It's a good question, but I don't share your dismissal that it's just, "criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment."
As someone with experience hiring/managing/firing people, I think there is something to the criticism that our schools don't prepare people for the need of critical thinking in the "real world", and it's a criticism that I've made many times. As I see it, it's very common to see workers in the position of having been given instructions on how to deal with a problem, and then encountering a situation where those instructions don't apply. How does the worker respond?
In my experience, very often the worker will just follow the instructions anyway, even if they notice that they're doing something that makes no sense and will obviously cause problems. A fair amount of the time-- again, at least in my experience-- workers will follow the instructions up until a point, figure out that they can't proceed, and then do some other things that also don't make sense, and then pretend that they've finished the job. Every once in a while, if someone is smart, they'll stop and ask for further guidance, but that's rare because nobody likes to admit that they don't know the answer. Even more rarely, someone will actually come up with a comprehensive solution that actually solves the problem.
And really, all that is just one symptom. Another symptom is the extent to which people will come to work, do exactly what they've been asked to do, and nothing more. Often, there's no curiosity about the role that they're playing within the company, about how their role could be expanded or refined, or somehow changed. Even the better employees are generally those who just follow instructions, and those people rarely seem to grasp why they were provided those specific instructions, let alone figure out a better set of instructions for themselves. And if they had come up with a better solution, they rarely suggest it to their boss.
So what is "critical thinking" in this context? I think it involves "problem solving", which might be no less vague. It involves a sort of curiosity, to want to know what's actually going on, and why those things are going on. I'm not sure what else...
But school often doesn't prepare us for that. We're trained to sit down, shut up, do exactly what we're told and no more. Don't ask questions. Don't imagine that you might be able to come up with a better solution. Just do what you're told, and don't think too much about it.
For example, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online" could be enhanced to something like, say, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online. Further on/off messages are suspended for 8 hours unless you click."
I think I mentioned elsewhere, a part of the problem with the sort of notifications I'm talking about is that I'm receiving them from many different vendors/services/devices who each choose their own standards, forms, and methodologies. It's the nature of things that I don't necessarily have any control over what I receive, how I receive it, when I receive it, or what form it comes in as. If I could even control what came in the subject line, then I wouldn't consider it such a problem.
For example, it's not just notifications saying, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online", but also any number of different notifications from different domain registrars that a domain is about to expire. I can't make GoDaddy, Namecheap, and NetworkSolutions follow the same procedures for how far in advance I get notified that a domain will expire, or what that notification will look like. I can't even stop one of those companies from deciding to change their own policies, changing the subject, content, and sender of those kinds of notifications. In fact, just to give an example, Dropbox uses Mailchimp for a bunch of their notifications, which means that each email is sent from a different sender address.
You can say, "Well these companies should have a better method of notification than email," or "These companies should be following certain standards," but good luck with making that happen. Until you can come up with a better solution, I'd really appreciate if someone could come up with some good tools for managing this kind of flood of notifications.
'felt like crap' for several days (enough so that he was taking his temp regularly)
Actually, he was supposed to be taking his temperature regularly even if he felt fine. That was part of the protocol for coming back from an Ebola outbreak.
I don't know about that. The reports that I've read have admitted that he was feeling ill in the days beforehand, but that he didn't have a fever. At least, he says he didn't have a fever, and he says he was taking his temperature twice a day, as he was supposed to. So I guess it depends on whether you want to take his word for it-- referring to the guy who knew he might have Ebola, was feeling sick, and still decided to go bowling.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on, "He wasn't checking his temperature and doesn't really know when the fever started."
When there's cooperation, the settings that deliver best mutual benefit should be worked out by direct interaction, for the sake of effectiveness. That would put email back into its role of transport mechanism, where it belongs.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but email transport is still in its role of transport mechanism, whereas email clients are still in their role of sorting and arranging emails for display by a user in a configurable way. I'm not sure what there is to be changed there. Do you feel like explaining your comment?
Some of that kind of nonsense happens in Powerpoint presentations-- embedding images that might be a couple hundred megabytes each. I see that in marketing companies often enough, but it's still been a pretty steady rate of growth for the past few years.
However, I still don't see multi-gigabyte Word or Excel documents, at least not often enough that I recall it.
Well yeah, lots of people are. An awful lot of work is still done in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. No need to embed a 5 GB video just because you have the space.
In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.
Not in mine. Granted, we're both going off of anecdotal evidence, but in my favor, my experience is based off of managing a few hundred servers and a couple thousand desktops.
It seems like most workstations/servers that I manage, if they're taking up massive amounts of space, it's very often because they're storing lots of old stuff. Several years ago, when we only had a 30 GB drives, people would go back and clear out, delete, and archive old data. Now they just store it, because why not? Storage is cheap. Most of the time, it doesn't seem like the data set is growing faster, but they're just holding on to old stuff longer.
So yes, I think it's true, if you have a 60 GB drive that's 90% full, it's a more pressing concern than if you have a 10 TB RAID that's 90% full. The RAID may be a bigger problem, but it's a less immediate problem.
Actually, I'd like to see better methods of processing/digesting email, but not for personal email.
My work email is flooded with all kinds of junk, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to improve that. I get a bunch of ads that I wouldn't necessarily call "spam", but their ads. I actually want to get some of them (they're sometimes relevant to my job), but it's always super-low priority. I also get copied on a bunch of stuff that I might want to look at, often don't really need to, but that I do want to keep a record of the exchange in my email.
I also get automated notifications for certain kinds of things which could stand to have automated intelligent processing. For example, I might have an automated alert set to email me when a server isn't responding to a ping, and I *do* want to see that. However, if the server's internet connection goes flaky overnight, I might end up with 80 messages saying, "Error: server.domain.com is offline", and then a little while later, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online". It'd be nice to have all of those rolled up into a email digest that says, "You received a flood of messages with similar subjects. Here is a list of them, in order." I don't know practically how you'd do that, but I wouldn't mind if someone were to figure that out. Considering how much spam still gets through my spam filters, I don't expect a solution anytime soon.
Anyway, my only point here is that there are improvements that could be made.
That's no good as an answer. If you can't narrow the possibilities at all, then there's no point in planning at all. Maybe there will be a weird set of circumstances that require we send a donkey along on the mission. I mean, the possibilities are indefinite, so who knows what we could run into. Maybe the best solution is to send a crew made entirely of 5 year olds.
You've got to narrow it down. How can you make things as robust and redundant as possible, covering all the most likely possibilities, and as many of the unlikely possibilities as you can, without being wasteful? That's why NASA needs smart people to try to figure things out, rather than throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh well, we can't figure it out!"
I don't know that it would mean an all-female crew. I'm just saying it's not as simple as saying, "Well it's possible that you'll need strength, because anything is possible."
companionship from the opposite sex will likely be important for long term mental health.
Or it could cause problems. Imagine having to break off a relationship while stuck in a tiny spaceship with that person for months. Imagine if one of the women became pregnant. Lots of things could go wrong.
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
I don't know... I think it'd make sense to try to evaluate the likelihood of needing that raw strength. What are possible situations that a manned mission to Mars would need strength? Now eliminate all of those situations where a group of women would be strong enough to accomplish the task. Now that that set, and eliminate the situations in which men would not be strong enough. Now you have the set of situations/tasks where men's strength would be of benefit to the mission.
Now you do a sort of risk analysis. Take each of the remaining tasks, and start looking at what the probability that the crew will be in a position to do that task. If the probability is low enough eliminate that task from your list. Look at what the consequences are for failing to perform that task. If the consequences are below a certain level of importance, eliminate them from your list. Look at what the alternatives are for performing each task.
Now take the remaining tasks, and weight the cost of the additional weight (and any other complications from including men) and weigh it against the consequences of not being able to complete those remaining tasks. How does that comparison work out?
I have no idea, frankly, but that's roughly how the decision should be made. I really don't know how often raw strength becomes an issue for space travel.
Career-wise, it would be useful to tell us the likelihood of making each earning bracket *by career*.
Of course, depending on how you break it down, that might not tell you what you think it will. Like "Most likely to make millions of dollars per year" might give you top careers like:
Sure, with those careers, you're pretty much guaranteed to be rich. But what are the chances that you'll get one of those careers? If you wanted to try to plot your career path, it'd probably be better to look at the most common jobs that are most likely to pay well. So there are a lot of physicians making a lot of money. If you set out to become a physician, your chances of getting rich are better than if you set out to be a lottery winner.
Of course, there's another problem. These are the top earners right now, but we don't know what things will look like in 10 years. If you're 18 and trying to figure out what to do with your life, then being a physician would seem to be a great choice. Hypothetically, if there were medical breakthroughs in the next 10 years that completely cure all diseases and health problems, then you might find you get out of medical school without much of a career lined up.
It's not below the "poverty level", but $100k isn't exactly "rolling in it" if you're living in NYC. It's enough for a single person to live in a good apartment in a pretty good neighborhood, but you're not talking about a second sports car for a "sweet downtown loft". $100k is still in the range where you're probably just hoping your tiny Brooklyn apartment's rent doesn't go up, because if it does, you don't know where you're going to be able to move to.
I'm not trying to convince you to like OSX, but just to attempt to give an explanation:
Compared to Dolphin, I find Finder far too limited, especially the inability to show hidden files. I've got no idea why there is no such menu toggle built into it. What are Apple afraid of? This is especially annoying when I have to look for.m2 and.git files. Sure, I can use the command line, but it's not as intuitive.
As someone who provides support for general users, I think Apple has handled this reasonably well. There are a lot of hidden files that a lot of people would find confusing. There are.DS_Store files and.Trash folders, along with the/etc directory in the root. If they had a little button on the Finder to "show hidden files", I have no doubt that there would be a lot of users who would hit it, see all the "Junk" in places they didn't like, and try to delete it.
Apple provides a option to show all files that can easily be changed from the command line. If you have trouble making this change, then you're not someone who should see those files. Seems reasonable to me.
The mouse scrolling was odd; the whole concept of "accelerating" while operating the wheel doesn't feel as natural as moving 2-3 lines with each movement. I had to download an app to get it the way I wanted (or, the same as it works in Windows and KDE).
Seems like a preference issue. To each his own, I guess. I thought you were going to complain about the "natural scrolling", which is something I'd have a lot more sympathy for, but which is also an option that can easily be changed.
It took me ages to realise that Command-Tab cycles through open applications, but not the windows. I found several windows all hidden behind one another that had been there for days, because OS X's window manager didn't present them to me. Apparently, I have to use Expose or something like that to see all of them.
Again, seems like a bit of an issue of preference. Ultimately, Apple's logical breakdown of running processes is much more aimed at whole applications rather than windows. Notice that each application has one button on the dock, regardless of how many windows you have open. Notice that you can often close all the windows of an application without closing the application. Notice that you can (depending on some thing) close the application without actually closing the windows, i.e. the application closes and the windows disappear, but when you reopen the application, the windows are all there where you left them.
Their approach is sensible, and it doesn't seem to be obviously wrong, but I can understand why you'd want it the other way.
Oddly, most things on Mac are Command+. However, on the command line, Ctrl+C is still used to break a program.
In my opinion, it's actually fairly nice that way. You can use Command+C to paste text into a terminal window, and Ctrl+C to break the current program. Less confusing than windows, where the short-cut's effect will change depending on context. In fact, Microsoft has been advertising the ability to use Ctrl-V to paste into a command line in Windows 10. Apparently, it's one of Windows 10's biggest features.
My Mac has been set up to be case insensitive. LS, GrEp, cAT, TAIl all behave as if they had been typed lowercase.
Yeah, this is... well... it's a bit unfortunate because it can cause some confusion. It's an issue with their file system (HFS+), which has been made semi-case-sensitive. For example, you can do "mkdir tEsT\ dIrEcToRy" and you'll get a directory called "tEsT dIrEcToRy", maintaining the case that you types in. However, if you then type "rmdir 'Test Directory'" then it will delete it. Essentially, it's case-sensitive when writing but not case-sensitive when reading.
including things like their version of Androids Intents (that they call "extensions")....notifications pane from iOS (stolen from Android, natch)...
Right, so you're upset that Apple is using plugins, extensions, and notifications because all of those things were invented by Android developers. Sure.
They're making it possible to make and receive phone calls on the desktop.
So they've added functionality. I don't' think anyone is complaining about Windows 8 for added functionality.
They're changing a bunch of apps to more closely mimic the cellphone UI. According to the review itself, this is resulting in UIs with excessive whitespace...
You might need to point that out in the review. I don't doubt what you're saying, I just need context, and skimming the review for a second, I didn't see anything specific about that.
Having used Yosemite for a while, I don't see there being a lot of extra unused space due to "mimicking the cellphone UI". It actually seems like, in a lot of cases (e.g. Safari), they've cut down on "wasted space" in a way that may have been inspired by the cellphone UI, but not in a way that sacrifices functionality. I definitely haven't had the experience of noticing that things are spaced out strangely as though it were optimizing OSX for touch interaction.
Mostly it seems like they just re-skinned it. The textures and colors are different, with almost the same spacing.
We'll never reach a stage of certainty that nothing will go wrong. To paraphrase, it's difficult to make things foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
Yes, I agree with you. There's always risk. However, when it comes to going into space, the whole process is dangerous and expensive enough when we've done everything we can to control the risks. Like you said, I think we mostly agree. I'm just arguing that we should work on the problem of sustainability first, keeping in mind the eventual aim of using that knowledge and technology for space travel and colonization. We shouldn't try to employ those techniques in space before we have good reason to think that we can be successful.
So, for example, the whole bio-dome thing failed the two times that we've tried it, but as you point out, we learned things. Let's try it some more! Let's continue to learn from that until we have a solid grasp on the requirements for building a sustainable biosphere.
From what I can see of Yosemite, Apple is doing the same thing with Mac OS X.
Can you be more specific as to what you're referring to? The biggest difference in the UI is that they reskinned things and change the icons and whatnot. You might not like the changes, but it's hardly the same thing as Windows 8's problems. The only things I can think of that make it more like their mobile OS-- at least this is all I can think of off the top of my head:
1) They added "Launchpad", which was done a couple of versions ago and is completely optional. Remove it from the dock and you never have to see it again.
2) They expanded the functionality of the notification area, and I don't really see there being a lot of grounds for complaints
3) They have a controlled "App Store", which again, was added a few versions ago and is optional.
4) They added an application for Maps...? I guess this makes it more like a mobile device. Again, optional.
5) Their chat/messaging application has increased support for SMS messages, which is additional functionality, and at least sort of optional.
I do generally agree with you, but, I don't think we should get too hung up on the idea of an enclosed system, as that's not actually what we live in
Yeah, that's fair, but it's a system without a lot of input or output, and the input is mostly sunlight. For example, I'd have no problem with the idea of an artificial biosphere having solar power. Still, my point is that we can't seem to make a successful almost-closed system here on earth, so why would we attempt doing it on the moon first, where the stakes will be so much higher?
My memory of the sorts of problems they faced were-- yes, some kind of insect infestation. Also, they made parts of the building out of concrete that they only later realized was either absorbing oxygen or putting out CO2. Part of my point here is, you wouldn't want to drag a bunch of people to the moon and then have that problem there. Let's get our shit together first.
And people tend to focus on things like, "can we renew the oxygen and food sources?" But then there are problems like, "What do we do when all the solar panels break or degrade? Do we have the facilities to recycle them? Can we gather the materials needed to build more?" Shipping more to the moon might not be too bad. But if we want to talk about having a sustainable colony on Mars or eventually interstellar travel, we would need to consider that kind of thing.
Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
I think this is a problem that we need to confront first: Figuring out how to live in a sustainable closed system.
Were people ever successful in those bio-dome experiments? Are we now able to build an enclosed biosphere that can function sustainably, indefinitely, without bringing in materials or resources from the outside once you get started? There's not much point in trying to build something like that in space until we know how to build a sustainable closed system, reliably, without fail, here on Earth. Doing it in space will be more expensive, and failures will be less forgiving. It seems to me that we don't even know how to live sustainably within the biosphere we inherited, already running, the size of the Earth.
The key word here is "sustainability". Can we live in an enclosed system, indefinitely, without using up all of our resources or making it unlivable with our waste and pollution? It's the key to being able to conduct long-term space travel. It's the key to being able to build an off-planet colony. It's the key to continuing to live right here on this planet.
You list Tolkien as though those properties haven't had their share of movies. In fact, I'd say that the second Captain America movie is, all told, a better movie than any of the Hobbit movies.
I think your best point is "They have a built in market." It's true that, if you release a big-budget movie about a popular character, there are some people who will watch it pretty much no matter what. That's why so many new movies are some kind of adaptation or remake-- so that they can count on a pre-existing audience who will see it, even if it's bad, if only out of curiousity or loyalty to the original work.
The rest of your points aren't quite fair, though. You could argue that the writing isn't amazing and that there's a lot of action, but the movie industry has been putting out dumb action movies for an awfully long time now, and it didn't start with comic-book movies. And really... the writing isn't necessarily bad.
I don't think they're easy. You have a few decades of really bad comic-book movies to demonstrate how easy it is to make a bad one. And I don't think "people are rarely disappointed". There's a bit of a consensus that the third X-Men was bad, the first Wolverine movie was terrible, and the Fantastic Four movies were pretty awful. A lot of people weren't particularly happy with "Man of Steel", either. Go back to the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, and I don't think you could sum up people's feelings about them with a word better than "disappointed".
I think the real explanation is that Sam Raimi showed everyone that you could make a good superhero movie that took the source material seriously, and then Christopher Nolan showed that you could make one that is also simply a good movie. Those were still one-offs and flukes, though, until Marvel showed that you could take a systematic approach toward leveraging these kinds of properties into a series of movies, and DC/Warner (as well as Fox) are looking to emulate that.
And though they might not be to your taste, a lot of these things aren't bad movies. Especially not if you compare them to other summer blockbuster action movies.
Seems like a dumb question, but it really becomes pretty unclear what people mean by the word, when you start listening to what people say. Is "capitalism" an economic system that promotes private ownership of the means of production, with minimal (or no) governmental/public oversight? Is "capitalism" a moral system that holds tenets such as "Greed is a healthy and beneficial impulse that promotes economic growth, which benefits us all," and "the goodness of action can be measured by its ability to generate profit," and "rich people are inherently better than poor people, or how else would they have become more successful?" Is "capitalism" a political system, some kind of subset of "plutocracy" where the public world is governed by the wealthy in proportion to their ability to leverage their economic power to influence political campaigns?
It seems really important to know what "capitalism" is if we want to determine whether we're becoming more or less "capitalist". Once we know what "capitalism" is, we would also have to analyze our political/legal/trade/economic policies to determine whether we're becoming more or less "capitalist", whatever we determine that to be.
Also, if we really wanted to try to determine causation, we'd probably have to determine how long it might take for policies to have an effect, and then compare that to the history of various economic trends. For example, it probably wouldn't make sense to blame an ongoing economic problem that started 10 years ago on an economic policy that was instituted yesterday.
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It's a good question, but I don't share your dismissal that it's just, "criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment."
As someone with experience hiring/managing/firing people, I think there is something to the criticism that our schools don't prepare people for the need of critical thinking in the "real world", and it's a criticism that I've made many times. As I see it, it's very common to see workers in the position of having been given instructions on how to deal with a problem, and then encountering a situation where those instructions don't apply. How does the worker respond?
In my experience, very often the worker will just follow the instructions anyway, even if they notice that they're doing something that makes no sense and will obviously cause problems. A fair amount of the time-- again, at least in my experience-- workers will follow the instructions up until a point, figure out that they can't proceed, and then do some other things that also don't make sense, and then pretend that they've finished the job. Every once in a while, if someone is smart, they'll stop and ask for further guidance, but that's rare because nobody likes to admit that they don't know the answer. Even more rarely, someone will actually come up with a comprehensive solution that actually solves the problem.
And really, all that is just one symptom. Another symptom is the extent to which people will come to work, do exactly what they've been asked to do, and nothing more. Often, there's no curiosity about the role that they're playing within the company, about how their role could be expanded or refined, or somehow changed. Even the better employees are generally those who just follow instructions, and those people rarely seem to grasp why they were provided those specific instructions, let alone figure out a better set of instructions for themselves. And if they had come up with a better solution, they rarely suggest it to their boss.
So what is "critical thinking" in this context? I think it involves "problem solving", which might be no less vague. It involves a sort of curiosity, to want to know what's actually going on, and why those things are going on. I'm not sure what else...
But school often doesn't prepare us for that. We're trained to sit down, shut up, do exactly what we're told and no more. Don't ask questions. Don't imagine that you might be able to come up with a better solution. Just do what you're told, and don't think too much about it.
For example, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online" could be enhanced to something like, say, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online. Further on/off messages are suspended for 8 hours unless you click ."
I think I mentioned elsewhere, a part of the problem with the sort of notifications I'm talking about is that I'm receiving them from many different vendors/services/devices who each choose their own standards, forms, and methodologies. It's the nature of things that I don't necessarily have any control over what I receive, how I receive it, when I receive it, or what form it comes in as. If I could even control what came in the subject line, then I wouldn't consider it such a problem.
For example, it's not just notifications saying, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online", but also any number of different notifications from different domain registrars that a domain is about to expire. I can't make GoDaddy, Namecheap, and NetworkSolutions follow the same procedures for how far in advance I get notified that a domain will expire, or what that notification will look like. I can't even stop one of those companies from deciding to change their own policies, changing the subject, content, and sender of those kinds of notifications. In fact, just to give an example, Dropbox uses Mailchimp for a bunch of their notifications, which means that each email is sent from a different sender address.
You can say, "Well these companies should have a better method of notification than email," or "These companies should be following certain standards," but good luck with making that happen. Until you can come up with a better solution, I'd really appreciate if someone could come up with some good tools for managing this kind of flood of notifications.
'felt like crap' for several days (enough so that he was taking his temp regularly)
Actually, he was supposed to be taking his temperature regularly even if he felt fine. That was part of the protocol for coming back from an Ebola outbreak.
he was not symptomatic during his subway rides.
I don't know about that. The reports that I've read have admitted that he was feeling ill in the days beforehand, but that he didn't have a fever. At least, he says he didn't have a fever, and he says he was taking his temperature twice a day, as he was supposed to. So I guess it depends on whether you want to take his word for it-- referring to the guy who knew he might have Ebola, was feeling sick, and still decided to go bowling.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on, "He wasn't checking his temperature and doesn't really know when the fever started."
When there's cooperation, the settings that deliver best mutual benefit should be worked out by direct interaction, for the sake of effectiveness. That would put email back into its role of transport mechanism, where it belongs.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but email transport is still in its role of transport mechanism, whereas email clients are still in their role of sorting and arranging emails for display by a user in a configurable way. I'm not sure what there is to be changed there. Do you feel like explaining your comment?
Some of that kind of nonsense happens in Powerpoint presentations-- embedding images that might be a couple hundred megabytes each. I see that in marketing companies often enough, but it's still been a pretty steady rate of growth for the past few years.
However, I still don't see multi-gigabyte Word or Excel documents, at least not often enough that I recall it.
Unless you are still producing KBs of data.
Well yeah, lots of people are. An awful lot of work is still done in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. No need to embed a 5 GB video just because you have the space.
In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.
Not in mine. Granted, we're both going off of anecdotal evidence, but in my favor, my experience is based off of managing a few hundred servers and a couple thousand desktops.
It seems like most workstations/servers that I manage, if they're taking up massive amounts of space, it's very often because they're storing lots of old stuff. Several years ago, when we only had a 30 GB drives, people would go back and clear out, delete, and archive old data. Now they just store it, because why not? Storage is cheap. Most of the time, it doesn't seem like the data set is growing faster, but they're just holding on to old stuff longer.
So yes, I think it's true, if you have a 60 GB drive that's 90% full, it's a more pressing concern than if you have a 10 TB RAID that's 90% full. The RAID may be a bigger problem, but it's a less immediate problem.
That would be nice if everything I received notifications for supported RSS.
Actually, I'd like to see better methods of processing/digesting email, but not for personal email.
My work email is flooded with all kinds of junk, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to improve that. I get a bunch of ads that I wouldn't necessarily call "spam", but their ads. I actually want to get some of them (they're sometimes relevant to my job), but it's always super-low priority. I also get copied on a bunch of stuff that I might want to look at, often don't really need to, but that I do want to keep a record of the exchange in my email.
I also get automated notifications for certain kinds of things which could stand to have automated intelligent processing. For example, I might have an automated alert set to email me when a server isn't responding to a ping, and I *do* want to see that. However, if the server's internet connection goes flaky overnight, I might end up with 80 messages saying, "Error: server.domain.com is offline", and then a little while later, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online". It'd be nice to have all of those rolled up into a email digest that says, "You received a flood of messages with similar subjects. Here is a list of them, in order." I don't know practically how you'd do that, but I wouldn't mind if someone were to figure that out. Considering how much spam still gets through my spam filters, I don't expect a solution anytime soon.
Anyway, my only point here is that there are improvements that could be made.
That's no good as an answer. If you can't narrow the possibilities at all, then there's no point in planning at all. Maybe there will be a weird set of circumstances that require we send a donkey along on the mission. I mean, the possibilities are indefinite, so who knows what we could run into. Maybe the best solution is to send a crew made entirely of 5 year olds.
You've got to narrow it down. How can you make things as robust and redundant as possible, covering all the most likely possibilities, and as many of the unlikely possibilities as you can, without being wasteful? That's why NASA needs smart people to try to figure things out, rather than throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh well, we can't figure it out!"
I don't know that it would mean an all-female crew. I'm just saying it's not as simple as saying, "Well it's possible that you'll need strength, because anything is possible."
companionship from the opposite sex will likely be important for long term mental health.
Or it could cause problems. Imagine having to break off a relationship while stuck in a tiny spaceship with that person for months. Imagine if one of the women became pregnant. Lots of things could go wrong.
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
I don't know... I think it'd make sense to try to evaluate the likelihood of needing that raw strength. What are possible situations that a manned mission to Mars would need strength? Now eliminate all of those situations where a group of women would be strong enough to accomplish the task. Now that that set, and eliminate the situations in which men would not be strong enough. Now you have the set of situations/tasks where men's strength would be of benefit to the mission.
Now you do a sort of risk analysis. Take each of the remaining tasks, and start looking at what the probability that the crew will be in a position to do that task. If the probability is low enough eliminate that task from your list. Look at what the consequences are for failing to perform that task. If the consequences are below a certain level of importance, eliminate them from your list. Look at what the alternatives are for performing each task.
Now take the remaining tasks, and weight the cost of the additional weight (and any other complications from including men) and weigh it against the consequences of not being able to complete those remaining tasks. How does that comparison work out?
I have no idea, frankly, but that's roughly how the decision should be made. I really don't know how often raw strength becomes an issue for space travel.
Career-wise, it would be useful to tell us the likelihood of making each earning bracket *by career*.
Of course, depending on how you break it down, that might not tell you what you think it will. Like "Most likely to make millions of dollars per year" might give you top careers like:
* Heir to grandfather's fortune
* NFL Quarterback
* Billionaire philanthropist
* Lottery winner
Sure, with those careers, you're pretty much guaranteed to be rich. But what are the chances that you'll get one of those careers? If you wanted to try to plot your career path, it'd probably be better to look at the most common jobs that are most likely to pay well. So there are a lot of physicians making a lot of money. If you set out to become a physician, your chances of getting rich are better than if you set out to be a lottery winner.
Of course, there's another problem. These are the top earners right now, but we don't know what things will look like in 10 years. If you're 18 and trying to figure out what to do with your life, then being a physician would seem to be a great choice. Hypothetically, if there were medical breakthroughs in the next 10 years that completely cure all diseases and health problems, then you might find you get out of medical school without much of a career lined up.
It's not below the "poverty level", but $100k isn't exactly "rolling in it" if you're living in NYC. It's enough for a single person to live in a good apartment in a pretty good neighborhood, but you're not talking about a second sports car for a "sweet downtown loft". $100k is still in the range where you're probably just hoping your tiny Brooklyn apartment's rent doesn't go up, because if it does, you don't know where you're going to be able to move to.
I'm just lucky I am easily able to ignore evidence that I don't like, or else this article would be troubling.
That is lucky. Apparently, you're also very good at accepting straw man arguments, or else your own post would be troubling.
I'm not trying to convince you to like OSX, but just to attempt to give an explanation:
Compared to Dolphin, I find Finder far too limited, especially the inability to show hidden files. I've got no idea why there is no such menu toggle built into it. What are Apple afraid of? This is especially annoying when I have to look for .m2 and .git files. Sure, I can use the command line, but it's not as intuitive.
As someone who provides support for general users, I think Apple has handled this reasonably well. There are a lot of hidden files that a lot of people would find confusing. There are .DS_Store files and .Trash folders, along with the /etc directory in the root. If they had a little button on the Finder to "show hidden files", I have no doubt that there would be a lot of users who would hit it, see all the "Junk" in places they didn't like, and try to delete it.
Apple provides a option to show all files that can easily be changed from the command line. If you have trouble making this change, then you're not someone who should see those files. Seems reasonable to me.
The mouse scrolling was odd; the whole concept of "accelerating" while operating the wheel doesn't feel as natural as moving 2-3 lines with each movement. I had to download an app to get it the way I wanted (or, the same as it works in Windows and KDE).
Seems like a preference issue. To each his own, I guess. I thought you were going to complain about the "natural scrolling", which is something I'd have a lot more sympathy for, but which is also an option that can easily be changed.
It took me ages to realise that Command-Tab cycles through open applications, but not the windows. I found several windows all hidden behind one another that had been there for days, because OS X's window manager didn't present them to me. Apparently, I have to use Expose or something like that to see all of them.
Again, seems like a bit of an issue of preference. Ultimately, Apple's logical breakdown of running processes is much more aimed at whole applications rather than windows. Notice that each application has one button on the dock, regardless of how many windows you have open. Notice that you can often close all the windows of an application without closing the application. Notice that you can (depending on some thing) close the application without actually closing the windows, i.e. the application closes and the windows disappear, but when you reopen the application, the windows are all there where you left them.
Their approach is sensible, and it doesn't seem to be obviously wrong, but I can understand why you'd want it the other way.
Oddly, most things on Mac are Command+. However, on the command line, Ctrl+C is still used to break a program.
In my opinion, it's actually fairly nice that way. You can use Command+C to paste text into a terminal window, and Ctrl+C to break the current program. Less confusing than windows, where the short-cut's effect will change depending on context. In fact, Microsoft has been advertising the ability to use Ctrl-V to paste into a command line in Windows 10. Apparently, it's one of Windows 10's biggest features.
My Mac has been set up to be case insensitive. LS, GrEp, cAT, TAIl all behave as if they had been typed lowercase.
Yeah, this is... well... it's a bit unfortunate because it can cause some confusion. It's an issue with their file system (HFS+), which has been made semi-case-sensitive. For example, you can do "mkdir tEsT\ dIrEcToRy" and you'll get a directory called "tEsT dIrEcToRy", maintaining the case that you types in. However, if you then type "rmdir 'Test Directory'" then it will delete it. Essentially, it's case-sensitive when writing but not case-sensitive when reading.
The reason for this, to a
including things like their version of Androids Intents (that they call "extensions")....notifications pane from iOS (stolen from Android, natch)...
Right, so you're upset that Apple is using plugins, extensions, and notifications because all of those things were invented by Android developers. Sure.
They're making it possible to make and receive phone calls on the desktop.
So they've added functionality. I don't' think anyone is complaining about Windows 8 for added functionality.
They're changing a bunch of apps to more closely mimic the cellphone UI. According to the review itself, this is resulting in UIs with excessive whitespace...
You might need to point that out in the review. I don't doubt what you're saying, I just need context, and skimming the review for a second, I didn't see anything specific about that.
Having used Yosemite for a while, I don't see there being a lot of extra unused space due to "mimicking the cellphone UI". It actually seems like, in a lot of cases (e.g. Safari), they've cut down on "wasted space" in a way that may have been inspired by the cellphone UI, but not in a way that sacrifices functionality. I definitely haven't had the experience of noticing that things are spaced out strangely as though it were optimizing OSX for touch interaction.
Mostly it seems like they just re-skinned it. The textures and colors are different, with almost the same spacing.
We'll never reach a stage of certainty that nothing will go wrong. To paraphrase, it's difficult to make things foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
Yes, I agree with you. There's always risk. However, when it comes to going into space, the whole process is dangerous and expensive enough when we've done everything we can to control the risks. Like you said, I think we mostly agree. I'm just arguing that we should work on the problem of sustainability first, keeping in mind the eventual aim of using that knowledge and technology for space travel and colonization. We shouldn't try to employ those techniques in space before we have good reason to think that we can be successful.
So, for example, the whole bio-dome thing failed the two times that we've tried it, but as you point out, we learned things. Let's try it some more! Let's continue to learn from that until we have a solid grasp on the requirements for building a sustainable biosphere.
From what I can see of Yosemite, Apple is doing the same thing with Mac OS X.
Can you be more specific as to what you're referring to? The biggest difference in the UI is that they reskinned things and change the icons and whatnot. You might not like the changes, but it's hardly the same thing as Windows 8's problems. The only things I can think of that make it more like their mobile OS-- at least this is all I can think of off the top of my head:
1) They added "Launchpad", which was done a couple of versions ago and is completely optional. Remove it from the dock and you never have to see it again.
2) They expanded the functionality of the notification area, and I don't really see there being a lot of grounds for complaints
3) They have a controlled "App Store", which again, was added a few versions ago and is optional.
4) They added an application for Maps...? I guess this makes it more like a mobile device. Again, optional.
5) Their chat/messaging application has increased support for SMS messages, which is additional functionality, and at least sort of optional.
I'm not seeing the problem.
I do generally agree with you, but, I don't think we should get too hung up on the idea of an enclosed system, as that's not actually what we live in
Yeah, that's fair, but it's a system without a lot of input or output, and the input is mostly sunlight. For example, I'd have no problem with the idea of an artificial biosphere having solar power. Still, my point is that we can't seem to make a successful almost-closed system here on earth, so why would we attempt doing it on the moon first, where the stakes will be so much higher?
My memory of the sorts of problems they faced were-- yes, some kind of insect infestation. Also, they made parts of the building out of concrete that they only later realized was either absorbing oxygen or putting out CO2. Part of my point here is, you wouldn't want to drag a bunch of people to the moon and then have that problem there. Let's get our shit together first.
And people tend to focus on things like, "can we renew the oxygen and food sources?" But then there are problems like, "What do we do when all the solar panels break or degrade? Do we have the facilities to recycle them? Can we gather the materials needed to build more?" Shipping more to the moon might not be too bad. But if we want to talk about having a sustainable colony on Mars or eventually interstellar travel, we would need to consider that kind of thing.
Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
I think this is a problem that we need to confront first: Figuring out how to live in a sustainable closed system.
Were people ever successful in those bio-dome experiments? Are we now able to build an enclosed biosphere that can function sustainably, indefinitely, without bringing in materials or resources from the outside once you get started? There's not much point in trying to build something like that in space until we know how to build a sustainable closed system, reliably, without fail, here on Earth. Doing it in space will be more expensive, and failures will be less forgiving. It seems to me that we don't even know how to live sustainably within the biosphere we inherited, already running, the size of the Earth.
The key word here is "sustainability". Can we live in an enclosed system, indefinitely, without using up all of our resources or making it unlivable with our waste and pollution? It's the key to being able to conduct long-term space travel. It's the key to being able to build an off-planet colony. It's the key to continuing to live right here on this planet.
You list Tolkien as though those properties haven't had their share of movies. In fact, I'd say that the second Captain America movie is, all told, a better movie than any of the Hobbit movies.
I think your best point is "They have a built in market." It's true that, if you release a big-budget movie about a popular character, there are some people who will watch it pretty much no matter what. That's why so many new movies are some kind of adaptation or remake-- so that they can count on a pre-existing audience who will see it, even if it's bad, if only out of curiousity or loyalty to the original work.
The rest of your points aren't quite fair, though. You could argue that the writing isn't amazing and that there's a lot of action, but the movie industry has been putting out dumb action movies for an awfully long time now, and it didn't start with comic-book movies. And really... the writing isn't necessarily bad.
I don't think they're easy. You have a few decades of really bad comic-book movies to demonstrate how easy it is to make a bad one. And I don't think "people are rarely disappointed". There's a bit of a consensus that the third X-Men was bad, the first Wolverine movie was terrible, and the Fantastic Four movies were pretty awful. A lot of people weren't particularly happy with "Man of Steel", either. Go back to the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, and I don't think you could sum up people's feelings about them with a word better than "disappointed".
I think the real explanation is that Sam Raimi showed everyone that you could make a good superhero movie that took the source material seriously, and then Christopher Nolan showed that you could make one that is also simply a good movie. Those were still one-offs and flukes, though, until Marvel showed that you could take a systematic approach toward leveraging these kinds of properties into a series of movies, and DC/Warner (as well as Fox) are looking to emulate that.
And though they might not be to your taste, a lot of these things aren't bad movies. Especially not if you compare them to other summer blockbuster action movies.
as our economy has become less capitalist
What is this "capitalism" you speak of?
Seems like a dumb question, but it really becomes pretty unclear what people mean by the word, when you start listening to what people say. Is "capitalism" an economic system that promotes private ownership of the means of production, with minimal (or no) governmental/public oversight? Is "capitalism" a moral system that holds tenets such as "Greed is a healthy and beneficial impulse that promotes economic growth, which benefits us all," and "the goodness of action can be measured by its ability to generate profit," and "rich people are inherently better than poor people, or how else would they have become more successful?" Is "capitalism" a political system, some kind of subset of "plutocracy" where the public world is governed by the wealthy in proportion to their ability to leverage their economic power to influence political campaigns?
It seems really important to know what "capitalism" is if we want to determine whether we're becoming more or less "capitalist". Once we know what "capitalism" is, we would also have to analyze our political/legal/trade/economic policies to determine whether we're becoming more or less "capitalist", whatever we determine that to be.
Also, if we really wanted to try to determine causation, we'd probably have to determine how long it might take for policies to have an effect, and then compare that to the history of various economic trends. For example, it probably wouldn't make sense to blame an ongoing economic problem that started 10 years ago on an economic policy that was instituted yesterday.