Well that's nice if someone would rather donate the full $$$ towards AIDS research, but most people want the iDevice or whatever product they're buying. Having $ or maybe even $$ donated to AIDS research by Apple for each sale is more than you could expect to get if you took all of the people who donated instead of buying something instead.
Is this completely good-will on Apple's part? I don't think so as they're essentially using it to get free press/advertising and they realize that even if they won't phrase it in that manner. I don't even think it will increase sales all that much, but if it suckers some idiot into buying an iDevice, that they otherwise wouldn't have, so that they can feel good about themselves it's money in the bank as far as Apple is concerned.
It's a decent gesture on the part of the company even if they're not doing it for the purest of reasons.
It's the internet. There's always going to be some small amount of trolling a crap posts. If Ubuntu started a project to donate to animal shelters someone would post about how cats are worthless and someone should just snap all of their necks. I'm surprised there wasn't another GNAA (or whatever the derivative spam post actually is now) posted to the thread as it seems to have been cropping up a lot.
I don't think Jobs cared too much. If you look at his life, he comes off as a bit of a sociopath. However, like so many other good businessmen he realized the importance of having a good public image and a small bit of charitable giving that amounts to an alternative form of advertising is never a bad thing.
I dislike this defeatist attitude of it's obviously not everything so why bother. By that same logic, don't bother donating any difference yourself because that $50 - $100 probably isn't enough either. In fact, unless you're fully capable of handing them a cure to AIDS yourself, best to not even get involved.
Never mind that any company that tried donating more than a token amount would quickly find itself being sued by the shareholders who are going to be wondering why all of the profits are being spent on some charity that the shareholder's themselves likely had no choice in choosing.
Remind's me of a similar case where a physics professor submitted what amounted to meaningless expressions or general nonsense to a journal. You can read the article in question if you're interested. It has some rather funny bits and some humor sprinkled in occasionally:
Mathematically, Einstein breaks with the tradition dating back to Euclid (and which is inflicted on high-school students even today!), and employs instead the non-Euclidean geometry developed by Riemann. Einstein's equations are highly nonlinear, which is why traditionally-trained mathematicians find them so difficult to solve.
In the 1980's a very different approach, known as string theory, became popular: here the fundamental constituents of matter are not point-like particles but rather tiny (Planck-scale) closed and open strings. In this theory, the space-time manifold does not exist as an objective physical reality; rather, space-time is a derived concept, an approximation valid only on large length scales (where ``large'' means ``much larger than 10^-33 centimeters''!).
As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''. More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.
That's probably open to interpretation. I could just as well read it in such as way as to construe the meaning to suggest that the profits from the endowment be used for the advancement science. In that regard one could argue that there's no obligation not to invest in something that is found to be morally objectionable and one could even argue that part of the endowment be used to fund research into reducing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Science doesn't say much of anything about how to invest. That's within the realm of economics and for the foreseeable future, fossil fuels are likely to remain both widely used and a solid investment.
My 18-year-old me would applaud them but my current 40-year-old self thinks they should shut the f**k up and go do something useful instead.
Just use "fuck". Writing "f**k" doesn't change anything. I still mentally translate it to the appropriate word in my head so you're not actually censoring it. You're probably mentally translating it as well, so it's not like your prohibiting yourself from using it internally. If you don't want to use the word, then use something else like "hell", "heck", or failing that a phrase like "shut your trap."
My apologies if it's some idiotic auto-correct or something similar which you're forced to endure.
For the vast majority of games, it's more about the power of the GPU than the CPU, which is why both Microsoft and Sony spent a lot more of the silicon and power budget on graphics than they did on the CPU. There's still an issue of most games and game developers failing to take advantage of all of these cores, but hopefully now that the consoles have been pushing increased core count for a while (the PS3 had it's cell processor that was similar to having multiple cores) that developers will get better at writing software that takes advantage of this.
Also, I really personally dislike using a TV for a PC screen. It also limits you to 1080p, and some PC gamers prefer using higher resolution displays or even some kind of multiple-monitor setup. Personally I game on a 1920 x 1200 monitor because I like the extra vertical space. Unfortunately some games don't support the resolution which is a bit annoying.
Yeah... that's not usually the case. Steam sales tend to be cheaper than used copies of console games. And sooner in a game's lifetime as well.
That may be true, but consoles do have the added benefit of physical media and being able to borrow a game from a friend. Typically with PC games, even the boxed copies have limited number of installs which makes sharing games more difficult. It would be interesting to do a comparison for popular games at different points in their life-cycle to see what the prices are like.
First the PC will have better specs on paper, but when it comes to running the actual game, the performance may be worse simply because having a console allows for more highly tuned and specialized code.
Second, that $600 PC purchased now will definitely be a lot better, but if it were purchased at the time of release, even the raw numbers wouldn't be all that much better, never mind the actual performance. Also if you don't already have a good monitor, that's even more of an investment, unless you want to hook up the PC to your TV as well.
Third, you forget the a console gamer can buy used games at a store, whereas PC gamers typically can't resell their digital downloads. Given that the online digital games on sale will probably be in the same price range as a used disc in a store for a similarly aged game and it's not that big of a difference. If you want to play the newest games as they're released the full-price cost is going to be about the same whether or not it's on PC or console.
I typically pick up a new console at some point in the generation just to play through some of the exclusives (PC's aren't going to get the new Zelda game any time soon, at least not in a completely legal fashion.) but in general I prefer the PC simply because many of the genres I like best lend themselves more readily to a mouse/keyboard combination.
However, there are some people for whom a console is a much better value proposition. If the PC was hands down better in every case, no one would buy one. However, given their popularity, it seems to suggest that there are a large number of people for who consider a console to be a better value.
Considering your original post commits a rather blatant logical fallacy of its own (begs the question by presupposing that not having registration leads to getting robbed, etc. and that having registration prevents it.) I'd have to ask you the same.
Also, considering all of this is done through an app that contains feedback and such ratings, it seems unlikely that such assaults are any more likely to occur when using Uber or some similar service as opposed to a regular cab driver. One could argue that a person with malicious intent could hack or otherwise gain unlawful access to the account of an Uber driver and use this to commit crimes against an unsuspecting victim, but the same vulnerabilities are present in the existing system as well where someone could impersonate a cab driver.
Further you include language such as "civilized world" which implies that not using that solution somehow makes a person or country backwards, which itself is another fallacy. There are arguments to be made for and against Uber, but frankly yours aren't very good. Use statistics to back up your claim and don't attempt to claim that any solution or implementation that does not match your own is somehow an indicator of incivility.
Actually I think they're more popular than ever before. There are a lot of people who got into Minecraft which has exposed PC gaming to a whole new generation of users. There's also the popularity of MOBA, RTS, and FPS games that are being played professionally now that are attracting wider audiences. Never mind companies like Valve that practically survive off their take of the sales of digital games.
Just because there aren't millions of people running Intel Extreme Edition CPUs with water-cooled CrossFire/SLI setups doesn't mean that PC gaming isn't doing well.
Not really sure how one goes about fighting the media in the first place.
Presumably by showing that the media is corrupt, biased, or wrong for other reasons. Personally I don't know if the approach will work because the kinds of sites that run those stories are more blogs that exist to write sensationalist titles and short articles related to gossip and rumors in order to drive ad revenue. I don't think the type of people who read them tend to be the intellectual sort that will care about how biased it is as long as it's entertaining or conforms to their world view.
The notion that Uber wants fight the media by leveraging other corrupt media that would shill for money really only proves the point of both sides though, that the media is potentially shoving an agenda and that Uber isn't a rather shady company that isn't above getting its hands dirty. Seems like a group of assholes made for each other.
For once we have an article that has nothing to do with that idiotic subject and not only do you have to bring it up, but you also create a massive straw-man while doing so. Are you just trying to start a flame war or something?
Businesses die off or fail all the time. Being a business isn't some magical code-word for guaranteed success. Businesses that turn into de facto monopolies like a government tend to suck and do a crap job because they really don't have to care and there's no competition. Look at Comcast and tell me that you'd want that for a government. Every bit as inept and rent seeking.
If we wanted a system that took the best aspects of capitalism, you'd let the states compete to see who can do the best job to win the chance to run the country as a whole. Obviously that's a general idea and an implementation would have a lot of issues to address, but you can't simply state that if the government were a business that all would be well in the world.
Everyone should just be glad that it doesn't require Google+ integration. Seems like just about everything they do now is getting tied to that millstone in one way or another.
The first past the post voting system used in the United States practically guarantees that over time the political choices will devolve into two different groups. In the event that one eventually dies or becomes too unpopular, the new group will splinter and replace the old one. Under other systems, it's quite likely that either party could be relegated to being much more niche in only a matter of decades.
If you don't know how it works, it's only because you haven't bothered to look it up.
Here's the patent and the Wikipedia article also gives a reasonable description. Otherwise I believe they've also published the basics behind the algorithm.
A list of who voted does need to exist to some extent. Otherwise it becomes too easily possible for some entity to start casting votes for other people or dead people without much risk of getting caught; and given the history of this country it's probably happened in a place or two from time to time.
Perhaps that are other solutions that can be used to mitigate this, but given we're still using a first past the post system that's probably quite far beyond us. This is just the other side of such records being available and likely easy to process with a computer. NPR had some coverage on modern campaigning recently and both parties are gathering and keeping a lot of data and with everything else out there, they can probably calculate to a reasonable certainty who you'll vote for.
It's kind of sleazy that they're using these kinds of marketing tactics, but on the other hand it beats a system where there isn't an choice, or even an allusion of choice due to neither party really being worth a damn. At least we can make sure the wrong lizard doesn't get in.
I was wondering the same as well. You would think that it could probably sense a lot of touch events occurring near the edge and treat that as a non-touch. It seems like the kind of problem that could be solved even with a relatively naive algorithm. If they aren't even considering it as a problem there's obviously something wrong with their design team.
He probably doesn't like it, but he was one of the founders for the company so he was obviously okay with it at the time. He probably could have changed the name, etc. before he sold his interests in it if he wanted to avoid the potential problems.
Most of them hardly qualify as stories. It's just linking to an actual story (or even more blog spam) from another site and adding their own two cents.
Many of the people who consume the stories don't care about this at all and are mostly just looking for something that validates their world-view, whatever that may be.
Not only is there the natural human tendency to not want to be wrong (even if it means lying to ourselves or others in the process) but it's something that tends to be reinforced entirely too much throughout our lives, and I think that's a bad thing in a certain way. The only way we can actually learn more about the universe is to come to the realization and accept that our understanding of that universe is flawed in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that's nice if someone would rather donate the full $$$ towards AIDS research, but most people want the iDevice or whatever product they're buying. Having $ or maybe even $$ donated to AIDS research by Apple for each sale is more than you could expect to get if you took all of the people who donated instead of buying something instead.
Is this completely good-will on Apple's part? I don't think so as they're essentially using it to get free press/advertising and they realize that even if they won't phrase it in that manner. I don't even think it will increase sales all that much, but if it suckers some idiot into buying an iDevice, that they otherwise wouldn't have, so that they can feel good about themselves it's money in the bank as far as Apple is concerned.
It's a decent gesture on the part of the company even if they're not doing it for the purest of reasons.
It's the internet. There's always going to be some small amount of trolling a crap posts. If Ubuntu started a project to donate to animal shelters someone would post about how cats are worthless and someone should just snap all of their necks. I'm surprised there wasn't another GNAA (or whatever the derivative spam post actually is now) posted to the thread as it seems to have been cropping up a lot.
I don't think Jobs cared too much. If you look at his life, he comes off as a bit of a sociopath. However, like so many other good businessmen he realized the importance of having a good public image and a small bit of charitable giving that amounts to an alternative form of advertising is never a bad thing.
I dislike this defeatist attitude of it's obviously not everything so why bother. By that same logic, don't bother donating any difference yourself because that $50 - $100 probably isn't enough either. In fact, unless you're fully capable of handing them a cure to AIDS yourself, best to not even get involved.
Never mind that any company that tried donating more than a token amount would quickly find itself being sued by the shareholders who are going to be wondering why all of the profits are being spent on some charity that the shareholder's themselves likely had no choice in choosing.
They've been doing this kind of promotion for years. They introduced the original RED iPod when Jobs was still in charge.
At least put some thought into your crappy trolling efforts.
Mathematically, Einstein breaks with the tradition dating back to Euclid (and which is inflicted on high-school students even today!), and employs instead the non-Euclidean geometry developed by Riemann. Einstein's equations are highly nonlinear, which is why traditionally-trained mathematicians find them so difficult to solve.
In the 1980's a very different approach, known as string theory, became popular: here the fundamental constituents of matter are not point-like particles but rather tiny (Planck-scale) closed and open strings. In this theory, the space-time manifold does not exist as an objective physical reality; rather, space-time is a derived concept, an approximation valid only on large length scales (where ``large'' means ``much larger than 10^-33 centimeters''!).
As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''. More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.
That's probably open to interpretation. I could just as well read it in such as way as to construe the meaning to suggest that the profits from the endowment be used for the advancement science. In that regard one could argue that there's no obligation not to invest in something that is found to be morally objectionable and one could even argue that part of the endowment be used to fund research into reducing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Science doesn't say much of anything about how to invest. That's within the realm of economics and for the foreseeable future, fossil fuels are likely to remain both widely used and a solid investment.
My 18-year-old me would applaud them but my current 40-year-old self thinks they should shut the f**k up and go do something useful instead.
Just use "fuck". Writing "f**k" doesn't change anything. I still mentally translate it to the appropriate word in my head so you're not actually censoring it. You're probably mentally translating it as well, so it's not like your prohibiting yourself from using it internally. If you don't want to use the word, then use something else like "hell", "heck", or failing that a phrase like "shut your trap."
My apologies if it's some idiotic auto-correct or something similar which you're forced to endure.
Also, I really personally dislike using a TV for a PC screen. It also limits you to 1080p, and some PC gamers prefer using higher resolution displays or even some kind of multiple-monitor setup. Personally I game on a 1920 x 1200 monitor because I like the extra vertical space. Unfortunately some games don't support the resolution which is a bit annoying.
Yeah... that's not usually the case. Steam sales tend to be cheaper than used copies of console games. And sooner in a game's lifetime as well.
That may be true, but consoles do have the added benefit of physical media and being able to borrow a game from a friend. Typically with PC games, even the boxed copies have limited number of installs which makes sharing games more difficult. It would be interesting to do a comparison for popular games at different points in their life-cycle to see what the prices are like.
You're overlooking a few key points.
First the PC will have better specs on paper, but when it comes to running the actual game, the performance may be worse simply because having a console allows for more highly tuned and specialized code.
Second, that $600 PC purchased now will definitely be a lot better, but if it were purchased at the time of release, even the raw numbers wouldn't be all that much better, never mind the actual performance. Also if you don't already have a good monitor, that's even more of an investment, unless you want to hook up the PC to your TV as well.
Third, you forget the a console gamer can buy used games at a store, whereas PC gamers typically can't resell their digital downloads. Given that the online digital games on sale will probably be in the same price range as a used disc in a store for a similarly aged game and it's not that big of a difference. If you want to play the newest games as they're released the full-price cost is going to be about the same whether or not it's on PC or console.
I typically pick up a new console at some point in the generation just to play through some of the exclusives (PC's aren't going to get the new Zelda game any time soon, at least not in a completely legal fashion.) but in general I prefer the PC simply because many of the genres I like best lend themselves more readily to a mouse/keyboard combination.
However, there are some people for whom a console is a much better value proposition. If the PC was hands down better in every case, no one would buy one. However, given their popularity, it seems to suggest that there are a large number of people for who consider a console to be a better value.
Considering your original post commits a rather blatant logical fallacy of its own (begs the question by presupposing that not having registration leads to getting robbed, etc. and that having registration prevents it.) I'd have to ask you the same.
Also, considering all of this is done through an app that contains feedback and such ratings, it seems unlikely that such assaults are any more likely to occur when using Uber or some similar service as opposed to a regular cab driver. One could argue that a person with malicious intent could hack or otherwise gain unlawful access to the account of an Uber driver and use this to commit crimes against an unsuspecting victim, but the same vulnerabilities are present in the existing system as well where someone could impersonate a cab driver.
Further you include language such as "civilized world" which implies that not using that solution somehow makes a person or country backwards, which itself is another fallacy. There are arguments to be made for and against Uber, but frankly yours aren't very good. Use statistics to back up your claim and don't attempt to claim that any solution or implementation that does not match your own is somehow an indicator of incivility.
Actually I think they're more popular than ever before. There are a lot of people who got into Minecraft which has exposed PC gaming to a whole new generation of users. There's also the popularity of MOBA, RTS, and FPS games that are being played professionally now that are attracting wider audiences. Never mind companies like Valve that practically survive off their take of the sales of digital games.
Just because there aren't millions of people running Intel Extreme Edition CPUs with water-cooled CrossFire/SLI setups doesn't mean that PC gaming isn't doing well.
Not really sure how one goes about fighting the media in the first place.
Presumably by showing that the media is corrupt, biased, or wrong for other reasons. Personally I don't know if the approach will work because the kinds of sites that run those stories are more blogs that exist to write sensationalist titles and short articles related to gossip and rumors in order to drive ad revenue. I don't think the type of people who read them tend to be the intellectual sort that will care about how biased it is as long as it's entertaining or conforms to their world view.
The notion that Uber wants fight the media by leveraging other corrupt media that would shill for money really only proves the point of both sides though, that the media is potentially shoving an agenda and that Uber isn't a rather shady company that isn't above getting its hands dirty. Seems like a group of assholes made for each other.
For once we have an article that has nothing to do with that idiotic subject and not only do you have to bring it up, but you also create a massive straw-man while doing so. Are you just trying to start a flame war or something?
Businesses die off or fail all the time. Being a business isn't some magical code-word for guaranteed success. Businesses that turn into de facto monopolies like a government tend to suck and do a crap job because they really don't have to care and there's no competition. Look at Comcast and tell me that you'd want that for a government. Every bit as inept and rent seeking.
If we wanted a system that took the best aspects of capitalism, you'd let the states compete to see who can do the best job to win the chance to run the country as a whole. Obviously that's a general idea and an implementation would have a lot of issues to address, but you can't simply state that if the government were a business that all would be well in the world.
Or it gives some insiders who might want to do such a thing a few ideas of how to go about it while maintaining plausible deniability.
Everyone should just be glad that it doesn't require Google+ integration. Seems like just about everything they do now is getting tied to that millstone in one way or another.
The first past the post voting system used in the United States practically guarantees that over time the political choices will devolve into two different groups. In the event that one eventually dies or becomes too unpopular, the new group will splinter and replace the old one. Under other systems, it's quite likely that either party could be relegated to being much more niche in only a matter of decades.
If you don't know how it works, it's only because you haven't bothered to look it up.
Here's the patent and the Wikipedia article also gives a reasonable description. Otherwise I believe they've also published the basics behind the algorithm.
A list of who voted does need to exist to some extent. Otherwise it becomes too easily possible for some entity to start casting votes for other people or dead people without much risk of getting caught; and given the history of this country it's probably happened in a place or two from time to time.
Perhaps that are other solutions that can be used to mitigate this, but given we're still using a first past the post system that's probably quite far beyond us. This is just the other side of such records being available and likely easy to process with a computer. NPR had some coverage on modern campaigning recently and both parties are gathering and keeping a lot of data and with everything else out there, they can probably calculate to a reasonable certainty who you'll vote for.
It's kind of sleazy that they're using these kinds of marketing tactics, but on the other hand it beats a system where there isn't an choice, or even an allusion of choice due to neither party really being worth a damn. At least we can make sure the wrong lizard doesn't get in.
I was wondering the same as well. You would think that it could probably sense a lot of touch events occurring near the edge and treat that as a non-touch. It seems like the kind of problem that could be solved even with a relatively naive algorithm. If they aren't even considering it as a problem there's obviously something wrong with their design team.
Further, why is this post a response to one of your posts when it is clearly aimed at someone else?
/. has the occasional rant or angry screed or just some crappy copy-paste mad lib crap, but this isn't even in the correct location.
I get that
Even the shit-posting around here is getting pretty substandard.
Well if his bot code sucks that bad, I'm obviously not going to trust his hosts file solution either.
He probably doesn't like it, but he was one of the founders for the company so he was obviously okay with it at the time. He probably could have changed the name, etc. before he sold his interests in it if he wanted to avoid the potential problems.
Most of them hardly qualify as stories. It's just linking to an actual story (or even more blog spam) from another site and adding their own two cents.
Many of the people who consume the stories don't care about this at all and are mostly just looking for something that validates their world-view, whatever that may be.
Not only is there the natural human tendency to not want to be wrong (even if it means lying to ourselves or others in the process) but it's something that tends to be reinforced entirely too much throughout our lives, and I think that's a bad thing in a certain way. The only way we can actually learn more about the universe is to come to the realization and accept that our understanding of that universe is flawed in some way.