I seriously don't know what you're talking about. I use VLC all the time, and find it impressive how wide a variety of formats it will play without any problems. It plays damned near everything and never crashes. The UI might not be completely Mac-like, but it's not as horrible as some ports.
Overall, I'll be unhappy if VLC development for OSX stops.
Handbrake doesn't have to use VLC. I think it was just an easy way to get access to the FFMPEG libraries, to require that VLC be installed. Anyway, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for them to find another way to deal with it.
And I may be wrong, but I think using VLC is a relatively new thing. I don't remember exactly, but back when Handbrake was OSX-only, I think it had the option of using Quicktime to encode movies.
I agree with keeping it old-school-- or at least it's good to avoid making things more complicated and technological than they need to be.
If you're trying to do something very complex and specific, there are probably good tools out there for you. Other people here are talking about tools that manage trouble tickets and stuff, and if you need that, great. Try some out, see what works. However, don't undervalue the old pen and paper. If you're going to use a computer, don't be afraid to type some lines into a text editor and save the text file, relying on simple directory structures and file names to keep things organized. As a techie, it may disappoint you to resort to such simple approaches, but the simple things still work.
I may be stating the obvious that everyone here already knows, but you might want to read Getting Things Done if you haven't already. The GTD fad may be overblown, but there's some good advise in there for making task lists.
But generally, my advice would be to not even try to devise a technical solution that will "keep you organized". Either you're organized or you aren't. If you add a complex technical solution on top of your disorganization, you'll probably end up dealing with your technical solution in a disorganized manner and it won't work. Get organized, then figure out a system that will help you skip over some of the more tedious steps of your workflow. Also, don't try to put all your information into a single task list. Keep the task list simple enough that you can glance at it and see if there's anything you can check off. If you need more information on a given task, keep a resource file somewhere else and store all the details there.
But regardless of this advice, you have to find a system that works for you. There's no "proper" way of handling these things that will work perfectly for everyone.
Well part of the problem is that, when you take statements like these seriously, a lot of people get upset that you can't voice frustrations without it being treated like a criminal case. But then on that one instance where the person actually stabs someone with an embalming instrument, everyone freaks out and says, "There were all these warning signs. Why didn't anyone do anything?!"
The unfortunate truth is that there is no sure way to tell the difference. People all want to make judgements in hindsight about what should have been done in a given situation, but none of us have the luxury of making decisions after the fact with full hindsight.
I think in general having scripting language embedded into an interactive document format is a good idea, however, it seems that Adobe's implementation is rather buggy and badly designed.
Personally, I disagree. I might be wrong, but I think having a scripting language embedded in an interactive document format is often not a very good idea. I think it's better to keep a separation, if possible, between "document" and "program". A document is a passive this which is read, and a program is the thing that does the reading.
The reason is that we've seen over and over again that trying to make "interactive documents" causes security problems. The natural assumption by users is that documents are passive, and so opening a document is virtually harmless. But then people get the bright idea to turn office documents and PDFs into executable files, and you get tons of exploits.
Personally, I think we'd be better off if we even separated out web browsers into two programs: one that views static pages, and one that runs web applications. I understand if that idea sounds stupid to people, but I think the current way we're dealing with this stuff is only sort-of working, and it's more confusing to people than we techies tend to think.
Not only that, but in my opinion "activation" is a pretty evil development in software distribution, and I wouldn't mind someone making it more difficult or unattractive for companies to use it.
Whenever possible, I avoid using software that requires activation. I don't pirate, but if I buy a piece of software, I don't want someone monitoring every time I install it. I want to be able to use imaging on my computers without worrying whether the software will disable itself. I don't want some company to be able to say, "Um, nope. You'd installed this a couple times already. We're too lazy to check whether you're installing it on the same computer or connection from the same IP, so we're just going to disable it. If this is our fault in any way, sorry, but you'll have to call us and spend an hour on hold." Or what happens if they disable their activation servers in 5 years? Are you simply not allowed to install it anymore?
Sorry, no. No activations. I'll sooner tolerate DRM on all my media than DRM on all my software.
I haven't really learned to operate in PowerShell yet, but it definitely has one distinct disadvantage: it's not used in other operating systems.
I know, that probably sounds like a weird complaint to some people. On the other hand, I can install cygwin on my Windows machine and learn how to do some bash scripting, and then sit down at a Linux/Unix/OSX machine and that knowledge remains useful. If I learn how to use PowerShell and then try to use that knowledge on OSX, I'm going to run into some difficulties.
That shouldn't be your only consideration in choosing a shell, but it seems pretty important to me.
Yeah, but that's not the end of Microsoft's shenanigans. I tried downloading the Office 2010 beta in Firefox. No dice. The page didn't work without IE.
Of course you can argue, "It's their website and they can do what they want with it." True enough. But certainly they're not committed to browser standards, nor do they seem very interested in making it easy for their customers to work with the browser of their own choice.
It's depressing coming back to the US and realize how much we're getting screwed by the phone companies compared to else where.
The US is looking more and more like a 3rd world country just as 3rd would countries are starting to look modern. We haven't invested in building and infrastructure. Our trains are useless. Public transportation is a joke. Train stations and airports are in terrible. Our internet is substandard in most places; you can't even get FIOS in most of NYC while some places in the country don't have anything better than dialup. Our cell phone networks are crappy and overpriced.
How do we expect to compete with the rest of the world? If I owned a company and was free to pick a location anywhere in the world, I don't think I'd put it in the US.
The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default.
Because the intent is to push you towards using their software for as many things as they can get you to. The more things you use it for, the more reliant you are on it, the more likely you are to buy more copies.
I don't think it's all that nefarious in intent. They want their software to be useful and cutting-edge. If their intent was only to create a fast PDF reader/writer, then they'd be done sometime around Acrobat 4. Every version since would be bug-fixes, performance improvements, and updates in the UI to keep up with changes in the OS UI, and it's hard to convince people to buy updates for those things.
Not that it would be bad if they'd done that-- I'd be more likely to buy a copy right now if that was the path their development had taken.
Correction: I had messed up in editing the end of the 3rd paragraph. Should read as, "Some estimates have the 360 failure rate as being higher than 15% per year, and higher than 50% since launch."
Well I think that the implication was supposed to be that the console market was a money-loser for Microsoft and so they might not want to continue. You're not doing a very good job of disputing that.
The video game industry isn't the only one posting losses recently, so this doesn't seem like a big deal at all. That and these consoles are four years old, it's not surprising to see sales dip.
Agreed. In particular, when the summary gets to the sales drop of the Wii, I have a hard time feeling sorry for Nintendo. For one thing, if you're talking about sales of the actual Wii console, well for something like a year and a half after launch it was still hard to buy a Wii because they kept selling out. If sales have dropped, it's probably because the Wii has only now hit its saturation point and everyone who wants a Wii has already bought one.
But also, it's important to note that Nintendo was making a profit on Wii sales from day one. Both Sony and Microsoft started off by selling their consoles at a loss in order to make up the loss in game licensing. This loss was compounded for Microsoft by all the defective units. But the Wii? It started out being sold at a profit. The original $250 price was more than the cost to Nintendo, and with the current price at $200, the profit margin has probably increased. That doesn't include all the sales of additional controllers and games. They had to have made money from their Zelda, Super Mario, and Metroid properties.
If you wanted to convince me that Microsoft had lost money, I might be able to convince me. They rushed a defective product to market, sold it at a loss, and they're still paying to replace defective units. Some estimates have the 5 year 360 failure rate as being higher than 15% per year, and higher than 60% since launch. Ouch! But Nintendo? They've been raking it in.
And if the console market did die, what would replace it?
Sometimes rich people are given free stuff because the vendor hopes it will lead to bigger purchases. For example, you might buy dinner for a prospective client in order to get an account that would net you far more than the cost of the dinner. Or sometimes people give rich people stuff out of a kind of hero worship. But often, very often, the idea is that rich people will influence others through their fame or their contacts.
That's an interesting point. Do you know if there are studies which bear it out-- that certain kinds of small distraction can aid in concentration?
I've read some things that suggest that our brains are a little less... unified (don't know if that's the right word) than we tend to think. If you accept that our minds are actually constructed of several competing faculties, then it does seem plausible that distracting one of them might help another function more effectively. Does it actually work out that way?
So maybe a possible suggestion to this guy's boss is to allow programmers to wear noise-cancelling headphones, perhaps even having the headphones play some soft white noise.
Of course, once people are wearing headphones, it wouldn't be too hard for someone to pipe some music into them.
I hesitate to acknowledge something like this as "injustice". Not allowing employees to listen to music is a dumb policy, but it's not really persecution.
Not that it's not important. I think that you could trace some of our social and economic problems back to our latent view as employers/executives as creatures of massive genius who must be coddled and rewarded at every turn, but common employees as tools. There's even a bit of an assumption that workers are all lazy and stupid, since "if they were smart and hardworking, they'd have someone working for them!" Still, even when employees are viewed as good, hard workers, there's still the viewpoint that they're no more than tools to be used and manipulated by master craftsmen (the craftsmen being employers and executives).
This sort of viewpoint adds to a sense of entitlement among the rich and successful, and it also is used to justify a million small abuses of power.
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant.
Well the problem is that, because of how the technology works, employers don't really need to dig very deep. Plug a name into Google, and something embarrassing from 10 years ago may pop up.
I'm of the opinion that, as we develop new information technology, we should keep this issue in mind. In general, we don't seem to be planning for the long-term consequences of how we're using technology. People in IT sometimes bring up the problem of media, platforms, and formats going obsolete and becoming unreadable, but on the other end of things you have kids posting embarrassing photos of themselves on Facebook. Yes, it's entirely possible that those photos will never ever go away, and that your only hope is for them to be swallowed a sea of newer and even more embarrassing photos-- that even if they're still there, people won't bother to look for them anymore.
I don't know what there is to be done about it. Maybe institute policies that data generally "expires" and disappears after some set period of time, assuming no particular reason to keep it? Enforce it by law somehow? Not only would that be extremely complicated, but you risk losing historically important documents, either through carelessness or because the importance of the documents could only be known in hindsight.
I'd say healthy skepticism is particularly good when the skeptic doesn't understand the underlying ideas that go into the subject matter. If I don't even understand the ideas, why should I be easily convinced?
No, I think the problem is more with people picking and choosing what they want to believe without applying genuine doubt or skepticism. For example, there are people who want to believe or disbelieve that global warming is happening, regardless of what they're presented with. They are only willing to apply skepticism to the position that they don't want to believe in.
Right. People talk about "science" as being almost a set of beliefs, a religion where "scientists" are the priests. We're told that science provides all these things, and science tells us what everything *really* is.
One problem with that viewpoint is that trusting "scientists" isn't scientific. Insofar as science is a good and helpful practice, it doesn't ask you to trust based on the authority of special individuals. There isn't really a special class of people called "scientists" who have special access to truth on all matters. "Scientist" is just a loose term for someone whose job involves science, used when we don't have a better term at hand. People may be more or less experts on a particular topic and may have more direct or clear knowledge about particular things. I could be employed as a garbage man and know more about DNA than a "scientist" who happens to be a physicist and hasn't studied biology in any depth.
Of course, there are still experts. The entire body of scientific knowledge is too large and complex for anyone to be the expert in all of it. Most of us have other jobs that don't allow in depth study on even a single scientific topic. As a result, we often have to decide whether to trust in the authority of experts. It's not as easy as it seems.
Imagine I was explaining the concept of general relativity to you, and it all made sense to you and you understood how it worked and you could see the equations and make sense of them. That's science, and it doesn't really require trust. Now imagine instead that I was explaining the concept and you didn't understand and it didn't make sense to you. Suddenly you'd be in a position of being expected to accept some pretty counter-intuitive ideas without understanding them, based on what I claim Einstein said. No only do you have to accept that Einstein is an authority and necessarily correct, but also that I understood Einstein properly and am explaining it properly. Accepting the claims of relativity then isn't much different from an article of faith.
We generally 'trust' science thousands of times per today. This morning I went into a man-made 'cave' deep in the ground and got on the subway. The 'cave' didn't fall in and the subway didn't crash. The subway train didn't have a 'driver' - It was automatic and operated by a computer. I listened to my mp3 player and trusted everything.
Well are you really "trusting science" in these examples? Did you trust the subway to work because you saw the designs and understood the scientific principles? Did you trust the subway because someone claiming to be a scientist said, "Go down into a deep cave and ride a machine. It will all work out. Trust me, I'm a scientist."?
I don't know your thought process, but I'd guess you aren't really trusting science. It's more like you're trusting other people and you're trusting your own experience. This morning was probably not your first trip into the subway. You've done it before and it got you there safely. That breeds trust.
The first time you went into the subway, you probably trusted it because there were lots of other people who seemed to be using it and were unconcerned. There's an instinctual thing where if you see a bunch of other people doing something and they seem to think it's safe, you'll be inclined to assume it's safe. On an intellectual level, you'd heard of people riding subways safely in the past, and you assumed that if it were unsafe, your city would shut the subway down.
Now those routes toward attaining trust, if you really think about it, have nothing to do with science. The trains could be operating through unknown magic, and if they had been operating for a hundred years in cities around the world with a good safety record and everyone were using them, we'd trust them to about the same degree. People trusted gravity to work before they had a name for it-- not because they understood how it worked, but because it had always worked in the past.
Good point. If they're going to charge per megabyte, then it actually makes sense to go back to having mobile versions of websites without anything more than absolutely necessary to display the content. That's part of the reason it was like that in the first place-- it wasn't *just* that the browsers were awful.
If they can identify 3% of people are using 40%, then by all means put a 'cap' on the fixed price service that *doesn't* affect the 97% of normal users.
Well ultimately their intent is not just to make the 3% pay more for the extra usage, but to make *everyone* pay more. It's just that they need an excuse to do it, and blaming other users for over-using the service gives them that excuse. These cell carriers want to advertise data services, they want to charge for data services, but they don't want to actually provide those services unless you pay extra.
It is definitely much better than TB2 on Windows and OSX too. Strangely, I still kind of prefer Postbox to Thunderbird even though it doesn't really add any features that I use, and I don't find it to be worth the purchase price. I guess it's a look and feel thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously don't know what you're talking about. I use VLC all the time, and find it impressive how wide a variety of formats it will play without any problems. It plays damned near everything and never crashes. The UI might not be completely Mac-like, but it's not as horrible as some ports.
Overall, I'll be unhappy if VLC development for OSX stops.
Handbrake doesn't have to use VLC. I think it was just an easy way to get access to the FFMPEG libraries, to require that VLC be installed. Anyway, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for them to find another way to deal with it.
And I may be wrong, but I think using VLC is a relatively new thing. I don't remember exactly, but back when Handbrake was OSX-only, I think it had the option of using Quicktime to encode movies.
I agree with keeping it old-school-- or at least it's good to avoid making things more complicated and technological than they need to be.
If you're trying to do something very complex and specific, there are probably good tools out there for you. Other people here are talking about tools that manage trouble tickets and stuff, and if you need that, great. Try some out, see what works. However, don't undervalue the old pen and paper. If you're going to use a computer, don't be afraid to type some lines into a text editor and save the text file, relying on simple directory structures and file names to keep things organized. As a techie, it may disappoint you to resort to such simple approaches, but the simple things still work.
I may be stating the obvious that everyone here already knows, but you might want to read Getting Things Done if you haven't already. The GTD fad may be overblown, but there's some good advise in there for making task lists.
But generally, my advice would be to not even try to devise a technical solution that will "keep you organized". Either you're organized or you aren't. If you add a complex technical solution on top of your disorganization, you'll probably end up dealing with your technical solution in a disorganized manner and it won't work. Get organized, then figure out a system that will help you skip over some of the more tedious steps of your workflow. Also, don't try to put all your information into a single task list. Keep the task list simple enough that you can glance at it and see if there's anything you can check off. If you need more information on a given task, keep a resource file somewhere else and store all the details there.
But regardless of this advice, you have to find a system that works for you. There's no "proper" way of handling these things that will work perfectly for everyone.
Well part of the problem is that, when you take statements like these seriously, a lot of people get upset that you can't voice frustrations without it being treated like a criminal case. But then on that one instance where the person actually stabs someone with an embalming instrument, everyone freaks out and says, "There were all these warning signs. Why didn't anyone do anything?!"
The unfortunate truth is that there is no sure way to tell the difference. People all want to make judgements in hindsight about what should have been done in a given situation, but none of us have the luxury of making decisions after the fact with full hindsight.
I think in general having scripting language embedded into an interactive document format is a good idea, however, it seems that Adobe's implementation is rather buggy and badly designed.
Personally, I disagree. I might be wrong, but I think having a scripting language embedded in an interactive document format is often not a very good idea. I think it's better to keep a separation, if possible, between "document" and "program". A document is a passive this which is read, and a program is the thing that does the reading.
The reason is that we've seen over and over again that trying to make "interactive documents" causes security problems. The natural assumption by users is that documents are passive, and so opening a document is virtually harmless. But then people get the bright idea to turn office documents and PDFs into executable files, and you get tons of exploits.
Personally, I think we'd be better off if we even separated out web browsers into two programs: one that views static pages, and one that runs web applications. I understand if that idea sounds stupid to people, but I think the current way we're dealing with this stuff is only sort-of working, and it's more confusing to people than we techies tend to think.
Not only that, but in my opinion "activation" is a pretty evil development in software distribution, and I wouldn't mind someone making it more difficult or unattractive for companies to use it.
Whenever possible, I avoid using software that requires activation. I don't pirate, but if I buy a piece of software, I don't want someone monitoring every time I install it. I want to be able to use imaging on my computers without worrying whether the software will disable itself. I don't want some company to be able to say, "Um, nope. You'd installed this a couple times already. We're too lazy to check whether you're installing it on the same computer or connection from the same IP, so we're just going to disable it. If this is our fault in any way, sorry, but you'll have to call us and spend an hour on hold." Or what happens if they disable their activation servers in 5 years? Are you simply not allowed to install it anymore?
Sorry, no. No activations. I'll sooner tolerate DRM on all my media than DRM on all my software.
</rant>
I haven't really learned to operate in PowerShell yet, but it definitely has one distinct disadvantage: it's not used in other operating systems.
I know, that probably sounds like a weird complaint to some people. On the other hand, I can install cygwin on my Windows machine and learn how to do some bash scripting, and then sit down at a Linux/Unix/OSX machine and that knowledge remains useful. If I learn how to use PowerShell and then try to use that knowledge on OSX, I'm going to run into some difficulties.
That shouldn't be your only consideration in choosing a shell, but it seems pretty important to me.
Yeah, but that's not the end of Microsoft's shenanigans. I tried downloading the Office 2010 beta in Firefox. No dice. The page didn't work without IE.
Of course you can argue, "It's their website and they can do what they want with it." True enough. But certainly they're not committed to browser standards, nor do they seem very interested in making it easy for their customers to work with the browser of their own choice.
It's depressing coming back to the US and realize how much we're getting screwed by the phone companies compared to else where.
The US is looking more and more like a 3rd world country just as 3rd would countries are starting to look modern. We haven't invested in building and infrastructure. Our trains are useless. Public transportation is a joke. Train stations and airports are in terrible. Our internet is substandard in most places; you can't even get FIOS in most of NYC while some places in the country don't have anything better than dialup. Our cell phone networks are crappy and overpriced.
How do we expect to compete with the rest of the world? If I owned a company and was free to pick a location anywhere in the world, I don't think I'd put it in the US.
The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default.
Because the intent is to push you towards using their software for as many things as they can get you to. The more things you use it for, the more reliant you are on it, the more likely you are to buy more copies.
I don't think it's all that nefarious in intent. They want their software to be useful and cutting-edge. If their intent was only to create a fast PDF reader/writer, then they'd be done sometime around Acrobat 4. Every version since would be bug-fixes, performance improvements, and updates in the UI to keep up with changes in the OS UI, and it's hard to convince people to buy updates for those things.
Not that it would be bad if they'd done that-- I'd be more likely to buy a copy right now if that was the path their development had taken.
Correction: I had messed up in editing the end of the 3rd paragraph. Should read as, "Some estimates have the 360 failure rate as being higher than 15% per year, and higher than 50% since launch."
Well I think that the implication was supposed to be that the console market was a money-loser for Microsoft and so they might not want to continue. You're not doing a very good job of disputing that.
The video game industry isn't the only one posting losses recently, so this doesn't seem like a big deal at all. That and these consoles are four years old, it's not surprising to see sales dip.
Agreed. In particular, when the summary gets to the sales drop of the Wii, I have a hard time feeling sorry for Nintendo. For one thing, if you're talking about sales of the actual Wii console, well for something like a year and a half after launch it was still hard to buy a Wii because they kept selling out. If sales have dropped, it's probably because the Wii has only now hit its saturation point and everyone who wants a Wii has already bought one.
But also, it's important to note that Nintendo was making a profit on Wii sales from day one. Both Sony and Microsoft started off by selling their consoles at a loss in order to make up the loss in game licensing. This loss was compounded for Microsoft by all the defective units. But the Wii? It started out being sold at a profit. The original $250 price was more than the cost to Nintendo, and with the current price at $200, the profit margin has probably increased. That doesn't include all the sales of additional controllers and games. They had to have made money from their Zelda, Super Mario, and Metroid properties.
If you wanted to convince me that Microsoft had lost money, I might be able to convince me. They rushed a defective product to market, sold it at a loss, and they're still paying to replace defective units. Some estimates have the 5 year 360 failure rate as being higher than 15% per year, and higher than 60% since launch. Ouch! But Nintendo? They've been raking it in.
And if the console market did die, what would replace it?
It's true. It's expensive to be poor, and meanwhile the rich and famous get retarded amounts of free shit.
Sometimes rich people are given free stuff because the vendor hopes it will lead to bigger purchases. For example, you might buy dinner for a prospective client in order to get an account that would net you far more than the cost of the dinner. Or sometimes people give rich people stuff out of a kind of hero worship. But often, very often, the idea is that rich people will influence others through their fame or their contacts.
That's an interesting point. Do you know if there are studies which bear it out-- that certain kinds of small distraction can aid in concentration?
I've read some things that suggest that our brains are a little less... unified (don't know if that's the right word) than we tend to think. If you accept that our minds are actually constructed of several competing faculties, then it does seem plausible that distracting one of them might help another function more effectively. Does it actually work out that way?
So maybe a possible suggestion to this guy's boss is to allow programmers to wear noise-cancelling headphones, perhaps even having the headphones play some soft white noise.
Of course, once people are wearing headphones, it wouldn't be too hard for someone to pipe some music into them.
I hesitate to acknowledge something like this as "injustice". Not allowing employees to listen to music is a dumb policy, but it's not really persecution.
Not that it's not important. I think that you could trace some of our social and economic problems back to our latent view as employers/executives as creatures of massive genius who must be coddled and rewarded at every turn, but common employees as tools. There's even a bit of an assumption that workers are all lazy and stupid, since "if they were smart and hardworking, they'd have someone working for them!" Still, even when employees are viewed as good, hard workers, there's still the viewpoint that they're no more than tools to be used and manipulated by master craftsmen (the craftsmen being employers and executives).
This sort of viewpoint adds to a sense of entitlement among the rich and successful, and it also is used to justify a million small abuses of power.
Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
Or you could just send a DMCA notice yourself. You have no right to request a takedown, but that doesn't stop big media companies.
IMHO just as thre's a 7-year stature of limitations on law, so too should employers have a limitation on how far back they can dig. Anything that predates this decade should be irrelevant.
Well the problem is that, because of how the technology works, employers don't really need to dig very deep. Plug a name into Google, and something embarrassing from 10 years ago may pop up.
I'm of the opinion that, as we develop new information technology, we should keep this issue in mind. In general, we don't seem to be planning for the long-term consequences of how we're using technology. People in IT sometimes bring up the problem of media, platforms, and formats going obsolete and becoming unreadable, but on the other end of things you have kids posting embarrassing photos of themselves on Facebook. Yes, it's entirely possible that those photos will never ever go away, and that your only hope is for them to be swallowed a sea of newer and even more embarrassing photos-- that even if they're still there, people won't bother to look for them anymore.
I don't know what there is to be done about it. Maybe institute policies that data generally "expires" and disappears after some set period of time, assuming no particular reason to keep it? Enforce it by law somehow? Not only would that be extremely complicated, but you risk losing historically important documents, either through carelessness or because the importance of the documents could only be known in hindsight.
I'd say healthy skepticism is particularly good when the skeptic doesn't understand the underlying ideas that go into the subject matter. If I don't even understand the ideas, why should I be easily convinced?
No, I think the problem is more with people picking and choosing what they want to believe without applying genuine doubt or skepticism. For example, there are people who want to believe or disbelieve that global warming is happening, regardless of what they're presented with. They are only willing to apply skepticism to the position that they don't want to believe in.
Right. People talk about "science" as being almost a set of beliefs, a religion where "scientists" are the priests. We're told that science provides all these things, and science tells us what everything *really* is.
One problem with that viewpoint is that trusting "scientists" isn't scientific. Insofar as science is a good and helpful practice, it doesn't ask you to trust based on the authority of special individuals. There isn't really a special class of people called "scientists" who have special access to truth on all matters. "Scientist" is just a loose term for someone whose job involves science, used when we don't have a better term at hand. People may be more or less experts on a particular topic and may have more direct or clear knowledge about particular things. I could be employed as a garbage man and know more about DNA than a "scientist" who happens to be a physicist and hasn't studied biology in any depth.
Of course, there are still experts. The entire body of scientific knowledge is too large and complex for anyone to be the expert in all of it. Most of us have other jobs that don't allow in depth study on even a single scientific topic. As a result, we often have to decide whether to trust in the authority of experts. It's not as easy as it seems.
Imagine I was explaining the concept of general relativity to you, and it all made sense to you and you understood how it worked and you could see the equations and make sense of them. That's science, and it doesn't really require trust. Now imagine instead that I was explaining the concept and you didn't understand and it didn't make sense to you. Suddenly you'd be in a position of being expected to accept some pretty counter-intuitive ideas without understanding them, based on what I claim Einstein said. No only do you have to accept that Einstein is an authority and necessarily correct, but also that I understood Einstein properly and am explaining it properly. Accepting the claims of relativity then isn't much different from an article of faith.
We generally 'trust' science thousands of times per today. This morning I went into a man-made 'cave' deep in the ground and got on the subway. The 'cave' didn't fall in and the subway didn't crash. The subway train didn't have a 'driver' - It was automatic and operated by a computer. I listened to my mp3 player and trusted everything.
Well are you really "trusting science" in these examples? Did you trust the subway to work because you saw the designs and understood the scientific principles? Did you trust the subway because someone claiming to be a scientist said, "Go down into a deep cave and ride a machine. It will all work out. Trust me, I'm a scientist."?
I don't know your thought process, but I'd guess you aren't really trusting science. It's more like you're trusting other people and you're trusting your own experience. This morning was probably not your first trip into the subway. You've done it before and it got you there safely. That breeds trust.
The first time you went into the subway, you probably trusted it because there were lots of other people who seemed to be using it and were unconcerned. There's an instinctual thing where if you see a bunch of other people doing something and they seem to think it's safe, you'll be inclined to assume it's safe. On an intellectual level, you'd heard of people riding subways safely in the past, and you assumed that if it were unsafe, your city would shut the subway down.
Now those routes toward attaining trust, if you really think about it, have nothing to do with science. The trains could be operating through unknown magic, and if they had been operating for a hundred years in cities around the world with a good safety record and everyone were using them, we'd trust them to about the same degree. People trusted gravity to work before they had a name for it-- not because they understood how it worked, but because it had always worked in the past.
Good point. If they're going to charge per megabyte, then it actually makes sense to go back to having mobile versions of websites without anything more than absolutely necessary to display the content. That's part of the reason it was like that in the first place-- it wasn't *just* that the browsers were awful.
If they can identify 3% of people are using 40%, then by all means put a 'cap' on the fixed price service that *doesn't* affect the 97% of normal users.
Well ultimately their intent is not just to make the 3% pay more for the extra usage, but to make *everyone* pay more. It's just that they need an excuse to do it, and blaming other users for over-using the service gives them that excuse. These cell carriers want to advertise data services, they want to charge for data services, but they don't want to actually provide those services unless you pay extra.
It is definitely much better than TB2 on Windows and OSX too. Strangely, I still kind of prefer Postbox to Thunderbird even though it doesn't really add any features that I use, and I don't find it to be worth the purchase price. I guess it's a look and feel thing.