Stupid rednecks are very innovative people! You should see the things they can do with beer cans alone.
In all seriousness, even if Chinese culture/education doesn't promote creativity or thinking outside of the box, with 1.3 billion people there are bound to be enough 'innovative' engineers for the Chinese to compete with whomever they choose.
First, people don't like change. When they get used to things working one way and then suddenly it doesn't work according to their expectations they get upset.
This can in fact be made an even broader generalization: people don't like when their expectations are not met. So they don't really need a logical reason for preferring an always-open status bar.
And the status bar is legitimately important to some of us (but does not need to always be visible). Knowing what you're clicking on before you actually click it is important information. Well, assuming javascript hasn't changed the status/you have your browser set to not allow javascript to change the status. Knowing what your browser is doing/actively loading is also very useful information. Without a status bar I'd have to pull up something like the Firebug net panel.
But there must be a reason. Either it doesn't hold up in court if you contest your citation or it's policy because it would be too broad or something else.
And I wasn't in purely hypothetical land. I can find defense attorney sites stating that people get hit with "careless operation" citations in my state. I can see fees associated with it. I can find blog posts where people got citations for it (and it looks like it's used for running a stop sign here and wrong way on a one way street, tacked onto DUI, etc).
I'm sorry if I don't get pulled over a lot and thus don't have personal experience with such an issue.
I promise you if a cop sees me swerving all over the inside of my lane and being a general hazard to traffic he can pull me over and give me a citation using "careless operation/reckless driving/whatever" laws, at least in my state. It would be pretty easy to just change policy by citing studies that driving with a phone constitutes unsafe driving and thus satisfies said law's requirements.
I see nothing in the law for my state that limits it to after-the-fact. I seriously doubt my state is a unique butterfly in that regard.
Passing a new specific law gets the law into the news and gives it exposure and gives a clearer mandate but is probably not necessary in many places (though many places already have cell phone restrictions anyway).
Honestly, all of these things are already banned under current careless operation/due diligence laws. I'm assuming most States have those. Would you rather they just made a policy (instead of a written law) for law enforcement to declare cell phone use while driving as careless operation and start issuing citations?
The radio, passengers talking to you, thinking about other things, cell phones, etc are all correlated (but causation not proved) to increased accidents. Citation: http://hawaii.gov/lrb/rpts05/cellcar.pdf
I'm sure distractions affect people differently and it's a shame to punish those people that can text message on their cell phone and drive perfectly at the same time (surely they exist!) The problem is that you drive on public property, with a license, and your (in)ability to operate your motor vehicle has the potential to harm many others.
In a perfect world I think revamping driver's ed classes and license tests to include better education on cell phone dangers would be the best solution. Sadly, it's not a perfect world and it may be worth a few additional rules to try to help save lives. This is of course assuming that the populace will even follow said rules and that the rules don't become a big money funnel/ticket scheme or impossible to enforce. It may be a lost cause and then we'll just have to one day accept that people will die because of convenience.
I can think of legitimate reasons for cell phone use in car (emergency calls [911, doctor, pregnant wife, etc]) and maybe even hands free operation if it's not proven a serious risk. I personally turn my phone off when I get into my car. I know it's a distraction and if family/friends need help desperately while I'm on the road then I cannot help them anyway. Anything not desperate can wait/is not worth the increased risk.
When they (Touchpads) were $200 - $250? They launched at $500 for the 16GB model in July 2011.
Then in August they did the $100/$150 firesale. I'd never even heard of the device before the firesale.
I don't think anyone will ever know why HP gave the Touchpad a little over a month before killing it off.
At the very least they should have ridden it out until the holiday season and then sold them at cost (supposedly ~300) with a firesale after the holidays if sales were still bad. After that they could have just tried to make back what they could through the app market.
Anyway, with regards to WebOS on the EVO: I believe the bleeding edge for that is being done by Ryan Hope.
There are still issues though and I think they're mostly waiting on the webOS source release to make it fully work.
I think the difference is that Chrome updates all of the time but it does it transparently (to the user) and so doesn't impact their browsing experience.
If Firefox updated in the background and it didn't break anything in the process then no one would care. Well, except when major GUI changes happened and then everyone would have a fit because they didn't get a choice to not update and keep things like they were.
Chrome has avoided that so far by pretty much keeping the same GUI throughout its lifespan. Alternatively, Chrome's design makes some add-ons not feasible (Adblock Plus doesn't really work well at blocking flash ads on Chrome last time I checked).
Even if whatever is only killing 'most' of the bacteria it's not guaranteed or even necessarily possible for said organism to evolve a mechanism to survive.
Um, the storage requirements for an electric car and for an electricity grid are different.
Not that I think the storage tech is there yet, but for example: one idea is to store compressed air underground in caves/old mines/whatever. Obviously one has to look at how much energy is lost in the compression/leakage/extraction/etc but you can think big when it doesn't have to also be light and small.
It's not like the energy you store has to be electrical. I also agree that nuclear is the best bet right now and, for something as important as electrical grid power, that it's smarter to go with something we know will work than something that we think might work in the future.
While I think there are concerns that the antibiotics for livestock may get passed on to people a little bit through the meat it's more that some bacteria affect both people and livestock.
Create a resistance in the bacteria (to the antibiotics) attacking the livestock and then, maybe, the new and improved bacteria could be passed to humans (either from the animals themselves or improper handling of the raw meat).
And farmers pretty much feed all of their animals antibiotics because it's easier? cheaper? than only feeding it to animals once they're sick (in general it's a lot harder to tell when an animal is sick than a human). Or at least that's my understanding, I could be wrong.
I have serious doubts that 'most' went back to Canada. I definitely remember from history class that a large percentage died in the expulsion (disease/boats going down) and that many did not return.
Granted I'm part cajun/acadian and the history books our schools picked on the subject may have been biased... I'm not also not sure that great of records were kept so maybe no one really knows.
That's called nuclear winter and it's a very widely disputed and heavily criticized theory that has been popularized in entertainment.
Sometimes I think, as a species, we take ourselves a little too seriously. Not that I condone doing bad things to the environment or being irresponsible but the world is pretty damn big and complex.
Actually, by my rough napkin math that 'destroy the world several hundred times over' thing is just a popular myth/urban legend.
I suspect that even if ALL of the nuclear weapons in existence were detonated we wouldn't destroy the planet (or even all life on the planet). MAYBE we could wipe out humanity. Certainly we could take out most major cities (and we probably don't need this capability to still ensure MAD protection). But I suspect people think your average nuclear bomb does far more damage and is far more lethal (at least immediately) than people think.
Calculate the area of destruction based on the blast radius of your average nuke and then multiply that out by the number of warheads and compare to the surface area of the earth (even just land surface area). See what you come up with (instead of just repeating what you've seen in movies).
I mean. They're bad. Very bad. And nuclear war would be very bad. But a lot of that rhetoric is inane drivel (and nuclear winter is probably an unrealistic scenario as well).
Have you tried disabling all of your addons/etc to see if you still have the problem? While in a perfect world addons wouldn't be able to cause memory leaks, it's a very hard thing to design against without putting severe limitations on addons.
I know firebug on my 3.6.x install of firefox has memory leak issues but otherwise I can run it for weeks without any significant memory increases (and I've done comparisons of firefox vs chrome usage and firefox was less or equal for the same sites with about ~15 tabs open). People just think Chrome uses less because every tab is a separate process and so it looks like less. My firefox 7.x machines don't use addons and don't even get much heavy flash usage so I've never see large memory usage on those either...
Umm, you have a choice? You can use an old release, go to a different distro (that different distro could be better targeted at old hardware even), or package up your own release (or take the released image and remove some packages to trim it down for your own needs).
In this case I don't see it making a lot of sense to make it not CD size just for 50 megabytes worth of data but I also don't think the user is entitled to ubuntu on a CD or that it's a project requirement for ubuntu.
It's not like the project is called Damn Small Linux and it suddenly requires a 32GB flash drive to install or something...
This is a terrible law, and would make business difficult for a lot of people, and (depending on how it's interpreted) could make garage sales more trouble than they're worth.
I think garage sales would be fine because it seems to make a exception for selling stuff only once a month. Though given how it's worded it could be one SALE every month or one day of operation. It's kind of ambiguous.
And of course the law will be entirely impossible to enforce in practice (except as an easy way to shut down flea markets which I suspect may be the real target instead of the stated copper theft market). What happens when people sell a scrap of paper with a stick figure as an original artwork that comes with a 'free' piece of 'junk'...
A direct result of piracy is definitely a stretch. At best piracy is a contributor to more established studios getting into the social/web game market (and social/web games have their own versions of 'piracy': almost all features that one can pay for can eventually be gotten with scripting).
Free-to-play web games have been around since the creation of the internet (and like most other websites they are usually funded by advertisements). Then as they got tied in with social platforms they got exposure to larger audiences and became 'social games'. Nothing new, nothing to scream, "OH MY GOD, PIRACY PUSHED THIS TO HAPPEN".
As they got more popular business people found better ways to monetize them (microtransactions) though even that is not new nor is it a direct result of piracy. It's been common in asian games for ages (and while piracy is a problem in the asian market I would suggest that piracy rates, microtransactions, lower costs are more of a result of poverty).
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Stupid rednecks are very innovative people! You should see the things they can do with beer cans alone.
In all seriousness, even if Chinese culture/education doesn't promote creativity or thinking outside of the box, with 1.3 billion people there are bound to be enough 'innovative' engineers for the Chinese to compete with whomever they choose.
First, people don't like change. When they get used to things working one way and then suddenly it doesn't work according to their expectations they get upset.
This can in fact be made an even broader generalization: people don't like when their expectations are not met.
So they don't really need a logical reason for preferring an always-open status bar.
And the status bar is legitimately important to some of us (but does not need to always be visible).
Knowing what you're clicking on before you actually click it is important information. Well, assuming javascript hasn't changed the status/you have your browser set to not allow javascript to change the status.
Knowing what your browser is doing/actively loading is also very useful information. Without a status bar I'd have to pull up something like the Firebug net panel.
The judge may not have even needed to order it to get the blog taken down.
It more than likely was against the blogger.com/blogspot content policy and could have been taken down (or filtered) by request.
But there must be a reason. Either it doesn't hold up in court if you contest your citation or it's policy because it would be too broad or something else.
And I wasn't in purely hypothetical land. I can find defense attorney sites stating that people get hit with "careless operation" citations in my state. I can see fees associated with it.
I can find blog posts where people got citations for it (and it looks like it's used for running a stop sign here and wrong way on a one way street, tacked onto DUI, etc).
I'm sorry if I don't get pulled over a lot and thus don't have personal experience with such an issue.
I promise you if a cop sees me swerving all over the inside of my lane and being a general hazard to traffic he can pull me over and give me a citation using "careless operation/reckless driving/whatever" laws, at least in my state.
It would be pretty easy to just change policy by citing studies that driving with a phone constitutes unsafe driving and thus satisfies said law's requirements.
I see nothing in the law for my state that limits it to after-the-fact.
I seriously doubt my state is a unique butterfly in that regard.
Passing a new specific law gets the law into the news and gives it exposure and gives a clearer mandate but is probably not necessary in many places (though many places already have cell phone restrictions anyway).
Honestly, all of these things are already banned under current careless operation/due diligence laws. I'm assuming most States have those.
Would you rather they just made a policy (instead of a written law) for law enforcement to declare cell phone use while driving as careless operation and start issuing citations?
The radio, passengers talking to you, thinking about other things, cell phones, etc are all correlated (but causation not proved) to increased accidents.
Citation: http://hawaii.gov/lrb/rpts05/cellcar.pdf
I'm sure distractions affect people differently and it's a shame to punish those people that can text message on their cell phone and drive perfectly at the same time (surely they exist!)
The problem is that you drive on public property, with a license, and your (in)ability to operate your motor vehicle has the potential to harm many others.
In a perfect world I think revamping driver's ed classes and license tests to include better education on cell phone dangers would be the best solution.
Sadly, it's not a perfect world and it may be worth a few additional rules to try to help save lives.
This is of course assuming that the populace will even follow said rules and that the rules don't become a big money funnel/ticket scheme or impossible to enforce.
It may be a lost cause and then we'll just have to one day accept that people will die because of convenience.
I can think of legitimate reasons for cell phone use in car (emergency calls [911, doctor, pregnant wife, etc]) and maybe even hands free operation if it's not proven a serious risk.
I personally turn my phone off when I get into my car. I know it's a distraction and if family/friends need help desperately while I'm on the road then I cannot help them anyway. Anything not desperate can wait/is not worth the increased risk.
When they (Touchpads) were $200 - $250? They launched at $500 for the 16GB model in July 2011.
Then in August they did the $100/$150 firesale. I'd never even heard of the device before the firesale.
I don't think anyone will ever know why HP gave the Touchpad a little over a month before killing it off.
At the very least they should have ridden it out until the holiday season and then sold them at cost (supposedly ~300) with a firesale after the holidays if sales were still bad. After that they could have just tried to make back what they could through the app market.
Anyway, with regards to WebOS on the EVO: I believe the bleeding edge for that is being done by Ryan Hope.
There are still issues though and I think they're mostly waiting on the webOS source release to make it fully work.
I think the difference is that Chrome updates all of the time but it does it transparently (to the user) and so doesn't impact their browsing experience.
If Firefox updated in the background and it didn't break anything in the process then no one would care.
Well, except when major GUI changes happened and then everyone would have a fit because they didn't get a choice to not update and keep things like they were.
Chrome has avoided that so far by pretty much keeping the same GUI throughout its lifespan.
Alternatively, Chrome's design makes some add-ons not feasible (Adblock Plus doesn't really work well at blocking flash ads on Chrome last time I checked).
Even if whatever is only killing 'most' of the bacteria it's not guaranteed or even necessarily possible for said organism to evolve a mechanism to survive.
Agreed, evolution isn't magic.
Um, the storage requirements for an electric car and for an electricity grid are different.
Not that I think the storage tech is there yet, but for example: one idea is to store compressed air underground in caves/old mines/whatever.
Obviously one has to look at how much energy is lost in the compression/leakage/extraction/etc but you can think big when it doesn't have to also be light and small.
It's not like the energy you store has to be electrical.
I also agree that nuclear is the best bet right now and, for something as important as electrical grid power, that it's smarter to go with something we know will work than something that we think might work in the future.
While I think there are concerns that the antibiotics for livestock may get passed on to people a little bit through the meat it's more that some bacteria affect both people and livestock.
Create a resistance in the bacteria (to the antibiotics) attacking the livestock and then, maybe, the new and improved bacteria could be passed to humans (either from the animals themselves or improper handling of the raw meat).
And farmers pretty much feed all of their animals antibiotics because it's easier? cheaper? than only feeding it to animals once they're sick (in general it's a lot harder to tell when an animal is sick than a human). Or at least that's my understanding, I could be wrong.
I have serious doubts that 'most' went back to Canada.
I definitely remember from history class that a large percentage died in the expulsion (disease/boats going down) and that many did not return.
Granted I'm part cajun/acadian and the history books our schools picked on the subject may have been biased...
I'm not also not sure that great of records were kept so maybe no one really knows.
The Acadians might beg to differ with regards to Canada.
And every year more people move from Canada to the USA than from the USA to Canada (and if we talk per capita the difference becomes much larger).
That's called nuclear winter and it's a very widely disputed and heavily criticized theory that has been popularized in entertainment.
Sometimes I think, as a species, we take ourselves a little too seriously.
Not that I condone doing bad things to the environment or being irresponsible but the world is pretty damn big and complex.
Actually, by my rough napkin math that 'destroy the world several hundred times over' thing is just a popular myth/urban legend.
I suspect that even if ALL of the nuclear weapons in existence were detonated we wouldn't destroy the planet (or even all life on the planet).
MAYBE we could wipe out humanity. Certainly we could take out most major cities (and we probably don't need this capability to still ensure MAD protection).
But I suspect people think your average nuclear bomb does far more damage and is far more lethal (at least immediately) than people think.
Calculate the area of destruction based on the blast radius of your average nuke and then multiply that out by the number of warheads and compare to the surface area of the earth (even just land surface area).
See what you come up with (instead of just repeating what you've seen in movies).
I mean. They're bad. Very bad. And nuclear war would be very bad.
But a lot of that rhetoric is inane drivel (and nuclear winter is probably an unrealistic scenario as well).
I would hope Nancy Pelosi is nowhere on her menstrual cycle, she's 71.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it can't happen.
Have you tried disabling all of your addons/etc to see if you still have the problem?
While in a perfect world addons wouldn't be able to cause memory leaks, it's a very hard thing to design against without putting severe limitations on addons.
I know firebug on my 3.6.x install of firefox has memory leak issues but otherwise I can run it for weeks without any significant memory increases (and I've done comparisons of firefox vs chrome usage and firefox was less or equal for the same sites with about ~15 tabs open).
People just think Chrome uses less because every tab is a separate process and so it looks like less.
My firefox 7.x machines don't use addons and don't even get much heavy flash usage so I've never see large memory usage on those either...
Not really. By now everyone is sure to have broken criminal law at some point or another, even if they were only misdemeanors.
Umm, you have a choice? You can use an old release, go to a different distro (that different distro could be better targeted at old hardware even), or package up your own release (or take the released image and remove some packages to trim it down for your own needs).
In this case I don't see it making a lot of sense to make it not CD size just for 50 megabytes worth of data but I also don't think the user is entitled to ubuntu on a CD or that it's a project requirement for ubuntu.
It's not like the project is called Damn Small Linux and it suddenly requires a 32GB flash drive to install or something...
This is a terrible law, and would make business difficult for a lot of people, and (depending on how it's interpreted) could make garage sales more trouble than they're worth.
I think garage sales would be fine because it seems to make a exception for selling stuff only once a month. Though given how it's worded it could be one SALE every month or one day of operation. It's kind of ambiguous.
And of course the law will be entirely impossible to enforce in practice (except as an easy way to shut down flea markets which I suspect may be the real target instead of the stated copper theft market).
What happens when people sell a scrap of paper with a stick figure as an original artwork that comes with a 'free' piece of 'junk'...
Umm? People get guns pulled on them/mugged for pocket change every day...
I back this claim up with real world evidence of it happening to multiple of my friends.
A direct result of piracy is definitely a stretch. At best piracy is a contributor to more established studios getting into the social/web game market (and social/web games have their own versions of 'piracy': almost all features that one can pay for can eventually be gotten with scripting).
Free-to-play web games have been around since the creation of the internet (and like most other websites they are usually funded by advertisements).
Then as they got tied in with social platforms they got exposure to larger audiences and became 'social games'.
Nothing new, nothing to scream, "OH MY GOD, PIRACY PUSHED THIS TO HAPPEN".
As they got more popular business people found better ways to monetize them (microtransactions) though even that is not new nor is it a direct result of piracy.
It's been common in asian games for ages (and while piracy is a problem in the asian market I would suggest that piracy rates, microtransactions, lower costs are more of a result of poverty).
I love you. If only there were more people like you.
Or a simple inert gas like Nitrogen? Which should give the same euphoria as well...