That's quite true. A few years back, when I lived in my home country, the cable network offered three CNN channels: the "normal" one, CNN International, and CNN en Español, along with Fox News, and several news channels from Europe: BBC, DW (Germany), RAI (Italy), TVE (Spain), a French one called Channel 5 or something; and also a few from Latin America.
From the what I could gather from the channels in the languages I don't speak, all the non-US channels did a fairly good job at covering news from outside their own countries. It was shocking to see how crappy the basic CNN and Fox were. In particular it was shocking because CNN International was about as good as the international ones, and CNN en Español managed to cover with some depth the news from ALL Latin America (including Brazil) plus Spain and Portugal, and STILL the coverage of news from US, Canada and the rest of the world was very good - much better than the regular CNN.
The saddest part is that all CNN channels claimed to be produced in their studios in Atlanta, and of course they shared the same material. So the problem is not that the basic CNN channel doesn't have access to high quality material, it's that they deliberately choose not to present it, most certainly because their main audience has no interest in it.
Dude, he said the price of the Mac was $4,935.00 while the Dell was "Now from $5,975". That's $1000 more for the Dell than for the Mac Pro, not the other way around.
My Powerbook also came with the trial / crapware versions of Stuffit, Omnigraffle, OmniOutliner, Quicken and some eReader thing that I forget the name of. No, it didn't take long to clean those off - but that's no excuse for them being there in the first place.
Actually at least OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, along with GraphicConverter and a couple other things were extremely useful extras that came with my PowerBook (bought in 2003). They were NOT trial versions nor crippleware. I use them regularly, although I haven't updated them since then.
I'll sorely miss OmniGraffle when I eventually buy a MacBook Pro, since it's no longer part of the package. Not sure about GraphicConverter, but OmniOutliner sure is included.
Maybe you should have actually tried them before deleting them. And yes, if you don't like them you can just delete them, along with the trial version of Office and Quicken. My PoweBook didn't have any eReader nor.Mac trial, so I can't comment on those.
Thanks for your extremely insightful posts. We really need people like you helping us gain some perspective on the current situation.
I only have one small correction: the Spanish names for the Falkland Islands is Malvinas, not Maldivas. The latter, Maldives in English, are a group of islands in the Indic Ocean, just south of India.
To stay a little bit on topic, here is a link to the relevant entry on the School of the Americas in Wikipedia.
Judging by your username, you are Canadian. Unfortunately, Canadians and Brits receive a different treatment in the USA than other foreigners. That's usually illegal, but quite common.
Thus, getting that first credit card with which you demonstrate that you are actually a responsible person and not the high credit risk that they think you are is harder for others. Heck, I got rejected because of my lack of credit history in the US even though I could prove that I had a perfect credit history in my home country (and had international Visa cards at the time). After "ignoring" the citizenship requirement stated in the rules for an AmEx card, I was able to get one and now have an "excellent" credit history and get offers for new cards all the time.
I think the people who responded before fail to understand the catch-22 situation that international students like you (and me) find when we first come to the US. As anyone with no credit history, we have trouble getting the services (credit cards, etc) that allow us to build a credit history. But in our case, things are made even more complex because banks and other credit card issuers ACTIVELY avoid giving credit cards to international students with no credit history.
Have you seen the check mark for "Are you a U.S. citizen" in the applications? Well, that's part of what condemns us. Of course, they are not going to admit up front that they do this kind of discrimination (actually once they did: First Tennessee Bank). Admittedly, I've know of a couple of cases where international students have screwed up and ended up declaring bankruptcy, but percentage-wise I think it's totally unfair.
So what do most international student do? Well, lie in their first application. With your fist credit card you build a history much faster than by other means (utility bills, etc), and then getting a second one under better terms is a piece of cake. In my case, I was told of a small loophole: back in 2003 the instructions for the application for the American Express Blue for Students card said that the applicant should be a citizen (or permanent resident?), but in the ONLINE application form that question was never asked (the paper application, sure enough, had the dreaded check mark). So at least we felt that we weren't actively lying in the application process. Hey, that's something. I'm not sure if AmEx's online forms still have the loophole, but it's certainly worth trying.
Once you get that first card, the suggestions that others gave you apply: use the credit card, use it a lot, but always pay way more than the minimum. It's OK not to always pay the full bill (it actually helps to build the history), but make sure you are not accumulating a lot of debt and don't ever max it nor miss any payments.
Early this year (just over two years after I got the card) my credit score was already "Excellent" (750 or something like that). Of course my credit limit is still low because I'm still a starving grad student ($4500 in my two cards, of which I'm using around $500), but I have no problem getting what I need (cell phone service, etc) as long as it's within my range. Now I'm considered a valuable member of society, according to that absurd measure. It's a real shame I had to lie tacitly to get here.
An addres of any importnace should be in an address book, a phone number in a contacts list,....
Yes, all the contact info of importance should be in an address book. The problem is that we typically receive A LOT of that info, so we consider almost all of it to be of little importance (and we are usually right). Good and fast searching capabilities (like Mail.app and Gmail) are useful for those situations where you are looking for information that was on an email you received months ago, but at the time you didn't think you would ever need it again.
...important messages should be archived in a way that are easy to find and contextualize (by project, date, etc).
That's useless when you want to search using different criteria from the one you used to archive ("by project, date, etc."). In those cases you again want fast searches. If you are frequently looking for messages that fit a certain criteria, you can always use Mail.app's "smart folders" (which are simply stored searches that refresh automatically) or Gmail's "filters" (or at least I believe that's what they are since I only interact with Gmail through POP).
For years I used to archive my messages in the way you suggest. Three years ago I switched to Mail.app and it has been a liberating experience. Now it takes me such a short time to search through all my inboxes and archives (including the old, categorized archives from pre-2004 that I still lug around) that I wouldn't consider doing a manual classification any more.
As for the "internet" quote, the snopes article is obviously written by someone with a bias. I was watching when he said it, and his exact words were "I took the initiative in creating the internet."
Funny, because the Snopes article quotes those exact words (among some others, for context). It seems that you deliberately decided not to read the article, and thus wouldn't know if it's biased.
While I totally agree with you in that Spain is in no way a third world country, I don't think nominal GDP is a good measure of development, at least as exposed by your link. For example, according to that measure Brazil, India, and Mexico would be more developed than Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. Somehow that seems incorrect.
The human race has evolved in such a way that now we are capable of really fucking up the planet and eventually extinguishing all life on it. But let's see what mechanisms we have for that.
On one hand, we have nuclear weapons of gargantuan power. If we start a nuclear war, we can easily kill half of the population and make life incredibly miserable for those who survive... but wait, that implies that billions of people will actually survive, so the race isn't really eliminated.
We have also produced technology that is capable of affecting the planet in a serious, perhaps irreversible way. The effect that mostly concerns us now is global warming. Because of our actions the weather may go really wacky, potentially causing the death of millions. The ice caps may melt, slowly sinking a very significant portion of the land, precisely where most of the population lives. But that process will take many, many decades, and even though millions may die, most people will have time to move away. This will cause the overpopulation of the current high lands, with enormously devastating effects. Furthermore, eventually the climate changes may make the planet completely inhabitable (at least by humans), but that will take several centuries to take place. Meanwhile, the human race will survive.
We can go on and on, analysing the different ways that we may fuck up. But we will always find the same answer: in order to actually eliminate the human race we have to make all our habitats inhabitable, and we still can't do that within 100 years from now. We need something like a giant meteor striking the planet or the sun exploding, or some other phenomena out of our control.
My point is: Stephen Hawking is a very smart guy, but this time he managed to make a question that is wrongly formulated:
How can the human race survive the next hundred years?
Duh, how can the human race not survive the next hundred years?
Interesting... all those words are included in the dictionary that has been included with Tiger since it was launched almost a year ago (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition). The only one missing is rewriteable, which is spelled rewritable in that dictionary. And, unlike the Oxford English Dictionary mentioned in the article, the verb google appears both capitalized and not capitalized.
After the pigs sprout wings and Macs take over the 95% market share lets see how many proffesonal hackers turn there attention away from Microsoft's products.
Maybe, maybe not. I guess we will only know if Apple's market share increases substantially, which may or may not happen.
Saying OSX is more robust than Windows XP is irelivant... where there is a will there is a way.
It's not irrelevant at all, because while we wait for the market share to increase, Windows users will continue to be worried about attacks. Meanwhile, Mac users will live a happier life with little worries, confident in their (possibly false) sense of security. And maybe they will be severely bitten when the attacks finally come. Or perhaps not, as the market share may never reach critical mass, or maybe it will turn out that MacOS X is actually more secure than Windows (gasp!).
So I would say that chances are that Mac users will be safer, happier, and will have spent much less time dealing with security issues, at least for some more years to come, just as they have been for the last few years. That's certainly not irrelevant.
Oh, and Mac users have spell checkers embedded in the text fields of their browsers (and of practically any other application). (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
The 26-by-13-millimeter device, about the size of a multivitamin capsule,...
Good Lord! That's around 1" by 0.5"! This thing is huge! What kind of multivitamin capsules do these people take?
I don't know how thick an endoscope is (1 cm in diameter doesn't seem too bad), but I have never seen a capsule close to that size. Having a thick endoscope pushed down my throat by another person doesn't seem as hard as having to convince myself to swallow a 1" capsule.
On second thought, I believe drug mules swallow larger drug-filled packages. But I still would rather go for an endoscopy...
High fructose corn syrup in cola makes sticky mess - no one uses sugar anymore.
And the fructose and glucose in high fructose corn syrup are, of course, sugars. You mean no one uses sucrose (table sugar) anymore, which isn't true either: Coca-cola made in some other countries (such as Mexico) is made with sucrose.
If you were going to kill her by starvation why not just do it? A drug to stop the heart, a plastic bag, a string? Why let her slowly starve to death?
Because in some legal systems letting the patient die by starvation or other "natural" cause won't get the doctors/relatives prosecuted, while doing something actively (e.g., supplying a drug to stop the heart) will. So in the end the laws that supposedly protect the patient end up having far more cruel consequences. (Of course "cruel" is a debatable term in this context).
Where did you read about this text-to-speech interface? I RTFA and I didn't see anything about it. Link?
In one of the pages they talk about voice feedback. I guess that's what the parent meant. (By the way, the "Voice feedback" tag is a link to a pseudo-demo of the feature.)
Can someone please explain me the difference between "reliable" and "dependable"? It's a honest question, as I'm not a native English speaker.
I already looked in the dictionaries included with Tiger. They appear as synonyms in the thesaurus and dependable is defined as "trustworthy and reliable". (And furthermore trustworthy is defined as "able to be relied on as honest and truthful"!)
Care to provide a link? When I configure the E1505 with the specifications you provide I get a price of $809 after instant rebate, not $649. (Admittedly they are throwing in an upgrade to 60 GB HD).
That's a problem with Dell. You have to hunt down the offers and monitor them constantly, or you feel like you're getting ripped off.
Slashdot Mirror
That's quite true. A few years back, when I lived in my home country, the cable network offered three CNN channels: the "normal" one, CNN International, and CNN en Español, along with Fox News, and several news channels from Europe: BBC, DW (Germany), RAI (Italy), TVE (Spain), a French one called Channel 5 or something; and also a few from Latin America.
From the what I could gather from the channels in the languages I don't speak, all the non-US channels did a fairly good job at covering news from outside their own countries. It was shocking to see how crappy the basic CNN and Fox were. In particular it was shocking because CNN International was about as good as the international ones, and CNN en Español managed to cover with some depth the news from ALL Latin America (including Brazil) plus Spain and Portugal, and STILL the coverage of news from US, Canada and the rest of the world was very good - much better than the regular CNN.
The saddest part is that all CNN channels claimed to be produced in their studios in Atlanta, and of course they shared the same material. So the problem is not that the basic CNN channel doesn't have access to high quality material, it's that they deliberately choose not to present it, most certainly because their main audience has no interest in it.
Fuck! I had moderation points yesterday but they expired!
Anyway, thanks for your words. That's the most insightful thing I've read in days. And concise.
Dude, he said the price of the Mac was $4,935.00 while the Dell was "Now from $5,975". That's $1000 more for the Dell than for the Mac Pro, not the other way around.
Actually at least OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, along with GraphicConverter and a couple other things were extremely useful extras that came with my PowerBook (bought in 2003). They were NOT trial versions nor crippleware. I use them regularly, although I haven't updated them since then.
I'll sorely miss OmniGraffle when I eventually buy a MacBook Pro, since it's no longer part of the package. Not sure about GraphicConverter, but OmniOutliner sure is included.
Maybe you should have actually tried them before deleting them. And yes, if you don't like them you can just delete them, along with the trial version of Office and Quicken. My PoweBook didn't have any eReader nor
Thanks for your extremely insightful posts. We really need people like you helping us gain some perspective on the current situation.
I only have one small correction: the Spanish names for the Falkland Islands is Malvinas, not Maldivas. The latter, Maldives in English, are a group of islands in the Indic Ocean, just south of India.
To stay a little bit on topic, here is a link to the relevant entry on the School of the Americas in Wikipedia.
Judging by your username, you are Canadian. Unfortunately, Canadians and Brits receive a different treatment in the USA than other foreigners. That's usually illegal, but quite common.
Thus, getting that first credit card with which you demonstrate that you are actually a responsible person and not the high credit risk that they think you are is harder for others. Heck, I got rejected because of my lack of credit history in the US even though I could prove that I had a perfect credit history in my home country (and had international Visa cards at the time). After "ignoring" the citizenship requirement stated in the rules for an AmEx card, I was able to get one and now have an "excellent" credit history and get offers for new cards all the time.
I think the people who responded before fail to understand the catch-22 situation that international students like you (and me) find when we first come to the US. As anyone with no credit history, we have trouble getting the services (credit cards, etc) that allow us to build a credit history. But in our case, things are made even more complex because banks and other credit card issuers ACTIVELY avoid giving credit cards to international students with no credit history.
Have you seen the check mark for "Are you a U.S. citizen" in the applications? Well, that's part of what condemns us. Of course, they are not going to admit up front that they do this kind of discrimination (actually once they did: First Tennessee Bank). Admittedly, I've know of a couple of cases where international students have screwed up and ended up declaring bankruptcy, but percentage-wise I think it's totally unfair.
So what do most international student do? Well, lie in their first application. With your fist credit card you build a history much faster than by other means (utility bills, etc), and then getting a second one under better terms is a piece of cake. In my case, I was told of a small loophole: back in 2003 the instructions for the application for the American Express Blue for Students card said that the applicant should be a citizen (or permanent resident?), but in the ONLINE application form that question was never asked (the paper application, sure enough, had the dreaded check mark). So at least we felt that we weren't actively lying in the application process. Hey, that's something. I'm not sure if AmEx's online forms still have the loophole, but it's certainly worth trying.
Once you get that first card, the suggestions that others gave you apply: use the credit card, use it a lot, but always pay way more than the minimum. It's OK not to always pay the full bill (it actually helps to build the history), but make sure you are not accumulating a lot of debt and don't ever max it nor miss any payments.
Early this year (just over two years after I got the card) my credit score was already "Excellent" (750 or something like that). Of course my credit limit is still low because I'm still a starving grad student ($4500 in my two cards, of which I'm using around $500), but I have no problem getting what I need (cell phone service, etc) as long as it's within my range. Now I'm considered a valuable member of society, according to that absurd measure. It's a real shame I had to lie tacitly to get here.
Yes, all the contact info of importance should be in an address book. The problem is that we typically receive A LOT of that info, so we consider almost all of it to be of little importance (and we are usually right). Good and fast searching capabilities (like Mail.app and Gmail) are useful for those situations where you are looking for information that was on an email you received months ago, but at the time you didn't think you would ever need it again.
That's useless when you want to search using different criteria from the one you used to archive ("by project, date, etc."). In those cases you again want fast searches. If you are frequently looking for messages that fit a certain criteria, you can always use Mail.app's "smart folders" (which are simply stored searches that refresh automatically) or Gmail's "filters" (or at least I believe that's what they are since I only interact with Gmail through POP).
For years I used to archive my messages in the way you suggest. Three years ago I switched to Mail.app and it has been a liberating experience. Now it takes me such a short time to search through all my inboxes and archives (including the old, categorized archives from pre-2004 that I still lug around) that I wouldn't consider doing a manual classification any more.
Funny, because the Snopes article quotes those exact words (among some others, for context). It seems that you deliberately decided not to read the article, and thus wouldn't know if it's biased.
While I totally agree with you in that Spain is in no way a third world country, I don't think nominal GDP is a good measure of development, at least as exposed by your link. For example, according to that measure Brazil, India, and Mexico would be more developed than Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. Somehow that seems incorrect.
The human race has evolved in such a way that now we are capable of really fucking up the planet and eventually extinguishing all life on it. But let's see what mechanisms we have for that.
On one hand, we have nuclear weapons of gargantuan power. If we start a nuclear war, we can easily kill half of the population and make life incredibly miserable for those who survive... but wait, that implies that billions of people will actually survive, so the race isn't really eliminated.
We have also produced technology that is capable of affecting the planet in a serious, perhaps irreversible way. The effect that mostly concerns us now is global warming. Because of our actions the weather may go really wacky, potentially causing the death of millions. The ice caps may melt, slowly sinking a very significant portion of the land, precisely where most of the population lives. But that process will take many, many decades, and even though millions may die, most people will have time to move away. This will cause the overpopulation of the current high lands, with enormously devastating effects. Furthermore, eventually the climate changes may make the planet completely inhabitable (at least by humans), but that will take several centuries to take place. Meanwhile, the human race will survive.
We can go on and on, analysing the different ways that we may fuck up. But we will always find the same answer: in order to actually eliminate the human race we have to make all our habitats inhabitable, and we still can't do that within 100 years from now. We need something like a giant meteor striking the planet or the sun exploding, or some other phenomena out of our control.
My point is: Stephen Hawking is a very smart guy, but this time he managed to make a question that is wrongly formulated:
Duh, how can the human race not survive the next hundred years?
Interesting... all those words are included in the dictionary that has been included with Tiger since it was launched almost a year ago (New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition). The only one missing is rewriteable, which is spelled rewritable in that dictionary. And, unlike the Oxford English Dictionary mentioned in the article, the verb google appears both capitalized and not capitalized.
Frankly this looks like rather old news...
centerpedal
It's not irrelevant at all, because while we wait for the market share to increase, Windows users will continue to be worried about attacks. Meanwhile, Mac users will live a happier life with little worries, confident in their (possibly false) sense of security. And maybe they will be severely bitten when the attacks finally come. Or perhaps not, as the market share may never reach critical mass, or maybe it will turn out that MacOS X is actually more secure than Windows (gasp!).
So I would say that chances are that Mac users will be safer, happier, and will have spent much less time dealing with security issues, at least for some more years to come, just as they have been for the last few years. That's certainly not irrelevant.
Oh, and Mac users have spell checkers embedded in the text fields of their browsers (and of practically any other application). (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
Good Lord! That's around 1" by 0.5"! This thing is huge! What kind of multivitamin capsules do these people take?
I don't know how thick an endoscope is (1 cm in diameter doesn't seem too bad), but I have never seen a capsule close to that size. Having a thick endoscope pushed down my throat by another person doesn't seem as hard as having to convince myself to swallow a 1" capsule.
On second thought, I believe drug mules swallow larger drug-filled packages. But I still would rather go for an endoscopy...
Duh! Both!
Because people already know about the iTMS, and frequently have iTunes running already. Lots of people don't even know that allmusic.com exists.
I agree totally. And yet I tend to look first on iTunes if I just want to listen to a small sample of a song... I guess I'm just used to it.
And the fructose and glucose in high fructose corn syrup are, of course, sugars. You mean no one uses sucrose (table sugar) anymore, which isn't true either: Coca-cola made in some other countries (such as Mexico) is made with sucrose.
Because in some legal systems letting the patient die by starvation or other "natural" cause won't get the doctors/relatives prosecuted, while doing something actively (e.g., supplying a drug to stop the heart) will. So in the end the laws that supposedly protect the patient end up having far more cruel consequences. (Of course "cruel" is a debatable term in this context).
In one of the pages they talk about voice feedback. I guess that's what the parent meant. (By the way, the "Voice feedback" tag is a link to a pseudo-demo of the feature.)
Yeah, I read on Slashdot that they make great human interfaces...
Cool! I get to be the Spelling Police today!
From the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition. (It's included with Tiger).
So although kinda and lotsa are awful words, they somehow managed to be considered less incorrect that alot.
Can someone please explain me the difference between "reliable" and "dependable"? It's a honest question, as I'm not a native English speaker.
I already looked in the dictionaries included with Tiger. They appear as synonyms in the thesaurus and dependable is defined as "trustworthy and reliable". (And furthermore trustworthy is defined as "able to be relied on as honest and truthful"!)
Care to provide a link? When I configure the E1505 with the specifications you provide I get a price of $809 after instant rebate, not $649. (Admittedly they are throwing in an upgrade to 60 GB HD).
That's a problem with Dell. You have to hunt down the offers and monitor them constantly, or you feel like you're getting ripped off.
Dude, if you find any camelid hot you've got worse problems than your caffeine addiction!