I don't have a lot to add to this conversation, but I want to say what is horribly lacking in 99% of these comments:
Cutting the Department of Education does not mean no more public education. Cutting even the USGS does not mean no more earthquake and tsunami research. In addition to the United States Geological Survey, there is a California Geological Survey, Mississippi Geological Survey, etc. The states already do virtually everything the federal government does to some degree. Even the interstate highways are handled by the individual states' Department of Transportations, albeit with money and quality standards issued by the US Department of Transportation.
Ron Paul's idea would be a dramatic change in recent US history, one of reducing centralized power and putting the power back into the individual states. It would not be the end of the world, it would be a return to bygone eras. Most of these departments are relatively recent in US history, and some have been good, and some have not produced the results we hoped. There are certainly areas where states do better than the feds (and vice versa) and we could live without the redundancy of some of them (drug laws, anyone?).
Google's process doesn't always run in the background. At this moment, it's not running on my machine. It tends to run on startup and sometimes after I close chrome, but it always eventually shuts itself down. And when it is running, it only uses negligible resources. It's how a service should work -- silently check on something, do something, then turn off.
When these are combat ready, there will be many unemployed soldiers.
We're talking about killing human beings and you're worried about economics. Such an American thing to do. (See: our wars.) I wonder why the world hates us.
Anonymous Coward seems to have missed the tongue-in-cheek humor in this post. Manfre was using a subtle type of pessimistic humor, perhaps black humor.
They assemble some cars here... they don't make them here.
Are you kidding? Most cars in the US are made and assembled in the US, Canada, or Mexico. That includes what Washington likes to call "imports". There are still a few that are imported entirely from Japan or Germany, but that is also changing rapidly. I doubt if any contain Chinese parts, but if they do they are minimal, and the quality controls are unimaginably stricter than any consumer electronics controls. If you think cars are so much made of overseas components, I suggest you head to Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and ask some people where their cars from.
I think this is supposed to supplement standard mail. The electronic system would reduce a huge amount of load that is presently on the standard mail system deliveries all kinds of bills every day. Rural post offices probably wouldn't change a lot, but city post offices would find themselves with a hugely-decreased load and thusly save a lot of money (money that can help keep rural post offices open).
The people who say that iPhones and tablets are going to kill handheld gaming systems are the same people saying that netbooks and laptops will replace the desktop computer. They're different systems with different intended audiences and are completely distinct in terms of user experience.
Angry Birds is a fun game, but it has a time and a place. You cannot play games like Mega Man or Metroid with a touch screen and motion controls. If the Wii and DS have taught the gaming industry anything, it's that touch and motion controls are not a substitute for buttons.
It will definitely be useful as another way to find people who are bad a critical thinking though.
Mine doesn't do it unless the light is shining directly into my ear. It also works with the mouse quote distant from my head; it works as far as I am able to physically stretch my arm away and still aim the light at my ear. I have an old ambidextrous optical Logitech with the aqua bubble (or whatever you'd call it) on top.
I can also hear a high-pitch ringing when the charging LED on my laptop and razor are on (they blink on and off, so it's easy to tell that the noise is coming from the LED -- high pitch noise when the light turns on and no noise when it turns off), so maybe this has something to do with the lighting. Not all LEDs do it, though. Or maybe it has something to do with the current. I have no idea, but it feels roughly the same high-pitch frequency as you hear when you turn a TV on.
I don't know, I'm not an electrical engineer. If anyone knows, please chime in.
It doesn't do it all the time. Sometimes it may just be a glitch. But it happens to me in Firefox and Chrome on multiple computers in multiple countries, and it happens with random things all the time... most often more than once a day.
I was actually explaining my problem to someone else when I tried "united states weather radar" as an example and it worked. I took a screenshot that time. http://i.imgur.com/d0wNX.png
This problem is without Instant. Instant produces a whole lot more maddening problems. One big one is that I'll be typing something, and a suggestion will come down, and then it will auto-search for that suggestion and change everything that I was typing in the search box.
Another problem I frequently have with Instant is that I will type something (e.g., "us weather radar"), and it will search for exactly what I type instantly. And I will see the exact result I want. And then in less than one second, must faster than I can move the mouse and click what I want, it will clear all the search results and automatically search for the stupid thing that it wants (e.g., "us weather ra").
As for Google Chrome, I am frequently unhappy at the awesome bar when I type something like "www.cnn.com", hit the Enter button, and instead of taking me to cnn.com, it takes me to some place that I visited yesterday that it autocompleted for me.
It's incredibly frustrating that new "features" within the past year are very much making Google a less-useable search engine, despite its tendency to provide vastly better results.
If you let Bing be your search of choice you probably don't discern.
That's a baseless statement.
I have tried Bing on many occasions because I'm tired of Google's brokenness and new "features" it keeps rolling out*. Unfortunately, Bing still frequently returns things that I'm not interested in. Conversely, I rarely end up with a Google search that doesn't send me to what I want to find.
*I am completely fed up with Google's hijacking of my search terms -- Google used to predict what you wanted to search for and suggest it to you. Now it just takes you to where it thinks you want to go, and you're lucky if it'll spit out a "did you mean?" More troublesome is that frequently, where it thinks I want to go is completely ridiculous and nonsensical. Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"?? This happens several times a day to me.
Though there are many side effects to hydrofracking (one of them being delicious natural gas production, another being fire-breathing kitchen sinks), earthquakes are not one of them. The cause of the earthquakes earlier this year in Arkansas is more-or-less agreed upon to be due to the injection wells, not the hydrofracking.
That is, fracking requires a huge amount of fracking liquid, gels, and god knows what else. Once it's been used, they need to do something with it. It's easier for them to drill a big well and inject all the liquid down there than it is for them to truck all the liquid away to some distance disposal area. Unfortunately, the waste water injection wells have been show to induce earthquakes. They don't necessarily induce them everywhere, but they do in Arkansas and several other places. It's probably best to spend the money trucking the liquid away.
This is interesting because I have read some years ago that the US Air Force has experimented with using blue LEDs mounted on the head but somewhat behind the eyes, and doing so resulted in pilots being able to fly for significantly longer times. It was presumed to tell their circadian rhythm, "no, it's not night time, yet."
I've noticed for years now that if I shine the light of an optical mouse in my ear, even with my eyes closed, even with someone else doing it with my eyes closed, I hear a high-frequency ring only at the times the light is shining in my ears.
But I don't know if this is because of the effect described in TFA or something to do with the engineering of optical mice.
Oh you wanna bet? Japan and Taiwan have universal medicine and they also hand out antibiotics for the common cold. And as far as my experience goes, you never get ONE medicine, you get about FIVE. And most of those are medicines that are for the purpose of treating the symptom, not the underlying cause.
And another thing that all companies nowadays -- not just telcos -- seem to have forgotten is the art of dealing with customers. Maybe you see us as walking bags of money. Fine, that's great. But it's no reason to treat us poorly. Treat the walking bags of money like shit, and they will do everything they can to exploit loopholes, bend rules, and steal. Treat the walking bags of money nicely and they will turn into loyal walking bags of money. It's not rocket science.
Although there are a lot of crazy people that want to watch Hulu and stream HD radio over their wireless network all day every day, I think most people are reasonable.
Firstly, text messages should be free and unlimited. It is time to do this. They cost the carriers basically nothing. In Japan, text messages cost close to nothing and voice plans cost money. This makes sense. Voice is orders of magnitude more bandwidth-hogging than a tweet.
Next, data plans needn't be unlimited, but make a reasonable data cap -- enough for someone to play on the internet, read blogs with pictures, and play on youtube at least nightly.
Make customizable account settings for notifications when you are approaching your cap. Do you want daily data usage texts? Weekly? One text every 1GB? One text every 500MB? There should be options for that. And there should be an official app to show current monthly data usage, and there should also be a number to text message that will reply back with the same information (if, say, you are in an area with poor mobile data reception)
Put throttling in your account settings. And give it advanced scheduling features. If we are going to have data caps, we want to be able to use our phones effectively. That means a simple and easy way to say, "I want full 4GB speeds in the morning, but throttle my speeds to 2mbps between 7:30pm and 12:30am." I should be able to turn on and off throttling easily, set exactly how fast I want to throttle, I should be able to schedule throttling at different speeds at different times of the day, or set up my connection to throttle down to 4mbps when I read 2GB for the month, and 2mbps when I reach 3GB for the month, etc. If we're going to be expected to keep an eye on our bandwidth usage, you need to give us powerful ways to control ourselves.
And lastly, no obscene overage charges. If the bandwidth cap is broken, suspend the internet and send an immediate text message. Give two options explicitly and clearly in the text message: 1. throttle the speeds (come on, at least 768kbps down, 256kbps up. less than dial-up speeds are unacceptable) OR 2. continue with 4G speeds and charge per kilobyte used, but charge at the same rate as the plan that you're on. That means that if I'm getting data at $10 per 1 GB, I expect to be charged 1 cent per additional 1 MB. It is not acceptable to charge me 1 cent per 1 MB while under my cap, and then $1 per 1 MB when I go over my cap. The rates should be exactly the same. And I should be able to easily switch between the two at any time that I want.
And though it seems like common sense to normal people, it apparently isn't common sense to companies -- BE TRANSPARENT. If you don't respect your customers, your customers will not respect you. If the company says, "we're working hard to do A, B, C, and D, and we will have E, F, and G caps until we can finish," the customers will understand. If you say, "we are working to upgrade our network infrastructure to introduce A speeds and B increased cap by C date," the customers will be understanding and happy. Everything should be laid out clear and simple for the customer. It should not be hidden away or disguised. There will always be a "top 5%", no matter how much or how little data people use. If it gets to the point where everyone is using tons of data, it may be time to consider upgrading your infrastructure. Spend the money and do it. When you're done, advertise your new infrastructure and watch how you will *gasp* out-compete your competitors.
...GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work.
This is one thing I've never understood about Linux.
I've been in the sciences for a couple years and I use Linux for a lot of things. Even before that, I have dabbled with Linux on and off over the years. Mostly I use Windows for my personal desktop; it's not 100% stable, but neither is XFCE which I use on my work laptop (which is not a beefy laptop, so I wanted something lighter than Gnome or KDE).
It seems to be, though, that the hardcore Linux base obsesses over customization and work. That's great. But apparently, "customization" means that you have to edit simple things in obscure config files deep in system directions, and "work" means that it has to look like a desktop from 1991.
What is wrong with a desktop environment where everything is controllable with a GUI, and that GUI edits some config files in a system directory? What is wrong with a pretty desktop environment? If all we care about is "work", we might as well go back to using 256 colors.
This has potential to dramatically improve US internet access. In China, they have been able to completely ignore the pain that the US had in wiring the entire country with telephones because they can just stick up one tower and give an entire remote village cell phone service. This allowed China to get the entire country phone service in a matter of decade (not decades). It'd be great if the US could do something similar with broadband internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a lot to add to this conversation, but I want to say what is horribly lacking in 99% of these comments:
Cutting the Department of Education does not mean no more public education. Cutting even the USGS does not mean no more earthquake and tsunami research. In addition to the United States Geological Survey, there is a California Geological Survey, Mississippi Geological Survey, etc. The states already do virtually everything the federal government does to some degree. Even the interstate highways are handled by the individual states' Department of Transportations, albeit with money and quality standards issued by the US Department of Transportation.
Ron Paul's idea would be a dramatic change in recent US history, one of reducing centralized power and putting the power back into the individual states. It would not be the end of the world, it would be a return to bygone eras. Most of these departments are relatively recent in US history, and some have been good, and some have not produced the results we hoped. There are certainly areas where states do better than the feds (and vice versa) and we could live without the redundancy of some of them (drug laws, anyone?).
I wonder if this CPU from a huge consortium of very powerful Japanese companies is finally making some progress?
Seven Japanese Companies to Develop Microprocessor to Compete Against AMD and Intel
Google's process doesn't always run in the background. At this moment, it's not running on my machine. It tends to run on startup and sometimes after I close chrome, but it always eventually shuts itself down. And when it is running, it only uses negligible resources. It's how a service should work -- silently check on something, do something, then turn off.
This is as tired of an argument as "they hate us for our freedom."
What China and the US have is the economic version of mutually-assured destruction.
China will be pulling no rug out from under the US. They're as fucked as we are.
When these are combat ready, there will be many unemployed soldiers.
We're talking about killing human beings and you're worried about economics. Such an American thing to do. (See: our wars.) I wonder why the world hates us.
Anonymous Coward seems to have missed the tongue-in-cheek humor in this post. Manfre was using a subtle type of pessimistic humor, perhaps black humor.
China is a good place to go if your want your hard-earned IP and research to be stolen.
Russia is a good place to go if you want government cronies to send you to jail and pick apart your company for scraps. ....There's always Ireland?
I don't know how your state is, but a lot of states actually make food and necessities sales tax exempt.
They assemble some cars here... they don't make them here.
Are you kidding? Most cars in the US are made and assembled in the US, Canada, or Mexico. That includes what Washington likes to call "imports". There are still a few that are imported entirely from Japan or Germany, but that is also changing rapidly. I doubt if any contain Chinese parts, but if they do they are minimal, and the quality controls are unimaginably stricter than any consumer electronics controls. If you think cars are so much made of overseas components, I suggest you head to Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and ask some people where their cars from.
I think this is supposed to supplement standard mail. The electronic system would reduce a huge amount of load that is presently on the standard mail system deliveries all kinds of bills every day. Rural post offices probably wouldn't change a lot, but city post offices would find themselves with a hugely-decreased load and thusly save a lot of money (money that can help keep rural post offices open).
The people who say that iPhones and tablets are going to kill handheld gaming systems are the same people saying that netbooks and laptops will replace the desktop computer. They're different systems with different intended audiences and are completely distinct in terms of user experience.
Angry Birds is a fun game, but it has a time and a place. You cannot play games like Mega Man or Metroid with a touch screen and motion controls. If the Wii and DS have taught the gaming industry anything, it's that touch and motion controls are not a substitute for buttons.
All Mozilla seems to be doing is encouraging the following practice in everyone's install.rdf
<em:maxVersion>100.*</em:maxVersion>
What about changing the radio station while driving?
...people are really attached to their out of shape bodies and low humidity disease causing houses.
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that disease didn't exist before the dehumidifier.
It will definitely be useful as another way to find people who are bad a critical thinking though.
Mine doesn't do it unless the light is shining directly into my ear. It also works with the mouse quote distant from my head; it works as far as I am able to physically stretch my arm away and still aim the light at my ear. I have an old ambidextrous optical Logitech with the aqua bubble (or whatever you'd call it) on top.
I can also hear a high-pitch ringing when the charging LED on my laptop and razor are on (they blink on and off, so it's easy to tell that the noise is coming from the LED -- high pitch noise when the light turns on and no noise when it turns off), so maybe this has something to do with the lighting. Not all LEDs do it, though. Or maybe it has something to do with the current. I have no idea, but it feels roughly the same high-pitch frequency as you hear when you turn a TV on.
I don't know, I'm not an electrical engineer. If anyone knows, please chime in.
It doesn't do it all the time. Sometimes it may just be a glitch. But it happens to me in Firefox and Chrome on multiple computers in multiple countries, and it happens with random things all the time... most often more than once a day.
I was actually explaining my problem to someone else when I tried "united states weather radar" as an example and it worked. I took a screenshot that time.
http://i.imgur.com/d0wNX.png
This problem is without Instant. Instant produces a whole lot more maddening problems. One big one is that I'll be typing something, and a suggestion will come down, and then it will auto-search for that suggestion and change everything that I was typing in the search box.
Another problem I frequently have with Instant is that I will type something (e.g., "us weather radar"), and it will search for exactly what I type instantly. And I will see the exact result I want. And then in less than one second, must faster than I can move the mouse and click what I want, it will clear all the search results and automatically search for the stupid thing that it wants (e.g., "us weather ra").
As for Google Chrome, I am frequently unhappy at the awesome bar when I type something like "www.cnn.com", hit the Enter button, and instead of taking me to cnn.com, it takes me to some place that I visited yesterday that it autocompleted for me.
It's incredibly frustrating that new "features" within the past year are very much making Google a less-useable search engine, despite its tendency to provide vastly better results.
If you let Bing be your search of choice you probably don't discern.
That's a baseless statement.
I have tried Bing on many occasions because I'm tired of Google's brokenness and new "features" it keeps rolling out*. Unfortunately, Bing still frequently returns things that I'm not interested in. Conversely, I rarely end up with a Google search that doesn't send me to what I want to find.
*I am completely fed up with Google's hijacking of my search terms -- Google used to predict what you wanted to search for and suggest it to you. Now it just takes you to where it thinks you want to go, and you're lucky if it'll spit out a "did you mean?" More troublesome is that frequently, where it thinks I want to go is completely ridiculous and nonsensical. Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"?? This happens several times a day to me.
Though there are many side effects to hydrofracking (one of them being delicious natural gas production, another being fire-breathing kitchen sinks), earthquakes are not one of them. The cause of the earthquakes earlier this year in Arkansas is more-or-less agreed upon to be due to the injection wells, not the hydrofracking.
That is, fracking requires a huge amount of fracking liquid, gels, and god knows what else. Once it's been used, they need to do something with it. It's easier for them to drill a big well and inject all the liquid down there than it is for them to truck all the liquid away to some distance disposal area. Unfortunately, the waste water injection wells have been show to induce earthquakes. They don't necessarily induce them everywhere, but they do in Arkansas and several other places. It's probably best to spend the money trucking the liquid away.
This is interesting because I have read some years ago that the US Air Force has experimented with using blue LEDs mounted on the head but somewhat behind the eyes, and doing so resulted in pilots being able to fly for significantly longer times. It was presumed to tell their circadian rhythm, "no, it's not night time, yet."
I've noticed for years now that if I shine the light of an optical mouse in my ear, even with my eyes closed, even with someone else doing it with my eyes closed, I hear a high-frequency ring only at the times the light is shining in my ears.
But I don't know if this is because of the effect described in TFA or something to do with the engineering of optical mice.
Oh you wanna bet? Japan and Taiwan have universal medicine and they also hand out antibiotics for the common cold. And as far as my experience goes, you never get ONE medicine, you get about FIVE. And most of those are medicines that are for the purpose of treating the symptom, not the underlying cause.
And another thing that all companies nowadays -- not just telcos -- seem to have forgotten is the art of dealing with customers. Maybe you see us as walking bags of money. Fine, that's great. But it's no reason to treat us poorly. Treat the walking bags of money like shit, and they will do everything they can to exploit loopholes, bend rules, and steal. Treat the walking bags of money nicely and they will turn into loyal walking bags of money. It's not rocket science.
Although there are a lot of crazy people that want to watch Hulu and stream HD radio over their wireless network all day every day, I think most people are reasonable.
Firstly, text messages should be free and unlimited. It is time to do this. They cost the carriers basically nothing. In Japan, text messages cost close to nothing and voice plans cost money. This makes sense. Voice is orders of magnitude more bandwidth-hogging than a tweet.
Next, data plans needn't be unlimited, but make a reasonable data cap -- enough for someone to play on the internet, read blogs with pictures, and play on youtube at least nightly.
Make customizable account settings for notifications when you are approaching your cap. Do you want daily data usage texts? Weekly? One text every 1GB? One text every 500MB? There should be options for that. And there should be an official app to show current monthly data usage, and there should also be a number to text message that will reply back with the same information (if, say, you are in an area with poor mobile data reception)
Put throttling in your account settings. And give it advanced scheduling features. If we are going to have data caps, we want to be able to use our phones effectively. That means a simple and easy way to say, "I want full 4GB speeds in the morning, but throttle my speeds to 2mbps between 7:30pm and 12:30am." I should be able to turn on and off throttling easily, set exactly how fast I want to throttle, I should be able to schedule throttling at different speeds at different times of the day, or set up my connection to throttle down to 4mbps when I read 2GB for the month, and 2mbps when I reach 3GB for the month, etc. If we're going to be expected to keep an eye on our bandwidth usage, you need to give us powerful ways to control ourselves.
And lastly, no obscene overage charges. If the bandwidth cap is broken, suspend the internet and send an immediate text message. Give two options explicitly and clearly in the text message: 1. throttle the speeds (come on, at least 768kbps down, 256kbps up. less than dial-up speeds are unacceptable) OR 2. continue with 4G speeds and charge per kilobyte used, but charge at the same rate as the plan that you're on. That means that if I'm getting data at $10 per 1 GB, I expect to be charged 1 cent per additional 1 MB. It is not acceptable to charge me 1 cent per 1 MB while under my cap, and then $1 per 1 MB when I go over my cap. The rates should be exactly the same. And I should be able to easily switch between the two at any time that I want.
And though it seems like common sense to normal people, it apparently isn't common sense to companies -- BE TRANSPARENT. If you don't respect your customers, your customers will not respect you. If the company says, "we're working hard to do A, B, C, and D, and we will have E, F, and G caps until we can finish," the customers will understand. If you say, "we are working to upgrade our network infrastructure to introduce A speeds and B increased cap by C date," the customers will be understanding and happy. Everything should be laid out clear and simple for the customer. It should not be hidden away or disguised. There will always be a "top 5%", no matter how much or how little data people use. If it gets to the point where everyone is using tons of data, it may be time to consider upgrading your infrastructure. Spend the money and do it. When you're done, advertise your new infrastructure and watch how you will *gasp* out-compete your competitors.
...GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work.
This is one thing I've never understood about Linux.
I've been in the sciences for a couple years and I use Linux for a lot of things. Even before that, I have dabbled with Linux on and off over the years. Mostly I use Windows for my personal desktop; it's not 100% stable, but neither is XFCE which I use on my work laptop (which is not a beefy laptop, so I wanted something lighter than Gnome or KDE).
It seems to be, though, that the hardcore Linux base obsesses over customization and work. That's great. But apparently, "customization" means that you have to edit simple things in obscure config files deep in system directions, and "work" means that it has to look like a desktop from 1991.
What is wrong with a desktop environment where everything is controllable with a GUI, and that GUI edits some config files in a system directory? What is wrong with a pretty desktop environment? If all we care about is "work", we might as well go back to using 256 colors.
This has potential to dramatically improve US internet access. In China, they have been able to completely ignore the pain that the US had in wiring the entire country with telephones because they can just stick up one tower and give an entire remote village cell phone service. This allowed China to get the entire country phone service in a matter of decade (not decades). It'd be great if the US could do something similar with broadband internet.