back of my head to spot death-wish cyclists and smartphone zombies throwing themselves under my wheels. However, governments are already intervening on that subject: running down cyclists without a really, really good excuse is already illegal where I live, and several countries have already announced the date for when they plan to ban sales of non-electric cars, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Compare ecigs to tobacco when looking at the health issue since the overwhelming majority of ecig users are former smokers.
At the moment.
The trouble is, two different questions are getting conflated here: (1) Are e-cigs safe? and (2) Are e-cigs safer than tobacco?
The latter is pretty much a no brainer - and e-cigs are clearly great for people trying to quit smoking.
However, claims for safety in absolute terms seem to rely a lot on an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" mentality. If e-cigs are touted as "harmless fun" rather than "a good way to quit" then, increasingly, non-smokers and, ex-smokers who have successfully quit are going to take it up, and existing vapers are going to vape more freely than they used to smoke. In 20 years time we'll find what continually inhaling glycol and assorted flavourings does to lungs, let alone what ever-increasing doses of nicotine does to you if lung cancer doesn't get you first.
That shit you cooked for dinner last night for dinner was far more offensive.
Yes, well, the increasing number of people who turn up to work with tupperware containers full of stinky food that they proceed to microwave in the office kitchen (previously reserved for cups of tea and the occasional celebratory cake) until the whole corridor is filled with the miasma from 57 varieties of re-heated leftovers are on my shit list too:-)
BTW - what do you think happens to all that glycol, glycerine and flavouring (which you might not use but plenty of other vapers do) after you breathe it out in a confined space (esp. in a bar with 30 other people doing the same)? The fact that the "smoke" disappears rapidly just means that the droplets have got too small to see. When you're banned from smoking in your own, freehold, detached, single-occupancy house, then maybe I'll side with you - in the meantime, if you want to vaporize chemicals, fuck off outside where others don't have to breathe the results. If you're addicted to nicotine you'll rationalise any sort of antisocial behaviour to satisfy your craving, which is why we need laws.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
This. I think I might have kinda agreed with Heinlein when I was about 14, but I got better. Reading Doc Smith didn't make me support eugenics, totalitarian government or committing genocide on anything with pseudopods instead of legs. Still enjoy re-reading the books though - but somehow I can then go on to read Iain M Banks or Ken McLeod (Trots in spaaace.... who's Learning The Word is actually a sort of Heinlein parody/homage) without having some sort of personal ideological meltdown. One of the great powers of SF is that it can put these political debates in a futuristic/fantasy context, disconnecting them from contemporary politics so that it is easier to think about and discuss them. Heck, millions of people have read both C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman without their heads exploding.
SF actually helps spot the weak spots in ideologies and the prerequisites for them to work: Doc Smith's universe works if, and only if, you can find some genuine-article, incorruptible Übermensch to police it. Heinlein's Starship Troopers version of democracy might work as long as military service wasn't the only way of becoming a citizen - the film version/parody showed the likely "failure mode" of the system. Banks's anarcho-communist Culture might work in a post-scarcity society overseen (in practice) by superintelligent and (mostly) benevolent machines. Neil Asher's "Polity" - a sort of free-market version of the Culture - turns out to ultimately need, yes, an Übermensch to deal with any AIs who go all progress-through-chaos on the human race. Footfall (a.k.a. SDI, the Novel) works provided you're fighting alien elephants from outer space and not the humans on the next continent...
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My company won't hire junior developers because they WON'T FRIGGIN' STAY AFTER THEY ARE TRAINED.
Does your company promote them and pay them more after they are trained up?
Maybe they do - just asking... because if they can earn more elsewhere after they've got their TLAs, you're not paying them the going rate.
The automobile analogy isn't apt because even though the average age of an auto on the road rose to an all time high of 11.5 years in 2015, new vehicles were still being purchased in record numbers...
Well, first I'd normally stop reading at the word "average" because the arithmetical mean is usually a lousy statistic. You don't need many 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60+ year-old cars still "on the road" (i.e. registered, even if they only ever get driven to 3 classic car rallies a year or are rented out for weddings) to drag up that average - there aren't many cars less than 0 years old to balance them out.
Second, "record numbers" compared to what? The "affordable" motor car has been a thing for a century, and if the Model T wasn't entirely practical, the basic "modern" car (that you or I would be able to hop in and drive without learning about double-declutching or advance/retard levers) was probably around by 1950, if not earlier. Developments since then have been slow and incremental - and the growth in the market has been slow and incremental, too, We buy new cars not because because our current car is obsolete, but because it is knackered (where the threshold for "knackered" varies from 'the ashtrays are full' to 'the floor just fell out' depending on your socio-economic status).
I don't think there was ever a 5 year period during which car ownership jumped from a few rich enthusiasts to 2.4 per family. Nor was there a 30 year period during which the price of a half-decent car remained the same, or lower in figures (even ignoring inflation) while the specifications of "half-decent" grew by several orders of magnitude. Yet that's exactly what's happened with personal computers/smartphones (NB: smartphones are personal computers by any definition that doesn't also exclude 90% of "real" personal computers).
If cars were personal computers, the Model T would have been out in 1979, the Mustang in 1983, the Prius in 1990 and we'd have spent New Year's Eve 1999 complaining about how we paid $800 for our Tesla Model 3 and still had to wait half an hour for the millennium bug patch to download on our 56k modems and had to buy adapters for all our old cigar-lighter powered devices.
So its not really an analogy - rather, its an example of the business model for a mature product that isn't driven by Moore's Law making 18-month old products genuinely obsolescent. The IT industry is going to have to adapt to that model - the whole mobile computing thing has served to delay that day a little, now we're seeing (finally) price inflation and blatant planned obsolescence.
Without DST you'd have less light in the evenings in the summer, and the same bleak dark winter days that you already complain about in the winter.
Assuming the solution to abolishing DST is literally to abolish DST rather than the sensible approach: make a zone-by-zone decision on whether to stay permanently on DST or non-DST.
Most of England would probably be best on permanent DST - unfortunately, Scotland probably needs its own time zone. Maybe that can be fixed if Scotland break away so they can stay in the EU... Trouble is, in the current political climate, the Daily Mail is gonna be shouting "you can take our Greenwich Mean Time from our cold dead fingers". Sigh.
Plus, even reading about someone discussing how they once looked at a picture of a piece of asparagus... makes your piss stink for 24 hours.
I mean, seriously, I could understand it if you ate a bowlful of the stuff*, but even a couple of tiny bits in a slice of quiche or mixed vegetables and, an hour later, its "I'd give that 5 minutes if I were you". Don't let the homeopaths get hold of this: a 1:10000 dilution would probably take out a city block! (* c.f. "note to self - you had seconds of the beet salad last night so no, you're not bleeding internally - but sadly its the wrong colour to cure your malaria!")
However I have often wondered how much the world would be different had Python been used as the in-browser programming language rather than JS (ECMAscript) from the start.
Well, yes, we'd probably all be using Python, but we'd have a Microsoft preprocessor called "PyScript" that let you use curly-bracket delimited blocks instead of significant whitespace , and which automatically converted Python 3 syntax to Python 2... :-)
The general lesson may be the same as that behind the Concorde. There's not a massive market for people willing to pay a massive amount of money for travel by planes.
Except the showers, cinemas, shopping malls etc, are entirely optional on the A380, and airlines can (and do) just fit them out with regular economy, business and first sections and just carry more people for the same price - or add deluxe accommodation in first without reducing the number of cattle in the back.
I've ended up on an A380 from San Francisco to Heathrow a couple of times in premium economy - the accommodation was no different from any other plane, except everything is a bit newer. What makes it more pleasant is that it is noticeably quieter and, supposedly, higher air pressure (I'll have to take that on trust since I had to give my barometer away to some bloody architect).
Nope, I suspect the "failure" of the 380 is that the easier solution to airport capacity is to add new flights between alternative, less crowded airports ...which is probably why, on my last trip, I ended up on a flight from Gatwick to Oakland on a regular plane that avoided the scrum of mega-airports, took me closer to where I needed to go and cost less.
And of course "atabreh" in reverse Polish.
No - reverse Polish would be : "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."
Well, when we have a universally agreed definition of what "intelligence" is, and have shown how it can be accurately and usefully quantified as a single number (a rather extraordinary claim in itself), then maybe someone could start to design an unbiassed test for it. Wake me up when that happens. The HHGTTG joke about the ultimate answer being 42 had it right: there's no point looking for an answer until you have properly defined and understood the question.
I mean, the person at Google who thought "lets automatically, and without consent, tag the public's photos with names as identified by an untested algorithm without any checks on identifying people as animals, celebrities, famous criminals, other people's partners etc. - what could possibly go wrong?" probably aced a shitload of intelligence tests.
Well you know these things happen in THREES.
Everybody knows that is false. Next, you'll be claiming that there were two sequels to The Matrix, too.
:-)
In which case why not launch something useful? I realise he doesn't want to risk a commercial satellite but he could launch fuel.
Pro tip: if you suspect that your launch vehicle stands a higher-than-usual chance of blowing up, don't launch stuff that is going to increase the blast radius or be unsuitable as a new artificial reef in the ocean off Florida.
Or he could get a bunch of cube sats and put those into orbit, assuming the launch works.
...but which will still leave a bunch of dissatisfied customers, sunk costs and bad publicity if it doesn't.
Even if this ends in a fireball, Musk wants to be able to present it as a "learning experience": try and launch anything useful and it looks like a failure.
But if doing something like that would delay the launch as they prepare the payload, it might not be worth it.
SpaceX are clearly half-expecting this launch to end in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - from which they will still learn a great deal - and don't want that to be seen as a failure. Any attempt to launch something useful means that someone is going to be disappointed, so better to launch some junk.
Besides, if you are launching supplies for a future space mission you do it properly or not at all - you don't want to fuck around and do it on the cheap because there's a 50% chance of it ending up in the Pacific. Plus, it needs to go into an orbit where future Mars explorers will actually be able to pick it up.
You seem to be terribly confused about the differences between playing a game, gambling on the outcome, or actually running a book on something...
Playing poker may be a game of skill, but playing it for money is gambling, just like betting on horse races, football games etc. You can play poker perfectly well with matchsticks or Monopoly money unless you are so tragically materialistic that you can't enjoy it without the prospect of winning real money.
...and yes, trading cards become a form of gambling as soon as "rare" cards start acquiring a market value. Whether they are a type of regulated gambling where you live is another matter.
So a commercial, for sale D&D game would need to give this up? What?
What? Indeed. Its D&D for fuck's sake - its all in your imagination. You acquire imaginary stuff in a RPG by completing imaginary quests - no real money needs to be involved. The only real-world money you spend is on real-world things like rulebooks or figurines. If your DM lets people acquire in-game loot by paying them real-world money then that is technically known as "completely fucking up the game" and you need to choose your friends more carefully.
The problem is that online computer games, moderated by commercially-operated servers, can create artificial scarcity - which means that "virtual" property starts acquiring real value - and then let you buy progress in the game with actual money (which is still totally fucking up the game) and this soon turns into gambling by selling "loot crates" or similar for real money.
Surprisingly, did no one actually understand the terms of this game?
What, you mean the 20 pages of dense legalese that we all scrupulously read every time we so much as install an update? Maybe the kids that many of these games are aimed at? You know - those kids that we don't let drive, vote or buy alcohol, because they might not yet have developed sound judgement? Especially in the games I've seen which deliberately muddy the waters between in-game pretend currency and real money. Of course, it is all their parents' fault for being confused by the confusing online payments systems and letting their kids spend money online (or maybe for raising felonious little brats who can remember a PIN number) so its perfectly OK to rip them off because, as we all know, two wrongs make a right.
Because you don't know what cards you get, and some are worth a lot of money while others are worthless, is this not gambling? Magic the gathering is the prime example as cards are so much more expensive than similar games.
Do you mean (a) "is it gambling" or (b) "is it unlawful gambling according to the particular laws of my jurisdiction"?
Ans:
(a) You're paying for the pack in the hope that it contains items worth considerably more than what you paid - of course it is bloody gambling.
(b) Go pay a lawyer to give you the answer you want - and if that doesn't work, go pay a local politician to change the law.
The next question is: is it a problem - considering we've had trading cards for years - compared with the type of "stealth" gambling that is now being concealed in computer games targeted at children. Apart from any "think of the children" issues, "free to pay" (hmm. that was a genuine typo...) games are a pox on the face of gaming, since they are inevitably designed to maximise in-game revenue rather than provide a good game.
In-N-Out Burgers. Eww.
Too close to "better out than in" for comfort. (I'd give that 5 minutes if I were you!)
Meanwhile... this sounds like the UK concept of the "Motorway service station" - a car park, filling station, and a franchise-filled mini-mall. Renowned throughout the kingdom for their cuisine*.
(* Note: post from UK, may contain sarcasm**)
(** Actually, they were destination restaurants for about 5 minutes after they first appeared in the 60s)
For the love of GOD, stop pronouncing "aluminum" with an extra syllable, brits. IT ONLY HAS 4!
Only because you guys miss out the second "i"...
I have never come across such a bunch of sore winners before as Trump voters.
Here in the UK we have this little thing called Brexit...
Can't they just call the police on their hand-crank telephone?
I think (if we're talking about the USA here) they count as one of the groups with "more guns and henchmen" and are certainly one of the cases where you're in more danger if you do have a gun when you meet them (when they come to put your gold/gas/water/beans under "police protection" as per government instruction).
And a well-preserved shotgun shell will let you defend your cans of beans, assuming you have a shotgun to shoot it out of.
I was going to mention guns but didn't want to pseudo-Godwin the thread... Anyway, personally, I think that just makes it a certainty that you're gonna get shot, because there will always be someone with more guns (and henchmen) than you. As for hunting, there isn't much wilderness near where I live and I've got a little picture of me heading down to the local deer park to bag some venison and meeting 1000 other people with the same idea. Ain't gonna work.
A lot of gun fans seem to be convinced that they're movie heroes played by Chuck Norris, Clint or Arnie. I'm more realistic and just see myself ending up on the wrong end of my own gun.
That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Nah. If you're planning for the collapse of civilisation - even temporary - bottled water, canned food, gasoline etc, are king. When the lights go out, gold will suffer just as much from superinflation as anything, but a can of beans will always be worth a day's food.
No point in planning for an apocalypse after which Walmart is still open, but only takes Krugerrand.
For Windows XP. The remaining 5% of people still using XP are ones that can't upgrade due to legacy applications or too old hardware and can't afford new ones.
...and, by now, the #1 thing such systems should not be doing is connecting to the internet and risking instant pwnage, so if you need Firefox you're holding it wrong. If you do need a web browser, it will probably be IE5/6 because the "legacy application" is some old IE-only web application - and even (especially) then you need to make damn sure that's the only thing it can connect to (and that nothing can connect to it).
If COBOL Applications can run for 50 years, so should XP support.
COBOL is a programming language, not an operating system - pretty sure you can compile COBOL on Windows 10 or Linux. Also, your 50 year-old COBOL application probably doesn't rely on internet access or web-baed GUIs, doesn't have to download and render possibly suspect JPEGs etc. I never heard of any rare form of the millennium bug which replied to a date after 1999 with a memory dump containing passwords and personal data.
Windows XP really is the worst case scenario - it comes from a time when the internet was taking off and being naively integrated into everything without regard for security. Also "requires XP" often means "written for Win 3.1/MS-DOS on a kludgy 8/16/32 bit hybrid processor mode with all that near- and far- pointer malarkey, loads of hardware dependencies and the assumption that everybody was admin - good luck porting it without a total rewrite". Everything about it needs to be killed with fire - apart from the UI which was actually OK and has been the main downfall of its successors.
Urgh, Typescript.
If you need to write for web browsers, node.js etc. (and like it or lump it, those are important platforms at the moment) Typescript is far from "Urgh".
Not only is it an improvement over Javascript (type checking for starters, plus backward compatibility for a lot of 'new' Javascript features that aren't in all browsers yet) but - unlike some other compile-to-javascript languages - outputs perfectly readable, manageable Javascript code. Transitioning a TS project to plain Javascript would be a matter of turning off 'strip comments', building, and then throwing away the Typescript sources, so you're not going to get locked in.
Why would Microsoft do that when they have been trying to push HTML5+Javascript as the best way to write "Modern" (Metro) apps?
Typescript - mentioned in TFS - is Microsoft's baby, too, and "compiles" to JavaScript.
I'm a cyclist and want cars banned because they produce carbon dioxide, carcinogens, and rapid acceleration of my body when they hit me.
Good idea. Looking forward to the day when I can call up a self-driving electric Johnny Cab and get around without needing to grow eyes in the back of my head to spot death-wish cyclists and smartphone zombies throwing themselves under my wheels. However, governments are already intervening on that subject: running down cyclists without a really, really good excuse is already illegal where I live, and several countries have already announced the date for when they plan to ban sales of non-electric cars, so I'm not sure what your point is.
Compare ecigs to tobacco when looking at the health issue since the overwhelming majority of ecig users are former smokers.
At the moment.
The trouble is, two different questions are getting conflated here: (1) Are e-cigs safe? and (2) Are e-cigs safer than tobacco? The latter is pretty much a no brainer - and e-cigs are clearly great for people trying to quit smoking.
However, claims for safety in absolute terms seem to rely a lot on an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" mentality. If e-cigs are touted as "harmless fun" rather than "a good way to quit" then, increasingly, non-smokers and, ex-smokers who have successfully quit are going to take it up, and existing vapers are going to vape more freely than they used to smoke. In 20 years time we'll find what continually inhaling glycol and assorted flavourings does to lungs, let alone what ever-increasing doses of nicotine does to you if lung cancer doesn't get you first.
That shit you cooked for dinner last night for dinner was far more offensive.
Yes, well, the increasing number of people who turn up to work with tupperware containers full of stinky food that they proceed to microwave in the office kitchen (previously reserved for cups of tea and the occasional celebratory cake) until the whole corridor is filled with the miasma from 57 varieties of re-heated leftovers are on my shit list too :-)
BTW - what do you think happens to all that glycol, glycerine and flavouring (which you might not use but plenty of other vapers do) after you breathe it out in a confined space (esp. in a bar with 30 other people doing the same)? The fact that the "smoke" disappears rapidly just means that the droplets have got too small to see. When you're banned from smoking in your own, freehold, detached, single-occupancy house, then maybe I'll side with you - in the meantime, if you want to vaporize chemicals, fuck off outside where others don't have to breathe the results. If you're addicted to nicotine you'll rationalise any sort of antisocial behaviour to satisfy your craving, which is why we need laws.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
This. I think I might have kinda agreed with Heinlein when I was about 14, but I got better. Reading Doc Smith didn't make me support eugenics, totalitarian government or committing genocide on anything with pseudopods instead of legs. Still enjoy re-reading the books though - but somehow I can then go on to read Iain M Banks or Ken McLeod (Trots in spaaace.... who's Learning The Word is actually a sort of Heinlein parody/homage) without having some sort of personal ideological meltdown. One of the great powers of SF is that it can put these political debates in a futuristic/fantasy context, disconnecting them from contemporary politics so that it is easier to think about and discuss them. Heck, millions of people have read both C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman without their heads exploding.
SF actually helps spot the weak spots in ideologies and the prerequisites for them to work: Doc Smith's universe works if, and only if, you can find some genuine-article, incorruptible Übermensch to police it. Heinlein's Starship Troopers version of democracy might work as long as military service wasn't the only way of becoming a citizen - the film version/parody showed the likely "failure mode" of the system. Banks's anarcho-communist Culture might work in a post-scarcity society overseen (in practice) by superintelligent and (mostly) benevolent machines. Neil Asher's "Polity" - a sort of free-market version of the Culture - turns out to ultimately need, yes, an Übermensch to deal with any AIs who go all progress-through-chaos on the human race. Footfall (a.k.a. SDI, the Novel) works provided you're fighting alien elephants from outer space and not the humans on the next continent...