Yeah! What DID we do before disposable containers? I mean, go back to drinking out of coconuts and shoes?! Or just our hands?!?!
And my disposable fast food containers.....
Paper.
Paper food containers work just fine. So do thicker -and thus reusable- plastic shopping bags. Your disposable pen is actually a quality item with long durability.
Coming from Europe i was stunned by the amount of thin plastic bags the USA customers consume. Walmart happily packs 1 bottle of soda in a plastic bag. Spending $50 gets you home with at least a dozen of useless plastic bags.
I'm used to buying a (slightly thicker) plastic bag for $0.15 that's actually usable several times (and i will, because i'm cheap), and will contain most of that $50 groceries in one bag. Alternatively, i bring my own sturdier bags. Sometimes filled with refund plastic bottles. Once you're used to it, it's really not such a big deal. And yes, we still have those thin plastics for certain goods, like fresh fruit or veggies.
I'm not saying our streets and highways are not littered with trash, cause they are.. Plastic drinking bottles or cans all around, cause people are *ssh*s. But removing those thin disposable plastic bags really does make a difference.
People aren't stupid, and will realize Roundup is now produced by Bayer. Bayer will just be the new 'synonym' for Monsanto.
Having said that all, i don't believe genetic modification or roundup is bad per-se. It's how it's been used that's possibly bad - with corn producing its own poisons, and roundup being available at consumer level and it's commercial use poorly regulated. People forget that Monsanto's products are also essential for feeding 8 billion people. However, it's also good that environmental-aware organizations keep a critical look at technological progress.
So, if any, Bayer has to be aware of some possible backlash that comes with assimilating Monsanto and destroying it's name in a bad attempt to cover up. If you'd ask me, it've been way wiser to keep the Monsanto name.
1. Microsoft would open source its Java competitor under better terms than Java...
Only to kill the Mono project consequently
2. Would fully adopt (as much as anyone other than Mozilla is) open web standards from the browser to all corporate products...
Guess you didn't try Edge yet..
3. Add a Linux compatibility layer...
Which is widely frowned upon. And while i use it regularly, i also think it's one of the E's in EEE.
4. Port Office to a platform like Android...
Only after all MS phone projects ended as a disaster. Mostly because they couldn't even keep it compatible with itself.
5. Be the 5th largest contributor to the Linux kernel...
Mostly for hypervisor stuff and other stuff related to compatibility with (closed) MS software. Meanwhile, NTFS support still suffers.
6. Enthusiastically sell cloud services based on Linux...
Because the customers must choose Microsoft above all. They can always switch to Windows at a later stage.
7. Microsoft would offer more innovative desktops than Apple...
Guess you didn't upgrade to windows 10 yet... Which basically feels like a downgrade. But is forced upon users because of compatibility and ending support for older windows versions. I guess it sort-of works, but nothing new or fancy that pleases the customers, if any, only confuses the hell out of the elderly user base.
8. Microsoft would compete for OEM licenses on price and merits, not contractual extortion...
I can't believe you seriously said that. OEM's have no choice but to get strangled by MS.
We'd have called you a crackhead. Not a dreamer, but a crackhead because only a crackhead would think up a future like that as being plausible. Yet... that's where we're at in 2018
Basically you're a crackhead (your words) if you believe any of the claims you made. Especially if you think those claims are sincere and not only serve to increase their profit margins.
I rather keep distrusting MS until proven beyond doubt that they can be trusted, than the other way around and be cheated upon again for the zillionth time since 1992.
As European -used to high taxes everywhere- i'd say that worker's income is the stupiest thing to tax. It increases the cost of labour, thereby slowing down economic growth and increasing the unemployment issue, leading to poverty.
I know, you'd have to tax something. But politicians usually pick the easiest thing to tax, disregarding consequences. You should tax where the costs are: vehicle tax for highways, housing tax based on property value, true costs for water, electricity and sewer etc. But stay away from raising income, and to a lesser degree sales taxes.
Don't do what Europe does - with 35-50% income tax (and thats' exclusing social insurances like retirement, unemployment and healthcare insurances) and 20% sales tax. It artificially makes everything expensive, especially labour intensive work, and has no added value apart pumping round money and making expenses less transparent.
There is no need for 'Universal Basic Income' as its being envisioned.
People have certain needs, like food, shelter and safety (and this includes the feeling of being safe).
It not really matters how this is provided, as long it is. However, we do see that in many `developed` countries, there remain numerous issues that threaten the basic needs. While most countries have some sort of welfare system, it's often barely enough to live from. 'Enough not to die, not enough to live from' is often heard. Added to that are a lot of bureaucratic rules that, in order to keep the system 'fair' and 'cost effective' also limits people to escape their situation and improve it. A lot of welfare benefits evaporate the moment people accept (temporary) work, raising uncertainty while not immediately improving their situation. We see that in Europe a lot, even in countries with solid welfare. It is very hard to escape from the 'bottom' once there.
Ironically, in America, one of the richest countries, the welfare system is even worse than in most European countries, even the 'poor European countries'. And when doing the math, it is easy to see that in general the economy would benefit if everyone has a fair income, and everyone that can is productive a.k.a. working. So it is easy to see where the idea for basic income came from.
Now i do agree with you that 'basic income' has become a buzzword that is promising the silver bullet to poverty. And while it might not be that, it might be the direction that welfare systems should evolve: less bureaucracy, more opportunities, and more safety & guarantuee of basic needs.
Ironically, i think basic income is as easy as reforming the welfare and taxation system, as in zero (or even 'negative') tax up to a certain threshold that provides minimum living needs. And make sure that people always financially progress when accepting (any kind of) work, instead of penalizing them.
Poverty control needs political attention. Be it by 'buzzwords' like basic income, sure - if needed. But basic income in itself is a reasonable idea. Opponents usually pull it out of context, and calculate it as expensive, while not realizing it would not be any more expensive than any welfare system currently in place, and only aid economy by allowing more people in (part-time) jobs.
I Analog recordings at best are equal to 32khz 24 bit recordings, and that's assuming you can get no hiss or feedback.
Ehm no. That is a misconception. 24 bit is overkill, even for digital (most `24` bit is actually no more than 18 bit, at most, and more likely 15-16). But as far sampling rate goes, (studio) tape reels happily go over 20kHz, and so does vinyl. You may be confused by FM broadcast, which has a 15kHz bandwidth. More fair would be to compare vinyl to '48kHz/16 bit'.
So people who think Vinyl sounds better, are full of shit, or deaf.
Define better. It sounds different, i think we easily agree on that. Mechanical issues, harmonics and more all play a role. If people say that it sounds better to them, you will have to accept that as a truth, since perception is subjective by definition. It's like saying 'you cannot find yellow prettier than blue, because blue is a nicer color because it has a shorter wavelength'. For similar or other reasons, some people do prefer tube amplifiers.
It's probably said a dozen times elsewhere in this topic, but personally i think the big difference between the vinyl vs digital `experience` is in the mastering. That's most likely why this 1970's old vinyl album of [fill in favorite band] sounds better than the 2005 cd release. Disclaimer: i am one of such people.
Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.
So eventually, a mesh network of satellites might actually have lower ping times than fiber connections.
As side note, for the average (consumer) internet connection, most latency is in buffer bloat, not in signal traveling time. As anecdotal evidence, I frequently have faster connections to servers at the other side of the Atlantic than to servers in my own country.
Trump is bad for just about everything, economy, environment, people etc. People want to argue about this even though it is obvious.
Javascript is the best scripting language. People still want to pretend it is terrible because it took over because it was so good.
I'm sorry but your examples are not as `obvious` as you think. Opinions differ, for a reason.
I'd not vote for Trump, but i also don't think everything he does is wrong. And actually, how he is pictured here in Europe is only testifying non-objective press. Same for javascript. It's popular because it filled a niche, and came at the right time at the right place. Apart that it indeed is a horrible language.
Things are not always perfect. Things not always have to be perfect. And any/most downsides have an upside. Trump got chosen cause a majority voted so. Javascript got popular despite a truckload of flaws. Climate change is politically abused as argument by all sides. Money and subsidies gets wasted while civilians have to pay up with unneeded taxes, while leaving the real big polluters untouched in the name of economy. Green electricity is often a farce and only consists of purchased certificates. It is very hard to find an objective truth, and surely it's less 'obvious' than you pretend it to be.
2 off-topic cents.
On-topic: they (pronhub) better not try to be holier than the pope or they'll lose a lot of visitors.
But then Microsoft launched Edge and it was a crushing blow to Microsoft's market share.
It doesn't help that Edge is a beta-quality browser. It does a lot of things reasonable well, most of them even pretty good and it tries to comply to standards. However, some stuff not works at all. Some stuff is horrible slow. And the browser itself is not a pinnacle of stability and also not free of weird non-reproducible quirks.
Admitting, that fits the general windows-10 way of doing things: more features coming faster, but at the cost of reduced stability.
In my personal point of view, Firefox is back as king with the best code-base. Stable, good all-round performance, features and compatibility. Chrome comes in second but is definitively not free of issues. So personally i expect Firefox' market share to reflect this in the years to come, they should be growing again.
If he doesn't believe the earth is round, why does he believe it has a center?
Because, on a flat earth the center would be, going by their maps, the north pole. Only a sphere has a 'center' that you theoretically could reach by drilling.
If this were his own words, then i think this dude knows darn well the earth is round. He's just seeking publicity. And just unmasked himself by this slip of the tongue.
Before you jump into conclusions with that observation; an alternate explanation is that those smartphone owners are now looking down to their phone all the time, leaving no moment for their gaze to reach the sky, therefore decimating the chance to spot an UFO.
The muffling of the bass with bluetooth will be clear as daylight.
While i do agree on the inferior (though usually acceptable) quality of bluetooth audio, the reason you hear more bass over your headphone-to-aux cable is because your phone (or other device) expects those modern headphones that simply are to small to have a linear frequency characteristic, hence needs the bass boosted (and the high tones reduced) for a better sound experience.
You might want to use an equalizer or tone control when you use aux. Don't use those software equalizers though.. they may work (sortof) but usually they suck big time and the general audio quality is greatly reduced. Better use tone control on whatever amp you have imho.
Only the cut-n-paste crowd will use cut-n-paste resources.
Real Programmers do not.
Real programmers re-use code. Real programmers see if there are more (elegant) solutions to a problem. Real programmers seek to save time. Real programmers write efficient code.
Only beginners will try to re-invent every wheel by themselves and bang their head against the wall for a week or two on a problem, trivial or not, that already has been solved a zillion times before, where a simple google query would enlighten them but their vein stops them from doing so.
Real programmers know how to use and spend their time effective and efficient. If that results in a simple copy'n'paste to paste in 3 lines of code instead of wasting a day on a problem, than that's all fine and they just proven their weight in gold for saving a day's work that can be spend on other stuff that needs to be done.
It's the difference between someone working a year on something 'very complex', or someone hacking shit together in a week or two that 'just works'. There's no need to go back to the 90's where internet was still a matter of dial-up and your best documentation was a 2000-page thick reference you'd had to borrow from 3 floors upstairs and return same afternoon because it's the only copy in the building. Search engines and sites as stack overflow are very useful for _every_ programmer. Don't let your pride stop you from using it and maybe learn something new.
When it comes to the feeling (perception) of safety, i'm usually more worried about other people's errors than my own errors. And i'm well aware i'm imperfect either, but the 'type' of collision seriously affects how much damage a human would get, as in - a side impact is way more dangerous than a head-tail collision. I rather be on the safe side and reduce risk, than assume everyone will drive perfectly and according the rules, which is a very flawed assumption.
On-topic. If the car gets confused, and i'm sure sooner or later it will, it's nice to have to ability to take control back. Common wisdom sais not to trust any machine, especially not moving ones. Factories have red emergency buttons everywhere for a reason. Machines can and will fail.
Also, the test and miles driven with autonomous cars do in no way relate to real-world circumstances. Yes, on highways it will work fine. On a rocky unmarked mountain road much less so.
People blindly believing in technology apparently never have seen it fail hard. And computer experts promoting safety of software should not be trusted, actually, should not be allowed to touch any code again the rest of their lives.
But hey, let's all be honest. Microsoft's hardware has NEVER been good. Be it laptops, tablets, or media players.
I don't agree. Their OEM keyboards and mice were excellent. Too bad they don't make that corded mouse anymore, it's the only one that fit in my (large) hands.
Most Logitech items with 'moveable' parts (like buttons) are either too small and/or break easy, the only reasonable quality items being the discontinued G15 keyboards and webcams. Most other brands are even worse, or tend to target 'gamers' with a lot of bling and lights, mouse buttons at inconvenient places and plain weird shapes..
All i ask from a mouse are 2 buttons that don't accidentally click when they hit something on my desk (like a keyboard), a nice rounded shape, a reasonable large size and a scroll wheel that keeps working. MS delivered on that. They don't do that anymore since this wireless hype. But the word 'never' in above statement is false, imho.
Modern designs are very safe and emit less radioactivity than burning coal.
Correct. The primary environmental issue isn't with the safety of the reactor. That's pretty well under control and unless someone severely screws up (which also happens), a modern reactor is reasonable safe. The real issue is with the nuclear waste for which we have still no proper solution. The best solution with can think of is to dig somewhere deep in a rock, dump it in there, poor concrete over it and pray for the best.
We have no clue at all what will geologically happen in 100,000 years. We can predict it to be safe but no-one can tell for sure. There's factors ranging from earthquakes to terrorists that are out of our control.
People have a hard time to care about anything but themselves and their children. They simply don't care for their grand-grand-grand-children that still have to be born. Let alone they care for civilization in 10,000 years from now. It apparently needs a special mindset to care for such things.
Yet, on the risk-scale, the long-term future is the issue of nuclear plants, not a 'trivial' issue that could happen today even not on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima.
The real point of paint is not 'painting', but a basic tool to do file conversions, save a screenshot or acquire an image from a scanner, and maybe some basic text annotations or other stuff. They (MS) underestimate it's usefulness. Moving it to the store is almost the same as abandoning. 99% chance i couldn't care less, now or ever, but for people that work on varying locations or have to administer other people's computers, or (play) helpdesk etc, might be upset. And rightfully. It's about the same effect as removing notepad would be. Notepad is a horrible application that even in 2017 still cannot handle line breaks correctly, but it does have it's uses and is part of the standard windows toolkit. Last not least - not everyone is permanently connected to the internet. Imho, windows is throwing in it's own windows with moves like this, and narrowing instead of broadening it's user base.
In Europe McDonald's does have such kiosks in most restaurants for a while now (a year or so). They appear to be quite popular and most customers use them. They have advantages and drawbacks. The obvious advantage is that you can take your time to make an order, and can decide what you want to eat in all peace.
The disadvantage is. If you already know what to eat it's more cumbersome than just ordering at a clerk. And making modifications (no ice, no salt) is a plain PITA. And ordering anything that's not on the menu (no pickles, glass of water, etc etc) plain impossible.
Another drawback is that the system is very sluggish. More often than not the system not responds within a reasonable time for modern UI's, having the user press the button twice etc.. Maybe some modern hardware fixes that but somehow i doubt that, as most kiosks are reasonable new installs. Last not least, cash payments are not possible.
My personal view - as long the customer can decide how to order it's not a big deal.. When it's busy it's actually better to be able to order right away at a kiosk, instead of queuing up and consequently feel hasted when ordering by all the people behind you.
I'm not sure why investors think it's such a big deal. I don't think it would attract more customers or save significant costs - they save some time on staff for ordering, which is lost again because the staff actually needs to serve out the food instead of having people waiting for it at the counter. But maybe they know something we don't.
As a home user, i pro-actively use all three of the 'big three' - Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Partly out of curiosity, partly because one might be slightly better at certain content than others (like hardware accelerated video content), partly to have separate sessions (closeable content vs content i need to keep 'hot' for multiple days) and partly to separate cookies. So running multiple browsers is just a simple life-hack i use for pragmatic purposes.
To be fair, i am pretty agnostic. All browsers do what they are supposed to do, i did not encounter compatibility issues recently (=last few years), so i guess people advocating one browser above the other have some reason for this preference. All of them support ad-blockers, which is the only real necessity added to 'factory settings' as far i'm concerned.
If any, i find edge the least stable. It had/has issues with the adblocker, and web-pages crash every so often, especially after the PC has been 'idle'. Apart the stability issue, it works just as well as the others.
Also, there is no noticeable difference between performance. Maybe because i upgraded my -by now- pretty old PC with an SSD disk and more RAM. Maybe because there is not much difference after all.
Conclusion: there is no winner. We are actually finally where we wanted to be a decade ago - browser-agnostic webcontent that works on any OS any browser. The only big issue i see is the new monoculture of webkit dominance.
As one of those dutch consumers - not so much. While i do totally understand and subscribe the need of net neutrality, this example already shows it is not always in the consumers best interest.
Another dutch provider (KPN, market leader) wanted to do this a few years ago, and ran into the same legal issue. Their final solution(s): 1. increase all data with all plans and 2. sell a discounted spotify subscription that came with 'free' additional data, the latter apparently being a legal solution.
This (net-neutrality thingy) was well known in the Netherlands, and T-Mobile should have been aware of this. I do recall seeing their advertisements for this unlimited streaming plan 2 months ago, just before i left the country, and already wondered how they would legally do this. Now i know the answer - they don't.
But back to the consumer - i'm not sure if consumers are better of as 'heavy users' are forced to premium plans just for their streaming needs. Then again, data plans in Holland (and in Europe in general) seem to be a lot cheaper than in the USA. This may partly be due to fragmentation - most plans in Europe are national, for a Europe-wide plan you'd pay a premium and streaming when abroad is more or less out of the question since you easily pay $10 for 100MB on the other side of your national borders. - and partly because of more competition - the Netherlands has a multiple of providers compared to the USA where only 3 providers seem to control the market. (Having said that, in Netherlands only 3* providers have their own network (*4 if you count in tele2), the rest are resellers).
Concluding: you can get anything as long you pay up. The more casual users are either left in the cold or forced to pay a premium for service they don't use. The market is not free to bind users in a way they see fit, because of some arbitrary legal requirement.
Well, you are right on most things, just this purist view brings the user nowhere. It's the old 'in an ideal world all lawyers would be jobless'...
And the example of windows is very wrong. A tonload of drivers for windows 7, hell, even drivers for vista and XP, just work on the latest windows 10. Simply because they have a well defined driver model. A thousand reasons to dislike Microsoft, but their driver model is not one of them.
It is not only a matter of developer resources. It is also that Linux is still a 'wild west' where anything that works might change in any newer version. And while the kernel maintainers have recognized this issue and proven a more stable ABI since kernel 2.6, some arbitrary projects still have a very egocentric view of the world.. Not to mention the zillion different distro's out there. Even the most well-willing hardware providers (and don't say that AMD and Intel and others aren't as they all showed tremendous effort) run against this wall of chaos...
And why, as end-user, do i care this? I need something that works. A newer version of xorg was apparently more important to drivers compatibility for the package maintainers. For me as user it was the other way around. And it is not trivially possible with Ubuntu to use an older version of xorg.
To elaborate on that: somewhere along the road the xorg developers decided to break something. How hard is it to design something and keep it (forward) compatible? Apparently for xorg very hard. I totally am ready to believe they had their reasons to do so, but you simply cannot expect all other involved developers to run behind them, within months, if they make make a change breaking stuff, totally ignoring the significant amount of testing the AMD developers would have to do. And surely the AMD developers still get the blame simply because they are 'closed source'.
From an idealistic stance of view, you are totally right. In an ideal world those drivers would be open source. From a practical stance of view, developers all over the world, both open and closed source, are hands tied down on license or agreements. And users just want something that works, not necessarily the latest greatest shiniest.
In case of Ubuntu 16.04 the AMD user is left in the cold, no matter who to blame. And this is why people who say 'Linux will never be ready for the desktop' are proven right. I did, and do, use and love Linux but in all fairness it has been a constant struggle, swimming upstream, because design decisions like those are not made from a user stance of view, and because i do not want to dedicate my life to the OS running on my computer. I just want to use my computer.
After many years of Ubuntu use as primary desktop, the thing that drove me away was ending the support for the closed source AMD video drivers.
Someone decided that the open source drivers were 'good enough'. Well, they are not, at least for what i was doing. And the choice to use the drivers as released by AMD was removed, and doing so manually anything but trivial, as in, you'd have more luck on an arch based distro.
Imho, Ubuntu, and all derivatives like Mint, suddenly alienate half their user base with that decision. And if this wasn't an online forum i'd use stronger wordings for that.
Also, i just need to get work done. And most of the stuff i do is reasonable platform-agnostic but expects reasonable 3D performance. So, i'm back to windows 10 which serves my need, ironically has Ubuntu user land built in these days, and Linux will have to wait until i upgrade my graphics to nVidia, or when i can be bothered to try another distro, or when open source graphics drivers are really of comparable quality, whichever come first.
* Just 2 cents from a frustrated ex-Ubuntu&Mint user on the desktop. *
As an ingress player, I couldn't disagree with you more.
Having said that, I took a quick look at pokemon and although interesting, it's surely not my game. There are similarities to ingress, but it's also targeted at a very different audience. Another drawback I saw was their pricing scheme, they seem mostly interested in you dollars, whereas ingress is totally free to play, with only a few 'gimmicks' sold for the die-hard players, and surely will not drain your wallet till the max.
On-topic - ingress has put a lot of couchpotato's outside, made hiking and traveling more fun, and socializes team members in sometimes very close and active communities. I wonder if pokemon will have the same socializing effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! What DID we do before disposable containers? I mean, go back to drinking out of coconuts and shoes?! Or just our hands?!?!
And my disposable fast food containers.....
Paper.
Paper food containers work just fine. So do thicker -and thus reusable- plastic shopping bags. Your disposable pen is actually a quality item with long durability.
Coming from Europe i was stunned by the amount of thin plastic bags the USA customers consume. Walmart happily packs 1 bottle of soda in a plastic bag. Spending $50 gets you home with at least a dozen of useless plastic bags.
I'm used to buying a (slightly thicker) plastic bag for $0.15 that's actually usable several times (and i will, because i'm cheap), and will contain most of that $50 groceries in one bag. Alternatively, i bring my own sturdier bags. Sometimes filled with refund plastic bottles. Once you're used to it, it's really not such a big deal. And yes, we still have those thin plastics for certain goods, like fresh fruit or veggies.
I'm not saying our streets and highways are not littered with trash, cause they are.. Plastic drinking bottles or cans all around, cause people are *ssh*s. But removing those thin disposable plastic bags really does make a difference.
It's a toxic brand
People aren't stupid, and will realize Roundup is now produced by Bayer. Bayer will just be the new 'synonym' for Monsanto.
Having said that all, i don't believe genetic modification or roundup is bad per-se. It's how it's been used that's possibly bad - with corn producing its own poisons, and roundup being available at consumer level and it's commercial use poorly regulated. People forget that Monsanto's products are also essential for feeding 8 billion people. However, it's also good that environmental-aware organizations keep a critical look at technological progress.
So, if any, Bayer has to be aware of some possible backlash that comes with assimilating Monsanto and destroying it's name in a bad attempt to cover up. If you'd ask me, it've been way wiser to keep the Monsanto name.
1. Microsoft would open source its Java competitor under better terms than Java...
Only to kill the Mono project consequently
2. Would fully adopt (as much as anyone other than Mozilla is) open web standards from the browser to all corporate products...
Guess you didn't try Edge yet..
3. Add a Linux compatibility layer...
Which is widely frowned upon. And while i use it regularly, i also think it's one of the E's in EEE.
4. Port Office to a platform like Android...
Only after all MS phone projects ended as a disaster. Mostly because they couldn't even keep it compatible with itself.
5. Be the 5th largest contributor to the Linux kernel...
Mostly for hypervisor stuff and other stuff related to compatibility with (closed) MS software. Meanwhile, NTFS support still suffers.
6. Enthusiastically sell cloud services based on Linux...
Because the customers must choose Microsoft above all. They can always switch to Windows at a later stage.
7. Microsoft would offer more innovative desktops than Apple...
Guess you didn't upgrade to windows 10 yet... Which basically feels like a downgrade. But is forced upon users because of compatibility and ending support for older windows versions. I guess it sort-of works, but nothing new or fancy that pleases the customers, if any, only confuses the hell out of the elderly user base.
8. Microsoft would compete for OEM licenses on price and merits, not contractual extortion...
I can't believe you seriously said that. OEM's have no choice but to get strangled by MS.
We'd have called you a crackhead. Not a dreamer, but a crackhead because only a crackhead would think up a future like that as being plausible. Yet... that's where we're at in 2018
Basically you're a crackhead (your words) if you believe any of the claims you made. Especially if you think those claims are sincere and not only serve to increase their profit margins.
I rather keep distrusting MS until proven beyond doubt that they can be trusted, than the other way around and be cheated upon again for the zillionth time since 1992.
As European -used to high taxes everywhere- i'd say that worker's income is the stupiest thing to tax. It increases the cost of labour, thereby slowing down economic growth and increasing the unemployment issue, leading to poverty.
I know, you'd have to tax something. But politicians usually pick the easiest thing to tax, disregarding consequences. You should tax where the costs are: vehicle tax for highways, housing tax based on property value, true costs for water, electricity and sewer etc. But stay away from raising income, and to a lesser degree sales taxes.
Don't do what Europe does - with 35-50% income tax (and thats' exclusing social insurances like retirement, unemployment and healthcare insurances) and 20% sales tax. It artificially makes everything expensive, especially labour intensive work, and has no added value apart pumping round money and making expenses less transparent.
2 cents.
There is no need for 'Universal Basic Income' as its being envisioned.
People have certain needs, like food, shelter and safety (and this includes the feeling of being safe).
It not really matters how this is provided, as long it is. However, we do see that in many `developed` countries, there remain numerous issues that threaten the basic needs. While most countries have some sort of welfare system, it's often barely enough to live from. 'Enough not to die, not enough to live from' is often heard. Added to that are a lot of bureaucratic rules that, in order to keep the system 'fair' and 'cost effective' also limits people to escape their situation and improve it. A lot of welfare benefits evaporate the moment people accept (temporary) work, raising uncertainty while not immediately improving their situation. We see that in Europe a lot, even in countries with solid welfare. It is very hard to escape from the 'bottom' once there.
Ironically, in America, one of the richest countries, the welfare system is even worse than in most European countries, even the 'poor European countries'. And when doing the math, it is easy to see that in general the economy would benefit if everyone has a fair income, and everyone that can is productive a.k.a. working. So it is easy to see where the idea for basic income came from.
Now i do agree with you that 'basic income' has become a buzzword that is promising the silver bullet to poverty. And while it might not be that, it might be the direction that welfare systems should evolve: less bureaucracy, more opportunities, and more safety & guarantuee of basic needs.
Ironically, i think basic income is as easy as reforming the welfare and taxation system, as in zero (or even 'negative') tax up to a certain threshold that provides minimum living needs. And make sure that people always financially progress when accepting (any kind of) work, instead of penalizing them.
Poverty control needs political attention. Be it by 'buzzwords' like basic income, sure - if needed. But basic income in itself is a reasonable idea. Opponents usually pull it out of context, and calculate it as expensive, while not realizing it would not be any more expensive than any welfare system currently in place, and only aid economy by allowing more people in (part-time) jobs.
I Analog recordings at best are equal to 32khz 24 bit recordings, and that's assuming you can get no hiss or feedback.
Ehm no. That is a misconception. 24 bit is overkill, even for digital (most `24` bit is actually no more than 18 bit, at most, and more likely 15-16). But as far sampling rate goes, (studio) tape reels happily go over 20kHz, and so does vinyl. You may be confused by FM broadcast, which has a 15kHz bandwidth. More fair would be to compare vinyl to '48kHz/16 bit'.
So people who think Vinyl sounds better, are full of shit, or deaf.
Define better. It sounds different, i think we easily agree on that. Mechanical issues, harmonics and more all play a role. If people say that it sounds better to them, you will have to accept that as a truth, since perception is subjective by definition. It's like saying 'you cannot find yellow prettier than blue, because blue is a nicer color because it has a shorter wavelength'. For similar or other reasons, some people do prefer tube amplifiers.
It's probably said a dozen times elsewhere in this topic, but personally i think the big difference between the vinyl vs digital `experience` is in the mastering. That's most likely why this 1970's old vinyl album of [fill in favorite band] sounds better than the 2005 cd release. Disclaimer: i am one of such people.
Signals in copper and fiber do not travel at light speed (in a vacuum). Radio signals in space do.
So eventually, a mesh network of satellites might actually have lower ping times than fiber connections.
As side note, for the average (consumer) internet connection, most latency is in buffer bloat, not in signal traveling time. As anecdotal evidence, I frequently have faster connections to servers at the other side of the Atlantic than to servers in my own country.
Create a cryptocurency SETIcoin, where the miners has to search aliens in order to get coins.
There are those days i wish i had modpoints. Not often, but today is one.
Example :
Trump is bad for just about everything, economy, environment, people etc. People want to argue about this even though it is obvious.
Javascript is the best scripting language. People still want to pretend it is terrible because it took over because it was so good.
I'm sorry but your examples are not as `obvious` as you think. Opinions differ, for a reason.
I'd not vote for Trump, but i also don't think everything he does is wrong. And actually, how he is pictured here in Europe is only testifying non-objective press.
Same for javascript. It's popular because it filled a niche, and came at the right time at the right place. Apart that it indeed is a horrible language.
Things are not always perfect. Things not always have to be perfect. And any/most downsides have an upside. Trump got chosen cause a majority voted so. Javascript got popular despite a truckload of flaws. Climate change is politically abused as argument by all sides. Money and subsidies gets wasted while civilians have to pay up with unneeded taxes, while leaving the real big polluters untouched in the name of economy. Green electricity is often a farce and only consists of purchased certificates. It is very hard to find an objective truth, and surely it's less 'obvious' than you pretend it to be.
2 off-topic cents.
On-topic: they (pronhub) better not try to be holier than the pope or they'll lose a lot of visitors.
But then Microsoft launched Edge and it was a crushing blow to Microsoft's market share.
It doesn't help that Edge is a beta-quality browser. It does a lot of things reasonable well, most of them even pretty good and it tries to comply to standards. However, some stuff not works at all. Some stuff is horrible slow. And the browser itself is not a pinnacle of stability and also not free of weird non-reproducible quirks.
Admitting, that fits the general windows-10 way of doing things: more features coming faster, but at the cost of reduced stability.
In my personal point of view, Firefox is back as king with the best code-base. Stable, good all-round performance, features and compatibility. Chrome comes in second but is definitively not free of issues. So personally i expect Firefox' market share to reflect this in the years to come, they should be growing again.
No one knows what's in the center of the Earth
If he doesn't believe the earth is round, why does he believe it has a center?
Because, on a flat earth the center would be, going by their maps, the north pole. Only a sphere has a 'center' that you theoretically could reach by drilling.
If this were his own words, then i think this dude knows darn well the earth is round. He's just seeking publicity. And just unmasked himself by this slip of the tongue.
Before you jump into conclusions with that observation; an alternate explanation is that those smartphone owners are now looking down to their phone all the time, leaving no moment for their gaze to reach the sky, therefore decimating the chance to spot an UFO.
Just saying...
The muffling of the bass with bluetooth will be clear as daylight.
While i do agree on the inferior (though usually acceptable) quality of bluetooth audio, the reason you hear more bass over your headphone-to-aux cable is because your phone (or other device) expects those modern headphones that simply are to small to have a linear frequency characteristic, hence needs the bass boosted (and the high tones reduced) for a better sound experience.
You might want to use an equalizer or tone control when you use aux. Don't use those software equalizers though.. they may work (sortof) but usually they suck big time and the general audio quality is greatly reduced. Better use tone control on whatever amp you have imho.
Only the cut-n-paste crowd will use cut-n-paste resources.
Real Programmers do not.
Real programmers re-use code. Real programmers see if there are more (elegant) solutions to a problem. Real programmers seek to save time. Real programmers write efficient code.
Only beginners will try to re-invent every wheel by themselves and bang their head against the wall for a week or two on a problem, trivial or not, that already has been solved a zillion times before, where a simple google query would enlighten them but their vein stops them from doing so.
Real programmers know how to use and spend their time effective and efficient. If that results in a simple copy'n'paste to paste in 3 lines of code instead of wasting a day on a problem, than that's all fine and they just proven their weight in gold for saving a day's work that can be spend on other stuff that needs to be done.
It's the difference between someone working a year on something 'very complex', or someone hacking shit together in a week or two that 'just works'. There's no need to go back to the 90's where internet was still a matter of dial-up and your best documentation was a 2000-page thick reference you'd had to borrow from 3 floors upstairs and return same afternoon because it's the only copy in the building. Search engines and sites as stack overflow are very useful for _every_ programmer. Don't let your pride stop you from using it and maybe learn something new.
When it comes to the feeling (perception) of safety, i'm usually more worried about other people's errors than my own errors. And i'm well aware i'm imperfect either, but the 'type' of collision seriously affects how much damage a human would get, as in - a side impact is way more dangerous than a head-tail collision. I rather be on the safe side and reduce risk, than assume everyone will drive perfectly and according the rules, which is a very flawed assumption.
On-topic. If the car gets confused, and i'm sure sooner or later it will, it's nice to have to ability to take control back. Common wisdom sais not to trust any machine, especially not moving ones. Factories have red emergency buttons everywhere for a reason. Machines can and will fail.
Also, the test and miles driven with autonomous cars do in no way relate to real-world circumstances. Yes, on highways it will work fine. On a rocky unmarked mountain road much less so.
People blindly believing in technology apparently never have seen it fail hard. And computer experts promoting safety of software should not be trusted, actually, should not be allowed to touch any code again the rest of their lives.
But hey, let's all be honest. Microsoft's hardware has NEVER been good. Be it laptops, tablets, or media players.
I don't agree. Their OEM keyboards and mice were excellent. Too bad they don't make that corded mouse anymore, it's the only one that fit in my (large) hands.
Most Logitech items with 'moveable' parts (like buttons) are either too small and/or break easy, the only reasonable quality items being the discontinued G15 keyboards and webcams. Most other brands are even worse, or tend to target 'gamers' with a lot of bling and lights, mouse buttons at inconvenient places and plain weird shapes..
All i ask from a mouse are 2 buttons that don't accidentally click when they hit something on my desk (like a keyboard), a nice rounded shape, a reasonable large size and a scroll wheel that keeps working. MS delivered on that. They don't do that anymore since this wireless hype. But the word 'never' in above statement is false, imho.
Modern designs are very safe and emit less radioactivity than burning coal.
Correct. The primary environmental issue isn't with the safety of the reactor. That's pretty well under control and unless someone severely screws up (which also happens), a modern reactor is reasonable safe. The real issue is with the nuclear waste for which we have still no proper solution. The best solution with can think of is to dig somewhere deep in a rock, dump it in there, poor concrete over it and pray for the best.
We have no clue at all what will geologically happen in 100,000 years. We can predict it to be safe but no-one can tell for sure. There's factors ranging from earthquakes to terrorists that are out of our control.
People have a hard time to care about anything but themselves and their children. They simply don't care for their grand-grand-grand-children that still have to be born. Let alone they care for civilization in 10,000 years from now. It apparently needs a special mindset to care for such things.
Yet, on the risk-scale, the long-term future is the issue of nuclear plants, not a 'trivial' issue that could happen today even not on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima.
The real point of paint is not 'painting', but a basic tool to do file conversions, save a screenshot or acquire an image from a scanner, and maybe some basic text annotations or other stuff.
They (MS) underestimate it's usefulness. Moving it to the store is almost the same as abandoning.
99% chance i couldn't care less, now or ever, but for people that work on varying locations or have to administer other people's computers, or (play) helpdesk etc, might be upset. And rightfully.
It's about the same effect as removing notepad would be. Notepad is a horrible application that even in 2017 still cannot handle line breaks correctly, but it does have it's uses and is part of the standard windows toolkit.
Last not least - not everyone is permanently connected to the internet. Imho, windows is throwing in it's own windows with moves like this, and narrowing instead of broadening it's user base.
In Europe McDonald's does have such kiosks in most restaurants for a while now (a year or so). They appear to be quite popular and most customers use them.
They have advantages and drawbacks. The obvious advantage is that you can take your time to make an order, and can decide what you want to eat in all peace.
The disadvantage is. If you already know what to eat it's more cumbersome than just ordering at a clerk. And making modifications (no ice, no salt) is a plain PITA. And ordering anything that's not on the menu (no pickles, glass of water, etc etc) plain impossible.
Another drawback is that the system is very sluggish. More often than not the system not responds within a reasonable time for modern UI's, having the user press the button twice etc.. Maybe some modern hardware fixes that but somehow i doubt that, as most kiosks are reasonable new installs. Last not least, cash payments are not possible.
My personal view - as long the customer can decide how to order it's not a big deal.. When it's busy it's actually better to be able to order right away at a kiosk, instead of queuing up and consequently feel hasted when ordering by all the people behind you.
I'm not sure why investors think it's such a big deal. I don't think it would attract more customers or save significant costs - they save some time on staff for ordering, which is lost again because the staff actually needs to serve out the food instead of having people waiting for it at the counter. But maybe they know something we don't.
As a home user, i pro-actively use all three of the 'big three' - Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Partly out of curiosity, partly because one might be slightly better at certain content than others (like hardware accelerated video content), partly to have separate sessions (closeable content vs content i need to keep 'hot' for multiple days) and partly to separate cookies. So running multiple browsers is just a simple life-hack i use for pragmatic purposes.
To be fair, i am pretty agnostic. All browsers do what they are supposed to do, i did not encounter compatibility issues recently (=last few years), so i guess people advocating one browser above the other have some reason for this preference. All of them support ad-blockers, which is the only real necessity added to 'factory settings' as far i'm concerned.
If any, i find edge the least stable. It had/has issues with the adblocker, and web-pages crash every so often, especially after the PC has been 'idle'. Apart the stability issue, it works just as well as the others.
Also, there is no noticeable difference between performance. Maybe because i upgraded my -by now- pretty old PC with an SSD disk and more RAM. Maybe because there is not much difference after all.
Conclusion: there is no winner. We are actually finally where we wanted to be a decade ago - browser-agnostic webcontent that works on any OS any browser. The only big issue i see is the new monoculture of webkit dominance.
Just 2 cents from a happy firefox&chrome user...
As one of those dutch consumers - not so much. While i do totally understand and subscribe the need of net neutrality, this example already shows it is not always in the consumers best interest.
Another dutch provider (KPN, market leader) wanted to do this a few years ago, and ran into the same legal issue. Their final solution(s): 1. increase all data with all plans and 2. sell a discounted spotify subscription that came with 'free' additional data, the latter apparently being a legal solution.
This (net-neutrality thingy) was well known in the Netherlands, and T-Mobile should have been aware of this. I do recall seeing their advertisements for this unlimited streaming plan 2 months ago, just before i left the country, and already wondered how they would legally do this. Now i know the answer - they don't.
But back to the consumer - i'm not sure if consumers are better of as 'heavy users' are forced to premium plans just for their streaming needs. Then again, data plans in Holland (and in Europe in general) seem to be a lot cheaper than in the USA. This may partly be due to fragmentation - most plans in Europe are national, for a Europe-wide plan you'd pay a premium and streaming when abroad is more or less out of the question since you easily pay $10 for 100MB on the other side of your national borders. - and partly because of more competition - the Netherlands has a multiple of providers compared to the USA where only 3 providers seem to control the market. (Having said that, in Netherlands only 3* providers have their own network (*4 if you count in tele2), the rest are resellers).
Concluding: you can get anything as long you pay up. The more casual users are either left in the cold or forced to pay a premium for service they don't use. The market is not free to bind users in a way they see fit, because of some arbitrary legal requirement.
Well, you are right on most things, just this purist view brings the user nowhere. It's the old 'in an ideal world all lawyers would be jobless'...
And the example of windows is very wrong. A tonload of drivers for windows 7, hell, even drivers for vista and XP, just work on the latest windows 10. Simply because they have a well defined driver model. A thousand reasons to dislike Microsoft, but their driver model is not one of them.
It is not only a matter of developer resources. It is also that Linux is still a 'wild west' where anything that works might change in any newer version. And while the kernel maintainers have recognized this issue and proven a more stable ABI since kernel 2.6, some arbitrary projects still have a very egocentric view of the world.. Not to mention the zillion different distro's out there. Even the most well-willing hardware providers (and don't say that AMD and Intel and others aren't as they all showed tremendous effort) run against this wall of chaos...
And why, as end-user, do i care this? I need something that works. A newer version of xorg was apparently more important to drivers compatibility for the package maintainers. For me as user it was the other way around. And it is not trivially possible with Ubuntu to use an older version of xorg.
To elaborate on that: somewhere along the road the xorg developers decided to break something. How hard is it to design something and keep it (forward) compatible? Apparently for xorg very hard. I totally am ready to believe they had their reasons to do so, but you simply cannot expect all other involved developers to run behind them, within months, if they make make a change breaking stuff, totally ignoring the significant amount of testing the AMD developers would have to do. And surely the AMD developers still get the blame simply because they are 'closed source'.
From an idealistic stance of view, you are totally right. In an ideal world those drivers would be open source. From a practical stance of view, developers all over the world, both open and closed source, are hands tied down on license or agreements. And users just want something that works, not necessarily the latest greatest shiniest.
In case of Ubuntu 16.04 the AMD user is left in the cold, no matter who to blame. And this is why people who say 'Linux will never be ready for the desktop' are proven right. I did, and do, use and love Linux but in all fairness it has been a constant struggle, swimming upstream, because design decisions like those are not made from a user stance of view, and because i do not want to dedicate my life to the OS running on my computer. I just want to use my computer.
After many years of Ubuntu use as primary desktop, the thing that drove me away was ending the support for the closed source AMD video drivers.
Someone decided that the open source drivers were 'good enough'. Well, they are not, at least for what i was doing. And the choice to use the drivers as released by AMD was removed, and doing so manually anything but trivial, as in, you'd have more luck on an arch based distro.
Imho, Ubuntu, and all derivatives like Mint, suddenly alienate half their user base with that decision. And if this wasn't an online forum i'd use stronger wordings for that.
Also, i just need to get work done. And most of the stuff i do is reasonable platform-agnostic but expects reasonable 3D performance. So, i'm back to windows 10 which serves my need, ironically has Ubuntu user land built in these days, and Linux will have to wait until i upgrade my graphics to nVidia, or when i can be bothered to try another distro, or when open source graphics drivers are really of comparable quality, whichever come first.
* Just 2 cents from a frustrated ex-Ubuntu&Mint user on the desktop. *
As an ingress player, I couldn't disagree with you more.
Having said that, I took a quick look at pokemon and although interesting, it's surely not my game. There are similarities to ingress, but it's also targeted at a very different audience. Another drawback I saw was their pricing scheme, they seem mostly interested in you dollars, whereas ingress is totally free to play, with only a few 'gimmicks' sold for the die-hard players, and surely will not drain your wallet till the max.
On-topic - ingress has put a lot of couchpotato's outside, made hiking and traveling more fun, and socializes team members in sometimes very close and active communities. I wonder if pokemon will have the same socializing effect.