For many people, exercise is something they HATE to do, not something they enjoy; they only do it to stay healthy and live longer. Keeping statistics turns exercise into a game, and that makes it a little easier to motivate themselves.
And for some who enjoy exercise, it adds to the enjoyment. After all, most of the people who enjoy playing sports like to keep score.
If you enjoy being active and don't need the motivation, more power (of unspecified wattage) to you!
I'm wondering about unintended consequences here: if people really started pulling over all the time to answer phone calls, check their GPS, etc, then you would have a lot more merging and lane-changing on highways and busy streets, which will increase accident rates. This should be taken into account-- maybe it's an insignificant factor, but then again maybe it's not.
I for one am never going to buy a game console; it's not worth the investment because I don't have the time or inclination to play elaborate games, and when I do have time to play I'm not necessarily at home. But I have downloaded a few games for my iPod Touch (only free ones so far, but I'm open to putting down a few bucks here or there). If there are a lot of people like me, then we are driving the surge in iPhone games, but we were never going to be game console customers in the first place, so it's not eating into the console's market at all. So big deal if cellphone/iPod games are on the rise; the problem for the console makers will be if people are playing games on the iPhone INSTEAD of on their consoles.
Your argument assumes that party positions are fixed, which is not the case: look at the US Republican party over the last decade or two to see how much political parties can change. Thus, it isn't always necessary to vote out the incumbent to change the government's policy; sometimes all you need to do is to threaten to vote out the incumbent. Politicians want to be re-elected, and if you can convince them that their current positions will result in their losing election, most of them will modify their positions. True, it's easier if a party already exists which represents your interests, because they come with a certain amount of power built in, but similar effects can be obtained via non-profit organizations. It's not easy, but it's not impossible.
After reading so much about how bad American cellphone plans are compared to the rest of the world, and how bad our broadband is, and all that, it's nice to hear that there are "first world" countries whose residents have less available to them than in the US. My condolences to the Australians.
You say they started checking vendor ID for no apparent reason, but as I mentioned earlier, not checking vendor ID sounds like a bug on their part, unless that particular product ID is specified for MP3 players only (you don't want iTunes trying to send MP3s to a printer). I don't really know anything about USB (or hardware in general) though; clearly there must be some way for computers to identify whether a device is a printer or an MP3 player, and maybe that's incorporated into the product ID, in which case it wasn't really a bug at all.
If I understand the previous poster (IANAUSBE), the product ID number tells you nothing about the type of device that's being plugged in unless you know the vendor ID. Sure, the Palm and the/an iPod have the same product ID, but that was intentional on Palm's part I'm sure. There's no reason that that product ID number might also refer to a camera, or a scanner, or a printer in someone else's product line, and THAT would potentially cause problems.
Did iTunes really not check the vendor ID, or did Palm spoof the vendor ID? If the former, it sounds like a bug which Palm exploited; if the latter, then Palm broke the rules, fair or not.
As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get enough grants and donations and whatnot. A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea, but probably won't go over very well in America. I'm reminded of an idea from the novel Earth by David Brin: in that society (set in roughly 2030 if I remember right) people were required to subscribe to a particular number of news feeds in order to keep the right to vote, the idea being that a voter must keep informed about current events. Suppose that, rather than funding news agencies directly, the government gave every citizen an allowance which they were required to donate to one or more news agencies (paid for by taxes, and therefore equivalent to requiring every citizen to pay for news, but with a subsidy for low-income citizens). This would allow the people to decide which news organizations should be funded, rather than letting the government decide. Of course, there are difficulties--- what constitutes a news agency? Fox News? DailyKos? What if I started my own newspaper, circulation 1, just so I could keep the money--- and they may be insurmountable. But I think journalism is very important to this country, as important as health care and sanitation and all the rest, and something will have to be done.
20 years ago I was taking a lot of exams and kept getting really serious neck and head pains when I looked down at the desk. Doctor offered painkillers which worked a little but left me too drowsy to take the exams. He suggested a chiropractor, I went for a single 1 hour session and was cured.
It makes perfect sense to me that a chiropractor would help in cases of neck and back pain; that's not an extraordinary claim. What sets my BS meter off is when they claim to cure the common cold, arthritis, etc. I have no personal evidence for or against (not having done or read any research myself), but I would require substantial proof to believe that.
Given the number of things that have to happen in the series as it stands today, there is no way that the series could have been wrapped up in one normal-sized book, at least not without a lot of handwaving and unanswered questions. Jordan just said "One more book" because he knew that people were bemused by the continually moving goalposts.
With all due respect to Robert Jordan, one nice thing about having a lifelong fan like Sanderson finish the series is that he knows exactly which threads the fans want to see resolved, and he's in no position to deny us. RJ might have gotten away with never revealing e.g. Asmodean's killer, but Sanderson doesn't have the luxury to be coy.
Things that affect me, locally, I can usually change. They don't make me depressed, they make me active, if anything. It's not depressing when it's within your power to avoid a catastrophe. It's actually quite compelling to get off your butt and DO something.
Then you're not clinically depressed. Depressed people aren't necessarily upset about the world, they're upset because they can't get themselves out of the house in the morning, because they find no pleasure in anything they used to enjoy. Clinical depression IS about the small, local stuff.
Not to belittle your anxieties-- I hope they aren't debilitating-- but I think you've got the wrong diagnosis.
I asked an Apple retailer (not an Apple Store) about buying a copy of 10.4 a couple of months ago, and they told me that word from Apple was that they could sell people a copy of 10.5, and then give them a burned CD with 10.4 on it. Actually a pretty nice deal, two OSes for one. I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering and this was just a local deal, but if you need a copy of an older MacOS, it doesn't hurt to ask.
There is with portable mp3 players. Grocery shopping to Black Sabbath or the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack is an epic experience.
Along the same lines, perhaps spaceship computers are designed to add sound effects to nearby collisions and explosions, to give their passengers the audio feedback they expect.
Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional".
Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units: we don't write that E is proportional to mc^2, that velocity is proportional to displacement over time, and so forth. To do so would be madness, and I've never seen a physics textbook that insisted upon it.
They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text) At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion." Starting with one-dimensional motion is hardly controversial; the textbook by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker does so as well.
You're defining "secure" as if it is an all-or-nothing term, but to my mind security is all about probabilities: if I use this weak password instead of this strong one, what is the probability my account will be hacked in the next year? As a bicyclist, I think about this all the time when I lock up my bike: it's certainly possible for someone to cut through my bike lock and steal my bike, but the odds of a thief coming along with the appropriate equipment are much smaller than the odds of a thief coming along who can pick an unlocked bike off the rack. Thus my lock improves my bicycle's security.
Nothing is completely secure-- even strong passwords might be defeated through sheer luck or coercion-- so it's always about playing the odds; hiding the key behind the loose brick does reduce the odds of a break-in, and therefore does increase security.
(Note to moderators: this is not a troll but a valid if snarky point.)
Sure, except that you can't assess all the ballots at a glance; each person would have to count them, and that leaves too much room for shenanigans.
Here's my idea: gather all the voters in a room (or more practically, gather 50-100 voters in a room at one time). Give each voter one ball, and put any extra balls in a secure but visible location. The room is equipped with a set of plastic tubes, one for each candidate or choice; the tubes are initially uncovered to show they are empty, but are then covered with a curtain to conceal individuals' votes. One at a time, voters approach the open end of the tubes and place their ball in the appropriate tube. After all voters have gone through, pull off the curtain, and the higher column of balls signifies the winner of the election. The tubes are labelled so that the exact count can be read off the tubes, and the total number of votes can be compared with the number of people in the room; an overcount means the vote has to be done over again. The voters are given official cards showing their precinct, the date and time of the election, and the results (maybe via photograph?) These results can then be announced publicly and aggregated for larger elections.
It may be too slow or unwieldy to be practical, of course. The key elements, though, are that you have a small group of voters voting at one time, make the results clearly visible, and have the results immediately released to those voters so that the total can be compared with the number of people actually in the room, and so that the results can be later compared with official reports.
Here's another idea: have each voter include on their ballot a glyph of their own choice: it could be a number, a set of letters, a picture, whatever. When the 50-100 voters in the room have voted, shuffle the ballots and project them on a wall, one at a time, slowly enough so that people can count the voters. If a voter does not see their ballot after that process, then there has been a misvote and it has to be redone. Of course, cheaters might rely on the fact that voters will be annoyed by the wasted time of a revote, but there will be enough civic-minded individuals there (they wouldn't be voting at all if they didn't care about the process to some degree) to keep people honest.
You make a good point: it is legitimate to introduce the availability of new products, even to remind people about old ones. If we limited advertising to that, it would not be offensive. If only ad agencies agreed to toss out the catchy jingles, the softcore porn, the over-the-top promises, and the pictures of people who are orgasmic for their new carpet cleaner, then I might consider removing my adblocker.
What is particularly disturbing is the use of psychological research on Madison Avenue. Like any computer, our brains have security flaws which allow messages to sneak in without our permission or intent. Madison Avenue is a Black-Hat conference for the mind, and unfortunately our brains are not so easily patched.
Since you are different varieties of geek, find ways to geek out together, and make it a priority. If a common interest fizzles as one or both of you loses interest, find something else to take its place.
Slashdot Mirror
For many people, exercise is something they HATE to do, not something they enjoy; they only do it to stay healthy and live longer. Keeping statistics turns exercise into a game, and that makes it a little easier to motivate themselves.
And for some who enjoy exercise, it adds to the enjoyment. After all, most of the people who enjoy playing sports like to keep score.
If you enjoy being active and don't need the motivation, more power (of unspecified wattage) to you!
Friend: "Oh my God, she doesn't have a pulse! I think she's dead!"
Woman sits up: "No no, it's just my artificial heart!"
Friend passes out.
I'm wondering about unintended consequences here: if people really started pulling over all the time to answer phone calls, check their GPS, etc, then you would have a lot more merging and lane-changing on highways and busy streets, which will increase accident rates. This should be taken into account-- maybe it's an insignificant factor, but then again maybe it's not.
I for one am never going to buy a game console; it's not worth the investment because I don't have the time or inclination to play elaborate games, and when I do have time to play I'm not necessarily at home. But I have downloaded a few games for my iPod Touch (only free ones so far, but I'm open to putting down a few bucks here or there). If there are a lot of people like me, then we are driving the surge in iPhone games, but we were never going to be game console customers in the first place, so it's not eating into the console's market at all. So big deal if cellphone/iPod games are on the rise; the problem for the console makers will be if people are playing games on the iPhone INSTEAD of on their consoles.
It never hurts to ask; if there were an easy magic software solution to do X, wouldn't you rather find out about it now, instead of after doing X?
Your argument assumes that party positions are fixed, which is not the case: look at the US Republican party over the last decade or two to see how much political parties can change. Thus, it isn't always necessary to vote out the incumbent to change the government's policy; sometimes all you need to do is to threaten to vote out the incumbent. Politicians want to be re-elected, and if you can convince them that their current positions will result in their losing election, most of them will modify their positions. True, it's easier if a party already exists which represents your interests, because they come with a certain amount of power built in, but similar effects can be obtained via non-profit organizations. It's not easy, but it's not impossible.
Welcome to the future of computing. Homeschool your kids.
Hey, it's still better than nothing. You want an open system, buy your own laptop.
Although, this IS Australia, so maybe in a couple years this will be the only legal type of computer; I wouldn't be surprised.
After reading so much about how bad American cellphone plans are compared to the rest of the world, and how bad our broadband is, and all that, it's nice to hear that there are "first world" countries whose residents have less available to them than in the US. My condolences to the Australians.
You say they started checking vendor ID for no apparent reason, but as I mentioned earlier, not checking vendor ID sounds like a bug on their part, unless that particular product ID is specified for MP3 players only (you don't want iTunes trying to send MP3s to a printer). I don't really know anything about USB (or hardware in general) though; clearly there must be some way for computers to identify whether a device is a printer or an MP3 player, and maybe that's incorporated into the product ID, in which case it wasn't really a bug at all.
If I understand the previous poster (IANAUSBE), the product ID number tells you nothing about the type of device that's being plugged in unless you know the vendor ID. Sure, the Palm and the/an iPod have the same product ID, but that was intentional on Palm's part I'm sure. There's no reason that that product ID number might also refer to a camera, or a scanner, or a printer in someone else's product line, and THAT would potentially cause problems.
Did iTunes really not check the vendor ID, or did Palm spoof the vendor ID? If the former, it sounds like a bug which Palm exploited; if the latter, then Palm broke the rules, fair or not.
If you're posting on Slashdot you've already been outed [as a virgin].
Oh no! I hope my daughter doesn't find out!
As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get enough grants and donations and whatnot. A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea, but probably won't go over very well in America. I'm reminded of an idea from the novel Earth by David Brin: in that society (set in roughly 2030 if I remember right) people were required to subscribe to a particular number of news feeds in order to keep the right to vote, the idea being that a voter must keep informed about current events. Suppose that, rather than funding news agencies directly, the government gave every citizen an allowance which they were required to donate to one or more news agencies (paid for by taxes, and therefore equivalent to requiring every citizen to pay for news, but with a subsidy for low-income citizens). This would allow the people to decide which news organizations should be funded, rather than letting the government decide. Of course, there are difficulties--- what constitutes a news agency? Fox News? DailyKos? What if I started my own newspaper, circulation 1, just so I could keep the money--- and they may be insurmountable. But I think journalism is very important to this country, as important as health care and sanitation and all the rest, and something will have to be done.
20 years ago I was taking a lot of exams and kept getting really serious neck and head pains when I looked down at the desk. Doctor offered painkillers which worked a little but left me too drowsy to take the exams. He suggested a chiropractor, I went for a single 1 hour session and was cured.
It makes perfect sense to me that a chiropractor would help in cases of neck and back pain; that's not an extraordinary claim. What sets my BS meter off is when they claim to cure the common cold, arthritis, etc. I have no personal evidence for or against (not having done or read any research myself), but I would require substantial proof to believe that.
Given the number of things that have to happen in the series as it stands today, there is no way that the series could have been wrapped up in one normal-sized book, at least not without a lot of handwaving and unanswered questions. Jordan just said "One more book" because he knew that people were bemused by the continually moving goalposts.
With all due respect to Robert Jordan, one nice thing about having a lifelong fan like Sanderson finish the series is that he knows exactly which threads the fans want to see resolved, and he's in no position to deny us. RJ might have gotten away with never revealing e.g. Asmodean's killer, but Sanderson doesn't have the luxury to be coy.
Things that affect me, locally, I can usually change. They don't make me depressed, they make me active, if anything. It's not depressing when it's within your power to avoid a catastrophe. It's actually quite compelling to get off your butt and DO something.
Then you're not clinically depressed. Depressed people aren't necessarily upset about the world, they're upset because they can't get themselves out of the house in the morning, because they find no pleasure in anything they used to enjoy. Clinical depression IS about the small, local stuff.
Not to belittle your anxieties-- I hope they aren't debilitating-- but I think you've got the wrong diagnosis.
I asked an Apple retailer (not an Apple Store) about buying a copy of 10.4 a couple of months ago, and they told me that word from Apple was that they could sell people a copy of 10.5, and then give them a burned CD with 10.4 on it. Actually a pretty nice deal, two OSes for one. I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering and this was just a local deal, but if you need a copy of an older MacOS, it doesn't hurt to ask.
Along the same lines, perhaps spaceship computers are designed to add sound effects to nearby collisions and explosions, to give their passengers the audio feedback they expect.
Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional".
Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units: we don't write that E is proportional to mc^2, that velocity is proportional to displacement over time, and so forth. To do so would be madness, and I've never seen a physics textbook that insisted upon it.
They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text)
At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion." Starting with one-dimensional motion is hardly controversial; the textbook by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker does so as well.
You're defining "secure" as if it is an all-or-nothing term, but to my mind security is all about probabilities: if I use this weak password instead of this strong one, what is the probability my account will be hacked in the next year? As a bicyclist, I think about this all the time when I lock up my bike: it's certainly possible for someone to cut through my bike lock and steal my bike, but the odds of a thief coming along with the appropriate equipment are much smaller than the odds of a thief coming along who can pick an unlocked bike off the rack. Thus my lock improves my bicycle's security.
Nothing is completely secure-- even strong passwords might be defeated through sheer luck or coercion-- so it's always about playing the odds; hiding the key behind the loose brick does reduce the odds of a break-in, and therefore does increase security.
He's flaunting his flouting, perhaps?
(Note to moderators: this is not a troll but a valid if snarky point.)
Sure, except that you can't assess all the ballots at a glance; each person would have to count them, and that leaves too much room for shenanigans.
Here's my idea: gather all the voters in a room (or more practically, gather 50-100 voters in a room at one time). Give each voter one ball, and put any extra balls in a secure but visible location. The room is equipped with a set of plastic tubes, one for each candidate or choice; the tubes are initially uncovered to show they are empty, but are then covered with a curtain to conceal individuals' votes. One at a time, voters approach the open end of the tubes and place their ball in the appropriate tube. After all voters have gone through, pull off the curtain, and the higher column of balls signifies the winner of the election. The tubes are labelled so that the exact count can be read off the tubes, and the total number of votes can be compared with the number of people in the room; an overcount means the vote has to be done over again. The voters are given official cards showing their precinct, the date and time of the election, and the results (maybe via photograph?) These results can then be announced publicly and aggregated for larger elections.
It may be too slow or unwieldy to be practical, of course. The key elements, though, are that you have a small group of voters voting at one time, make the results clearly visible, and have the results immediately released to those voters so that the total can be compared with the number of people actually in the room, and so that the results can be later compared with official reports.
Here's another idea: have each voter include on their ballot a glyph of their own choice: it could be a number, a set of letters, a picture, whatever. When the 50-100 voters in the room have voted, shuffle the ballots and project them on a wall, one at a time, slowly enough so that people can count the voters. If a voter does not see their ballot after that process, then there has been a misvote and it has to be redone. Of course, cheaters might rely on the fact that voters will be annoyed by the wasted time of a revote, but there will be enough civic-minded individuals there (they wouldn't be voting at all if they didn't care about the process to some degree) to keep people honest.
You make a good point: it is legitimate to introduce the availability of new products, even to remind people about old ones. If we limited advertising to that, it would not be offensive. If only ad agencies agreed to toss out the catchy jingles, the softcore porn, the over-the-top promises, and the pictures of people who are orgasmic for their new carpet cleaner, then I might consider removing my adblocker.
What is particularly disturbing is the use of psychological research on Madison Avenue. Like any computer, our brains have security flaws which allow messages to sneak in without our permission or intent. Madison Avenue is a Black-Hat conference for the mind, and unfortunately our brains are not so easily patched.
Since you are different varieties of geek, find ways to geek out together, and make it a priority. If a common interest fizzles as one or both of you loses interest, find something else to take its place.
Advertising is an (often feeble, granted) attempt at mind control, and therefore offensive by definition.
I have AT&T internet at home and I get free access to their WiFi spots, most significantly at Starbucks and McDonald's.