The thing about bubbles, though, is that even when everybody knows it's a bubble, everybody thinks they'll get out before it bursts. But they never do.
Spotting a bubble's the easy part. Knowing when to get out of one's hard.
Here in the UK I can have perfectly consensual sex with a girl of 16, but if I possessed a picture of the same girl without her clothes on I could end up on the sex offenders' register.
Can anybody explain to me how this makes any sense at all?
Hang on, don't the pilots of Apache helicopters and the like have a HUD over one eye? I've heard stories of how they develop a weird ability to move and focus each eye independently, like a human chameleon.
Eritrean ex-pats have to pay, I think, 2% of their income to the government back home. This isn't really enforceable but if you ever want to go back and haven't kept up with your payments, they'll stop you entering the country. Thing is, most of them pay it willingly because it's such a poor country and they want to do their bit to make things better.
I don't work for them either and I'd just like to say that having been with them for, I dunno, three years, I can assure you they're the business. They do exactly what they promise - you get the throughput they say you'll get, all the time, and when they say unlimited, they mean unlimited. Enjoy.
Give them a chance, they're only really getting going now. Traditionally this has been an area that Linux has fallen down on. You're welcome to speculate as to the reasons but it seems to me that a lot of people in the community just aren't that excited by making stuff more user-friendly. Not to say that it doesn't interest them at all, it's just that they're more interested in performance and functionality, and so these are the areas in which efforts tend to be focused, meaning that user-friendliness can sometimes take a back seat, however unintentionally. Canonical have only really had a dedicated team focused on UI design for the last year or so, and to be honest those guys have had a bit of a battle with the community, whose hearts are generally in the right place, but a lot of them just don't appreciate the merits of, say, spending An Awful Lot Of Money (you probably wouldn't believe just how much money) on a house font.
I know they're hard at work, though, and I know Mark Shuttleworth thinks it's about the most important hurdle to get over in order for the general public to really take to Ubuntu. I think you're going to see a lot more interesting stuff coming from them over the next while.
(I know some of the people in there, in case you didn't guess)
It's great. It's the one place you know you're not going to be disturbed. That time is yours and yours alone. And what's more, if you're doing it work, you get the added bonus of feeling like you're sticking it to the Man.
As fair as I'm aware, they've never, as yet, conducted any Inquisitions, Crusades, or any amount of other heinous, greedy, megalomaniacal skulduggery. And they're certainly not in the business of keeping the masses poor and ignorant to further concentrate their power over them.
The child abuse is one of the Church's lesser crimes, to be honest. It's just current.
Nothing to do with hatred of the religious, everything to do with hatred of a two-thousand-year-old child-abusing extortion racket. I see no problem with that.
"Hey man, I know things seem really tough right now. We had mixed feelings about writing the story of how you lost the prototype, but the story is fascinating. And tragic, which makes it human. And our sin is that we cannot resist a good story. Especially one that is human, and not merely about a gadget — that’s something that rarely comes out of Apple anymore. But hopefully you take these hard times and turn things around. We all make mistakes. Yours was just public. Tomorrow’s another day. We will all be cheering for you."
I went to Glastonbury (big English festival in a field) last year with an iPhone. I got there on Wednesday afternoon with a fully charged phone and did all the obvious power-saving things, like turning off 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth. I turned the phone off when I went to sleep (which wasn't much). I was on the phone a lot, co-ordinating meetups between different groups of friends, because text messages couldn't be relied on to arrive in timely fashion due to the network being completely overwhelmed. I even did a little bit of browsing, took a few photos, and even played the odd song through the built-in speaker. The phone made it through to Sunday evening.
I was actually really impressed, I'd expected it to keel over by Friday. You might call that micromanagement, but I wasn't doing anything particularly drastic.
In Europe at least, cars seem to have been getting taller and taller. Though they won't admit it because it makes for bad marketing, this is because the population's getting older, and taller cars are easier for old people to get in and out of. VW, for example, sells the Golf Plus, which is just a slightly taller Golf, and whose reason for existence probably baffles the young and flexible. Similarly, Ford sells the Fusion (which has nothing whatsoever in common with the North American Ford Fusion), ostensibly as a funky alternative to the regular fare, but actually the dealers push it to old folks.
Lately I've had the opposite complaint to your own - cars have been getting pointlessly taller, adding headroom which nobody actually needs (honestly, I don't ever foresee the need to wear a top hat at the wheel), meaning that cars become less aerodynamic and therefore less economical. Mercedes are bragging about the drag coefficient of the E-class coupe being the best around, and yet it's only marginally better than the Opel Calibra that came out twenty years before.
(By the way, I've a friend who's taller than you and he seems to manage just fine in a BMW 3-series)
Of course, your Dodge Sprinter is really a Mercedes Sprinter, and as such is just one of a whole host of vans available in Europe that get this kind of mileage or better. Compared to what's available in Europe, American vans seem incredibly antiquated. Why don't, for instance, Ford parachute in the good ol' Transit to replace those ancient designs they sell over there now? They're so much more comfortable, nimble and efficient, and they don't seem to cost any more.
Helps with the engine management and hence fuel economy. Instead of just dumping fuel into the engine every time you press the accelerator and expecting the combustion process to sort it all out, the electronics interpret your intentions in the context of what the engine's up to at the time, and deliver no more fuel than is necessary.
Obviously they've been stung into action by those pesky Pommies' headlong rush into totalitarianism, and as usual are pulling out all the stops to get one over on their old rival...
I'm probably going to get modded to hell for this, but I don't mean it in a disparaging way at all.
I can't be the only one who's noticed a tendency for open source projects to get close to completion only for the mastermind behind it to decide it's no good, scrap it and start again. To my mind, this is a natural tendency for geeky types - they want things to be perfect and aren't usually willing to compromise on this. When it becomes apparent that what they're working on has gone up some perceived blind alley, their natural reaction is to destroy it and try again, only this time they'll get it right. Until some other snag appears...
And this is why sometimes, loath as most of Slashdot's readership may be to admit it, it helps to have good management keeping an eye on things. Somebody with a sense of perspective who's able to put a little bit of distance between themselves and the project, and recognise when things are Good Enough, and then get it out the door.
The problem is that many open-source projects don't work to deadlines and are self-determined - nobody's standing over hobbyist programmers cracking the whip, things are done when they're done. And if it's not quite how it should be, well, we'll just take a bit longer. Until the developers get bored and move onto some new problem instead. Just look at all the stalled projects on Sourceforge for ample proof of this. And so with infinite dicking-around time at their disposal, our OSS developers choose to dick around - after all, the journey is in some ways more important for them than the destination, they're coding for their own amusement, not necessarily to provide the world with a service.
There's nothing wrong with this - they can spend their time how they like. But I just wonder how often promising things have been scrapped and restarted because there was nobody around able to take a detached look at it and say "Y'know, maybe we should just get this out, and we can do the rewrite in version 2".
Some of that money's going to be wasted, you need to accept this. It's utter chaos out there and the people that need help the most are not always going to be the ones that get it first, simply because it's harder to get it to them. There are going to be warehouses full of supplies with nobody to distribute them. Somewhere else there will be people ready to give out aid parcels but their supplies won't have turned up. That's just the nature of the beast. Relief efforts like this are really hard and necessarily imperfect.
But don't let that put you off helping out. Give what you can. Even if it doesn't all get through it'll still make a difference, which it's most definitely not going to do sitting in your wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
Tap them on the shoulder. They'll move.
That's more than every RIAA member put together has made since the organisation was founded.
So trying to argue that that's how much better off they'd be if only Limewire didn't exist is transparently dumb.
Why do they think this line of argument is going to help their case?
I don't think bubbles are hard to spot at all.
The thing about bubbles, though, is that even when everybody knows it's a bubble, everybody thinks they'll get out before it bursts. But they never do.
Spotting a bubble's the easy part. Knowing when to get out of one's hard.
Which makes a mockery of the whole thing.
Here in the UK I can have perfectly consensual sex with a girl of 16, but if I possessed a picture of the same girl without her clothes on I could end up on the sex offenders' register.
Can anybody explain to me how this makes any sense at all?
Hang on, don't the pilots of Apache helicopters and the like have a HUD over one eye? I've heard stories of how they develop a weird ability to move and focus each eye independently, like a human chameleon.
Don't ever try to join my pub quiz team with that attitude...
Nope.
Eritrean ex-pats have to pay, I think, 2% of their income to the government back home. This isn't really enforceable but if you ever want to go back and haven't kept up with your payments, they'll stop you entering the country. Thing is, most of them pay it willingly because it's such a poor country and they want to do their bit to make things better.
I don't work for them either and I'd just like to say that having been with them for, I dunno, three years, I can assure you they're the business. They do exactly what they promise - you get the throughput they say you'll get, all the time, and when they say unlimited, they mean unlimited. Enjoy.
And I use Be, who do their best to keep contention to 1:1 and give me a steady 18MB/S down, 1MB/S up, for £18 a month or something. Can't beat 'em.
Give them a chance, they're only really getting going now. Traditionally this has been an area that Linux has fallen down on. You're welcome to speculate as to the reasons but it seems to me that a lot of people in the community just aren't that excited by making stuff more user-friendly. Not to say that it doesn't interest them at all, it's just that they're more interested in performance and functionality, and so these are the areas in which efforts tend to be focused, meaning that user-friendliness can sometimes take a back seat, however unintentionally. Canonical have only really had a dedicated team focused on UI design for the last year or so, and to be honest those guys have had a bit of a battle with the community, whose hearts are generally in the right place, but a lot of them just don't appreciate the merits of, say, spending An Awful Lot Of Money (you probably wouldn't believe just how much money) on a house font.
I know they're hard at work, though, and I know Mark Shuttleworth thinks it's about the most important hurdle to get over in order for the general public to really take to Ubuntu. I think you're going to see a lot more interesting stuff coming from them over the next while.
(I know some of the people in there, in case you didn't guess)
It's great. It's the one place you know you're not going to be disturbed. That time is yours and yours alone. And what's more, if you're doing it work, you get the added bonus of feeling like you're sticking it to the Man.
As fair as I'm aware, they've never, as yet, conducted any Inquisitions, Crusades, or any amount of other heinous, greedy, megalomaniacal skulduggery. And they're certainly not in the business of keeping the masses poor and ignorant to further concentrate their power over them.
The child abuse is one of the Church's lesser crimes, to be honest. It's just current.
Nothing two-faced about the Catholic Church wanting to make money. It's what they've always been about.
Nothing to do with hatred of the religious, everything to do with hatred of a two-thousand-year-old child-abusing extortion racket. I see no problem with that.
Yes, but you're one of the biggest fucking idiots ever to profess to be a journalist. That may also have been a factor.
Just look at the note they wrote the guy:
"Hey man, I know things seem really tough right now. We had mixed feelings about writing the story of how you lost the prototype, but the story is fascinating. And tragic, which makes it human. And our sin is that we cannot resist a good story. Especially one that is human, and not merely about a gadget — that’s something that rarely comes out of Apple anymore. But hopefully you take these hard times and turn things around. We all make mistakes. Yours was just public. Tomorrow’s another day. We will all be cheering for you."
I mean, honestly, come ON.
I went to Glastonbury (big English festival in a field) last year with an iPhone. I got there on Wednesday afternoon with a fully charged phone and did all the obvious power-saving things, like turning off 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth. I turned the phone off when I went to sleep (which wasn't much). I was on the phone a lot, co-ordinating meetups between different groups of friends, because text messages couldn't be relied on to arrive in timely fashion due to the network being completely overwhelmed. I even did a little bit of browsing, took a few photos, and even played the odd song through the built-in speaker. The phone made it through to Sunday evening.
I was actually really impressed, I'd expected it to keel over by Friday. You might call that micromanagement, but I wasn't doing anything particularly drastic.
A QAT is fine too?
Really?
In Europe at least, cars seem to have been getting taller and taller. Though they won't admit it because it makes for bad marketing, this is because the population's getting older, and taller cars are easier for old people to get in and out of. VW, for example, sells the Golf Plus, which is just a slightly taller Golf, and whose reason for existence probably baffles the young and flexible. Similarly, Ford sells the Fusion (which has nothing whatsoever in common with the North American Ford Fusion), ostensibly as a funky alternative to the regular fare, but actually the dealers push it to old folks.
Lately I've had the opposite complaint to your own - cars have been getting pointlessly taller, adding headroom which nobody actually needs (honestly, I don't ever foresee the need to wear a top hat at the wheel), meaning that cars become less aerodynamic and therefore less economical. Mercedes are bragging about the drag coefficient of the E-class coupe being the best around, and yet it's only marginally better than the Opel Calibra that came out twenty years before.
(By the way, I've a friend who's taller than you and he seems to manage just fine in a BMW 3-series)
Of course, your Dodge Sprinter is really a Mercedes Sprinter, and as such is just one of a whole host of vans available in Europe that get this kind of mileage or better. Compared to what's available in Europe, American vans seem incredibly antiquated. Why don't, for instance, Ford parachute in the good ol' Transit to replace those ancient designs they sell over there now? They're so much more comfortable, nimble and efficient, and they don't seem to cost any more.
Holy shit, talk about over-elaborate. Who came up with that, Wallace and Gromit?
Surely if they cut down on all the crazy bits and pieces flying out at various stages, they could fit more sensors and gadgets to the actual probe?
Helps with the engine management and hence fuel economy. Instead of just dumping fuel into the engine every time you press the accelerator and expecting the combustion process to sort it all out, the electronics interpret your intentions in the context of what the engine's up to at the time, and deliver no more fuel than is necessary.
Obviously they've been stung into action by those pesky Pommies' headlong rush into totalitarianism, and as usual are pulling out all the stops to get one over on their old rival...
I'm probably going to get modded to hell for this, but I don't mean it in a disparaging way at all.
I can't be the only one who's noticed a tendency for open source projects to get close to completion only for the mastermind behind it to decide it's no good, scrap it and start again. To my mind, this is a natural tendency for geeky types - they want things to be perfect and aren't usually willing to compromise on this. When it becomes apparent that what they're working on has gone up some perceived blind alley, their natural reaction is to destroy it and try again, only this time they'll get it right. Until some other snag appears...
And this is why sometimes, loath as most of Slashdot's readership may be to admit it, it helps to have good management keeping an eye on things. Somebody with a sense of perspective who's able to put a little bit of distance between themselves and the project, and recognise when things are Good Enough, and then get it out the door.
The problem is that many open-source projects don't work to deadlines and are self-determined - nobody's standing over hobbyist programmers cracking the whip, things are done when they're done. And if it's not quite how it should be, well, we'll just take a bit longer. Until the developers get bored and move onto some new problem instead. Just look at all the stalled projects on Sourceforge for ample proof of this. And so with infinite dicking-around time at their disposal, our OSS developers choose to dick around - after all, the journey is in some ways more important for them than the destination, they're coding for their own amusement, not necessarily to provide the world with a service.
There's nothing wrong with this - they can spend their time how they like. But I just wonder how often promising things have been scrapped and restarted because there was nobody around able to take a detached look at it and say "Y'know, maybe we should just get this out, and we can do the rewrite in version 2".
Some of that money's going to be wasted, you need to accept this. It's utter chaos out there and the people that need help the most are not always going to be the ones that get it first, simply because it's harder to get it to them. There are going to be warehouses full of supplies with nobody to distribute them. Somewhere else there will be people ready to give out aid parcels but their supplies won't have turned up. That's just the nature of the beast. Relief efforts like this are really hard and necessarily imperfect.
But don't let that put you off helping out. Give what you can. Even if it doesn't all get through it'll still make a difference, which it's most definitely not going to do sitting in your wallet.