I know, right? It's really awful when just because there has been a history of comparing black people to monkeys in the US as a way of denying their intelligence and humanity that some oversensitive people leap to the absurd conclusion that a picture of a black person being portrayed as a monkey is somehow race-baiting.
I'm sure it was probably drawn because the artist felt that monkeys are cute, Michelle Obama is cute, and a Michelle Obama monkey is probably even cuter, right? Because it's just stupid to imagine that there would be any racial component to it. This is the 21st century! We don't do that stuff any more!
They don't need to do that. They can just say, "Don't like it? Use a different search engine. I hear Bing's really good for Scientologists, and Bill Gates will call you personally to thank you for being one of their first 1000 users."
Google is not under any obligation to be consistent. Scientologists can bitch and moan all they like that their crazy is being exposed to the world, but until exposing that craziness violates the law, Google is well within their rights to index it. Google is also well within their rights to choose to delete it from their index. It really comes down to business decisions. People getting pissy because of race baiting photos is worth doing something about; crazy people who believe in Xenu getting pissed because now the whole world knows they are bugfuck insane probably is not.
Why would they need to ask? Why would they even bother?
There have been signs of racial epithets directed at the man's children from those teabagger lynchmobs, and I don't recall anything from the administration in response. Why would he bother asking for a stupid caricature of his wife?
It absolutely makes sense to me that regular people would get offended enough by what they see as race baiting to contact google and ask them to do something about it, no intervention by the administration is needed. I'm sure people were offended by the google chimp pictures, too, but then it's really hard to argue that comparing a white guy to a chimp is racist and not satire.
The administration wouldn't have to lift a finger to get Google to remove this - market pressures would. Someone finds a race-baiting image of the First Lady is a top result on Google and sends word to everyone in their address book about it, and those people spread it, and so on. At some point you'd have tons of people contacting Google to demand that it be remedied, and Google would do it rather than suffer a pretty serious PR black eye.
Why would the Obama administration bother swinging at a pitch in the dirt like this? People have been shown at protests with signs that insult the man's *children* by calling them all kinds of racist names, and he doesn't bother responding to it, but you think that a stupid caricature of his wife is somehow going to get him to say "Hey, I think I'll take an action that, if found out, would completely ruin my credibility and won't have any impact because the image will still be out there. That's a winning move!"
It looks like you're a paranoid kook who doesn't have any clue how the real world actually works. The fact that some other mong modded you "insightful" should be frightening to people who actually have a functioning brain.
I totally agree. I'm sick of people on the Left trying to tell me that I need to be protected from people who want to burn flags. And it enrages me when those goddamn Lefties keep on pushing those constitutional amendments that ban gay marriage as if somehow I need to be protected from 2 adult men or 2 adult women expressing their commitment to each other! I also probably don't need to tell you about how it sickens me that people on the Left want to stop teaching sex education and safer sex practices that might help our kids not get pregnant or STIs! And you know, I actually hear that those goddamn Lefties want to keep out homosexuals from serving in the military because they think that somehow grown men and women - trained soldiers and people who've volunteered to put their country before themselves - can't handle it! Can you imagine?
Stupid Lefties, with their attempts to protect us from things that aren't remotely dangerous! No wonder they're always going into churches to shoot up people who don't agree with them, amiright?
No doubt - my father, who is in his late 80's - recently had a lens replaced and a couple of other procedures, and he no longer needs glasses (after 60+ years of needing them for everything). I've been considering going under the knife, but I want to wait until not only will I have at least average vision, but a good shot at having better than 20/20 as well. Right now, for my kinds of problems, that's not there (astigmatism & strain)
They're expensive because they can be, I guess - and the market is limited. As was said by someone else, most people don't want to walk around with freaky solid black eyes, and for most people the added expense just isn't worth it - no real performance gain for them.
I've got the transitions lenses in my regular glasses, and actually, the change is gradual enough that my eyes still get a workout from sudden changes (inside to outside). It really doesn't seem to be mechanically different from putting on sunglasses; the main advantage I've found is that whereas before I would frequently forget my sunglasses or lose them, now I don't worry about it.
I'm really excited about the future of augmented reality and augmented senses. I'd love to see enhancements for all our senses. The visual possibilities are obvious (facial recognition, distance calculation, displaying overlay information about whatever you're looking at), but the other senses are equally exciting:
Hearing: Augment my hearing so that when I'm in the dark I can have a sonar type display projected onto my eyes. Night vision is cool, but it still requires some light, and can be baffled by smoke - sonar would let people "see" in situations where they otherwise wouldn't. Throw in some filters, also - I'm listening to music while on a train, noise cancellation would be nice. I hear a snippet of song on the radio and want to know what it is - my new ears will recognize the song and tell me the name (and probably let me get it from iTunes or whatever right then, if I want).
Smell & Taste: For emergency services workers, it'd be great if they had a way of knowing what was in the air in a dangerous environment. Augmented smell would let them do that, or allow humans to sense other things that currently are too subtle for us to detect. There's been some work with dogs that could smell cancer - it'd be an interesting diagnostic tool to add smell to a quick medical scan. Or for foodies, we could take a bite of something and instantly be shown what's in it and in what proportion.
Touch: I'd just like to see something that would let me run my fingers over a surface and then translate that into visuals.
Obviously, all of this (and more) could be turned on/turned off by the user to make it unobtrusive if they wanted, and certainly there would be privacy issues.
One thing I do wonder about is how our brains would cope with being supported in this fashion - I know that my memory for things like phone numbers has gone to shit since I've begun using a cellphone, and while I'm much better at figuring out how to find information than I used to be, thanks to Google, I'm also a lot worse at keeping random facts in my head. What will happen to a generation of people raised without having to engage in tasks like having to remember people's names/faces/details? It could be interesting.
Professional athletes wear sun-sensitive contacts, actually. They're about the only people who have a big enough need for that kind of thing and can afford them - they're rather expensive.
But I have the I Am Rich app for my iPhone, and thus people know I'm really wealthy.
In seriousness, while the notion of status through money may be important for some, for the vast majority of people, status through money is simply not achievable, and actually leads to laughable attempts. I'm reminded of the Onion editorial, "As you can see from my Tommy Hilfiger clothing, I am not poor."
I don't think wristwatches will become obsolete, but they will certainly be (and in many cases have been) relegated to the role of optional fashion accessory.
And why would anyone need to pawn their phone or their wristwatch? Are you suggesting that people might spend $500 on a phone or $15000 on a wristwatch that they cannot, actually, afford, and thus will need to sell in a pinch? Egads. Nothing screams "I'm an important and wealthy player!" quite like a pawn-ticket.
I get that - not sure I buy it, since we're clearly still doing a ton of collateral damage despite FAR more sophisticated & accurate targeting, mainly due to operator error - but I get it.
What I was responding to was the incredibly moronic bit in the summary about how this somehow indicates we live in the fantastic world of tomorrow. Interestingly, I don't see those "It's the FUTURE!" comments when there are articles about improved medical techniques or things that will make life better - I guess blowing shit up with lasers is somehow a better sign of progress than being able to cure diseases or repair injuries that previously were not remotely treatable.
Seriously, I'm amazed that people are excited about even more warporn. Sure it'll hopefully have non-military spin-offs, but I guess I just can't get all gleeful over the idea that we now have a much more modern way of ending the lives of other human beings.
You mean the bank info that routinely gets stolen or accidentally leaked? Or do you mean credit card information that is being sold around the world? Maybe the medical information that frequently gets made public when a consultant to an HMO gets their laptop stolen when traveling on business or because some idiot working at your doctor's office leaves your info up on her screen/a file out? Perhaps you mean those supposedly secret sex-tapes & nekkid pics that your boy/girlfriend/husband/wife made that they make public when they break up with you?
Sure, there are "legal remedies" if someone screws up and puts your private info out there, but they're negligible, and they don't stuff the genie back into its bottle. The only way to have privacy is if you completely control it. The instant there are any other people involved it's gone. You don't have privacy; you have anonymity. Even in your home, things that happen there if you ever leave your shades open or have another person living there - it's still not private.
The best way to handle it is to accept that, understand it, and move on in such a way that the impact of whatever does get leaked is minimal, if that's important to you. Thus the best you can hope for is anonymity.
Privacy is already gone for the vast majority of people on the planet. The best anyone can hope for now is anonymity.
5, 10, 15 years from now, you'll be able to snap a picture of someone, upload it to Google Faces, and get back every single picture of that person on the internet. Some enterprising person will write a bit of software that reads the tags and connects them to public information sources about the person. There will probably be software that snatches up tons of publicly available writing samples of the person and compares it to a "signature" that has a reasonable degree of accuracy in figuring out who that person is. There will be other tools that let anyone do some basic snooping through archives to find other references to that person from other sources (like a Google stalk, but a bit more in-depth and the tool will tell clueless people how to be more efficient in tracking someone). If the footage from surveillance systems ever becomes public, you can bet that someone will figure out how to track an individual's movements. It will, in short, be trivial to get a work-up on people that's about as complete as you can imagine any private investigator, but you'll be able to do it on the fly, from home.
Our privacy is already gone, most of us just don't know it yet. The best that we can do is to make as sure as possible that all this surveillance data that is being collected becomes part of the public domain which will ironically help limit abuse.
Now I can sleep on top of a computer that is a cat!
I love my kitties, but they really do find the least helpful times to crawl onto my keyboard/chew through a cable/unplug my machine. Maybe now that there's a hybrid cat/computer it can explain to the organic ones why they need to chill out.
The thing is, there really IS a whole lot of stuff to human interactions. Not quite as absurd as portrayed by that bit of Dune, but it can be psychotically nuanced, especially in situations where people have (internal) goals that are often in conflict (i.e. "tell your boss to fuck off" vs. "I need to keep this job" vs. "I don't want to be hassled" vs. "I don't want to be a doormat" vs. "I don't want my co-workers to think I'm unstable/unreliable" vs. "I don't want them to think I'm a pushover, either" etc.)
Most of the time, these levels don't matter much - it isn't like we're diplomats handling intricate protocol, the proper execution & understanding of which keeps the fate of nations in the balance. If you fail to ask a sighing, moping acquaintance what "nothing" means, the worst that will happen is your sighing, moping acquaintance will mope off to someone else to fish for sympathy, you know?
In the article, it felt like he was using extreme exemplars to really highlight the ideas he was talking about. It's often easier to use really SUPER over the top examples than it is to use more subtle ones, when talking about interactions.
I know, right? It's almost as if he were pretending that the conversations in The Office were like, extreme examples of the things that people do, in fact, run into every day in office situations and then using them as exemplars, and that he also thought maybe more people have seen The Office than would be privy to the goings on at McManus, Kinsey & Schmidt Box & Container Manufacturers. What kind of insanity as this?
It would have been MUCH better if he used really tame or low-key examples from some office in the middle of Podunk, Iowa that nobody has ever heard of, because that would just work so much better for an article intended for a nation/world-wide audience. EVERYONE knows how Jeanne in Accounts Payable is like this while Frank in Customer Service is like THAT. Cause that stuff is REAL, yo.
Gotta keep it real.
Does it also bug you that people study literature or historical accounts which may very well be somewhat fictionalized/idealized portrayals of real events, and attempt to use them to understand human interaction?
That's cool - you're an idiot or a child and that's OK. It's a free country.
When you mature a bit and are able to engage in critical thinking before you just parrot back things you've heard from other idiots, I'm sure you'll have something meaningful to contribute to discussions.
Point out a single ad where Apple tries to say that their stuff is scarce, rare, hard to find or otherwise exclusive. You can't because those ads, and the notion that Apple wants you to think it's hard to locate an Apple product to purchase is absurd. In fact, in the computer industry, marketing something as rare or exclusive is fucking retarded because then nobody will want to buy it because it won't be compatible with anything else.
Think about it for a second. Try to get that one working neuron you engaged in your original posting to spark up a bit at this idea: why is Windows so "popular?" Answer: "That's what I use at work" or "That's what I know how to use" or "That's what everyone else uses." Apple is a business in the business of selling a product, they don't want to have to struggle to do that or to convince people that the product - a tool - that they are selling will not work with the other tools people use. They go to GREAT lengths to explain to people that Macs can handle all kinds of files that people generally have on a Windows machine. They went to great pains to let people know about Boot Camp. They want people to think that Apple machines can do everything a PC can do and more, not that Macs are rare/obscure or otherwise elite. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an absolute fucking moron, and you are an absolute moron for proposing such, and so is the person who called your nonsense insightful.
Apple's entire marketing thrust is that they make a product that is good, does more things easily and with less hassle than the alternatives. They don't want to be mysterious or elite, they just want to be the people you think of when you're tired of arguing with your appliances and you want something that "just works."
Terraforming is ridiculously inefficient compared to just building colonies out in space. Why tie up such large quantities of useful resources just to provide a surface to live on and mass to provide gravity, when for a fraction of those resources you can put a lot more people into space-based colonies and provide mass by spin?
I predict that if we ever do colonize off-world, planetary colonization will be an amusing sideline as opposed to where the bulk of people live. There are too many advantages to space-based habitats and too many disadvantages to sitting on a planet that isn't Earth.
From what I've read on the subject of machine evolution (mostly articles for the layperson), the end results are often completely baffling. It works, but the reason why isn't very obvious. In a few cases, I recall reading about evolved antenna schematics & shapes that worked REALLY well, but made absolutely no sense, or took advantage of things that engineers normally consider flaws/problems to be overcome in design.
So yeah, it'd probably come up with code & designs that are pretty difficult to parse, much like biological evolution. Pretty cool!
Because intelligence isn't just a software thing. At least not in humans.
I recall reading about field programmable gate arrays being used in an experiment with genetic algorithms. They wanted to force the FPGAs to evolve to tell the difference between two different frequency sounds. Eventually they wound up with chips that accomplished the task in a variety of ways - ways that worked but for no explicable reason, some of them being ways that took advantage of tiny differences in the individual (identical, at least from a manufacturing perspective) chips, and even that required slight differences in the room's environment. This was years ago.
Simulations won't have those little idiosyncraces between individual units and thus might miss a huge component. Variation among individuals that is only in software misses the whole concept of variation between individuals that comes about from hardware, and also from the interaction between the two.
For me, I'd say "7 days of regular use without charging" would be the point beyond which it wouldn't matter unless it was literally "indefinitely, with regular use."
With my Kindle, I've literally never been inconvenienced because it was at a low charge, despite using it for 2+ hours daily - it is a very forgiving device. Have I ever needed 2 weeks worth? No, not NEEDED. Have I used 2 weeks worth? You betcha.
The **AA's customers are the record labels. The **AA's don't sell things directly to consumers. The record labels are not doing so hot these days, either.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies, by definition, are able to be abusive and get away with it.
Amazon? B&N? Not so much. I can get books from millions of places, ebooks from thousands of places. Sure, they *might* try to shoot themselves in the foot by doing something stupid like this, but I'm going to say it's unlikely.
Also, on my Kindle, my copy of 1984 was never removed - I didn't get it from Amazon. It also doesn't have any DRM on it, nor do 99.99% of the books I have on it.
Sure, when I'm not traveling generally the amount of time I can spend between charges isn't that big. Lately, though, I've been taking flights that last for more than 8 hours and end with me wanting to have juice to make phone-calls - this is huge. Also sometimes, even when I'm not traveling, I don't sleep at home, or might spend more time during a day using a device than I normally do, so having more room for not needing to recharge is definitely a plus.
I've had my iPhone run out of juice on me at least 10 times in the last year, and in all 10 of those instances it was inconvenient. Longer battery life is more convenient, even if it isn't an issue all the time.
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I know, right? It's really awful when just because there has been a history of comparing black people to monkeys in the US as a way of denying their intelligence and humanity that some oversensitive people leap to the absurd conclusion that a picture of a black person being portrayed as a monkey is somehow race-baiting.
I'm sure it was probably drawn because the artist felt that monkeys are cute, Michelle Obama is cute, and a Michelle Obama monkey is probably even cuter, right? Because it's just stupid to imagine that there would be any racial component to it. This is the 21st century! We don't do that stuff any more!
They don't need to do that. They can just say, "Don't like it? Use a different search engine. I hear Bing's really good for Scientologists, and Bill Gates will call you personally to thank you for being one of their first 1000 users."
Google is not under any obligation to be consistent. Scientologists can bitch and moan all they like that their crazy is being exposed to the world, but until exposing that craziness violates the law, Google is well within their rights to index it. Google is also well within their rights to choose to delete it from their index. It really comes down to business decisions. People getting pissy because of race baiting photos is worth doing something about; crazy people who believe in Xenu getting pissed because now the whole world knows they are bugfuck insane probably is not.
Why would they need to ask? Why would they even bother?
There have been signs of racial epithets directed at the man's children from those teabagger lynchmobs, and I don't recall anything from the administration in response. Why would he bother asking for a stupid caricature of his wife?
It absolutely makes sense to me that regular people would get offended enough by what they see as race baiting to contact google and ask them to do something about it, no intervention by the administration is needed. I'm sure people were offended by the google chimp pictures, too, but then it's really hard to argue that comparing a white guy to a chimp is racist and not satire.
You're ridiculous.
The administration wouldn't have to lift a finger to get Google to remove this - market pressures would. Someone finds a race-baiting image of the First Lady is a top result on Google and sends word to everyone in their address book about it, and those people spread it, and so on. At some point you'd have tons of people contacting Google to demand that it be remedied, and Google would do it rather than suffer a pretty serious PR black eye.
Why would the Obama administration bother swinging at a pitch in the dirt like this? People have been shown at protests with signs that insult the man's *children* by calling them all kinds of racist names, and he doesn't bother responding to it, but you think that a stupid caricature of his wife is somehow going to get him to say "Hey, I think I'll take an action that, if found out, would completely ruin my credibility and won't have any impact because the image will still be out there. That's a winning move!"
It looks like you're a paranoid kook who doesn't have any clue how the real world actually works. The fact that some other mong modded you "insightful" should be frightening to people who actually have a functioning brain.
I totally agree. I'm sick of people on the Left trying to tell me that I need to be protected from people who want to burn flags. And it enrages me when those goddamn Lefties keep on pushing those constitutional amendments that ban gay marriage as if somehow I need to be protected from 2 adult men or 2 adult women expressing their commitment to each other! I also probably don't need to tell you about how it sickens me that people on the Left want to stop teaching sex education and safer sex practices that might help our kids not get pregnant or STIs! And you know, I actually hear that those goddamn Lefties want to keep out homosexuals from serving in the military because they think that somehow grown men and women - trained soldiers and people who've volunteered to put their country before themselves - can't handle it! Can you imagine?
Stupid Lefties, with their attempts to protect us from things that aren't remotely dangerous! No wonder they're always going into churches to shoot up people who don't agree with them, amiright?
No doubt - my father, who is in his late 80's - recently had a lens replaced and a couple of other procedures, and he no longer needs glasses (after 60+ years of needing them for everything). I've been considering going under the knife, but I want to wait until not only will I have at least average vision, but a good shot at having better than 20/20 as well. Right now, for my kinds of problems, that's not there (astigmatism & strain)
They're expensive because they can be, I guess - and the market is limited. As was said by someone else, most people don't want to walk around with freaky solid black eyes, and for most people the added expense just isn't worth it - no real performance gain for them.
I've got the transitions lenses in my regular glasses, and actually, the change is gradual enough that my eyes still get a workout from sudden changes (inside to outside). It really doesn't seem to be mechanically different from putting on sunglasses; the main advantage I've found is that whereas before I would frequently forget my sunglasses or lose them, now I don't worry about it.
I'm really excited about the future of augmented reality and augmented senses. I'd love to see enhancements for all our senses. The visual possibilities are obvious (facial recognition, distance calculation, displaying overlay information about whatever you're looking at), but the other senses are equally exciting:
Hearing: Augment my hearing so that when I'm in the dark I can have a sonar type display projected onto my eyes. Night vision is cool, but it still requires some light, and can be baffled by smoke - sonar would let people "see" in situations where they otherwise wouldn't. Throw in some filters, also - I'm listening to music while on a train, noise cancellation would be nice. I hear a snippet of song on the radio and want to know what it is - my new ears will recognize the song and tell me the name (and probably let me get it from iTunes or whatever right then, if I want).
Smell & Taste: For emergency services workers, it'd be great if they had a way of knowing what was in the air in a dangerous environment. Augmented smell would let them do that, or allow humans to sense other things that currently are too subtle for us to detect. There's been some work with dogs that could smell cancer - it'd be an interesting diagnostic tool to add smell to a quick medical scan. Or for foodies, we could take a bite of something and instantly be shown what's in it and in what proportion.
Touch: I'd just like to see something that would let me run my fingers over a surface and then translate that into visuals.
Obviously, all of this (and more) could be turned on/turned off by the user to make it unobtrusive if they wanted, and certainly there would be privacy issues.
One thing I do wonder about is how our brains would cope with being supported in this fashion - I know that my memory for things like phone numbers has gone to shit since I've begun using a cellphone, and while I'm much better at figuring out how to find information than I used to be, thanks to Google, I'm also a lot worse at keeping random facts in my head. What will happen to a generation of people raised without having to engage in tasks like having to remember people's names/faces/details? It could be interesting.
Professional athletes wear sun-sensitive contacts, actually. They're about the only people who have a big enough need for that kind of thing and can afford them - they're rather expensive.
But I have the I Am Rich app for my iPhone, and thus people know I'm really wealthy.
In seriousness, while the notion of status through money may be important for some, for the vast majority of people, status through money is simply not achievable, and actually leads to laughable attempts. I'm reminded of the Onion editorial, "As you can see from my Tommy Hilfiger clothing, I am not poor."
I don't think wristwatches will become obsolete, but they will certainly be (and in many cases have been) relegated to the role of optional fashion accessory.
And why would anyone need to pawn their phone or their wristwatch? Are you suggesting that people might spend $500 on a phone or $15000 on a wristwatch that they cannot, actually, afford, and thus will need to sell in a pinch? Egads. Nothing screams "I'm an important and wealthy player!" quite like a pawn-ticket.
I get that - not sure I buy it, since we're clearly still doing a ton of collateral damage despite FAR more sophisticated & accurate targeting, mainly due to operator error - but I get it.
What I was responding to was the incredibly moronic bit in the summary about how this somehow indicates we live in the fantastic world of tomorrow. Interestingly, I don't see those "It's the FUTURE!" comments when there are articles about improved medical techniques or things that will make life better - I guess blowing shit up with lasers is somehow a better sign of progress than being able to cure diseases or repair injuries that previously were not remotely treatable.
I'm so glad we have better ways to kill people!
Seriously, I'm amazed that people are excited about even more warporn. Sure it'll hopefully have non-military spin-offs, but I guess I just can't get all gleeful over the idea that we now have a much more modern way of ending the lives of other human beings.
You mean the bank info that routinely gets stolen or accidentally leaked? Or do you mean credit card information that is being sold around the world? Maybe the medical information that frequently gets made public when a consultant to an HMO gets their laptop stolen when traveling on business or because some idiot working at your doctor's office leaves your info up on her screen/a file out? Perhaps you mean those supposedly secret sex-tapes & nekkid pics that your boy/girlfriend/husband/wife made that they make public when they break up with you?
Sure, there are "legal remedies" if someone screws up and puts your private info out there, but they're negligible, and they don't stuff the genie back into its bottle. The only way to have privacy is if you completely control it. The instant there are any other people involved it's gone. You don't have privacy; you have anonymity. Even in your home, things that happen there if you ever leave your shades open or have another person living there - it's still not private.
The best way to handle it is to accept that, understand it, and move on in such a way that the impact of whatever does get leaked is minimal, if that's important to you. Thus the best you can hope for is anonymity.
Privacy is already gone for the vast majority of people on the planet. The best anyone can hope for now is anonymity.
5, 10, 15 years from now, you'll be able to snap a picture of someone, upload it to Google Faces, and get back every single picture of that person on the internet. Some enterprising person will write a bit of software that reads the tags and connects them to public information sources about the person. There will probably be software that snatches up tons of publicly available writing samples of the person and compares it to a "signature" that has a reasonable degree of accuracy in figuring out who that person is. There will be other tools that let anyone do some basic snooping through archives to find other references to that person from other sources (like a Google stalk, but a bit more in-depth and the tool will tell clueless people how to be more efficient in tracking someone). If the footage from surveillance systems ever becomes public, you can bet that someone will figure out how to track an individual's movements. It will, in short, be trivial to get a work-up on people that's about as complete as you can imagine any private investigator, but you'll be able to do it on the fly, from home.
Our privacy is already gone, most of us just don't know it yet. The best that we can do is to make as sure as possible that all this surveillance data that is being collected becomes part of the public domain which will ironically help limit abuse.
Now I can sleep on top of a computer that is a cat!
I love my kitties, but they really do find the least helpful times to crawl onto my keyboard/chew through a cable/unplug my machine. Maybe now that there's a hybrid cat/computer it can explain to the organic ones why they need to chill out.
The thing is, there really IS a whole lot of stuff to human interactions. Not quite as absurd as portrayed by that bit of Dune, but it can be psychotically nuanced, especially in situations where people have (internal) goals that are often in conflict (i.e. "tell your boss to fuck off" vs. "I need to keep this job" vs. "I don't want to be hassled" vs. "I don't want to be a doormat" vs. "I don't want my co-workers to think I'm unstable/unreliable" vs. "I don't want them to think I'm a pushover, either" etc.)
Most of the time, these levels don't matter much - it isn't like we're diplomats handling intricate protocol, the proper execution & understanding of which keeps the fate of nations in the balance. If you fail to ask a sighing, moping acquaintance what "nothing" means, the worst that will happen is your sighing, moping acquaintance will mope off to someone else to fish for sympathy, you know?
In the article, it felt like he was using extreme exemplars to really highlight the ideas he was talking about. It's often easier to use really SUPER over the top examples than it is to use more subtle ones, when talking about interactions.
I know, right? It's almost as if he were pretending that the conversations in The Office were like, extreme examples of the things that people do, in fact, run into every day in office situations and then using them as exemplars, and that he also thought maybe more people have seen The Office than would be privy to the goings on at McManus, Kinsey & Schmidt Box & Container Manufacturers. What kind of insanity as this?
It would have been MUCH better if he used really tame or low-key examples from some office in the middle of Podunk, Iowa that nobody has ever heard of, because that would just work so much better for an article intended for a nation/world-wide audience. EVERYONE knows how Jeanne in Accounts Payable is like this while Frank in Customer Service is like THAT. Cause that stuff is REAL, yo.
Gotta keep it real.
Does it also bug you that people study literature or historical accounts which may very well be somewhat fictionalized/idealized portrayals of real events, and attempt to use them to understand human interaction?
That's cool - you're an idiot or a child and that's OK. It's a free country.
When you mature a bit and are able to engage in critical thinking before you just parrot back things you've heard from other idiots, I'm sure you'll have something meaningful to contribute to discussions.
What are you, 12 years old?
Point out a single ad where Apple tries to say that their stuff is scarce, rare, hard to find or otherwise exclusive. You can't because those ads, and the notion that Apple wants you to think it's hard to locate an Apple product to purchase is absurd. In fact, in the computer industry, marketing something as rare or exclusive is fucking retarded because then nobody will want to buy it because it won't be compatible with anything else.
Think about it for a second. Try to get that one working neuron you engaged in your original posting to spark up a bit at this idea: why is Windows so "popular?" Answer: "That's what I use at work" or "That's what I know how to use" or "That's what everyone else uses." Apple is a business in the business of selling a product, they don't want to have to struggle to do that or to convince people that the product - a tool - that they are selling will not work with the other tools people use. They go to GREAT lengths to explain to people that Macs can handle all kinds of files that people generally have on a Windows machine. They went to great pains to let people know about Boot Camp. They want people to think that Apple machines can do everything a PC can do and more, not that Macs are rare/obscure or otherwise elite. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an absolute fucking moron, and you are an absolute moron for proposing such, and so is the person who called your nonsense insightful.
Apple's entire marketing thrust is that they make a product that is good, does more things easily and with less hassle than the alternatives. They don't want to be mysterious or elite, they just want to be the people you think of when you're tired of arguing with your appliances and you want something that "just works."
Terraforming is ridiculously inefficient compared to just building colonies out in space. Why tie up such large quantities of useful resources just to provide a surface to live on and mass to provide gravity, when for a fraction of those resources you can put a lot more people into space-based colonies and provide mass by spin?
I predict that if we ever do colonize off-world, planetary colonization will be an amusing sideline as opposed to where the bulk of people live. There are too many advantages to space-based habitats and too many disadvantages to sitting on a planet that isn't Earth.
From what I've read on the subject of machine evolution (mostly articles for the layperson), the end results are often completely baffling. It works, but the reason why isn't very obvious. In a few cases, I recall reading about evolved antenna schematics & shapes that worked REALLY well, but made absolutely no sense, or took advantage of things that engineers normally consider flaws/problems to be overcome in design.
So yeah, it'd probably come up with code & designs that are pretty difficult to parse, much like biological evolution. Pretty cool!
Because intelligence isn't just a software thing. At least not in humans.
I recall reading about field programmable gate arrays being used in an experiment with genetic algorithms. They wanted to force the FPGAs to evolve to tell the difference between two different frequency sounds. Eventually they wound up with chips that accomplished the task in a variety of ways - ways that worked but for no explicable reason, some of them being ways that took advantage of tiny differences in the individual (identical, at least from a manufacturing perspective) chips, and even that required slight differences in the room's environment. This was years ago.
Simulations won't have those little idiosyncraces between individual units and thus might miss a huge component. Variation among individuals that is only in software misses the whole concept of variation between individuals that comes about from hardware, and also from the interaction between the two.
For me, I'd say "7 days of regular use without charging" would be the point beyond which it wouldn't matter unless it was literally "indefinitely, with regular use."
With my Kindle, I've literally never been inconvenienced because it was at a low charge, despite using it for 2+ hours daily - it is a very forgiving device. Have I ever needed 2 weeks worth? No, not NEEDED. Have I used 2 weeks worth? You betcha.
The **AA's customers are the record labels. The **AA's don't sell things directly to consumers. The record labels are not doing so hot these days, either.
Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies, by definition, are able to be abusive and get away with it.
Amazon? B&N? Not so much. I can get books from millions of places, ebooks from thousands of places. Sure, they *might* try to shoot themselves in the foot by doing something stupid like this, but I'm going to say it's unlikely.
Also, on my Kindle, my copy of 1984 was never removed - I didn't get it from Amazon. It also doesn't have any DRM on it, nor do 99.99% of the books I have on it.
Sure, when I'm not traveling generally the amount of time I can spend between charges isn't that big. Lately, though, I've been taking flights that last for more than 8 hours and end with me wanting to have juice to make phone-calls - this is huge. Also sometimes, even when I'm not traveling, I don't sleep at home, or might spend more time during a day using a device than I normally do, so having more room for not needing to recharge is definitely a plus.
I've had my iPhone run out of juice on me at least 10 times in the last year, and in all 10 of those instances it was inconvenient. Longer battery life is more convenient, even if it isn't an issue all the time.