Having hunted both pigeons and doves I can tell you that flight patterns of pigeons are a reasonable practice run for doves. However doves are slightly more challenging by virtue of being about half the size.
In some small towns I have heard tell of the town giving their night-shift police officers air rifles and a request that the pigeon problem be "dealt with". Apparently you can reduce the nuisance by a couple hundred roosting birds a night when there's no actual crime that needs attending to.
I don't know, I'd rather liken this to you not going to jail for shooting the robber who invaded your property. Maybe the hunters felt threatened by the helicopter, maybe they were buzzing the hunters with it and one of them took the expeditious route of shooting it with the gun already in his hand. Maybe there was concern that the animal rights group had gone full blown psycho eco-terrorist and loaded the thing up with TNT to protect the precious little birds by blowing the hunters up.
Big, loud, strange looking thing is hovering over you menacingly - who knows what to think about that. It certainly had no business on your property. Shoot first and ask questions later.
I have yet to find any civilian purchasable ammunition or ordinance cable of traveling 7+ miles straight up in the air. Hell, I don't even know of any that can travel 7+ miles overland in a ballistic arc.
Military is different (obviously) but more expensive and not generally available to the civilian population.
Slightly better? no, massively better. Win 8 added 20 fps to my games.
Which doesn't mean a thing when the interface is so clunky that I'd rather use anything else to get the game up and running. If Windows 8 SP1 includes some options for turning off "Metro", "Modern" or whatever the hell it's being called now, and gives me back a start menu (you know, so all the applications aren't hidden by default) then maybe upgrading will be an option. For now all of the under the hood fixes are vastly overshadowed by the suckstorm that is the UI.
I think you underestimate what an absolute torrential downpour of data you are talking about. The big nasty one is "using recognition software to track you on the streets and in public buildings". It may, just possibly, be technically feasible to do this for a small, secure area. But realtime processing and tracking of something like a major metropolitan area would require bandwidth that would make Google cringe. And *that* is assuming that you can interconnect all of the necessary systems and get them to talk to each other coherently.
They aimed too high as it is. $380 million will buy a *lot* of lawyer time for appeals and suchlike. If it was $10-$20 million it might not be worth Apple's time, but $380 million assures *years* of appeals.
The thing is, most people already have their apps and whatnot, and re-downloading them is free. So you get very little in extra sales when people upgrade their devices. If they went to a model like that people would pay less for the device and then have to repurchase all of their apps at every upgrade. All that would accomplish would be to put people off of upgrading their device in the first place. No. They really can't afford to go to a model where they recoup the price on iTunes sales. Too much would have to change and people would rebel.
Exactly! And the explosives in a stinger are probably an order of magnitude more effective than that in your standard IED. Sure it won't drop an aircraft out of the sky without the fancy electronics package, but it could still ruin a Humvee's day. For that matter the rocket propellant would probably make a fairly effective pipe bomb. Two for one.
Look, the fundamental problem is that you'd still be giving them a stockpile of things that violently go boom. Okay, without the high tech guidance stuff it's not so useful for knocking down airplanes, but that missile can still be disassembled, a new detonator plugged in the the go-boom juice and the guts of a stinger missile will still very satisfactorily destroy a ground vehicle in much more spectacular fashion than your average IED.
Nah, the idea being that that prevents Iran from establishing a Muslim Caliphate, uniting the Muslim world against the U.S. and moving from there to dominate the world. The joke is on us though, the Muslim Caliphate will be centered in Turkey.
Retards must be removed from the gene pool because they have less functional brains and are thus less human. Making it illegal to screw sub-human retards is the best way to do that, according to my state politicians. I see now. "Protecting them" is a good cover story.
Umm....it's about ability to consent. To the best of our knowledge and ability, people who are protected under such laws lack sufficient faculties to grant consent to the person having sex with them. Ergo, they were raped. It has nothing to do with "purifying" the gene pool, and everything to do with being as humane as possible to people who got a raw deal due to fate/circumstance/birth/whatever.
My company got access to Windows 8 two months ago (the RTM version that everyone else is getting tomorrow, not some preview - we're a software assurance customer) and I installed it on my laptop and a couple of HP Slate Tablets we had floating around.
I strongly dislike it on my laptop. It's jarring to be bounced back and forth from Metro to the Desktop as I do day-to-day tasks, and by the time I finally got it configured how I wanted it, it was basically Windows 7 minus Aero and Start Menu.
On the Slates it was marginally more functional. The on-screen keyboard is about a billion times better than Win7 for tablets, and the touch gestures make a *lot* more sense than they do with a mouse. However, the same jarring transitions are still there, and in all honesty, doing regular Windows stuff on a tablet is still just a pain in the ass. Just slightly less so with Win8. But I'm rather have an ultrabook or an HP Mini or similar for any "real" work in Windows.
That's *always* the case. It's the classic pigeon hole problem. In order to encode absolutely every possible string of bytes there must be some encodings which use at least that many bytes to do so. You see this readily with lossless image/audio compression algorithms. They make everything smaller in the average case (normal songs, spoken audio, landscape pics, family photos), but shove a randomly generated mess at them and they almost always produce a file larger than the original.
Look, as a sysadmin I can tell you that it isn't just "change" that makes me dislike Windows 8. Setting this thing up for a user's desktop is a grade-A class 1 pain in the ass. I finally got an image that at *least* keeps all the standard shortcuts and displays them in Metro across all profile, but if I install something else it doesn't show up at all until I get the user logged in and step them through how to sticky it in the Metro list. And the only way to do that for them is in the base image when you sysprep it.
Now, yes, people can figure out how to sticky their apps, but it's a retraining issue and it just flat out gets in the way of them doing their job. If they'd just kept the damn start menu I wouldn't be complaining (even if it needed a reg-hack to enable), but instead they're forcing this cruft down our throats, and as enterprise users we don't appreciate it.
For the home user it's actually pretty close to ideal. You can spend most of your time in "tablet mode" and sit their consuming content and writing the occasional document or Facebook update. You don't need anything remotely related to added complexity. Fine. And Microsoft's overarching goal of getting people used to the UI so they'll be more apt to buy a WinPhone? Sure, I get it. But alienating corporate customers in the process? That's just shooting yourself in the foot. At least the Enterprise Edition should have a more serious interface.
Ctrl-INS / Shift-DEL / Shift-INS *still work* (Windows 7) and I use them instead of the ctrl-c / ctrl-x/ctrl-v combos because when I try to use the ctrl combos I hit ctrl-c instead of ctrl-v and have to reacquire my text. The old school way is much easier to do without looking and less error prone (for me at least).
XP's support for SSDs is practically nonexistent (it treats them like any other block device, leading to terrible decreases on performance over time).
You generally make good points, but I wanted to address this one. Whenever I build a Windows XP image here at work, I always format the box with Win7 PE first, with an align=1024 on the partition to set it on a megabyte boundary. Conveniently, this fixes the boundary issue that one would typically experience with SSD's. You're right that WinXP is not natively aware of how to properly handle SSD's, but the fix is fairly trivial and, at least in the enterprise, something that any competent image builder should have fixed long ago.
What happened to transparent aluminum? Did they forget that technology in the 24th century too?
Strictly speaking, we have that now. Sapphire glass is used in all kinds of things (including, but not limited to, the camera lens on the iPhone 5). True it's not really "glass" but calling it such makes it more understandable as to what it's used for. Interestingly, it's also used in bullet-proof armor (vehicles and people).
Well, first and foremost all politicians will make the choice that best serves their own self-interest. Secondary to that, if there is no self-interest to be served in a given decision, then they will follow the generic Demonrat or Republican't party line.
Dear Crazy Fundie Muslims, An all-powerful God who created the universe from nothingness does not require you to go psycho and kill people in order to defend his honor. If he was that upset he could easily do it himself.
This is somewhat ironic considering how often these religious fundamentalists promote hate, discrimination and violence against anyone who does not subscribe to their beliefs.
The Qur'an requires them to. If a people are not Muslims then they are to fight against them until either they convert, submit, or die. There is no option for living with them peacefully as equals.
More to the point, any law outlawing religious blasphemy will be inherently self-contradictory. It is blasphemous for a Christian for someone to call Mohammed a prophet of God, and it is blasphemous for a Muslim to claim that he is not. Either way you are giving offense to 1.5 billion plus people just from that one statement. So...yeah, blasphemy laws will never work in a heterogeneous society. Basically what the Muslims want is blasphemy laws protecting Islam, and then abolishing all other world religions. This will never fly in the United States. At least not in my lifetime.
He went through the motions of expressing regret, but that asshole smirk was the only genuine, believable part of his entire performance. What kind of person does that, I thought? Then it hit me: the kind of person who picks on a gay kid, holds him down, hacks off his hair, then when confronted years later, lies about it. An asshole.
I am reasonably convinced that, from the early 1800's on, the prime requirement for the office of President of the United States is that the president must be a sociopath.
I can't wait until we're debating which vehicles get the best miles per microgram of anti-matter. Because, as a point of somewhat interesting fact, the complete annihilation of one microgram of anti-matter (plus one microgram of regular matter) is equivalent to just over one U.S. gallon of gasoline (about 1 1/3 gallons actually). A milligram of the stuff could potentially keep you driving around all year (though accidents would be utterly spectacular).
I added the Quick Launch back into Windows 7, and I did the same in Windows 8. The only difference is that my Quick Launch in Windows 8 has an extra 15 or so icons in it so that I can get to *everything* that I commonly use instead of simply supplementing my start menu.
Either way, my huge overarching complaint with Windows 8 on the enterprise desktop is that apps that require administrator to install then have to be manually pinned on users' Metro interface, or put on the desktop, or into a Quick Launch. There's no immediately obvious method of accessing your new app, and extra action has to be taken to get it listed *for every user that uses that computer*. But you can bet your ass they have access to the Windows Store by default (which doesn't work behind the firewall anyway). Way to crap on your business customers Microsoft.
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Having hunted both pigeons and doves I can tell you that flight patterns of pigeons are a reasonable practice run for doves. However doves are slightly more challenging by virtue of being about half the size.
In some small towns I have heard tell of the town giving their night-shift police officers air rifles and a request that the pigeon problem be "dealt with". Apparently you can reduce the nuisance by a couple hundred roosting birds a night when there's no actual crime that needs attending to.
I don't know, I'd rather liken this to you not going to jail for shooting the robber who invaded your property. Maybe the hunters felt threatened by the helicopter, maybe they were buzzing the hunters with it and one of them took the expeditious route of shooting it with the gun already in his hand. Maybe there was concern that the animal rights group had gone full blown psycho eco-terrorist and loaded the thing up with TNT to protect the precious little birds by blowing the hunters up.
Big, loud, strange looking thing is hovering over you menacingly - who knows what to think about that. It certainly had no business on your property. Shoot first and ask questions later.
I have yet to find any civilian purchasable ammunition or ordinance cable of traveling 7+ miles straight up in the air. Hell, I don't even know of any that can travel 7+ miles overland in a ballistic arc.
Military is different (obviously) but more expensive and not generally available to the civilian population.
Slightly better? no, massively better. Win 8 added 20 fps to my games.
Which doesn't mean a thing when the interface is so clunky that I'd rather use anything else to get the game up and running. If Windows 8 SP1 includes some options for turning off "Metro", "Modern" or whatever the hell it's being called now, and gives me back a start menu (you know, so all the applications aren't hidden by default) then maybe upgrading will be an option. For now all of the under the hood fixes are vastly overshadowed by the suckstorm that is the UI.
I think you underestimate what an absolute torrential downpour of data you are talking about. The big nasty one is "using recognition software to track you on the streets and in public buildings". It may, just possibly, be technically feasible to do this for a small, secure area. But realtime processing and tracking of something like a major metropolitan area would require bandwidth that would make Google cringe. And *that* is assuming that you can interconnect all of the necessary systems and get them to talk to each other coherently.
They aimed too high as it is. $380 million will buy a *lot* of lawyer time for appeals and suchlike. If it was $10-$20 million it might not be worth Apple's time, but $380 million assures *years* of appeals.
The thing is, most people already have their apps and whatnot, and re-downloading them is free. So you get very little in extra sales when people upgrade their devices. If they went to a model like that people would pay less for the device and then have to repurchase all of their apps at every upgrade. All that would accomplish would be to put people off of upgrading their device in the first place. No. They really can't afford to go to a model where they recoup the price on iTunes sales. Too much would have to change and people would rebel.
Exactly! And the explosives in a stinger are probably an order of magnitude more effective than that in your standard IED. Sure it won't drop an aircraft out of the sky without the fancy electronics package, but it could still ruin a Humvee's day. For that matter the rocket propellant would probably make a fairly effective pipe bomb. Two for one.
Look, the fundamental problem is that you'd still be giving them a stockpile of things that violently go boom. Okay, without the high tech guidance stuff it's not so useful for knocking down airplanes, but that missile can still be disassembled, a new detonator plugged in the the go-boom juice and the guts of a stinger missile will still very satisfactorily destroy a ground vehicle in much more spectacular fashion than your average IED.
Nah, the idea being that that prevents Iran from establishing a Muslim Caliphate, uniting the Muslim world against the U.S. and moving from there to dominate the world. The joke is on us though, the Muslim Caliphate will be centered in Turkey.
Retards must be removed from the gene pool because they have less functional brains and are thus less human. Making it illegal to screw sub-human retards is the best way to do that, according to my state politicians. I see now. "Protecting them" is a good cover story.
Umm....it's about ability to consent. To the best of our knowledge and ability, people who are protected under such laws lack sufficient faculties to grant consent to the person having sex with them. Ergo, they were raped. It has nothing to do with "purifying" the gene pool, and everything to do with being as humane as possible to people who got a raw deal due to fate/circumstance/birth/whatever.
My company got access to Windows 8 two months ago (the RTM version that everyone else is getting tomorrow, not some preview - we're a software assurance customer) and I installed it on my laptop and a couple of HP Slate Tablets we had floating around.
I strongly dislike it on my laptop. It's jarring to be bounced back and forth from Metro to the Desktop as I do day-to-day tasks, and by the time I finally got it configured how I wanted it, it was basically Windows 7 minus Aero and Start Menu.
On the Slates it was marginally more functional. The on-screen keyboard is about a billion times better than Win7 for tablets, and the touch gestures make a *lot* more sense than they do with a mouse. However, the same jarring transitions are still there, and in all honesty, doing regular Windows stuff on a tablet is still just a pain in the ass. Just slightly less so with Win8. But I'm rather have an ultrabook or an HP Mini or similar for any "real" work in Windows.
That's *always* the case. It's the classic pigeon hole problem. In order to encode absolutely every possible string of bytes there must be some encodings which use at least that many bytes to do so. You see this readily with lossless image/audio compression algorithms. They make everything smaller in the average case (normal songs, spoken audio, landscape pics, family photos), but shove a randomly generated mess at them and they almost always produce a file larger than the original.
Look, as a sysadmin I can tell you that it isn't just "change" that makes me dislike Windows 8. Setting this thing up for a user's desktop is a grade-A class 1 pain in the ass. I finally got an image that at *least* keeps all the standard shortcuts and displays them in Metro across all profile, but if I install something else it doesn't show up at all until I get the user logged in and step them through how to sticky it in the Metro list. And the only way to do that for them is in the base image when you sysprep it.
Now, yes, people can figure out how to sticky their apps, but it's a retraining issue and it just flat out gets in the way of them doing their job. If they'd just kept the damn start menu I wouldn't be complaining (even if it needed a reg-hack to enable), but instead they're forcing this cruft down our throats, and as enterprise users we don't appreciate it.
For the home user it's actually pretty close to ideal. You can spend most of your time in "tablet mode" and sit their consuming content and writing the occasional document or Facebook update. You don't need anything remotely related to added complexity. Fine. And Microsoft's overarching goal of getting people used to the UI so they'll be more apt to buy a WinPhone? Sure, I get it. But alienating corporate customers in the process? That's just shooting yourself in the foot. At least the Enterprise Edition should have a more serious interface.
Ctrl-INS / Shift-DEL / Shift-INS *still work* (Windows 7) and I use them instead of the ctrl-c / ctrl-x /ctrl-v combos because when I try to use the ctrl combos I hit ctrl-c instead of ctrl-v and have to reacquire my text. The old school way is much easier to do without looking and less error prone (for me at least).
Now get off my lawn.
XP's support for SSDs is practically nonexistent (it treats them like any other block device, leading to terrible decreases on performance over time).
You generally make good points, but I wanted to address this one. Whenever I build a Windows XP image here at work, I always format the box with Win7 PE first, with an align=1024 on the partition to set it on a megabyte boundary. Conveniently, this fixes the boundary issue that one would typically experience with SSD's. You're right that WinXP is not natively aware of how to properly handle SSD's, but the fix is fairly trivial and, at least in the enterprise, something that any competent image builder should have fixed long ago.
What happened to transparent aluminum? Did they forget that technology in the 24th century too?
Strictly speaking, we have that now. Sapphire glass is used in all kinds of things (including, but not limited to, the camera lens on the iPhone 5). True it's not really "glass" but calling it such makes it more understandable as to what it's used for. Interestingly, it's also used in bullet-proof armor (vehicles and people).
Welcome to the future!
Well, first and foremost all politicians will make the choice that best serves their own self-interest. Secondary to that, if there is no self-interest to be served in a given decision, then they will follow the generic Demonrat or Republican't party line.
Dear Crazy Fundie Muslims,
An all-powerful God who created the universe from nothingness does not require you to go psycho and kill people in order to defend his honor. If he was that upset he could easily do it himself.
Signed,
All the Normal People
This is somewhat ironic considering how often these religious fundamentalists promote hate, discrimination and violence against anyone who does not subscribe to their beliefs.
The Qur'an requires them to. If a people are not Muslims then they are to fight against them until either they convert, submit, or die. There is no option for living with them peacefully as equals.
More to the point, any law outlawing religious blasphemy will be inherently self-contradictory. It is blasphemous for a Christian for someone to call Mohammed a prophet of God, and it is blasphemous for a Muslim to claim that he is not. Either way you are giving offense to 1.5 billion plus people just from that one statement. So...yeah, blasphemy laws will never work in a heterogeneous society. Basically what the Muslims want is blasphemy laws protecting Islam, and then abolishing all other world religions. This will never fly in the United States. At least not in my lifetime.
He went through the motions of expressing regret, but that asshole smirk was the only genuine, believable part of his entire performance. What kind of person does that, I thought? Then it hit me: the kind of person who picks on a gay kid, holds him down, hacks off his hair, then when confronted years later, lies about it. An asshole.
I am reasonably convinced that, from the early 1800's on, the prime requirement for the office of President of the United States is that the president must be a sociopath.
I can't wait until we're debating which vehicles get the best miles per microgram of anti-matter. Because, as a point of somewhat interesting fact, the complete annihilation of one microgram of anti-matter (plus one microgram of regular matter) is equivalent to just over one U.S. gallon of gasoline (about 1 1/3 gallons actually). A milligram of the stuff could potentially keep you driving around all year (though accidents would be utterly spectacular).
I added the Quick Launch back into Windows 7, and I did the same in Windows 8. The only difference is that my Quick Launch in Windows 8 has an extra 15 or so icons in it so that I can get to *everything* that I commonly use instead of simply supplementing my start menu.
Either way, my huge overarching complaint with Windows 8 on the enterprise desktop is that apps that require administrator to install then have to be manually pinned on users' Metro interface, or put on the desktop, or into a Quick Launch. There's no immediately obvious method of accessing your new app, and extra action has to be taken to get it listed *for every user that uses that computer*. But you can bet your ass they have access to the Windows Store by default (which doesn't work behind the firewall anyway). Way to crap on your business customers Microsoft.