Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook. Those workflows don't only depend on Outlook, but through Outlook they depend on Exchange. So if you really want to displace Microsoft, you have to create a mail/groupware client to Outlook, either by creating one compatible with Exchange or creating groupware server to replace Exchange as well. Or you need to create an alternative to both of those things that won't screw up businesses' workflows. Or I guess you can convince businesses to overhaul their workflows.
The issue of "workflow" is a huge issue that too many people ignore. Even if a different software solution provides all the same "functionality", if it requires people to change how they work, they aren't going to go for it. It's especially difficult if it changes the way people work by requiring frequent repetitive steps (e.g. if you can do all the same things, but if doing it in Microsoft Office requires 2 clicks and LibreOffice requires 5 clicks, then people are going to get frustrated).
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?
Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.
But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
The fact that you don't even read what you post here is quite indicative.
I didn't read the whole study. Why should I? You asked for a study for proof of what anyone with any knowledge on the subject knows, and I provided that.
Now you change your argument. "Oh, I knew that different people have different metabolic rates, and we don't really know what determines that. I'm just going to backtrack on my argument that nutrition is simple thermodynamics and instead point out an idea that you already acknowledged, that nutrition is on some level subject to thermodynamics in some kind of general sense."
And this is why I don't like getting into arguments with people like you. You post snotty little misinformed replies on subjects you don't understand and then can't admit when you're wrong.
But that's OK - Hillary is a bona fide member of the protected spook/bankster class; she need not fear consequences, only maintain the charade well enough for the narrative to continue.
She doesn't even need to maintain the charade. She just has to stall long enough to employ the strategy that many politicians (including her husband) have used to great success in the past.
Step 1: Deny. "I didn't do it. I did nothing wrong."
Step 2: Stonewall. Delay. Wait.
Step 3: As evidence trickles out slowly, provide some kind of perfunctory defense. It doesn't have to be a strong defense, and actually shouldn't be a very good one. It should be just good enough that the people who want to support you can maintain their state of denial.
Step 4: When enough evidence, come clean, but underplay the importance. "Well yes, I did it, but so what? This is old news, and people have been after me for years about this stuff, and nobody cared. Sure, I said I didn't do it before, but all my lies and my attempts to defend myself were so stupid, you must have known I was lying, and you didn't care. If you didn't care then, why would you care now?"
Somehow we're all so stupid that we fall for this kind of thing all the time.
I'm not an expert on these things, but at least one thing that I've heard someone on the news claim about this whole thing is that messages are often classified after the fact. The way it's supposed to work, apparently, is that the Secretary of State uses his/her official email address to conduct all of their official business. They will often be emailing information that should be classified, but may not yet be. The information is generated and analyzed first, and later, someone analyzes the information and decides that it's classified. They then have people pour over the official emails and mark emails as classified when they find information that has since been classified.
So if what I've just written is true (I'm just relaying what some guy said on the news), then it would mean that part of the problem is that her email wasn't made available to the appropriate staff to be marked as classified. Yes, it was classified after the fact, but if the process is, "The secretary of state receives information in email, then analysts review the email, and *then* emails are marked classified," then she subverted the whole security process by having these emails sent to a server where those analysts wouldn't have access.
Sorry, but have you ever read anything about this, or are you just going on what your Crossfit trainer told you? Ok, fine:here's a study.
I didn't even read it, but if you don't like it, try googling "scientific study bmr" and I'm sure you'll find some more. It's a plain, ordinary, well know, uncontroversial fact that different people have different metabolic rates. You may as well be asking me to find you a study that shows, "shooting yourself in the foot will probably hurt." I used an example from my life in the hopes of giving you something really simple that you could wrap your little head around, so maybe you'd quit being such a tool.
To be honest with you, I trust the NSA MORE than a trust any local cop or prosecutor.
Well part of my issue with the whole thing is not really so much about whether I trust the NSA or my local police department, but more whether I trust a random NSA agent or police officer. I think the agencies involved certainly have bigger fish to fry than me, but a random dude with access to a lot of information... who knows what he'll do?
On the one hand, I understand what you're saying, that you think the local police are more likely to misuse it in small petty ways. However, I think the NSA is more competent to misuse it. They have a large scale systematic methods of collecting your information, and more tools and training to process it. I have doubts that my local beat cop can use a computer.
But then there have also been signs that the NSA is sharing some of its collected data with other government agencies... I think the FBI and ATF. I don't think there's been anything about local police departments. But that's not really the point. The point is, the NSA's misbehavior has, in my opinion, poisoned the well for any argument from any governmental organization that says, "Trust us. We'll only use this information responsibly."
I think I might have some small sympathy for the idea that law enforcement should have some recourse to access the contents of a cell phone, provided they first get a warrant. However, in light of what we've learned about the NSA spying, I don't see how anyone could trust that such a back door won't be abused. Really, building any kind of backdoor is a serious security risk, since any backdoor that the "good guys" can use also carries a risk that the "bad guys" will discover it. But beyond all the normal security risks, we now know that our this kind of access has been abused by various forms of law enforcement in ways that are ethically questionable if not illegal.
So... sorry. You no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. If you wanted our good faith, you shouldn't have secretly abused the system.
I don't even really want to argue with you, because I'm sensing that you're going to be one of *those* people who get irrationally butthurt when science is against you. But just let me give you a simple explanation and example.
Last year, I cut my caloric intake a little and started working out more. Sure enough, I lost about 10 lbs and have kept it off. Good for me, I'm right in the range of healthy weight. So your understanding is supported by this. However, if we were to go back and count the calories I was eating when I was 17, I would bet money that I was eating a number approaching twice my current calorie count, if not more than twice the amount. The amount that I ate was absurd. And I was rail-thin back then, around 30 lbs less than I now weigh. So I eat less now, exercise more, and weigh 30 lbs heavier.
If diet were simple thermodynamics, this would be physically impossible. More calories with less energy expenditure should mean more mass, pure and simple. However, that's not the case. Have you ever noticed that when they try to estimate your BMR, they take age into account? That's because older people tend to use fewer calories per day. However, those BMR calculators you see, where you enter your age, weight, height, and gender-- those are just providing estimates. Two people of the same age, weight, height, and gender can have different BMRs.
So on a practical level, given that we don't yet have a good way of fine-tuning our metabolisms, cutting calories is the best way to lose weight. However, claiming that human digestion is just "basic thermodynamics" is ignorant.
You can't gain weight by expending more calories than you consume without violating known physical laws.
Right, I'm not disagreeing with that. That puts one limit on the system-- you can't expend more calories than you take in. However, you can and do expend fewer calories than you take in, and there are variances on that number, and what limit there might be on that side is still undetermined.
Calories in means all calories in. Calories out means all calories: maintenance, exercise, whatever calories are in the waste products.
Yes, again, that's true enough, once you admit that we don't know what determines the number of calories in "maintenance" and "waste products", but that it can vary significantly from one person to another. Those would be the complications I mention.
If calories in is greater than calories out, you gain weight. If calories in is less than calories out, you lose weight.
Yeah, but I was making a particular point here. What I quoted is true enough, but it depends on what you mean by "calories in" and "calories out". If when you say, "calories in" you mean, "total number of calories eaten," and "calories out" you mean, "calories expended in exercise", then no, that equation is really far off. If, however, "calories in" is just "the number of calories your body absorbs and makes use of" and "calories out" means "total number of calories your body expends in any way at all," then yeah, that's true, but it doesn't address the complexity of what's going on. It's a bit like saying, "Running a big company is just simple budgeting. Make more money then you spend, and you'll make a profit." -- which, yeah, that's kind of true, but not really a fair assessment of the complexities of running a company.
Your body is a complex system. If you have two people of the same height and weight, with the same diet and same exercise routine, it's not at all unlikely that one could lose weight while the other gains weight. Or the same person with the same diet and exercise routine might gain or lose weight at different times in that one person's life. And the fact is, we don't exactly know why that is. So no, it's not just simple thermodynamics.
I think they also just aren't thinking about the quality of the service they're providing. Their customers are stuck with them, so why should they care about customer satisfaction? Why invest in R&D for new cool equipment, or pay for the fancy stuff that someone else has delivered, when they can just deliver the same old shit they always have?
I think it's a whole series of things. Like you said, they keep trying to push up the monthly fee one way or another, and they don't let you do a la carte. They also pretty much force you to get their cable boxes and DVRs, which they also charge you a monthly fee for. And those cable boxes and DVRs suck. They feel like 15 year old tech, and they constantly break. They're big and bulky, and make a lot of heat and noise for something that seems slower and less powerful than my mobile phone.
And you have no choices. You're pretty much tied to your ISP, and you might have no other choices in your area. Or if you're lucky, there might be a choice between FIOS and your cable provider. Either way, the customer service will be atrocious. And you can't just watch your shows on demand, unless it's one of the few shows they're offering on demand or you set your DVR ahead of time. While you're paying for all these channels that you may not want, they keep degrading the quality of them. The History Channel isn't historical. The Learning Channel doesn't involve learning. And then on top of all this, even though you're paying a huge monthly fee, you still have to watch advertising.
There's only so much shittiness you can heap onto a product before people stop buying it.
You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
It's sort of almost that simple, but not quite. I know I'm walking into a mine field, here, because a lot of people seem to have a lot invested in thinking that digestion is just "basic thermodynamics", but it's a little more complicated. I'm only bothering to raise this because I think a lot of people try to argue that being overweight is a simple issue of "willpower" and "not eating so much", but there are some basic complications:
1) You can't actually make use of all calories in all food, though it's my understanding that nutritional labels already try to take that into account.
2) There seem to be other factors that can influence the number of calories you actually make use of, and we don't know all of those factors yet.
3) When taking into account the "calories you burn", the amount that you burn in exercise is typically very small in comparison to the amount you just burn by living.
4) The number of calories you "just burn by living" can be substantially different from one person to another. This number may be estimated by looking at simple factors (e.g. age, weight, gender), but in truth it can still vary quite a bit between people with the same stats, and we don't yet know exactly what determines the number of calories you burn automatically.
So while it's true enough that your weight will increase if you "consume more calories than you burn," it's really only that simple if you're counting the calories you "consume" as the amount your body makes use of, and the number you "burn" is not limited to the calories you burn in exercise. And then you should admit that we don't fully know the factors that determine how much you consume and how much you'll burn. There also do seem to be foods that create unfortunate effects for people trying to lose weight, such as failing to satisfy feelings of hunger while carrying a lot of calories. This doesn't violate the rule that "If you consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase," but it does help to explain why the kind of food that you eat can make a tremendous difference.
Getting back on topic, none of this helps Coca Cola's case. It's true in any case that, given the things that we currently know, the best way to lose weight is going to include eating fewer calories. Insofar as it not just being about eating fewer calories, but also making better food choices, you shouldn't be choosing Coca Cola products, for the most part.
In Warlizard's case (the guy who wrote the comment the GP reposted), he, talking about censorship, said that if reddit stands for "free speech" as they claim to, then no they shouldn't ban offensive subreddits like/r/rapingwomen.... SRS took the first part of that and ran with it, called him a "rapist," followed him around, harassing him, and leaving nasty reviews on Amazon of the books he's authored.
I had something very much like that happen on reddit a few years back. I forget the context, because the context was so amazingly innocuous. It was something like: Someone said of a suspected child rapist, "This guy doesn't deserve rights. He should just be dragged out into the middle of town and beaten to death." to which I responded, "No, obviously everyone should get a trial. We don't know what happened or what extenuating circumstances there might have been, which is why we have trials."
There was no response for a couple of hours, and then my inbox got flooded with people threatening me. I found that someone had responded to my post claiming that I was defending child molesters, and therefore must be one. The response was upvoted a couple hundred times, and there were a bunch of responses like, "Yeah, this guy is a piece of shit. How dare he defend child molesters."
The whole thing was so insane to me that I didn't even bother responding. I immediately deleted my account. It was one of those moments that makes me a little terrified of the Internet. I don't know exactly why my post became a target, whether someone linked to it on another subreddit or something, but I was pretty disturbed by the experience. I had the distinct feeling that if any personal information had been associated with my account, I would have been harassed and possibly assaulted in real life, simply because I made the mistake of advocating for due process and rule of law in a public forum.
My understanding is that the intended purpose of shadowbanning was for things like spam bots, with the idea that the bots can detect a normal ban and automatically switch to another non-banned account. At least based on some reddit conversations I've seen, you're not supposed to shadowban real people, but some mods and admins have been misusing the feature.
Even though the start screen was much hated, at least it was relatively well thought out.
I disagree pretty strongly. I mean, you shared your opinion, which is fair, and I'm just giving mine back in return, no disrespect intended.
But first, I find the whole Metro/Modern design to have been a bit misguided. It looked very nice, in my opinion, and it was smart to make bigger buttons that were touch-friendly for Windows tablets, but as many people will argue, I don't think it made sense on the desktop. But that's not really the problem I have with it.
The first problem is the design itself. They've made improvements over the past few years, but especially to start off with, the UI was inconsistent, filled with hidden menus if you performed the correct mouse click in the correct location, or if you hovered in the right place. It was pretty hard to tell which options would be in which menus, and which menus would be triggered by which actions. It was not very intuitive at all, even if you were using a Surface, which is essentially the device it was designed to run on.
And though I have a problem with the menus for being hidden (and seemingly random in terms of which options were in which menus), that's not even my biggest problem with the Start Screen. My single biggest issue is something subtle enough that many technical people overlooked it, because they tend to think in terms of functionality rather than experience: the Start Menu breaks context every time you load it.
Now I don't know if you'll immediately know what I mean there, and even if you do, you might think "That's a silly thing to complain about." It's not a complaint about functionality. It's a complaint about the psychological impact on the user whenever the Start Menu appears on the screen. To simplify (perhaps to oversimplify) we've developed a bunch of spacial metaphors that allow us to navigate our computers, where we treat things like they're physical objects in a physical location. Things are drawn on the screen in a 2D grid, and then we have some additional dimensional information (e.g. some windows are "behind" others, directories are depicted as "folders" and things are shown as being "in" the folder). So we're generally presented with a coherent spacial realm that we're operating within when we are working on our computers. Sometimes we are presented with very different kinds of spacial realms, such as when you load up a full screen game and you're immersed into a 3D world with drastically different physical rules than are present in your normal "desktop" spacial realm.
So that switch between the "desktop world" and the "game world" is a context switch. Your brain has to change its interpretation of what's going on to account for entering into a different spacial realm with different rules. Most of the time, you don't think much about it when you switch contexts, so it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. You go from typing in a Word processor to talking on the phone to talking with a person in real life to playing a video game, and it all seems pretty simple. It's kind of not, though. These kinds of context switches take a little toll on your brain whenever they happen, and it takes your brain a few seconds or minutes to recover. You usually don't really notice, but think about when you're in the middle of writing a complicated email, and someone interrupts you for a brief conversation-- when you go back to that email, you might take a few seconds or minutes to get back where you were before you can continue. It's not quite an instantaneous process.
So my problem with the Start Screen is that it sets up a change in context every single time you enter it. The existing spacial context of your desktop environment is wiped away and replaced with a different UI context with different rules. If I want to launch a program that's not on my desktop or task bar, I need to switch contexts to launch it, and then switch back to my original context once it's launched. If you're doing this frequently during the day, it can be pretty damned disrupting. It's just a really, really, extremely stupid UI convention, and I don't know how Microsoft thought it wouldn't be a problem.
I don't think it's and either/or situation. Every person who is rich or successful is lucky. Every single one. I don't care how hard they worked or how smart they were, every one of them had moments where if they'd turned left instead of right, or if some random person hadn't helped them, they would not have been able to make it all work.
But also, almost all of them had some kind of virtue that made it possible. It's not that the guy running a huge software company is necessarily the best programmer and best businessman, but maybe he is great at talking to people. Maybe he's great at putting a good team together. Maybe he's just very clever and sneaky, and is excellent at stabbing people in the back. Somehow, he got himself into that situation. Even people who inherit all of their money and who are essentially useless to society, they have to at least have enough sense not to squander their money, or else they won't stay rich for very long.
So it's not really, "Either they're good at things or they're lucky." It's more like, "They're definitely lucky and they're almost certainly good at something. But how good are they, and what exactly are they good at?"
People tend to idolize too easily... Steve Jobs could not have done anything without the engineers at Apple.
I think we also idolize too easily in the sense that we oversimplify people's characters. We both idolize and vilify. People are good or bad. They're good businessmen or they're bad businessmen. They're smart or they're stupid. They're nice or they're mean.
We don't like dealing with the subtlety of reality. Really, people are good in some ways, bad in others. Nice sometimes, mean other times. Good at certain aspects of running a business, but bad at other aspects, and the best and luckiest people manage to surround themselves with people who make up for their shortcomings.
I'm not sure it's necessary to have all your friends on the same service, but the more services they're spread across, the more accounts you have to create and maintain, the more places you have to check, the more sites you have to log into, and the more mobile apps you need to install if you want to stay on top of everything.
$2.42 per 400-calorie bottle so $12.08 a day,... cooking my self I can manage a (I hope) tastier alternative for less,... What is the gain in using this?
Well, you don't have to cook a meal yourself, so that's one benefit. Also, if we can assume that it is actually a "balanced meal" it does mean that you don't have to figure out or plan a balanced diet. The fact that it's liquid means that you can just gulp it down-- no need to silverware, no crumbs, no need to chew even. The fact that it is in an individual bottle that doesn't need refrigeration means that you don't have to mix it, and you can just grab a bottle, throw it in a bag, and go.
In short, it's very convenient. It's not the cheapest option or the tastiest option. But if you're someone who doesn't have the time or inclination to think about meals, and just wants balanced nutrition without spending any time or energy on it, then you're the target audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook. Those workflows don't only depend on Outlook, but through Outlook they depend on Exchange. So if you really want to displace Microsoft, you have to create a mail/groupware client to Outlook, either by creating one compatible with Exchange or creating groupware server to replace Exchange as well. Or you need to create an alternative to both of those things that won't screw up businesses' workflows. Or I guess you can convince businesses to overhaul their workflows.
The issue of "workflow" is a huge issue that too many people ignore. Even if a different software solution provides all the same "functionality", if it requires people to change how they work, they aren't going to go for it. It's especially difficult if it changes the way people work by requiring frequent repetitive steps (e.g. if you can do all the same things, but if doing it in Microsoft Office requires 2 clicks and LibreOffice requires 5 clicks, then people are going to get frustrated).
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.
That wouldn't make a lot of sense, since my family and friends don't know what Linux is.
Most of the people I encounter can barely use the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, which is something that LibreOffice has covered.
It's true enough, but honestly, it needs to be prettier. I know it's superficial and stupid, and everyone here will say that LibreOffice shouldn't bother trying to look "pretty" or that it's already "pretty" enough, but here's the thing: I've always had terrible luck getting people to use LibreOffice. My impression is that there's no particular reason in terms of functionality, but it looks to them like it's a cheap knock-off of an old version of Microsoft Office. On both Windows and Mac, the icons seem a bit out of place, the UI takes up too much screen real-estate because things are kind of spread out, the default fonts and formatting are less attractive, the dialog boxes don't look native to the OS, and I don't even know what else people are reacting to. I think some people are confused by the way that it's sort of all one single application, but also a bunch of different applications, depending on how you launch it...?
Anyway, I can't get people to use it, even when it's exactly the tool they need. I've had an easier time getting people to use Apple's Pages/Sheets, and not for technical reasons, but because the app is prettier, the templates are prettier, and it feels easier to make a pretty document. At least, that's what I think the difference is.
But suggesting that aesthetics matter has always been blasphemy here at Slashdot.
The fact that you don't even read what you post here is quite indicative.
I didn't read the whole study. Why should I? You asked for a study for proof of what anyone with any knowledge on the subject knows, and I provided that.
Now you change your argument. "Oh, I knew that different people have different metabolic rates, and we don't really know what determines that. I'm just going to backtrack on my argument that nutrition is simple thermodynamics and instead point out an idea that you already acknowledged, that nutrition is on some level subject to thermodynamics in some kind of general sense."
And this is why I don't like getting into arguments with people like you. You post snotty little misinformed replies on subjects you don't understand and then can't admit when you're wrong.
But that's OK - Hillary is a bona fide member of the protected spook/bankster class; she need not fear consequences, only maintain the charade well enough for the narrative to continue.
She doesn't even need to maintain the charade. She just has to stall long enough to employ the strategy that many politicians (including her husband) have used to great success in the past.
Step 1: Deny. "I didn't do it. I did nothing wrong."
Step 2: Stonewall. Delay. Wait.
Step 3: As evidence trickles out slowly, provide some kind of perfunctory defense. It doesn't have to be a strong defense, and actually shouldn't be a very good one. It should be just good enough that the people who want to support you can maintain their state of denial.
Step 4: When enough evidence, come clean, but underplay the importance. "Well yes, I did it, but so what? This is old news, and people have been after me for years about this stuff, and nobody cared. Sure, I said I didn't do it before, but all my lies and my attempts to defend myself were so stupid, you must have known I was lying, and you didn't care. If you didn't care then, why would you care now?"
Somehow we're all so stupid that we fall for this kind of thing all the time.
I'm not an expert on these things, but at least one thing that I've heard someone on the news claim about this whole thing is that messages are often classified after the fact. The way it's supposed to work, apparently, is that the Secretary of State uses his/her official email address to conduct all of their official business. They will often be emailing information that should be classified, but may not yet be. The information is generated and analyzed first, and later, someone analyzes the information and decides that it's classified. They then have people pour over the official emails and mark emails as classified when they find information that has since been classified.
So if what I've just written is true (I'm just relaying what some guy said on the news), then it would mean that part of the problem is that her email wasn't made available to the appropriate staff to be marked as classified. Yes, it was classified after the fact, but if the process is, "The secretary of state receives information in email, then analysts review the email, and *then* emails are marked classified," then she subverted the whole security process by having these emails sent to a server where those analysts wouldn't have access.
Sorry, but have you ever read anything about this, or are you just going on what your Crossfit trainer told you? Ok, fine:here's a study.
I didn't even read it, but if you don't like it, try googling "scientific study bmr" and I'm sure you'll find some more. It's a plain, ordinary, well know, uncontroversial fact that different people have different metabolic rates. You may as well be asking me to find you a study that shows, "shooting yourself in the foot will probably hurt." I used an example from my life in the hopes of giving you something really simple that you could wrap your little head around, so maybe you'd quit being such a tool.
To be honest with you, I trust the NSA MORE than a trust any local cop or prosecutor.
Well part of my issue with the whole thing is not really so much about whether I trust the NSA or my local police department, but more whether I trust a random NSA agent or police officer. I think the agencies involved certainly have bigger fish to fry than me, but a random dude with access to a lot of information... who knows what he'll do?
On the one hand, I understand what you're saying, that you think the local police are more likely to misuse it in small petty ways. However, I think the NSA is more competent to misuse it. They have a large scale systematic methods of collecting your information, and more tools and training to process it. I have doubts that my local beat cop can use a computer.
But then there have also been signs that the NSA is sharing some of its collected data with other government agencies... I think the FBI and ATF. I don't think there's been anything about local police departments. But that's not really the point. The point is, the NSA's misbehavior has, in my opinion, poisoned the well for any argument from any governmental organization that says, "Trust us. We'll only use this information responsibly."
I think I might have some small sympathy for the idea that law enforcement should have some recourse to access the contents of a cell phone, provided they first get a warrant. However, in light of what we've learned about the NSA spying, I don't see how anyone could trust that such a back door won't be abused. Really, building any kind of backdoor is a serious security risk, since any backdoor that the "good guys" can use also carries a risk that the "bad guys" will discover it. But beyond all the normal security risks, we now know that our this kind of access has been abused by various forms of law enforcement in ways that are ethically questionable if not illegal.
So... sorry. You no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt. If you wanted our good faith, you shouldn't have secretly abused the system.
I don't even really want to argue with you, because I'm sensing that you're going to be one of *those* people who get irrationally butthurt when science is against you. But just let me give you a simple explanation and example.
Last year, I cut my caloric intake a little and started working out more. Sure enough, I lost about 10 lbs and have kept it off. Good for me, I'm right in the range of healthy weight. So your understanding is supported by this. However, if we were to go back and count the calories I was eating when I was 17, I would bet money that I was eating a number approaching twice my current calorie count, if not more than twice the amount. The amount that I ate was absurd. And I was rail-thin back then, around 30 lbs less than I now weigh. So I eat less now, exercise more, and weigh 30 lbs heavier.
If diet were simple thermodynamics, this would be physically impossible. More calories with less energy expenditure should mean more mass, pure and simple. However, that's not the case. Have you ever noticed that when they try to estimate your BMR, they take age into account? That's because older people tend to use fewer calories per day. However, those BMR calculators you see, where you enter your age, weight, height, and gender-- those are just providing estimates. Two people of the same age, weight, height, and gender can have different BMRs.
So on a practical level, given that we don't yet have a good way of fine-tuning our metabolisms, cutting calories is the best way to lose weight. However, claiming that human digestion is just "basic thermodynamics" is ignorant.
You can't gain weight by expending more calories than you consume without violating known physical laws.
Right, I'm not disagreeing with that. That puts one limit on the system-- you can't expend more calories than you take in. However, you can and do expend fewer calories than you take in, and there are variances on that number, and what limit there might be on that side is still undetermined.
Calories in means all calories in. Calories out means all calories: maintenance, exercise, whatever calories are in the waste products.
Yes, again, that's true enough, once you admit that we don't know what determines the number of calories in "maintenance" and "waste products", but that it can vary significantly from one person to another. Those would be the complications I mention.
If calories in is greater than calories out, you gain weight. If calories in is less than calories out, you lose weight.
Yeah, but I was making a particular point here. What I quoted is true enough, but it depends on what you mean by "calories in" and "calories out". If when you say, "calories in" you mean, "total number of calories eaten," and "calories out" you mean, "calories expended in exercise", then no, that equation is really far off. If, however, "calories in" is just "the number of calories your body absorbs and makes use of" and "calories out" means "total number of calories your body expends in any way at all," then yeah, that's true, but it doesn't address the complexity of what's going on. It's a bit like saying, "Running a big company is just simple budgeting. Make more money then you spend, and you'll make a profit." -- which, yeah, that's kind of true, but not really a fair assessment of the complexities of running a company.
Your body is a complex system. If you have two people of the same height and weight, with the same diet and same exercise routine, it's not at all unlikely that one could lose weight while the other gains weight. Or the same person with the same diet and exercise routine might gain or lose weight at different times in that one person's life. And the fact is, we don't exactly know why that is. So no, it's not just simple thermodynamics.
I think they also just aren't thinking about the quality of the service they're providing. Their customers are stuck with them, so why should they care about customer satisfaction? Why invest in R&D for new cool equipment, or pay for the fancy stuff that someone else has delivered, when they can just deliver the same old shit they always have?
I think it's a whole series of things. Like you said, they keep trying to push up the monthly fee one way or another, and they don't let you do a la carte. They also pretty much force you to get their cable boxes and DVRs, which they also charge you a monthly fee for. And those cable boxes and DVRs suck. They feel like 15 year old tech, and they constantly break. They're big and bulky, and make a lot of heat and noise for something that seems slower and less powerful than my mobile phone.
And you have no choices. You're pretty much tied to your ISP, and you might have no other choices in your area. Or if you're lucky, there might be a choice between FIOS and your cable provider. Either way, the customer service will be atrocious. And you can't just watch your shows on demand, unless it's one of the few shows they're offering on demand or you set your DVR ahead of time. While you're paying for all these channels that you may not want, they keep degrading the quality of them. The History Channel isn't historical. The Learning Channel doesn't involve learning. And then on top of all this, even though you're paying a huge monthly fee, you still have to watch advertising.
There's only so much shittiness you can heap onto a product before people stop buying it.
You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
It's sort of almost that simple, but not quite. I know I'm walking into a mine field, here, because a lot of people seem to have a lot invested in thinking that digestion is just "basic thermodynamics", but it's a little more complicated. I'm only bothering to raise this because I think a lot of people try to argue that being overweight is a simple issue of "willpower" and "not eating so much", but there are some basic complications:
1) You can't actually make use of all calories in all food, though it's my understanding that nutritional labels already try to take that into account.
2) There seem to be other factors that can influence the number of calories you actually make use of, and we don't know all of those factors yet.
3) When taking into account the "calories you burn", the amount that you burn in exercise is typically very small in comparison to the amount you just burn by living.
4) The number of calories you "just burn by living" can be substantially different from one person to another. This number may be estimated by looking at simple factors (e.g. age, weight, gender), but in truth it can still vary quite a bit between people with the same stats, and we don't yet know exactly what determines the number of calories you burn automatically.
So while it's true enough that your weight will increase if you "consume more calories than you burn," it's really only that simple if you're counting the calories you "consume" as the amount your body makes use of, and the number you "burn" is not limited to the calories you burn in exercise. And then you should admit that we don't fully know the factors that determine how much you consume and how much you'll burn. There also do seem to be foods that create unfortunate effects for people trying to lose weight, such as failing to satisfy feelings of hunger while carrying a lot of calories. This doesn't violate the rule that "If you consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase," but it does help to explain why the kind of food that you eat can make a tremendous difference.
Getting back on topic, none of this helps Coca Cola's case. It's true in any case that, given the things that we currently know, the best way to lose weight is going to include eating fewer calories. Insofar as it not just being about eating fewer calories, but also making better food choices, you shouldn't be choosing Coca Cola products, for the most part.
In Warlizard's case (the guy who wrote the comment the GP reposted), he, talking about censorship, said that if reddit stands for "free speech" as they claim to, then no they shouldn't ban offensive subreddits like /r/rapingwomen.... SRS took the first part of that and ran with it, called him a "rapist," followed him around, harassing him, and leaving nasty reviews on Amazon of the books he's authored.
I had something very much like that happen on reddit a few years back. I forget the context, because the context was so amazingly innocuous. It was something like: Someone said of a suspected child rapist, "This guy doesn't deserve rights. He should just be dragged out into the middle of town and beaten to death." to which I responded, "No, obviously everyone should get a trial. We don't know what happened or what extenuating circumstances there might have been, which is why we have trials."
There was no response for a couple of hours, and then my inbox got flooded with people threatening me. I found that someone had responded to my post claiming that I was defending child molesters, and therefore must be one. The response was upvoted a couple hundred times, and there were a bunch of responses like, "Yeah, this guy is a piece of shit. How dare he defend child molesters."
The whole thing was so insane to me that I didn't even bother responding. I immediately deleted my account. It was one of those moments that makes me a little terrified of the Internet. I don't know exactly why my post became a target, whether someone linked to it on another subreddit or something, but I was pretty disturbed by the experience. I had the distinct feeling that if any personal information had been associated with my account, I would have been harassed and possibly assaulted in real life, simply because I made the mistake of advocating for due process and rule of law in a public forum.
My understanding is that the intended purpose of shadowbanning was for things like spam bots, with the idea that the bots can detect a normal ban and automatically switch to another non-banned account. At least based on some reddit conversations I've seen, you're not supposed to shadowban real people, but some mods and admins have been misusing the feature.
Even though the start screen was much hated, at least it was relatively well thought out.
I disagree pretty strongly. I mean, you shared your opinion, which is fair, and I'm just giving mine back in return, no disrespect intended.
But first, I find the whole Metro/Modern design to have been a bit misguided. It looked very nice, in my opinion, and it was smart to make bigger buttons that were touch-friendly for Windows tablets, but as many people will argue, I don't think it made sense on the desktop. But that's not really the problem I have with it.
The first problem is the design itself. They've made improvements over the past few years, but especially to start off with, the UI was inconsistent, filled with hidden menus if you performed the correct mouse click in the correct location, or if you hovered in the right place. It was pretty hard to tell which options would be in which menus, and which menus would be triggered by which actions. It was not very intuitive at all, even if you were using a Surface, which is essentially the device it was designed to run on.
And though I have a problem with the menus for being hidden (and seemingly random in terms of which options were in which menus), that's not even my biggest problem with the Start Screen. My single biggest issue is something subtle enough that many technical people overlooked it, because they tend to think in terms of functionality rather than experience: the Start Menu breaks context every time you load it.
Now I don't know if you'll immediately know what I mean there, and even if you do, you might think "That's a silly thing to complain about." It's not a complaint about functionality. It's a complaint about the psychological impact on the user whenever the Start Menu appears on the screen. To simplify (perhaps to oversimplify) we've developed a bunch of spacial metaphors that allow us to navigate our computers, where we treat things like they're physical objects in a physical location. Things are drawn on the screen in a 2D grid, and then we have some additional dimensional information (e.g. some windows are "behind" others, directories are depicted as "folders" and things are shown as being "in" the folder). So we're generally presented with a coherent spacial realm that we're operating within when we are working on our computers. Sometimes we are presented with very different kinds of spacial realms, such as when you load up a full screen game and you're immersed into a 3D world with drastically different physical rules than are present in your normal "desktop" spacial realm.
So that switch between the "desktop world" and the "game world" is a context switch. Your brain has to change its interpretation of what's going on to account for entering into a different spacial realm with different rules. Most of the time, you don't think much about it when you switch contexts, so it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. You go from typing in a Word processor to talking on the phone to talking with a person in real life to playing a video game, and it all seems pretty simple. It's kind of not, though. These kinds of context switches take a little toll on your brain whenever they happen, and it takes your brain a few seconds or minutes to recover. You usually don't really notice, but think about when you're in the middle of writing a complicated email, and someone interrupts you for a brief conversation-- when you go back to that email, you might take a few seconds or minutes to get back where you were before you can continue. It's not quite an instantaneous process.
So my problem with the Start Screen is that it sets up a change in context every single time you enter it. The existing spacial context of your desktop environment is wiped away and replaced with a different UI context with different rules. If I want to launch a program that's not on my desktop or task bar, I need to switch contexts to launch it, and then switch back to my original context once it's launched. If you're doing this frequently during the day, it can be pretty damned disrupting. It's just a really, really, extremely stupid UI convention, and I don't know how Microsoft thought it wouldn't be a problem.
Well, LibreOffice just hit version 5.0, while OpenOffice is at 4.1.1. Obviously, LibreOffice is exactly 0.8.9 amount better.
I don't think it's and either/or situation. Every person who is rich or successful is lucky. Every single one. I don't care how hard they worked or how smart they were, every one of them had moments where if they'd turned left instead of right, or if some random person hadn't helped them, they would not have been able to make it all work.
But also, almost all of them had some kind of virtue that made it possible. It's not that the guy running a huge software company is necessarily the best programmer and best businessman, but maybe he is great at talking to people. Maybe he's great at putting a good team together. Maybe he's just very clever and sneaky, and is excellent at stabbing people in the back. Somehow, he got himself into that situation. Even people who inherit all of their money and who are essentially useless to society, they have to at least have enough sense not to squander their money, or else they won't stay rich for very long.
So it's not really, "Either they're good at things or they're lucky." It's more like, "They're definitely lucky and they're almost certainly good at something. But how good are they, and what exactly are they good at?"
People tend to idolize too easily... Steve Jobs could not have done anything without the engineers at Apple.
I think we also idolize too easily in the sense that we oversimplify people's characters. We both idolize and vilify. People are good or bad. They're good businessmen or they're bad businessmen. They're smart or they're stupid. They're nice or they're mean.
We don't like dealing with the subtlety of reality. Really, people are good in some ways, bad in others. Nice sometimes, mean other times. Good at certain aspects of running a business, but bad at other aspects, and the best and luckiest people manage to surround themselves with people who make up for their shortcomings.
I'm hoping this will be a live action adaptation of the 80s cartoon.
Well my friend, you just illustrated my point.
I'm not sure it's necessary to have all your friends on the same service, but the more services they're spread across, the more accounts you have to create and maintain, the more places you have to check, the more sites you have to log into, and the more mobile apps you need to install if you want to stay on top of everything.
$2.42 per 400-calorie bottle so $12.08 a day,... cooking my self I can manage a (I hope) tastier alternative for less,... What is the gain in using this?
Well, you don't have to cook a meal yourself, so that's one benefit. Also, if we can assume that it is actually a "balanced meal" it does mean that you don't have to figure out or plan a balanced diet. The fact that it's liquid means that you can just gulp it down-- no need to silverware, no crumbs, no need to chew even. The fact that it is in an individual bottle that doesn't need refrigeration means that you don't have to mix it, and you can just grab a bottle, throw it in a bag, and go.
In short, it's very convenient. It's not the cheapest option or the tastiest option. But if you're someone who doesn't have the time or inclination to think about meals, and just wants balanced nutrition without spending any time or energy on it, then you're the target audience.