You don't seem to understand what population control is. You say that it is best left alone, then suggest a means to achieve population control. Killing lots of people, and trying to educate them out of over breeding, are both forms of population control. I can agree with you, the other poster, both or neither, but trying to pretend that the quantity of population is the single biggest factor in environmental pollution, and that the earth does not have a maximum population possible, is a clear sign of someone that is claiming to be an environmentalist so that they can get a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and doesn't really care, or understand the real issue.
After listening to an Apple fanboy explain to me why pressing a green plus symbol makes perfect sense for shrinking a window, and how it makes total sense that pressing a red X closes some programs, and leaves others running, I am no longer surprised at anything that gets accepted by some people.
Well, given that complaining about a person's grammar or spelling is pretty much always a way of saying 'I agree with everything you have said, but don't want to admit it.', your post leads me to believe that you completely agree with your previous post.
The fact that he doesn't want to be part of the 90% doesn't mean he isn't right. If my credit card spending was 900% of my income, I woulds want to cut back my spending either, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't go bankrupt. Any environmentalist that isn't discussing population control, isn't an environmentalist.
And ScentCone declares Benjamin Franklin to be one of our Founding Pirates. A thief that inspired generations of thieves after him to rip off artists and businesses.
That is a very poor excuse. I think any competent adult could figure out how to solve the problem if your excuse were true. It also doesn't explain why doctors are late at the beginning of the day as much as at the end.
It is common in many businesses. If a person feels that they are better than you, or even if they just feel they have the upper hand, many will chose to be an ass to you.
Just look at how many Dr. offices have no cell phone signs and have no problem being 20 minutes late to an appointment, but will throw a hissy if you are 5 minutes late, even though they were not going to see you anyway. They expect you to sit quitely and non-productively in their lobby until they decide it is time to honor you with their presence.
Look at how punctual the phone company and cable companies are when you call for an install.
I'm sure if you thought about it, you could think of a couple of dozen industries where they treat their customers like garbage.
In trendy restaurants it often even increases their business.
Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
It is also important to note that many municipalities have a law that states when roads are audited, the speed must be set to some % below the speed of traffic. Given this, if everyone obeyed the speed limit, it would become illegal to drive.
Another example would be driving, when you first start driving, there is so much to do, it is hard to focus on it all. But soon you can switch easily between looking at the speedometer, checking your mirrors, looking in front, checking the temperature gauge, etc. It isn't so much that you are focusing on multiple things at once so much as you've gotten good at switching between them all, and can do them all without any trouble.
While I agree with what you say, I don't believe that it is the whole story with new drivers, or even the biggest piece of a multi-piece problem. Bigger than efficient task switching is that experienced drivers DON'T focus on many of the tasks you point out. Frequently they ignore some tasks that new drivers are told to focus on, and often the ones they don't ignore, they only watch for a change that would call greater attention. I can honestly say that I haven't looked at my temperature gauge more than a couple of times in years. Why? Because I have good reliable cars that don't over heat. I do glance at my dash, and take note if anything looks out of place, but the temperature gauge does not get any actual focus. Even the speedometer isn't used as much as new drivers a lead to believe. After years of driving, we get good at gauging our speed based on the feel of the car and looking out the window. We tend to use the car's speedometer as a calibration tool for our own biological speedometer. New drivers on the other hand, have to keep looking at the speedometer because they are just not as good at gauging their speed. New drivers are also told to read all the street signs. That is just dangerous. With experience, they learn to ignore the signs that don't matter. They stop looking for signs where they won't find them.
Professional Starcraft players are the same way, if you look at what they do, it is amazing how they can focus efficiently on so many things at once. Also, the first time you try to do it yourself, it is exhausting and hard to even do a quarter of what they do. Then slowly, after practicing, you can begin to build units continually while assigning them to different places, then you are able to do it while simultaneously fighting a battle, then you are able to fight two battles simultaneously. They way to do it, once again, is to switch focus between all the tasks.
This is actually also a good example of NOT paying attention. These guy don't fight multiple battles just buy switching tasks quickly. A major component of what they do is knowing their troop capabilities, and know what will happen when they are not looking. Then they stop looking instead of watching to see what happens. They issue a command, and move to the next group. Much like looking at the speedometer, they might pop over periodically to calibrate their assumptions to reality, but they don't focus on the unimportant details.
As much as people don't want to admit it, driving is accomplished through huge amounts of assumption. New drivers are regularly told to perform the impossible. Old drivers don't recognize that their assumptions are not physically taking place. It reminds me of the old saying "You know what happens when you Assume don't you? You make an Ass out of U and Me." That saying is always followed in my head with "And you get up in the morning because you assume that you still have a job." You eat your meal at a restaurant because you assume your credit card will not be declined. You open your front door because you assume that the outside air is not filled with a poison gas....". Life is impossible to live without making millions of assumptions every day. Likewise driving is impossible to do safely without making tons of assumptions.
So, while I agree with your sentiment on task switching, just as important is the ability to make good assumptions.
Of course the fact that every single 'study' I have seen done on 'distracted driving' has been horribly biased to produce the results that cell phones are evil doesn't help the whole discussion.
I would disagree. I have met plenty of people that just seem dumb on a day to day basis, but as soon as they want something, they are suddenly brilliant. These are the people that I would call intellectually lazy. On the other hand, I have met plenty of people who simply were not physically capable of being smart. It wasn't a matter of trying. They just didn't have the physical brains for it.
No doubt that there are plenty of shades of gray in between, and that if you are intellectually lazy long enough, you don't have the basic building blocks of knowledge to really use your physical capabilities, but there is a difference.
I believe they are trying to differentiate between the people who could learn if they tried vs. the people who's brains are simply not up to snuff to learn much. Of course, maybe they are just trying to use PC language.
Unfortunately for many, they can study for years, and still never become a great musician, physician, actor, engineer, scientist, etc.... Most people just are not built for it. This has always been the case, and is unlikely to ever change.
The problem with teaching information checking in school is that good information checking would rule out a huge amount of sources that schools use as their references.
I suspect that's not even it. I suspect it is because doctors tend to have an over inflated sense of importance, and enough of them had behaved badly enough that the techs started to throw a fit. Someone in the office politics sort of way decided that this was a way that they could 'force' the doctors to be nicer. This sort of thing rarely works, but people keep trying.
You missed the point. They were showing how RIGHT wing they are. They wore all black to morn the death of the Republican party. Or, at least any sanity left in it.
And it's one thing to say "adenosine is released locally by needle pricks". And another to say that there are mysterious "meridians" that run through the body and connects your pinky toe to your heart, and your left butt cheek to your kidney or whatever, and that you can cure all kinds of diseases in those "connected" organs by poking the exactly right spots with needles.
And it's one thing to say "adenosine is released locally by needle pricks". And another to say that there are mysterious "meridians" that run through the body and connects your pinky toe to your heart, and your left butt cheek to your kidney or whatever, and that you can cure all kinds of diseases in those "connected" organs by poking the exactly right spots with needles.
That's part of the problem. It really isn't. We know scientifically that there are lines through the body that connect parts of the body. We call them nerves. One of the big problems is that when someone sees an effect, they try to find an explanation. Sometimes the explanation is that the effect is from wishful thinking, sometimes it is that they only think there was an effect, sometimes the explanation is a good rational guess.
When there is a real effect, and it isn't from a placebo, the scientific method is a reliable way to determine why the effect happens. Even so, for a real effect, making up a bogus reason does not change the effect. This means that experiments, and even the scientific method can produce results confirming magic.
Case in point, if I set up a proper experiment to test whether I can attract microscopic fire sprites to my hands by rubbing them together really fast. I can set up controls, and do all of the good science to test it. I can predict the heating of my hands from the fire sprites, and show that in fact fire sprites ARE attracted to my rubbing hands. I would still be wrong of course, but I would have an experiment that 'proved' fire sprites. The fact that I was wrong as to why would not make rubbing my hands together on a cold day any less effective at warming them.
The whole thing gets worse when you claim a thousand different effects caused by an action, and argue it with a thousand different people.
The fact is, we KNOW that sticking needles in peoples body will produce a reaction. The question is whether it produces an good reactions, and if it does, what those reactions really are. As individuals, we need to do a risk analysis on the quantity/likelyhood/quality of the good reactions to the quantity/likelyhood/quality of the bad reactions. This includes the bad reaction of cost.
No, what is insanity is allowing businesses to dig up the streets at all to run data cables. A sane municipality would dig up their streets once to lay pipe in the same manner as their sewer system, and then their residents could have 40 different data lines running into their house and every time a new one showed up, the only disruption to the streets would be pulling up a manhole cover and putting it back down after the cables were run.
I currently have 3 separate conduits run into my house, and one more is out at the street. The one in the street and two of the three running into my house are owned and maintained by the City. Municipalities are very experienced with building and maintaining pipes that reach from central stations to each and every home.
"Natural Monopoly" is only the answer to describe the last mile for data if the wrong question is asked.
That is no longer true. My Nexus One with 2.2 has live wallpapers. They display when the device is locked. The live wallpapers display information perfectly well. I have tried two different apps that work outside of the lock. One is a weather live wallpaper that shows the weather. I didn't find it very good, but it did offer information outside the lock. The other is a widget with the controls for the media player on the outside of the lock. This is VERY convenient.
You are exhibiting several symptoms of being an Apple fanboy. The first is in the claim that pushing a function from the OS to the application, and that introducing inconsistancy is a good thing. It is not, and inconsistencies between applications has been a major harping point by Apple fanboys against Microsoft and Linux. To claim that it is good when it is in an Apple product is a bad sign.
You also show the symptom in defending the One button is all you need idea. Having a button that always takes you out of what you are doing is not the problem. Having it as the ONLY button, and the Only control that you can really expect to see IS a bad idea. Having the most destructive action you can make in an application in an easy to accidentally hit location is a massive UI blunder. Even when done by Apple.
You also make the mistake of quoting Fitt's Law. Fitt's law isn't a law. It has some reasonable ideas, but taking them at face value is a poor idea. For example, the idea that corners are easy to hit, does make some sense with a mouse on a screen. Why? Because you just shove the mouse as far up and over as it can go and you will be on the target. You don't have to actually hit the target. On a touch screen, that does not apply. It also doesn't apply to buttons being at a difficult to reach location. The back button being (when it is there) in the upper left corner makes about as much sense as remapping the 'e' key on your keyboard to the Esc key because it is in the corner. Frequently used touch points should be as close to where the fingers naturally fall as possible without interfering with the rest of the application.
Correct, another method would be to take the double entry accounting approach. You run the command in two different ways that should provide the same answer if correct, but different answers if wrong. You would only need a very small part of the chip to be really reliable as an error checker. I do think that this would be better handled by hardware than software, but the premise is not unreasonable.
The real question is whether chips could be sped up enough to counteract the slow down introduced by error checking CPUs. I suppose that this could be a legitimate use of dual processing. Run two CPUs in parallel that produce their results via different methods, and then have a reliable watchdog that causes them to rerun the commands if they don't match.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. Here you go.
You don't seem to understand what population control is. You say that it is best left alone, then suggest a means to achieve population control. Killing lots of people, and trying to educate them out of over breeding, are both forms of population control. I can agree with you, the other poster, both or neither, but trying to pretend that the quantity of population is the single biggest factor in environmental pollution, and that the earth does not have a maximum population possible, is a clear sign of someone that is claiming to be an environmentalist so that they can get a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and doesn't really care, or understand the real issue.
After listening to an Apple fanboy explain to me why pressing a green plus symbol makes perfect sense for shrinking a window, and how it makes total sense that pressing a red X closes some programs, and leaves others running, I am no longer surprised at anything that gets accepted by some people.
You have a lot more faith in the future of copyright than I do.
Well, given that complaining about a person's grammar or spelling is pretty much always a way of saying 'I agree with everything you have said, but don't want to admit it.', your post leads me to believe that you completely agree with your previous post.
The fact that he doesn't want to be part of the 90% doesn't mean he isn't right. If my credit card spending was 900% of my income, I woulds want to cut back my spending either, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't go bankrupt. Any environmentalist that isn't discussing population control, isn't an environmentalist.
And ScentCone declares Benjamin Franklin to be one of our Founding Pirates. A thief that inspired generations of thieves after him to rip off artists and businesses.
That is a very poor excuse. I think any competent adult could figure out how to solve the problem if your excuse were true. It also doesn't explain why doctors are late at the beginning of the day as much as at the end.
Hmmmm.... Chicken nail pillow fence?
It is common in many businesses. If a person feels that they are better than you, or even if they just feel they have the upper hand, many will chose to be an ass to you.
Just look at how many Dr. offices have no cell phone signs and have no problem being 20 minutes late to an appointment, but will throw a hissy if you are 5 minutes late, even though they were not going to see you anyway. They expect you to sit quitely and non-productively in their lobby until they decide it is time to honor you with their presence.
Look at how punctual the phone company and cable companies are when you call for an install.
I'm sure if you thought about it, you could think of a couple of dozen industries where they treat their customers like garbage.
In trendy restaurants it often even increases their business.
Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
It is also important to note that many municipalities have a law that states when roads are audited, the speed must be set to some % below the speed of traffic. Given this, if everyone obeyed the speed limit, it would become illegal to drive.
Another example would be driving, when you first start driving, there is so much to do, it is hard to focus on it all. But soon you can switch easily between looking at the speedometer, checking your mirrors, looking in front, checking the temperature gauge, etc. It isn't so much that you are focusing on multiple things at once so much as you've gotten good at switching between them all, and can do them all without any trouble.
While I agree with what you say, I don't believe that it is the whole story with new drivers, or even the biggest piece of a multi-piece problem. Bigger than efficient task switching is that experienced drivers DON'T focus on many of the tasks you point out. Frequently they ignore some tasks that new drivers are told to focus on, and often the ones they don't ignore, they only watch for a change that would call greater attention. I can honestly say that I haven't looked at my temperature gauge more than a couple of times in years. Why? Because I have good reliable cars that don't over heat. I do glance at my dash, and take note if anything looks out of place, but the temperature gauge does not get any actual focus. Even the speedometer isn't used as much as new drivers a lead to believe. After years of driving, we get good at gauging our speed based on the feel of the car and looking out the window. We tend to use the car's speedometer as a calibration tool for our own biological speedometer. New drivers on the other hand, have to keep looking at the speedometer because they are just not as good at gauging their speed. New drivers are also told to read all the street signs. That is just dangerous. With experience, they learn to ignore the signs that don't matter. They stop looking for signs where they won't find them.
Professional Starcraft players are the same way, if you look at what they do, it is amazing how they can focus efficiently on so many things at once. Also, the first time you try to do it yourself, it is exhausting and hard to even do a quarter of what they do. Then slowly, after practicing, you can begin to build units continually while assigning them to different places, then you are able to do it while simultaneously fighting a battle, then you are able to fight two battles simultaneously. They way to do it, once again, is to switch focus between all the tasks.
This is actually also a good example of NOT paying attention. These guy don't fight multiple battles just buy switching tasks quickly. A major component of what they do is knowing their troop capabilities, and know what will happen when they are not looking. Then they stop looking instead of watching to see what happens. They issue a command, and move to the next group. Much like looking at the speedometer, they might pop over periodically to calibrate their assumptions to reality, but they don't focus on the unimportant details. As much as people don't want to admit it, driving is accomplished through huge amounts of assumption. New drivers are regularly told to perform the impossible. Old drivers don't recognize that their assumptions are not physically taking place. It reminds me of the old saying "You know what happens when you Assume don't you? You make an Ass out of U and Me." That saying is always followed in my head with "And you get up in the morning because you assume that you still have a job." You eat your meal at a restaurant because you assume your credit card will not be declined. You open your front door because you assume that the outside air is not filled with a poison gas....". Life is impossible to live without making millions of assumptions every day. Likewise driving is impossible to do safely without making tons of assumptions.
So, while I agree with your sentiment on task switching, just as important is the ability to make good assumptions.
Of course the fact that every single 'study' I have seen done on 'distracted driving' has been horribly biased to produce the results that cell phones are evil doesn't help the whole discussion.
I would disagree. I have met plenty of people that just seem dumb on a day to day basis, but as soon as they want something, they are suddenly brilliant. These are the people that I would call intellectually lazy. On the other hand, I have met plenty of people who simply were not physically capable of being smart. It wasn't a matter of trying. They just didn't have the physical brains for it.
No doubt that there are plenty of shades of gray in between, and that if you are intellectually lazy long enough, you don't have the basic building blocks of knowledge to really use your physical capabilities, but there is a difference.
I believe they are trying to differentiate between the people who could learn if they tried vs. the people who's brains are simply not up to snuff to learn much. Of course, maybe they are just trying to use PC language.
Unfortunately for many, they can study for years, and still never become a great musician, physician, actor, engineer, scientist, etc.... Most people just are not built for it. This has always been the case, and is unlikely to ever change.
The problem with teaching information checking in school is that good information checking would rule out a huge amount of sources that schools use as their references.
If it was M.A.D. and it wasn't no longer needed, we would probably already know. So, sleep easy tonight.
I suspect that's not even it. I suspect it is because doctors tend to have an over inflated sense of importance, and enough of them had behaved badly enough that the techs started to throw a fit. Someone in the office politics sort of way decided that this was a way that they could 'force' the doctors to be nicer. This sort of thing rarely works, but people keep trying.
You missed the point. They were showing how RIGHT wing they are. They wore all black to morn the death of the Republican party. Or, at least any sanity left in it.
Yes, I joke....
And it's one thing to say "adenosine is released locally by needle pricks". And another to say that there are mysterious "meridians" that run through the body and connects your pinky toe to your heart, and your left butt cheek to your kidney or whatever, and that you can cure all kinds of diseases in those "connected" organs by poking the exactly right spots with needles.
And it's one thing to say "adenosine is released locally by needle pricks". And another to say that there are mysterious "meridians" that run through the body and connects your pinky toe to your heart, and your left butt cheek to your kidney or whatever, and that you can cure all kinds of diseases in those "connected" organs by poking the exactly right spots with needles.
That's part of the problem. It really isn't. We know scientifically that there are lines through the body that connect parts of the body. We call them nerves. One of the big problems is that when someone sees an effect, they try to find an explanation. Sometimes the explanation is that the effect is from wishful thinking, sometimes it is that they only think there was an effect, sometimes the explanation is a good rational guess.
When there is a real effect, and it isn't from a placebo, the scientific method is a reliable way to determine why the effect happens. Even so, for a real effect, making up a bogus reason does not change the effect. This means that experiments, and even the scientific method can produce results confirming magic. Case in point, if I set up a proper experiment to test whether I can attract microscopic fire sprites to my hands by rubbing them together really fast. I can set up controls, and do all of the good science to test it. I can predict the heating of my hands from the fire sprites, and show that in fact fire sprites ARE attracted to my rubbing hands. I would still be wrong of course, but I would have an experiment that 'proved' fire sprites. The fact that I was wrong as to why would not make rubbing my hands together on a cold day any less effective at warming them.
The whole thing gets worse when you claim a thousand different effects caused by an action, and argue it with a thousand different people.
The fact is, we KNOW that sticking needles in peoples body will produce a reaction. The question is whether it produces an good reactions, and if it does, what those reactions really are. As individuals, we need to do a risk analysis on the quantity/likelyhood/quality of the good reactions to the quantity/likelyhood/quality of the bad reactions. This includes the bad reaction of cost.
No, what is insanity is allowing businesses to dig up the streets at all to run data cables. A sane municipality would dig up their streets once to lay pipe in the same manner as their sewer system, and then their residents could have 40 different data lines running into their house and every time a new one showed up, the only disruption to the streets would be pulling up a manhole cover and putting it back down after the cables were run.
I currently have 3 separate conduits run into my house, and one more is out at the street. The one in the street and two of the three running into my house are owned and maintained by the City. Municipalities are very experienced with building and maintaining pipes that reach from central stations to each and every home.
"Natural Monopoly" is only the answer to describe the last mile for data if the wrong question is asked.
That is no longer true. My Nexus One with 2.2 has live wallpapers. They display when the device is locked. The live wallpapers display information perfectly well. I have tried two different apps that work outside of the lock. One is a weather live wallpaper that shows the weather. I didn't find it very good, but it did offer information outside the lock. The other is a widget with the controls for the media player on the outside of the lock. This is VERY convenient.
You are exhibiting several symptoms of being an Apple fanboy. The first is in the claim that pushing a function from the OS to the application, and that introducing inconsistancy is a good thing. It is not, and inconsistencies between applications has been a major harping point by Apple fanboys against Microsoft and Linux. To claim that it is good when it is in an Apple product is a bad sign.
You also show the symptom in defending the One button is all you need idea. Having a button that always takes you out of what you are doing is not the problem. Having it as the ONLY button, and the Only control that you can really expect to see IS a bad idea. Having the most destructive action you can make in an application in an easy to accidentally hit location is a massive UI blunder. Even when done by Apple.
You also make the mistake of quoting Fitt's Law. Fitt's law isn't a law. It has some reasonable ideas, but taking them at face value is a poor idea. For example, the idea that corners are easy to hit, does make some sense with a mouse on a screen. Why? Because you just shove the mouse as far up and over as it can go and you will be on the target. You don't have to actually hit the target. On a touch screen, that does not apply. It also doesn't apply to buttons being at a difficult to reach location. The back button being (when it is there) in the upper left corner makes about as much sense as remapping the 'e' key on your keyboard to the Esc key because it is in the corner. Frequently used touch points should be as close to where the fingers naturally fall as possible without interfering with the rest of the application.
Trust me, it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Correct, another method would be to take the double entry accounting approach. You run the command in two different ways that should provide the same answer if correct, but different answers if wrong. You would only need a very small part of the chip to be really reliable as an error checker. I do think that this would be better handled by hardware than software, but the premise is not unreasonable.
The real question is whether chips could be sped up enough to counteract the slow down introduced by error checking CPUs. I suppose that this could be a legitimate use of dual processing. Run two CPUs in parallel that produce their results via different methods, and then have a reliable watchdog that causes them to rerun the commands if they don't match.