Apple doesn't do technological research. Instead, they pour all of that money into usage research, so that they can design an improved user experience.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a place for both the technological side, and the usability side. Most tech companies focus on the technology side while neglecting the usability, which is why so much technology ends up unusable by laymen.
Microsoft actually does a lot of usability research too. But the difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Apple has (or had) someone steering the ship. They're a top-down dictatorship-style management house. Microsoft is more about internal competition to see who wins out. They're more of a survival-of-the-fittest, cream-of-the-crop-rises-to-the-top type of management house.
The problem is not the alcohol necessarily. The problem is that alcohol is typically consumed (prior to driving) at the end of a long day. The driving happens even later, usually late at night. Nobody wakes up at 6pm to go out to dinner, or at 11pm to go out to a bar or club.
Both these factors already impair driving ability to varying but non-trivial degrees. Alcohol is a multiplicative factor. It makes what would otherwise be slight impairment significant.
Only one of these three factors can reasonably be prevented, and done so via legislation. Thus, it is so.
3) Once legal, it can be taxed to fund addiction clinics and other support services that users can now turn to without fear of legal punishment. So, that naturally helps to control the problem and further reduce crime.
While true, this is not very realistic. The taxes would probably go to funding road maintenance or (inclusive) into some politician's pocket.
Yeah, but sending it to him isn't exactly going to stop him. His office is not an elected position. He's not going to risk losing his job come November this year. He'll do whatever the hell he wants to, ergo whatever makes him the most money, ergo ignore the letter and continue doing what the MPAA was tasked to do by the movie industry.
Whereas if you write to the actual Senators and Representatives currently in that capacity, you'd likely get more done.Some of them might even listen.
The lesson: Don't keep your laptop powered up when you're crossing customs. And use an encrypted container on top of an encrypted system for maximum protection (the inner container would be for obfuscation against casual intrusion instead of any real security).
But this is true in general, irrespective of whether the material on the computer is incriminating or not. Imagine storing trade secrets, confidential material (financial or otherwise), or private client material on a laptop. Imagine being forced to give up the system decryption key because customs suspects the laptop has something else in it. Even if it's legal to refuse, it'd save everyone a whole lot of time and trouble if you gave them the system key, but didn't tell them about the container that's actually holding the sensitive information.
But just keeping your laptop powered down would work for most cases.
They need a better brand if they want to make it big. I'm not commenting on the service per se. But the brand name itself is a big element in what draws new users.
It's three words, comprising one syllable each. So it's effectively five units in length of time to say. Not only that, but the hard "K" in "duck" forces the intermediate pause between the first two words, and encourages it between the latter two (attempts to say the name in only three units' time would sound closer to DU-DUCK-O). The pauses in between each of the individual words carries over from speech to mental reading and writing. Both the writer and the reader, are speaking their words inside their heads when they write or read. Which means the brand is both annoying to read and write about.
The repetition of "duck" makes the URL pretty annoying to type as well. At they very least, they can get a shorter domain that's easy to remember! For other types of products, the need might be different, but for a text-based internet destination, it's gotta be easy to type. They got the "duck" and "go" parts are more or less correct (no one-finger acrobatics needed to type the words), but the repeated duck completely negates the benefit.
Otherwise, they seem like an acceptable alternative to Scroogle. I've used them before, but Google is just easier to type (the double-o detracts a bit, but the brevity of the name more than makes up for this), so I always end up going back to Google.
Your analogy is terrible. Maybe you're more of a pushover, but if some random stranger tried to kick me in the nuts, I'd be at his throat. And if I just so happened to have a gun in my hand at the time (unlikely, because that's not a viable range to shoot someone, so I wouldn't be holding a gun at that time unless I was already being attacked from a farther distance), you better bet it'll go off into the guy's chest at point blank range.
It's certainly not entitlement to expect to be able to protect oneself from bodily harm.
Where are you located anyway? I'm always up for kicking other people in the nuts if they're going to exercise "self control" and not retaliate.
You can argue that even for pennies. Money is usually calculated to 4 decimal places. Going up to the dime level just means shifting everything so that it's only calculated to 3 decimal places.
Might as well make the dime the new penny. If the cost of manufacturing the penny and the nickle are more than the face value of the coin, then there's a problem. At that point, you might as well treat it like a metal-backed currency.
I have no idea how Sanderson could possibly wrap up all the loose threads in just one more book
Easy: Bring them all together.
It has already started to happen in the previous book. Everyone and everything is coming together. And once that happens, he only needs to write one final scene.
The problem towards the middle was that everybody was going off on their own. And for whatever reason, Jordan had to keep track of everybody and describe every step of everybody's journey. He couldn't just focus on just the one, two, or three main characters. Instead, the middle books were juggling something like seven or eight characters. It's impossible to make significant advances in a story with so many lines, which is why the middle books were so slow and sucked so badly compared to the first few books (when they were all together) and now the last few (when they're coming back together).
I wonder who edited these books. Much of this is just poor editing. A good editor will not only do the usual grammar check, but also cut out the unnecessary parts that do not advance the story or develop the character. In Jordan's case, entire character lines needed to be cut. The main character (or arguably three) were the only ones relevant, and the things that happened to everybody else should've been left to inner stories after the fact.
You're not looking at it from the right level of abstraction.
The information of yesterday was Enigma codes. The information of today is pictures, wikipedia, and pr0n. The computers of yesterday and today are effectively doing the same things: storing and moving information and making calculations to glean new information.
They are the same. You just can do more with it now, because your potential is limited, while a computer's potential is only limited by technological progress. But the theory backing computers 50 years ago remains equally valid today.
As for GP, the "computer" in the quote refers to the state-of-the-art computation devices of the time. The modern equivalent to the "computer" then is the supercomputer. And in this sense, the quote still more or less holds true today. There aren't that many supercomputers out there, and their uses are limited.
To become infinitely nothing, lesser even, is the most frightening thing in existence.
Man created religion to make this end less frightening.
I personally don't require such mental comforts. But it seems there's still a very real need for it for others. Maybe you should switch from atheist to agnostic. It'll at least allow you to use logic to dictate your actions asopposed to fear, if only for a little while.
If you're not interested in such a thing, then I leave you with this:
When you die, you don't become nothing, and you certainly don't become lesser than nothing. You leave behind a whole host of things in the world of the living, including memories and influences. They're not your memories and not changes to your life, but memories of you and changes to others by you. These things are as important as, if not more important than, your life.
You can, if you so choose, to look at death not as ceasing life, but as the inability for you to have new memories created of you, and the inability for you to assert your influence upon the world anymore. And if you look at it that way, it's still a sad thing to die and for others to die, but it's not the end of the world. The important thing for many people then, is to leave good memories behind, and leave a good legacy behind.
To think that once you die, your very existence is gone (like a certain Japanese light novel/anime), is not only unrealistic and foolhardy, it's also incredibly self-centered.
What a silly question. It's not about consistency, morality, or ethics. It's about what they can get away with, how far they can get away with it, and what happens if/when they get caught.
Gotta get with the times. There's no such thing as corporate responsibility. How the money is made, where it comes from, and what the consequences of making it are, are all problems left for everyone else to deal with. There's only quarterly earnings, year over year growth, and valuation. Get in, make a boatload, and pray to your local diety you get out before the whole system comes crashing down on the heads of all the less fortunate ones who couldn't get out in time.
Some belief is just groupthink. One person makes an assetion. Some people pick it up and repeat the same assertion. More people pick it up. They repeat the assertion, affirming it of the first group. It quickly becomes a vicious cycle of affirmation. Before long, the assertion becomes true irrespective of reality, and no amount of proof or evidence otherwise can dissuade the believers. A great example of this is Bush's (or really, Karl Rove's) "swift boat" campaign ads against Kerry. Another is Obama's birth location, and "death panels."
Other belief stems from a strong childhood belief that plays a significant role in their lives. People hold onto these beliefs in defiance of all logic and evidence otherwise because the nostalgia grants them feelings of security. Religion is the biggest one of them. The more insecure people feel, the more energy goes into denying reality, the stronger their conviction.
What you're talking about specifically is superstition, or the beginnings of superstition. Yes, religion and "belief" comes out of superstition. But superstition comes first, and it is distinct from religion in that it is weaker. It comes out of a want to control what is inherently chaotic and uncontrollable. It's perfectly healthy and natural, though there's an important need to recognize when a superstition becomes unfounded.
The hierarchy goes from the last thing I listed to the first. Those who are superstitious are susceptible to religious influences. Those who are religious are susceptible to groupthink. With each successive level, the conviction is stronger, logic is more marginalized, reality is more tuned in the mind ot the belief, cognative dissonance becomes more prominent, until the point of self-destruction.
The reason there are so many political examples of the first type of belief is because it is easy to start, especially among people who are already zealously religious. It's easy to manipulate these people, and so politicians and political strategiests constantly use it as a weapon against the competition.
Finally, there are a group of believers who recognize what belief is. They realize (or are taught) that belief is personal. It is a choice that each individual makes. They are secure in their beliefs, requiring no external validation. These people tend to not be superstitious at all. They can believe in a diety, that there is no such thing as a diety, or be unsure. But you'll never know unless you ask, because they'll otherwise never have a want or need to tell you. These are the rational individuals, who when they die (because all religion satisfies the need to know the ultimate unknown), will accept whatever comes afterwards, if anything, and hence does not need to posit, assert, or speculate on it beforehand.
There are many of these people, but because they remain silent and are content to do so, only the insure seeking their own self-affirmation through others get heard. In a society where the volume and not character determines quality, they will never be represented properly. Their wants and desires will never be fulfilled. They will ever be marginalized, ever be relegated to being unwilling spectators to an unwelcomed circus.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple doesn't do technological research. Instead, they pour all of that money into usage research, so that they can design an improved user experience.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a place for both the technological side, and the usability side. Most tech companies focus on the technology side while neglecting the usability, which is why so much technology ends up unusable by laymen.
Microsoft actually does a lot of usability research too. But the difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Apple has (or had) someone steering the ship. They're a top-down dictatorship-style management house. Microsoft is more about internal competition to see who wins out. They're more of a survival-of-the-fittest, cream-of-the-crop-rises-to-the-top type of management house.
The problem is not the alcohol necessarily. The problem is that alcohol is typically consumed (prior to driving) at the end of a long day. The driving happens even later, usually late at night. Nobody wakes up at 6pm to go out to dinner, or at 11pm to go out to a bar or club.
Both these factors already impair driving ability to varying but non-trivial degrees. Alcohol is a multiplicative factor. It makes what would otherwise be slight impairment significant.
Only one of these three factors can reasonably be prevented, and done so via legislation. Thus, it is so.
3) Once legal, it can be taxed to fund addiction clinics and other support services that users can now turn to without fear of legal punishment. So, that naturally helps to control the problem and further reduce crime.
While true, this is not very realistic. The taxes would probably go to funding road maintenance or (inclusive) into some politician's pocket.
Maybe a bit more if they've got an extra leg or two.
FTFY
Yeah, but sending it to him isn't exactly going to stop him. His office is not an elected position. He's not going to risk losing his job come November this year. He'll do whatever the hell he wants to, ergo whatever makes him the most money, ergo ignore the letter and continue doing what the MPAA was tasked to do by the movie industry.
Whereas if you write to the actual Senators and Representatives currently in that capacity, you'd likely get more done.Some of them might even listen.
The lesson: Don't keep your laptop powered up when you're crossing customs. And use an encrypted container on top of an encrypted system for maximum protection (the inner container would be for obfuscation against casual intrusion instead of any real security).
But this is true in general, irrespective of whether the material on the computer is incriminating or not. Imagine storing trade secrets, confidential material (financial or otherwise), or private client material on a laptop. Imagine being forced to give up the system decryption key because customs suspects the laptop has something else in it. Even if it's legal to refuse, it'd save everyone a whole lot of time and trouble if you gave them the system key, but didn't tell them about the container that's actually holding the sensitive information.
But just keeping your laptop powered down would work for most cases.
Apple's response:
Cut and paste.
They need a better brand if they want to make it big. I'm not commenting on the service per se. But the brand name itself is a big element in what draws new users.
It's three words, comprising one syllable each. So it's effectively five units in length of time to say. Not only that, but the hard "K" in "duck" forces the intermediate pause between the first two words, and encourages it between the latter two (attempts to say the name in only three units' time would sound closer to DU-DUCK-O). The pauses in between each of the individual words carries over from speech to mental reading and writing. Both the writer and the reader, are speaking their words inside their heads when they write or read. Which means the brand is both annoying to read and write about.
The repetition of "duck" makes the URL pretty annoying to type as well. At they very least, they can get a shorter domain that's easy to remember! For other types of products, the need might be different, but for a text-based internet destination, it's gotta be easy to type. They got the "duck" and "go" parts are more or less correct (no one-finger acrobatics needed to type the words), but the repeated duck completely negates the benefit.
Otherwise, they seem like an acceptable alternative to Scroogle. I've used them before, but Google is just easier to type (the double-o detracts a bit, but the brevity of the name more than makes up for this), so I always end up going back to Google.
How about we ditch the base and buggies, keep the C-4, and swap those geologists with lawyers, politicians, and media company executives?
It got nailed by the foot to its perch and sold to some unsuspecting buyer.
The FAA only regulates certain classes of aircraft. I'm sure RC helicopters don't apply.
Your analogy is terrible. Maybe you're more of a pushover, but if some random stranger tried to kick me in the nuts, I'd be at his throat. And if I just so happened to have a gun in my hand at the time (unlikely, because that's not a viable range to shoot someone, so I wouldn't be holding a gun at that time unless I was already being attacked from a farther distance), you better bet it'll go off into the guy's chest at point blank range.
It's certainly not entitlement to expect to be able to protect oneself from bodily harm.
Where are you located anyway? I'm always up for kicking other people in the nuts if they're going to exercise "self control" and not retaliate.
I am Not an Animal!
Half these people can't even give you a history of their own country. For the most part, they are barely literate.
For such people, since these things did not directly happen to them, they can't even begin to conceive of what you describe.
Most interstate commerce requires plastic now, mainly because it's costly and unreliable to pay by cold hard cash online or through the mail.s
But a lot of local places still work in cash only. Plastic takes 3% off the top, and not every business can afford that, or would want to.
You can argue that even for pennies. Money is usually calculated to 4 decimal places. Going up to the dime level just means shifting everything so that it's only calculated to 3 decimal places.
Might as well make the dime the new penny. If the cost of manufacturing the penny and the nickle are more than the face value of the coin, then there's a problem. At that point, you might as well treat it like a metal-backed currency.
I have no idea how Sanderson could possibly wrap up all the loose threads in just one more book
Easy: Bring them all together.
It has already started to happen in the previous book. Everyone and everything is coming together. And once that happens, he only needs to write one final scene.
The problem towards the middle was that everybody was going off on their own. And for whatever reason, Jordan had to keep track of everybody and describe every step of everybody's journey. He couldn't just focus on just the one, two, or three main characters. Instead, the middle books were juggling something like seven or eight characters. It's impossible to make significant advances in a story with so many lines, which is why the middle books were so slow and sucked so badly compared to the first few books (when they were all together) and now the last few (when they're coming back together).
I wonder who edited these books. Much of this is just poor editing. A good editor will not only do the usual grammar check, but also cut out the unnecessary parts that do not advance the story or develop the character. In Jordan's case, entire character lines needed to be cut. The main character (or arguably three) were the only ones relevant, and the things that happened to everybody else should've been left to inner stories after the fact.
You're not looking at it from the right level of abstraction.
The information of yesterday was Enigma codes. The information of today is pictures, wikipedia, and pr0n. The computers of yesterday and today are effectively doing the same things: storing and moving information and making calculations to glean new information.
They are the same. You just can do more with it now, because your potential is limited, while a computer's potential is only limited by technological progress. But the theory backing computers 50 years ago remains equally valid today.
As for GP, the "computer" in the quote refers to the state-of-the-art computation devices of the time. The modern equivalent to the "computer" then is the supercomputer. And in this sense, the quote still more or less holds true today. There aren't that many supercomputers out there, and their uses are limited.
To become infinitely nothing, lesser even, is the most frightening thing in existence.
Man created religion to make this end less frightening.
I personally don't require such mental comforts. But it seems there's still a very real need for it for others. Maybe you should switch from atheist to agnostic. It'll at least allow you to use logic to dictate your actions asopposed to fear, if only for a little while.
If you're not interested in such a thing, then I leave you with this:
When you die, you don't become nothing, and you certainly don't become lesser than nothing. You leave behind a whole host of things in the world of the living, including memories and influences. They're not your memories and not changes to your life, but memories of you and changes to others by you. These things are as important as, if not more important than, your life.
You can, if you so choose, to look at death not as ceasing life, but as the inability for you to have new memories created of you, and the inability for you to assert your influence upon the world anymore. And if you look at it that way, it's still a sad thing to die and for others to die, but it's not the end of the world. The important thing for many people then, is to leave good memories behind, and leave a good legacy behind.
To think that once you die, your very existence is gone (like a certain Japanese light novel/anime), is not only unrealistic and foolhardy, it's also incredibly self-centered.
640 ought to be enough for anybody.
What a silly question. It's not about consistency, morality, or ethics. It's about what they can get away with, how far they can get away with it, and what happens if/when they get caught.
Gotta get with the times. There's no such thing as corporate responsibility. How the money is made, where it comes from, and what the consequences of making it are, are all problems left for everyone else to deal with. There's only quarterly earnings, year over year growth, and valuation. Get in, make a boatload, and pray to your local diety you get out before the whole system comes crashing down on the heads of all the less fortunate ones who couldn't get out in time.
You must be a lawyer.
As if space wasn't inhospitable enough, now we find out you'll get CO poisoning if you breathe out there.
It's just evidence of the LHC working properly.
Some belief is just groupthink. One person makes an assetion. Some people pick it up and repeat the same assertion. More people pick it up. They repeat the assertion, affirming it of the first group. It quickly becomes a vicious cycle of affirmation. Before long, the assertion becomes true irrespective of reality, and no amount of proof or evidence otherwise can dissuade the believers. A great example of this is Bush's (or really, Karl Rove's) "swift boat" campaign ads against Kerry. Another is Obama's birth location, and "death panels."
Other belief stems from a strong childhood belief that plays a significant role in their lives. People hold onto these beliefs in defiance of all logic and evidence otherwise because the nostalgia grants them feelings of security. Religion is the biggest one of them. The more insecure people feel, the more energy goes into denying reality, the stronger their conviction.
What you're talking about specifically is superstition, or the beginnings of superstition. Yes, religion and "belief" comes out of superstition. But superstition comes first, and it is distinct from religion in that it is weaker. It comes out of a want to control what is inherently chaotic and uncontrollable. It's perfectly healthy and natural, though there's an important need to recognize when a superstition becomes unfounded.
The hierarchy goes from the last thing I listed to the first. Those who are superstitious are susceptible to religious influences. Those who are religious are susceptible to groupthink. With each successive level, the conviction is stronger, logic is more marginalized, reality is more tuned in the mind ot the belief, cognative dissonance becomes more prominent, until the point of self-destruction.
The reason there are so many political examples of the first type of belief is because it is easy to start, especially among people who are already zealously religious. It's easy to manipulate these people, and so politicians and political strategiests constantly use it as a weapon against the competition.
Finally, there are a group of believers who recognize what belief is. They realize (or are taught) that belief is personal. It is a choice that each individual makes. They are secure in their beliefs, requiring no external validation. These people tend to not be superstitious at all. They can believe in a diety, that there is no such thing as a diety, or be unsure. But you'll never know unless you ask, because they'll otherwise never have a want or need to tell you. These are the rational individuals, who when they die (because all religion satisfies the need to know the ultimate unknown), will accept whatever comes afterwards, if anything, and hence does not need to posit, assert, or speculate on it beforehand.
There are many of these people, but because they remain silent and are content to do so, only the insure seeking their own self-affirmation through others get heard. In a society where the volume and not character determines quality, they will never be represented properly. Their wants and desires will never be fulfilled. They will ever be marginalized, ever be relegated to being unwilling spectators to an unwelcomed circus.