So this vaunted "flu-scanner" can be fooled simply by taking Tylenol? Are you serious? Shouldn't it be assumed that anyone who is running a fever will most likely be taking fever-reducing medications?
It should be. But when people get nervous, they get stupid and they stop asking questions. Will magic box make everything better? Let's buy magic box! Doesn't matter if it's a box of rocks with "majik" painted on the side, this nice man says it will protect us from terrorists/swine flu/birth defects/CNN's breaking story of the day/angst! Buy the magic box!
Oh, god, horrible mental images. My brain just kind of fused the parent, GP, and GGP into one *thing* and got a dominatrix with a strap on making her sub beat off a dead horse. I need to go bleach my brain now.
Don't knock it. If they ever invent a way to hook an inkjet printer right to your brain, you can make a lot of cash with those images!
That's what they do, but unfortunately the roads don't have the decency to crumble uniformly, with some parts turning to potholes and others staying sound.
The obvious conclusion, gentlemen, is that we need shoddier workmanship so it all goes to hell simultaneously. DOWN WITH QUALITY!
And what is "maximize" good for. Isn't it ironic for someone who derides a one button mouse to want a one window GUI ?
It's about as ironic as a person who won't ride a two-wheeled motorcycle driving a two-door car. Which is to say, no, not ironic at all. Opinion on user interface feature/failing X has no relevance to opinion on user interface feature/failing Y, particularly in regards to how much of X and Y is a good thing.
On XP I alt-tab between maximized windows all the time. If windows aren't full screen, they're either being used in a drag-and-drop or something like a magnifier that by definition can't run full screen. If my mouse has less than two buttons and a scroll wheel it slows me down. So I'm a one-window multiple-button kind of guy without being a walking paradox.
And while we're on the subject, does anyone use Num Lock or Pause anymore?
Pausing a fast-moving BIOS screen is still handy. Plus, winkey+pause brings up the system properties on XP. Convenient for a front-line geek who does upgrades fairly regularly and needs to show the end-user that Windows says there's more RAM or a new ethernet port or whatever.
And that's all well and good until I run into one of those damn BenQ keyboards that bumps the print screen/scroll lock/pause keys down into the home/page up/etc cluster, and replaces them with wake/sleep/power.
A power button. On the keyboard. In the exact same spot where another key normally resides. It has caused screams of anger and anguish more than once for me, and if I ever meet BenQ's keyboard designer, I'm gonna use one of his keyboards to leave a reverse imprint of wake/sleep/power in his forehead.
I wondered what possible mental model of programming this person could have where they thought that pulling random punch cards out of a waste bin could possibly be helpful. My conclusion was that they were just trying to get us students consultants to write the code from scratch for them and he random cards were a way to pretend they had already done some work.
Possibly, but I'm gonna chuck Hanlon's razor at this one: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
After some of the insanity I have seen from people, I'm willing to believe anything. For instance, when trying to set up a printer for someone over the phone (never again...), I hit a dead end. After an hour where I couldn't get them to communicate despite verifying the physical connection three times, I ultimately found out that the printer was parallel and the cable the person was trying to use was USB.
Why did this person think that resting this USB cable in the general vicinity of the printer's port would somehow work despite my repeated insistence that it had to be plugged and locked into the big wide hole? She had put it in an old box she found from a parallel cable (and when I asked her to describe the cable, she described the picture on the box). There was no malice, she just earnestly believed that cables were cables, and simply resting it in the right box for long enough would allow it to absorb the abilities of whatever cable the box was made for. Now, if you told her that putting a red ribbon (or paper or yarn or whatever) in a box of blue ribbon (paper, etc.) would make the red one blue, she'd tell you you were loony.
So, yeah, there's some people out there who seem normal, but have absolutely insane and illogical ideas when it comes to technology they don't understand. And without proof to the contrary, I by default count students as members of the general public, to be treated with the same assumption of insanity.
There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."
Conclusion to be reached from grandparent: Some teachers are idiots.
I find this saying utter bullshit. I grew up among teachers and I hear complaints all the time about either stupid students or students with absolutely no manners.
Conclusion to be reached from parent: Some students are idiots.
I like to think outside of the box though, I say arm the birds.
Good God, man. Have you already forgotten the lessons of Hitchcock? Tippi Hedren barely made it through when those feathery sons of bitches were engaging in hand-to-ha... er... hand-to-wing combat. Arm them and we're all doomed!
Just week or two ago there was a story on slashdot about some parent whose son had taken the wrong bus home from school and got lost so he asked slashdot ways to track his child with GPS...
So I belive that what you described will happen very soon.
Makes less sense for kids, though. They grow out of clothing FAST. I'm not arguing that the erosion of personal privacy's not going to accelerate, but I don't think it'll take the form of something wearable. Sewable into clothing, maybe, but not as clothing.
IMHO, it'll be more likely built into (either directly or as a 3rd party addon) the cell phone/mp3 player/portable game unit the kid already lugs around. Anyone too young for that, it'll still be something installable onto something else.
I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.
Most would. Hmm. Now only if there were a game show to exploit this concept....
Most English books stunk and I remember nothing of them.
I quickly learned that it wasn't always the books that stunk, sometimes it was the teacher. Grade 7ish we had a short story anthology book that we read selected stories out of. I remember they were quite consistently bad, and hated that book.
One day, caught on a long bus ride and without other reading material (I'm the sort who will read cereal box ingredient lists in preference to doing nothing), I read one of the stories we hadn't been assigned, resigning myself to loathing it.
And it was quite good. Not great, certainly, but easily the best in the book so far. (I've actually tried to track it down since. Sadly, plot plus some basic dialogue is all I remember.) So I kept reading. And I was absolutely shocked to find Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel", amongst others, waiting for me in those pages the teacher never visited.
I finished the entire book before the end of the year, and I found that I could almost consistently predict which stories the teacher would pick from a given section just by picking the worst ones.
And then there was my Grade 10 teacher, who was, to quote TV Tropes, sure that everyone is Jesus in Purgatory. Heaven help you (no pun intended) if you handed in a book report that didn't insist that the titular characters of "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Lady of Shallot" were both Jesus dying for mankind's sins.
I had a few really good English teachers, I admit, but some of them made me realize why some kids were proud to be borderline illiterate.
That reminds me. The first few times I saw a post containing "tl;dr" I assumed it was some idjit trying to post some insane HTML or JS thing to a web form, and that's all that got through alive. And then I saw it more, so I googled it.
And thus I learned that it was some idjit trying to be clever or terse and instead coming across as a newb or owner of a keyboard-loving cat.
Congrats on being the first person to use it in a genuinely clever manner.
Here in Canada, the only ATMs I've crashed personally were both running linux (either that, or a version of Windows that displays a fake linux boot sequence to save face.)
A Windows version with a sense of shame. That would be impressive, particularly coming from a company who's pretty much shameless.
From TFA, three single drops of water took one and a half hours to simulate. The babbling water simulation took over 12 hours.
That's okay, we could prerender it and just use the recording! Sure, you could just record REAL water, but, damn it, if I wanted real water I'd go outside! I don't like reality! It sucks! I expect objects to appear in my hands when I step on them! When I die, I expect to respawn in my base(ment)! I want all injuries to color my vision red for a moment and then do nothing to impair me! I want to survive multiple gunshot wounds to the chest just because I happen to be carrying a few first-aid kits (that I just stepped on)!
(And if you don't believe me that reality is worse than synthetics, tell me that speech synthesis voice acting would be appreciably worse than anything available on http://www.audioatrocities.com/ )
Last saturday in South Carolina a facebook group organized a 200 person strong group of teenagers to go out attack a store clerk and pull out and beat up a family in a car.
Really? Tragic, horrible, an abomination. Surely a 200 person mob attacking innocent victims must have made the news by Sunday, which would be the 31st. I know that a +2 Interesting mod means it MUST be true, but let's check....
Google news tells me the only stories for the 30th and 31st containing "South", "Carolina" and "clerk" are:
* Adult Books for High School Students
* Symposium celebrates SC women through the ages
* Waiting on death row: In 7 brutal cases, killers deserve sentences...
* Incompetence, indifference leave St. Paul couple snarled in...
* TV Movies for the week of May 31
* Cyber security plan
* Bearing witness to kindness and care
* Two arrested for murder
The murder ones are all deaths that happened weeks or years ago. The couple is the standard "lost home to medical bills" story. Ones containing "South", "Carolina" and "Facebook" are even fewer and more mundane. Thus, this post is either mistaken, trolling, or trying to be funny.
Mods, PLEASE check facts before modding. I know you can't verify a post relating to the details of quantum chromodynamics, but if the answer is literally one Google search away....
Where do you shop that has a 1 year open box return policy on software?
When I ask the customers who try it (or something similar), they seem to think everyone else has such a forgiving policy.
Belabored service department technician: "Yeah. This RAM was bought eight months ago, the box is damaged, and the RAM has a layer of brown tarry dust on it, just like it was in a smoker's PC for all that time. We're not refunding your money."
Customer: "What? That's a horrible thing to say! It's never been used! All your competitors would take this back. WALMART WOULD TAKE IT BACK!"
Belabored service department technician: "You may wish to buy all your DDR 333MHz RAM at Wal-Mart from now on, then."
Slashdot Mirror
No. But having sex with Vista makes you a pervert.
And I knew my corruption was complete when I saw that sentence and thought, "There's probably OS-tan hentai of that."
its second purpose is to discover when lizard people have infiltrated our society
Damn! He's on to us! CANCEL INVASION! CANCEL INVASION!
So this vaunted "flu-scanner" can be fooled simply by taking Tylenol? Are you serious? Shouldn't it be assumed that anyone who is running a fever will most likely be taking fever-reducing medications?
It should be. But when people get nervous, they get stupid and they stop asking questions. Will magic box make everything better? Let's buy magic box! Doesn't matter if it's a box of rocks with "majik" painted on the side, this nice man says it will protect us from terrorists/swine flu/birth defects/CNN's breaking story of the day/angst! Buy the magic box!
Tell me again what the point of this scanner is?
Profiteering?
Or, another way of seeing it:
1 - Come to the conclusion that a good swine flu detector would be useful.
2 - ???
3 - Build thousands of swine flu detectors and sell them.
4 - Profit!
#2 is easy. Convince someone with a lot of money and a lot of fear that a good swine flu detector would be useful.
That's quite a mouthful.
... aaaaannnnd we're right back to the strap-on.
Oh, god, horrible mental images. My brain just kind of fused the parent, GP, and GGP into one *thing* and got a dominatrix with a strap on making her sub beat off a dead horse. I need to go bleach my brain now.
Don't knock it. If they ever invent a way to hook an inkjet printer right to your brain, you can make a lot of cash with those images!
Just drive on the roads until they crumble.
That's what they do, but unfortunately the roads don't have the decency to crumble uniformly, with some parts turning to potholes and others staying sound.
The obvious conclusion, gentlemen, is that we need shoddier workmanship so it all goes to hell simultaneously. DOWN WITH QUALITY!
And what is "maximize" good for. Isn't it ironic for someone who derides a one button mouse to want a one window GUI ?
It's about as ironic as a person who won't ride a two-wheeled motorcycle driving a two-door car. Which is to say, no, not ironic at all. Opinion on user interface feature/failing X has no relevance to opinion on user interface feature/failing Y, particularly in regards to how much of X and Y is a good thing.
On XP I alt-tab between maximized windows all the time. If windows aren't full screen, they're either being used in a drag-and-drop or something like a magnifier that by definition can't run full screen. If my mouse has less than two buttons and a scroll wheel it slows me down. So I'm a one-window multiple-button kind of guy without being a walking paradox.
And while we're on the subject, does anyone use Num Lock or Pause anymore?
Pausing a fast-moving BIOS screen is still handy. Plus, winkey+pause brings up the system properties on XP. Convenient for a front-line geek who does upgrades fairly regularly and needs to show the end-user that Windows says there's more RAM or a new ethernet port or whatever.
And that's all well and good until I run into one of those damn BenQ keyboards that bumps the print screen/scroll lock/pause keys down into the home/page up/etc cluster, and replaces them with wake/sleep/power.
A power button. On the keyboard. In the exact same spot where another key normally resides. It has caused screams of anger and anguish more than once for me, and if I ever meet BenQ's keyboard designer, I'm gonna use one of his keyboards to leave a reverse imprint of wake/sleep/power in his forehead.
Lol @ excessive response to lesser problems.
Something must be done to combat terrorism.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
I wondered what possible mental model of programming this person could have where they thought that pulling random punch cards out of a waste bin could possibly be helpful. My conclusion was that they were just trying to get us students consultants to write the code from scratch for them and he random cards were a way to pretend they had already done some work.
Possibly, but I'm gonna chuck Hanlon's razor at this one: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
After some of the insanity I have seen from people, I'm willing to believe anything. For instance, when trying to set up a printer for someone over the phone (never again...), I hit a dead end. After an hour where I couldn't get them to communicate despite verifying the physical connection three times, I ultimately found out that the printer was parallel and the cable the person was trying to use was USB.
Why did this person think that resting this USB cable in the general vicinity of the printer's port would somehow work despite my repeated insistence that it had to be plugged and locked into the big wide hole? She had put it in an old box she found from a parallel cable (and when I asked her to describe the cable, she described the picture on the box). There was no malice, she just earnestly believed that cables were cables, and simply resting it in the right box for long enough would allow it to absorb the abilities of whatever cable the box was made for. Now, if you told her that putting a red ribbon (or paper or yarn or whatever) in a box of blue ribbon (paper, etc.) would make the red one blue, she'd tell you you were loony.
So, yeah, there's some people out there who seem normal, but have absolutely insane and illogical ideas when it comes to technology they don't understand. And without proof to the contrary, I by default count students as members of the general public, to be treated with the same assumption of insanity.
There is an old saying - "Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach."
Conclusion to be reached from grandparent: Some teachers are idiots.
I find this saying utter bullshit. I grew up among teachers and I hear complaints all the time about either stupid students or students with absolutely no manners.
Conclusion to be reached from parent: Some students are idiots.
Root cause: Some people are idiots.
Congratulations! You're both right.
I like to think outside of the box though, I say arm the birds.
Good God, man. Have you already forgotten the lessons of Hitchcock? Tippi Hedren barely made it through when those feathery sons of bitches were engaging in hand-to-ha... er... hand-to-wing combat. Arm them and we're all doomed!
Also, WTF is a "vicegerent"?
It's the guy who becomes gerent after the incumbent gerent is shot.
All kidding aside, "gerent" and "vicegerent" are words, no matter how much it looks like someone typoed "regent":
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gerent
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gerent
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vicegerent
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vicegerent
Just week or two ago there was a story on slashdot about some parent whose son had taken the wrong bus home from school and got lost so he asked slashdot ways to track his child with GPS...
So I belive that what you described will happen very soon.
Makes less sense for kids, though. They grow out of clothing FAST. I'm not arguing that the erosion of personal privacy's not going to accelerate, but I don't think it'll take the form of something wearable. Sewable into clothing, maybe, but not as clothing.
IMHO, it'll be more likely built into (either directly or as a 3rd party addon) the cell phone/mp3 player/portable game unit the kid already lugs around. Anyone too young for that, it'll still be something installable onto something else.
I can honestly say that, at a minimum, 95% of what I learned in school was worthless. And, even though I'm a college graduate (3.7 GPA) - if you were to give me a 7th grade history exam, I would fail.
Most would. Hmm. Now only if there were a game show to exploit this concept....
Most English books stunk and I remember nothing of them.
I quickly learned that it wasn't always the books that stunk, sometimes it was the teacher. Grade 7ish we had a short story anthology book that we read selected stories out of. I remember they were quite consistently bad, and hated that book.
One day, caught on a long bus ride and without other reading material (I'm the sort who will read cereal box ingredient lists in preference to doing nothing), I read one of the stories we hadn't been assigned, resigning myself to loathing it.
And it was quite good. Not great, certainly, but easily the best in the book so far. (I've actually tried to track it down since. Sadly, plot plus some basic dialogue is all I remember.) So I kept reading. And I was absolutely shocked to find Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel", amongst others, waiting for me in those pages the teacher never visited.
I finished the entire book before the end of the year, and I found that I could almost consistently predict which stories the teacher would pick from a given section just by picking the worst ones.
And then there was my Grade 10 teacher, who was, to quote TV Tropes, sure that everyone is Jesus in Purgatory. Heaven help you (no pun intended) if you handed in a book report that didn't insist that the titular characters of "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Lady of Shallot" were both Jesus dying for mankind's sins.
I had a few really good English teachers, I admit, but some of them made me realize why some kids were proud to be borderline illiterate.
That reminds me. The first few times I saw a post containing "tl;dr" I assumed it was some idjit trying to post some insane HTML or JS thing to a web form, and that's all that got through alive. And then I saw it more, so I googled it.
And thus I learned that it was some idjit trying to be clever or terse and instead coming across as a newb or owner of a keyboard-loving cat.
Congrats on being the first person to use it in a genuinely clever manner.
Seriously...
How hard is
If "A" A = A + 1 elseif "B" B = B + 1 elseif "C" C = C + 1 endif
???
I can see you've never read http://thedailywtf.com/ For some so-called programmers, it's impossible.
I'm normally not a fan of government getting their tentacles into everything but I suppose in this instance turnabout is fair play.
Err... in Soviet Japan, tentacles get their government into everything?
I think I've simultaneously confused and aroused myself.
Here in Canada, the only ATMs I've crashed personally were both running linux (either that, or a version of Windows that displays a fake linux boot sequence to save face.)
A Windows version with a sense of shame. That would be impressive, particularly coming from a company who's pretty much shameless.
Sweet. Where do I download some money then?
Now, now. Money doesn't grow on binary trees.
From TFA, three single drops of water took one and a half hours to simulate. The babbling water simulation took over 12 hours.
That's okay, we could prerender it and just use the recording! Sure, you could just record REAL water, but, damn it, if I wanted real water I'd go outside! I don't like reality! It sucks! I expect objects to appear in my hands when I step on them! When I die, I expect to respawn in my base(ment)! I want all injuries to color my vision red for a moment and then do nothing to impair me! I want to survive multiple gunshot wounds to the chest just because I happen to be carrying a few first-aid kits (that I just stepped on)!
(And if you don't believe me that reality is worse than synthetics, tell me that speech synthesis voice acting would be appreciably worse than anything available on http://www.audioatrocities.com/ )
Last saturday in South Carolina a facebook group organized a 200 person strong group of teenagers to go out attack a store clerk and pull out and beat up a family in a car.
Really? Tragic, horrible, an abomination. Surely a 200 person mob attacking innocent victims must have made the news by Sunday, which would be the 31st. I know that a +2 Interesting mod means it MUST be true, but let's check....
Google news tells me the only stories for the 30th and 31st containing "South", "Carolina" and "clerk" are: ... ...
* Adult Books for High School Students
* Symposium celebrates SC women through the ages
* Waiting on death row: In 7 brutal cases, killers deserve sentences
* Incompetence, indifference leave St. Paul couple snarled in
* TV Movies for the week of May 31
* Cyber security plan
* Bearing witness to kindness and care
* Two arrested for murder
The murder ones are all deaths that happened weeks or years ago. The couple is the standard "lost home to medical bills" story. Ones containing "South", "Carolina" and "Facebook" are even fewer and more mundane. Thus, this post is either mistaken, trolling, or trying to be funny.
Mods, PLEASE check facts before modding. I know you can't verify a post relating to the details of quantum chromodynamics, but if the answer is literally one Google search away....
Where do you shop that has a 1 year open box return policy on software?
When I ask the customers who try it (or something similar), they seem to think everyone else has such a forgiving policy.
Belabored service department technician: "Yeah. This RAM was bought eight months ago, the box is damaged, and the RAM has a layer of brown tarry dust on it, just like it was in a smoker's PC for all that time. We're not refunding your money."
Customer: "What? That's a horrible thing to say! It's never been used! All your competitors would take this back. WALMART WOULD TAKE IT BACK!"
Belabored service department technician: "You may wish to buy all your DDR 333MHz RAM at Wal-Mart from now on, then."
Can I duplicate this in Dwarf Fortress?
You can, but then carp get in the water and all the operators get butchered.