Joking aside, you're spot on that it depends on the software. My daughter started using my iPad when she was one, and some of the educational/kids apps are complete garbage, doing more harm than good. Some of the apps however are FABULOUS. She learned her numbers and letters before she was three, and despite my best efforts, I think the iPad did most of the work. The big benefit the iPad has is that it can hold their attention, and give them infinite time when it's got it. I had to struggle to keep her interested in letters and numbers, and I would run out of energy (or time) relatively quickly.
On top of that, iOS is just fantastic for kids. My current one year old grabs the iPad whenever he can get his hands on it (he bites it so I keep it away from him!), and he's already figured out how to open it, scroll through the apps, and launch one without breaking anything. All in the few seconds he gets when I'm not looking! Even at 3 my daughter can't use a mouse effectively, so a normal computer is totally unworkable at these young ages.
Finally, I think using a tablet is a lot better than zoning in front of a tv. God knows how much Time our generations spent doing at, and we still managed to turn out okay... I think...
This. I have (and still do) use all sorts of various systems for backups both at home and at work, and Time Machine is by far the best. Completely invisible, automatic and smart. You can turn off your computer mid-backup and it just continues when you turn it back on. It is so much better than the alternatives, I'm surprised how little limelight it gets.
Perhaps just as important as the backups: it has a great UI to access said backups! One click gives access to a file at any date in the past you want.
The most sleep deprived profession is parenthood. The fact that taking care of kids isn't considered a 'job' is one of the great tragedies of our times. Without a doubt it is one of the most useful jobs for our societies, and one of the hardest. My experience with staying home and taking care of a child was that it was about 3x harder than a job (in IT). The second child was 2x harder again. And I get paid nothing (tax wise). The government would rather my child getting far inferior care in daycare - because apparently that's a 'real' job.
You know, I'm all for vaccines and think they have helped to change the world, but where can we find these statistics? I've looked high and low trying to put numbers together to prove that getting a vaccine is statistically better than not, but I've come up mostly empty handed.
To be accurate the numbers need to look at total risk of the vaccine, which admittedly is probably tough to know, but surely there are numbers for known and obvious reactions. They also need to look at the real current risks of the various diseases, properly weighting the severity of the risk.
To be honest I suspect that this data has either not been collected properly, or is being hidden for whatever strange corporate reasons.
This looks horribly annoying. I don't know what they are aiming for, but it appears they are making Gnome like iOS. Who thought that would be a good idea? Bye bye gnome!
It's inevitable that the media giants are going to get their way, or most of it, eventually. The reason is simple: They have the will and resources to keep flinging bills at the figurative wall until one sticks - and it only takes once - whereas the public has to continually be on their guard trying to stop these things. It's like being followed by a hyena... No matter how long you keep your guard up or how many opportunities the hyena misses, you're going to lose eventually.
How are you a anywhere even close to done after scanning? Even if you bypass directories and proper file names in favor of metadata and searching, inputting all that meta data is a *huge* job, no matter how quick and efficient you make it.
I tried to go paperless for a while, but the scanning and meta data were just too much, and the benefits too little. For the rare occassion I actually need to look up something that requires 'searching', it's less effort overall to just use paper. I've actually gone so far as to change all my bills and whatnot back to paper, because the filing and processing is just so much easier.
Compare paper bills to paperless:
Paper: - open envelope - pay bill on bank website - stuff bill in obvious folder in filing cabinet The whole process takes maybe one minute being slow, and scales well with multiple bills at a time. The filing is easy and logical (year - category), and relatively simple for common lookups (for example getting all the electricity bills for last year is trivial, taking maybe 30 seconds). There is only one website to deal with, so it keeps problems to a minimum.
Paperless: - open email informing of bill - figure out which websites I need to open - hope all websites are accessible, working, and havent changed so that my auto-fill stops working - figure out how to lookup how much I owe - pay bill on bank website - download copy of bill - edit meta data, file name, place in correct folder Inevitably when dealing with so many (quirky) websites, some are inaccessible, broken, or have changed enough that the auto-fill stops working. My electricity company changed the way they do logins drastically enough to require calling them (30 minutes - mostly on hold)... 3 times in one year! And it's not like I can use a different electricity company... Just changing the file name of the bill after downloading takes as much time as the entire filing process with a paper bill. Editing the meta data is prone to error and annoying (oops I must have forgotten one of the 20 necessary tags on that bill), and without proper meta data you lose basically 50% of the benefits of paperless (searching and space). The whole process is annoying if it goes smoothly, and time consuming and frustrating if it goes badly - and its a tossup and out of my control whether it will go smoothly or not.
Anyways, my main point was that it's not as simple as scanning a piece of paper - which, if we're being honest and realistic, is harder than filing said paper. And really the benefits are minimal for the average person.
Nonsense. An iPad recharges at about 1%/minute, and lasts for about 6minutes/1%. Plugging it in for 10 minutes gets you an hour of use - its at 50% in 50 minutes - and it will last for about 10 hours before needing to be plugged in (of constant use - a month in sleep mode). There's no way the battery is going to be an issue for them.
That's because no one has a business that (they think) depends on stopping rape (nor is it a very big problem). If you legalized prostitution and it became run by mega corps, and rape became a larger issue, you would definitely see a push for the things you mentioned.
This is exactly why I think our culture is doomed (in some figurative way): the more money you have, the more ability you have to change the laws, and corporations inevitably have the most money. Therefore, corporations inevitably make all the laws. Doom.
This is basically exactly what copying used to be, only it was harder and didn't work as well. Poole would borrow and copy tapes (or vinyls to tape). Now we can make a perfect copy in much less time, as many times as we want. It's actually something I already engage in, although not from fear of a lawsuit, but rather because the bandwidth caps where I live are fairly low. My neighbors and I often trade hard drives and copy them.
Lmao That's exactly right. The only thing you missed is that software 'engineering' is a synonym for 'hacking'. It's a glorified term because we hate calling ourselves code monkeys.
Holy f#ck people are racist on here. The dude was using some code he wrote to train people. Can we assume guilt of something *after guilt has been proven*? Pretty please?
You wish. The reality is that they will call you a scammer and not give you a refund, exactly as they did to the guy in the article (until he went to the press with it).
The reason these stores don't crack the packaging and check to make sure it's legit is because it costs them money to do so. It's far easier to simply accept the returned item easily (good PR), toss it back on the shelf and sell it again (minimize cost and loss), and blame it on the person who really gets screwed later. They'll only stop doing this when they get enough bad press on it.
This is just baseless speculation. I think it is fairly obvious that it probably isn't likely.
First of all, even if ET's were common, the galaxy (let alone the universe) is an enormous place. We're talking like all the matter put together in the galaxy is a couple grains of sand in a stadium. Even if you disregard problems like the speed of light, there is simply no reason to think an ET would have been anywhere near our planet.
Second, even if our solar system was a freaking interstellar highway, we probably wouldn't notice unless they started taking pit stops in Hawaii or something. We can hardly spot asteroids whipping around the planet - a little spaceship millions of km's away would be invisible. Even the communications would be tough to spot... Due to inverse square nature of light, radio waves drop off in power very fast... I doubt they would be focusing a signal straight at us.
And then you have the problem of travel: we don't even know if FTL travel is possible, or what form it would take. Maybe it's not possible, or very expensive, or simply impractical. Beyond that, maybe an ET civ simply has no need of spreading to every possible planet... I mean 100B planets in our galaxy is a lot of planets...
To summarize, not only did you base your speculation on nothing, there are numerous reasons why it's unlikely to be true. I doubt I've covered half of them.
It strikes me that the likelihood of other life out there somewhere is probably very, very high. In fact I'd be surprised if the galaxy isn't teeming with simple life. The question is more one of technological life (not 'intelligent', as some think, or even tool users - they have to be progressive tool users getting more advanced with time). It's really hard to make any useful estimates about the chances of technological life developing somewhere, but I think it is clear that it is not inevitable from any given life pool. Here on earth it took hundreds of millions of years after anything more complex than bacteria for a technological species to come about - and we've only been technological for 10,000 years... Who knows how long we'll stick around for. It seems obvious then that only a very low percent of life bearing planets will develop technological life.
If we assert that 1% of planets have life, and 1% of those have technological life (optimistic estimates to be sure), and we have 100B planets in the galaxy (10M tech civs), and 300B stars in the galaxy, then we would have a density of 1 technological civilization per 3000 stars. We can estimate that there are 3000 stars within 4000 ly. Therefore the next technological civilizations (aliens) would be around 8000ly away.
Right away one important thing pops out about that number - they would be looking at us building pyramids, and have a long time to wait to see our tv and radio signals. Furthermore, considering the inverse square nature of radio waves, those tv and radio signals are not going to be of much use at 8000ly (in fact they will be weaker than background noise after only a few light years).
Think about that, and then ask yourself why an alien civilization would be any different from ours in this regard? Basically the only way we could detect them is if we are pointing SETI telescopes at them at the exact same time they are focusing an intense signal at us, in a frequency we can detect... Not very likely. No, it's always struck me as a hopeless search, looking for alien signals, as even in the most alien rich universe I can imagine there is basically no chance of detecting them. There really isn't a Fermi Paradox.
It's so funny, because I was thinking the exact opposite. The phone in the video looks complicated and ungainly. The user can't even hit the bottom buttons properly. He's moving things around the gui in ways that look totally cryptic, like some alien ui in a movie. I don't even own an iPhone and I've picked one up before and used it like I had been using it for years...
Except isn't the opposite true as well? If you remove patents, then anything one company designs and builds can easily be copied wholesale by another. It will completely kill innovation, because nobody will want to put money into something that everyone else will simply copy. Unlike what seems to be the majority of slashdot posters, I don't think there is a simple and obvious solution. The reality is that a lot of very smart people have already designed a patent system that, for the most part, seems to work to a semi-acceptable level. The world is complex, and in a lot of cases there is no simple or easy answer.
The average slashdot poster will undoubtably argue vehemently against a "post-pc" world, but I think to an extent it is inevitable. It probably won't happen this decade, but maybe in the next. Computer appliances are the way of the future. Average Joe wants an easy to use appliance, not a build-it-yourself nightmare. Even before tablets, the big pc makers were using less and less user maintainable parts. In most modern laptops basically the only thing you can fiddle with is the ram.
The question is: will custom hackable computers ever really go away? I think the car industry may give a glimmer of hope there. As cars have become more and more difficult to self-service, there is a still a healthy and thriving enthusiast community who hack their cars. I suspect this will also be true for computers. Don't put your solder away yet!
I dont think it is a matter of "schmoozing", but rather of attitude and culturing. As an example, what sets people apart into cliches in high school such as jock, prep, nerd? Invariably it is as much to do with their attitude and experience as anything else. Executives have an "executive" attitude. Their whole life is about their work, with little time for even families on the side. Their ethics are different than the average worker, and their instincts usually honed from years of training in high class and executive environments. You and I could no more become an executive, even with luck, than a nerd could become a jock. I speak of all this from experience, as my father is an upper class CEO.
Are you sure that works? What's stopping any Facebook widget site from placing a cookie on your machine and tracking you? Sure they may not know who you are, but they can still collect all the same data. I don't know if they do this, but the whole Facebook network scares me.
Slashdot Mirror
Joking aside, you're spot on that it depends on the software. My daughter started using my iPad when she was one, and some of the educational/kids apps are complete garbage, doing more harm than good. Some of the apps however are FABULOUS. She learned her numbers and letters before she was three, and despite my best efforts, I think the iPad did most of the work. The big benefit the iPad has is that it can hold their attention, and give them infinite time when it's got it. I had to struggle to keep her interested in letters and numbers, and I would run out of energy (or time) relatively quickly.
On top of that, iOS is just fantastic for kids. My current one year old grabs the iPad whenever he can get his hands on it (he bites it so I keep it away from him!), and he's already figured out how to open it, scroll through the apps, and launch one without breaking anything. All in the few seconds he gets when I'm not looking! Even at 3 my daughter can't use a mouse effectively, so a normal computer is totally unworkable at these young ages.
Finally, I think using a tablet is a lot better than zoning in front of a tv. God knows how much Time our generations spent doing at, and we still managed to turn out okay... I think...
This.
I have (and still do) use all sorts of various systems for backups both at home and at work, and Time Machine is by far the best. Completely invisible, automatic and smart. You can turn off your computer mid-backup and it just continues when you turn it back on. It is so much better than the alternatives, I'm surprised how little limelight it gets.
Perhaps just as important as the backups: it has a great UI to access said backups! One click gives access to a file at any date in the past you want.
The most sleep deprived profession is parenthood. The fact that taking care of kids isn't considered a 'job' is one of the great tragedies of our times. Without a doubt it is one of the most useful jobs for our societies, and one of the hardest. My experience with staying home and taking care of a child was that it was about 3x harder than a job (in IT). The second child was 2x harder again. And I get paid nothing (tax wise). The government would rather my child getting far inferior care in daycare - because apparently that's a 'real' job.
You know, I'm all for vaccines and think they have helped to change the world, but where can we find these statistics? I've looked high and low trying to put numbers together to prove that getting a vaccine is statistically better than not, but I've come up mostly empty handed.
To be accurate the numbers need to look at total risk of the vaccine, which admittedly is probably tough to know, but surely there are numbers for known and obvious reactions. They also need to look at the real current risks of the various diseases, properly weighting the severity of the risk.
To be honest I suspect that this data has either not been collected properly, or is being hidden for whatever strange corporate reasons.
This looks horribly annoying. I don't know what they are aiming for, but it appears they are making Gnome like iOS. Who thought that would be a good idea? Bye bye gnome!
It's inevitable that the media giants are going to get their way, or most of it, eventually. The reason is simple: They have the will and resources to keep flinging bills at the figurative wall until one sticks - and it only takes once - whereas the public has to continually be on their guard trying to stop these things. It's like being followed by a hyena... No matter how long you keep your guard up or how many opportunities the hyena misses, you're going to lose eventually.
But did the communists kill for atheism, or for communism?
How are you a anywhere even close to done after scanning? Even if you bypass directories and proper file names in favor of metadata and searching, inputting all that meta data is a *huge* job, no matter how quick and efficient you make it.
I tried to go paperless for a while, but the scanning and meta data were just too much, and the benefits too little. For the rare occassion I actually need to look up something that requires 'searching', it's less effort overall to just use paper. I've actually gone so far as to change all my bills and whatnot back to paper, because the filing and processing is just so much easier.
Compare paper bills to paperless:
Paper:
- open envelope
- pay bill on bank website
- stuff bill in obvious folder in filing cabinet
The whole process takes maybe one minute being slow, and scales well with multiple bills at a time. The filing is easy and logical (year - category), and relatively simple for common lookups (for example getting all the electricity bills for last year is trivial, taking maybe 30 seconds). There is only one website to deal with, so it keeps problems to a minimum.
Paperless:
- open email informing of bill
- figure out which websites I need to open
- hope all websites are accessible, working, and havent changed so that my auto-fill stops working
- figure out how to lookup how much I owe
- pay bill on bank website
- download copy of bill
- edit meta data, file name, place in correct folder
Inevitably when dealing with so many (quirky) websites, some are inaccessible, broken, or have changed enough that the auto-fill stops working. My electricity company changed the way they do logins drastically enough to require calling them (30 minutes - mostly on hold)... 3 times in one year! And it's not like I can use a different electricity company...
Just changing the file name of the bill after downloading takes as much time as the entire filing process with a paper bill. Editing the meta data is prone to error and annoying (oops I must have forgotten one of the 20 necessary tags on that bill), and without proper meta data you lose basically 50% of the benefits of paperless (searching and space).
The whole process is annoying if it goes smoothly, and time consuming and frustrating if it goes badly - and its a tossup and out of my control whether it will go smoothly or not.
Anyways, my main point was that it's not as simple as scanning a piece of paper - which, if we're being honest and realistic, is harder than filing said paper. And really the benefits are minimal for the average person.
Nonsense. An iPad recharges at about 1%/minute, and lasts for about 6minutes/1%. Plugging it in for 10 minutes gets you an hour of use - its at 50% in 50 minutes - and it will last for about 10 hours before needing to be plugged in (of constant use - a month in sleep mode). There's no way the battery is going to be an issue for them.
That's because no one has a business that (they think) depends on stopping rape (nor is it a very big problem). If you legalized prostitution and it became run by mega corps, and rape became a larger issue, you would definitely see a push for the things you mentioned.
This is exactly why I think our culture is doomed (in some figurative way): the more money you have, the more ability you have to change the laws, and corporations inevitably have the most money. Therefore, corporations inevitably make all the laws. Doom.
This is basically exactly what copying used to be, only it was harder and didn't work as well. Poole would borrow and copy tapes (or vinyls to tape). Now we can make a perfect copy in much less time, as many times as we want. It's actually something I already engage in, although not from fear of a lawsuit, but rather because the bandwidth caps where I live are fairly low. My neighbors and I often trade hard drives and copy them.
Lmao
That's exactly right. The only thing you missed is that software 'engineering' is a synonym for 'hacking'. It's a glorified term because we hate calling ourselves code monkeys.
Holy f#ck people are racist on here.
The dude was using some code he wrote to train people. Can we assume guilt of something *after guilt has been proven*? Pretty please?
My shirt from physics in 2nd year had on it a cow blown up like a balloon, and the text 'first, assume the cow is spherical'. I loved physics.
You wish.
The reality is that they will call you a scammer and not give you a refund, exactly as they did to the guy in the article (until he went to the press with it).
The reason these stores don't crack the packaging and check to make sure it's legit is because it costs them money to do so. It's far easier to simply accept the returned item easily (good PR), toss it back on the shelf and sell it again (minimize cost and loss), and blame it on the person who really gets screwed later. They'll only stop doing this when they get enough bad press on it.
This is just baseless speculation. I think it is fairly obvious that it probably isn't likely.
First of all, even if ET's were common, the galaxy (let alone the universe) is an enormous place. We're talking like all the matter put together in the galaxy is a couple grains of sand in a stadium. Even if you disregard problems like the speed of light, there is simply no reason to think an ET would have been anywhere near our planet.
Second, even if our solar system was a freaking interstellar highway, we probably wouldn't notice unless they started taking pit stops in Hawaii or something. We can hardly spot asteroids whipping around the planet - a little spaceship millions of km's away would be invisible. Even the communications would be tough to spot... Due to inverse square nature of light, radio waves drop off in power very fast... I doubt they would be focusing a signal straight at us.
And then you have the problem of travel: we don't even know if FTL travel is possible, or what form it would take. Maybe it's not possible, or very expensive, or simply impractical. Beyond that, maybe an ET civ simply has no need of spreading to every possible planet... I mean 100B planets in our galaxy is a lot of planets...
To summarize, not only did you base your speculation on nothing, there are numerous reasons why it's unlikely to be true. I doubt I've covered half of them.
It strikes me that the likelihood of other life out there somewhere is probably very, very high. In fact I'd be surprised if the galaxy isn't teeming with simple life. The question is more one of technological life (not 'intelligent', as some think, or even tool users - they have to be progressive tool users getting more advanced with time). It's really hard to make any useful estimates about the chances of technological life developing somewhere, but I think it is clear that it is not inevitable from any given life pool. Here on earth it took hundreds of millions of years after anything more complex than bacteria for a technological species to come about - and we've only been technological for 10,000 years... Who knows how long we'll stick around for. It seems obvious then that only a very low percent of life bearing planets will develop technological life.
If we assert that 1% of planets have life, and 1% of those have technological life (optimistic estimates to be sure), and we have 100B planets in the galaxy (10M tech civs), and 300B stars in the galaxy, then we would have a density of 1 technological civilization per 3000 stars. We can estimate that there are 3000 stars within 4000 ly. Therefore the next technological civilizations (aliens) would be around 8000ly away.
Right away one important thing pops out about that number - they would be looking at us building pyramids, and have a long time to wait to see our tv and radio signals. Furthermore, considering the inverse square nature of radio waves, those tv and radio signals are not going to be of much use at 8000ly (in fact they will be weaker than background noise after only a few light years).
Think about that, and then ask yourself why an alien civilization would be any different from ours in this regard? Basically the only way we could detect them is if we are pointing SETI telescopes at them at the exact same time they are focusing an intense signal at us, in a frequency we can detect... Not very likely. No, it's always struck me as a hopeless search, looking for alien signals, as even in the most alien rich universe I can imagine there is basically no chance of detecting them. There really isn't a Fermi Paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Count_of_stars_by_distance_from_sun.jpg
It's so funny, because I was thinking the exact opposite. The phone in the video looks complicated and ungainly. The user can't even hit the bottom buttons properly. He's moving things around the gui in ways that look totally cryptic, like some alien ui in a movie. I don't even own an iPhone and I've picked one up before and used it like I had been using it for years...
Why?
I'm not trying to ge a dick. In fact personally I think large corporations should be broken up. But WHY, from Apples perspective, should they stop?
Ill third you, but for Canada. Netflix here is garbage old movies. Everyone I know who tried it has canceled. I don't know how they are surviving.
Except isn't the opposite true as well? If you remove patents, then anything one company designs and builds can easily be copied wholesale by another. It will completely kill innovation, because nobody will want to put money into something that everyone else will simply copy. Unlike what seems to be the majority of slashdot posters, I don't think there is a simple and obvious solution. The reality is that a lot of very smart people have already designed a patent system that, for the most part, seems to work to a semi-acceptable level. The world is complex, and in a lot of cases there is no simple or easy answer.
The average slashdot poster will undoubtably argue vehemently against a "post-pc" world, but I think to an extent it is inevitable. It probably won't happen this decade, but maybe in the next. Computer appliances are the way of the future. Average Joe wants an easy to use appliance, not a build-it-yourself nightmare. Even before tablets, the big pc makers were using less and less user maintainable parts. In most modern laptops basically the only thing you can fiddle with is the ram.
The question is: will custom hackable computers ever really go away?
I think the car industry may give a glimmer of hope there. As cars have become more and more difficult to self-service, there is a still a healthy and thriving enthusiast community who hack their cars. I suspect this will also be true for computers. Don't put your solder away yet!
Tell that to my iBook that's been in constant use for 9 years with the same battery. It doesn't last as long as it used to, but it still works.
I dont think it is a matter of "schmoozing", but rather of attitude and culturing. As an example, what sets people apart into cliches in high school such as jock, prep, nerd? Invariably it is as much to do with their attitude and experience as anything else. Executives have an "executive" attitude. Their whole life is about their work, with little time for even families on the side. Their ethics are different than the average worker, and their instincts usually honed from years of training in high class and executive environments. You and I could no more become an executive, even with luck, than a nerd could become a jock. I speak of all this from experience, as my father is an upper class CEO.
Are you sure that works?
What's stopping any Facebook widget site from placing a cookie on your machine and tracking you? Sure they may not know who you are, but they can still collect all the same data. I don't know if they do this, but the whole Facebook network scares me.