You're not living in America. Or at least, not in the majority of America. You're probably living in the little blue corner of wherever you're at. A lot of people agree with his deeds, especially once you sprinkle "muslim" or "islamic" liberally into the object of your sentence. That's the real America that's all around you. It's a place socially engineered over generations to hate and fear the rest of the world, especially those different from the "Western" norm.
Have you tried the Sandisk Sansa Clip/Clip+/Clip Zip?
It's cheap, small, and extensible with a microSD card. And if you're an audiophile or find yourself becoming one, it's got the flattest frequency response in its class of MP3 players.
They should've gone with a micropayment scheme that maxes out at a certain (parent-specified) amount. That would draw in children (or really, their parents) more than a monthly fee for "unlimited" play time. The idea of having unlimited play time discourages parents from purchasing it and subscribing, because they're already unhappy their kids are playing video games all the time.
It seems like they did some market research about MMORPG players, and made their business decisions based on existing MMORPGs. They completely ignored the fact that LEGO is primarily a children's toy for family play. Unfortunately, I see that kind of square-peg-round-hole thing all the time when companies don't actually know what they're doing.
Now, Minecraft is an example of a successful block world. A lot of LEGO fans (children and adults) I know also enjoy playing Minecraft, and like the two for the very same reasons (full disclosure: this population includes myself). But Minecraft's business model is more suited to that type of play, i.e. anyone can start a Minecraft server and make their own sandbox world, just pay once and continue to get updates, single-player offline play, etc.
But if Mojang decided to run their own official servers in the future, and ended up running it like The LEGO Group did with Universe, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't see nearly the same level of success as they currently are seeing (and there'd be a community revolt if they nixed the individual server software on top of that, but that's highly unlikely).
In both cases, it's the nature of the gameplay and the players that makes a WoW-style business plan impractical.
And what do we do with the taxes we pay when we physically go across state lines, buy something there, and bring it back? And what happens when that "something" is in your stomach, or its worth has depreciated?
Use tax is a ridiculous concept. It's no wonder nobody actually pays it, and no wonder it's not enforced.
UI designers taking over GUIs is a problem, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they should go away.
There's certainly a place where the GUI looks nice and is completely functional. UI "designers" make UIs pretty (I put designers in quotes because if they were real designers, they wouldn't sacrifice functionality for looks). Software developers make UIs useful. The UI designers should be in charge of making a functional thing look nice. The developers should be in charge of making something that looks nice functional.
It doesn't take a team of people to design a UI--only two. One needs to understand what looks nice and appeals to the recreational user. The other needs to understand what is functional and appeals to the productive user. The only other thing needed is a mediator (manager) who can resolve the disputes from an unbiased perspective.
I just remind them that you don't get actions of this form in a Bash shell.
Sounds like a case of aliasing or hard linking, which Bash supports.
I aliased "path" to be "echo $PATH". Whenever I type "path" in bash, I get the executable search path of the current user. I aliased "lpdiff" to print a diff of two files in a landscaped printer-friendly layout. There are plenty more.
Where your comparison has any merit is that Bash doesn't have aliases set up for you, unlike Windows 7, which appears to have many common commands set up as aliases. In Bash (and *NIX system in general) you have to set them all up yourself. I sort of agree, that it'd be nice if del and delete was aliased to rm, and dir was aliased to ls (it is in many configurations) out of the box, but to say that the ability doesn't exist is merely ignorant of the basic capabilities of Bash (oh, and I'm not talking about fancy Bash 4.0, but this feature has been in the Bourne Shell in fact, and really all POSIX shells have had something similar for many decades).
Now, regarding this "ip address" action itself, frankly, I would have been more impressed if "ip address" was linked to ipconfig, but that's just because when I type a command to get a text answer, I expect a text answer rather than a fancy dialog box containing the text answer somewhere, possibly, hopefully in the default tab. I wouldn't mind, say, if you typed in "properties C:\Windows" and it popped up the properties dialog box of the Windows directory in C:, but again, that's just me and my expectations.
Actually, I think it'd be awesome to have keywords linked to certain executables (being able to manipulate it would be a plus). That way, I can just type "ip" and get two or three options that would allow me to either manipulate or display my IP address and its associated information. Then again, any more than two or three options and users tune out, so maybe it shouldn't be easy for a 3rd party to manipulate them, or there should be some checks in place to make sure programs don't go keyword crazy, especially in the same way that they typically go desktop icon crazy.
Anyway, I digress. The little program search bar in Windows 7 is still a complete UI win, if only because (as I said in another post above) I can run commands off of it like it's a simple command prompt, and I don't have to go though a hundred folders in "Programs" to locate the one I want.
Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows 7 (personally, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole and a hazmat suit), but they got the little search/run bar in the start menu right.
Want a program? Type in its name, pick from the list, done. Want to run a command? Type in the command line, done. It's the best of both worlds. Simple, elegant, and you can still do all the advanced CLI stuff with it.
There are probably better ways to manage windows. But removing them outright isn't it. Some people need simultaneous windows. Some people like setting things up exactly as they want them. One of my major peeves about Windows' windows was that every time you opened up a program, its position would change. Now, it's a good security feature in that it prevents "hidden" windows from nefariously running behind the main one. But there are better ways of doing it, e.g. having it pop up where the user put it last time, and then putting elsewhere the subsequent new instances that had never existed before.
But just because a part of the UI is a mess doesn't mean all of it is. And just because it's a mess for the basic user doesn't mean it's a mess for the intermediate or advanced user and vice versa. And somewhere is a middle ground that the default for all systems should be. Nobody's really there yet, and sadly, it seems fewer and fewer UI projects are trying for it.
I don't know if what Einstein said is exactly what he meant or how it's interpreted, and if it is, I don't know if it's entirely accurate.
Revolutionary ideas don't come from years of study. One doesn't spend twenty years studying black holes just to figure out a way for them to not exist (some however, do hedge their bets by making wagers against themselves). Revolutionary ideas come from knowing only the abstractions, looking only at the data points, and then coming up with ideas as to why it is the way it is. The real science of showing the idea holds comes afterwards.
That's how revolutions happen in knowledge. Everything else is just refinement, evolution. It moves the field forward. But it doesn't change the field.
It's important, nonetheless, to have a solid foundation. Without knowing what a photon is, one cannot develop a new theory of light. Without knowing how to do arithmetic, one cannot know how to quantify what's otherwise just still an idea, no matter how brilliant. But the fifty years spent studying one subject, while it may produce extraordinary results, is unlikely to redefine the entire field.
And when Einstein says "great contribution to science," that's the kind of contribution he might be alluding to.
When you see someone suspicious eyeing the underneath of a car, and then later that person sees something they don't know about there, have the bomb squad called in. You don't know it isn't a terrorist's car bomb. That's how Oklahoma City happened after all, wasn't it?
There are free speech issues at play here. An individual (not corporation) can still purchase air time on television to endorse that person's preferred candidate. Even if banning non-human entities from political speech, it still gives an unfair advantage to those who have money.
The only defense against corruption is education. The most corrupt governments are also in nations with a poorly educated populace. And it's not a cause-effect relationship, but worse: a vicious cycle. Poor education leads to government corruption which leads to even worse education.
Conversely, an informed (and non-apathetic) populace will result in an accountable government. As this is the information age, the populace should be more informed, not less. Yet, because of an inability to separate information from disinformation brought about by poor primary and secondary education, the populace is actually significantly more misinformed than it ever has been before (it's important to not confuse uninformed with misinformed here, because while the former damages the system through a lack of action, the latter causes damage through negative actions, and is much worse).
Everything else is just skirting the real problem. Sure, it'll help. But only if the primary problem gets resolved.
Most of your boards, the components on your boards (capacitors, etc.), and the raw materials thereof all had their share of time in a Chinese factory. The high-skill parts certainly are manufactured in Japan, Korea, the Americas, or Europe, but no small amount of the raw materials for those parts came from China. Most of the minor parts came from China. A lot of your boards are assembled by Taiwanese companies, who have all outsourced the majority of their factories to mainland China.
Do you really think anything's "Made in x" where x is not China anymore? There are varying regulations (or none at all) on what that means, depending on the product, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what you think it means.
This is what happens when your populace becomes a bunch of uneducated couch potatoes. Some very smart people realized at the same time that you can't market effectively to smart people, and that dumb people are easy to trick. So they take an already-failing education system and make it as bad as it possibly can be. Today, there are still a lot of people able to recognize society's problems. In twenty years, nobody'll know what happened or what's going on, only that somewhere, somehow, they got the short end of the stick. Soon enough, those wall street protests will turn into riots. And that's when we lose, and the rich and powerful finally win.
You can actually draw a lot of parallels between the state of the U.S. and the end of the Roman Empire. Towards the end, the populace was so distracted with entertainment that they couldn't see the world around them crumbling into dust. It'll be the same here all over again.
Intelligence is a luxury, especially incredibly high intelligence. Physical prowess is still the most important trait for survival. That, and intelligent people tend to have fewer children.
It's usually the (sometimes dubious) work of real law enforcement.
The TSA needs to be dismantled. In its place should be competent local law enforcement. I mean, you don't see huge security lines at the train station or bus depot. The most you'll encounter are M16's and bomb-sniffing dogs, and that's on a bad day. The dogs alone do more to discourage explosive-carrying terrorists than anything else.
But in the end, it's all about shutting down the cell before it can carry out its plans, and shutting down the funding before even that.
Even if you were the creator of BASIC itself, you're in no danger of an imminent natural death. However, you may still want to go into hiding. I hear there are a lot of angry former BASIC programmers out there.
"Can you give me the closest McDonalds west of here?"
or
"Is there a McDonalds nearby?"
or
"How do I get to the nearest McDonalds while avoiding the less reputable parts of town?"
or
"Is the Burger King or McDonalds closer if I driver? What if I walk?"
or
"What's the best burger joint within walking distance?"
I'm certain a good natural language processor can recognize multiple forms of one thing. The real test is how many things it can recognize, and how many it can string up to form a query that's still sensible.
But how? These are the demands. Where are the solutions?
There are plenty of lawyer-types out there protesting. Draft some bills. Send them to Washington.
Maybe half the laws have to be thrown out. Then throw them out. But identify the half of the laws that should be thrown out. The system is currently not working. Then figure out where the defective parts are and fix them.
But just complaining about it does nothing productive. Proposing actual fixes does. Figure out which sections of which acts need to be repealed. Find out what bits of legislation need to be added to make the list above happen. Just shouting loudly does nothing but make people turn up their stereos.
Each invitee should have been able to invite all of their friends immediately--and optionally--automatically. By making it exclusive and limited, they're not increasing their appeal but the opposite. A budding social network is not a new phone where blanket limiting its adoption increases its desirability. A social network requires others to socialize with.
The whole real names thing has turned more people off than on. It's more work than it's worth, especially people who have strange names. Google thought they were the top dog who could dictate what happens on their service. Unfortunately, when they're breaking into a new market already saturated by a reasonably function competitor, they are crawling their way up from the bottom. It's the other way around; they're at the users' mercy. And once the bad word gets out, it's over. Those who are using it already will leave, because their friends aren't going to be on it in the near future.
Others can speak for the competing features or lack thereof. I'm not a user of any such services. But from a business perspective alone, they've failed to the point where even the "Google" brand cannot save the product. They're a tech company, certainly, but it seems there's no one with any business savvy working for them at all--only engineers and marketing people calling all of the shots. The only thing I have to say about features is that in order to draw people away from a competing service, they need both to replicate the competition's most used feature set, to make improvements in all aspects thereof; and they need at least one killer feature. Privacy controls may be a selling point, but it should have been clearly not enough. Since so many people are using Facebook albeit grudgingly, it's obvious the privacy aspect cannot be the killer feature, only an additional point of consideration.
There are other companies who botch their products by neutering them in the same or a similar way on launch. It's usually the mark of inept, unrealistic management. Knowing a little about Google's organization structure, in this case, it may be because of an outright lack of management.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not living in America. Or at least, not in the majority of America. You're probably living in the little blue corner of wherever you're at. A lot of people agree with his deeds, especially once you sprinkle "muslim" or "islamic" liberally into the object of your sentence. That's the real America that's all around you. It's a place socially engineered over generations to hate and fear the rest of the world, especially those different from the "Western" norm.
Have you tried the Sandisk Sansa Clip/Clip+/Clip Zip?
It's cheap, small, and extensible with a microSD card. And if you're an audiophile or find yourself becoming one, it's got the flattest frequency response in its class of MP3 players.
Making money and doing something enjoyable are not mutually exclusive (and if it is, it may be time to go look for a new career).
They should've gone with a micropayment scheme that maxes out at a certain (parent-specified) amount. That would draw in children (or really, their parents) more than a monthly fee for "unlimited" play time. The idea of having unlimited play time discourages parents from purchasing it and subscribing, because they're already unhappy their kids are playing video games all the time.
It seems like they did some market research about MMORPG players, and made their business decisions based on existing MMORPGs. They completely ignored the fact that LEGO is primarily a children's toy for family play. Unfortunately, I see that kind of square-peg-round-hole thing all the time when companies don't actually know what they're doing.
Now, Minecraft is an example of a successful block world. A lot of LEGO fans (children and adults) I know also enjoy playing Minecraft, and like the two for the very same reasons (full disclosure: this population includes myself). But Minecraft's business model is more suited to that type of play, i.e. anyone can start a Minecraft server and make their own sandbox world, just pay once and continue to get updates, single-player offline play, etc.
But if Mojang decided to run their own official servers in the future, and ended up running it like The LEGO Group did with Universe, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't see nearly the same level of success as they currently are seeing (and there'd be a community revolt if they nixed the individual server software on top of that, but that's highly unlikely).
In both cases, it's the nature of the gameplay and the players that makes a WoW-style business plan impractical.
They'll be scratching their heads over why they hired a new engineer and why he never showed up for work.
And what do we do with the taxes we pay when we physically go across state lines, buy something there, and bring it back? And what happens when that "something" is in your stomach, or its worth has depreciated?
Use tax is a ridiculous concept. It's no wonder nobody actually pays it, and no wonder it's not enforced.
UI designers taking over GUIs is a problem, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they should go away.
There's certainly a place where the GUI looks nice and is completely functional. UI "designers" make UIs pretty (I put designers in quotes because if they were real designers, they wouldn't sacrifice functionality for looks). Software developers make UIs useful. The UI designers should be in charge of making a functional thing look nice. The developers should be in charge of making something that looks nice functional.
It doesn't take a team of people to design a UI--only two. One needs to understand what looks nice and appeals to the recreational user. The other needs to understand what is functional and appeals to the productive user. The only other thing needed is a mediator (manager) who can resolve the disputes from an unbiased perspective.
I just remind them that you don't get actions of this form in a Bash shell.
Sounds like a case of aliasing or hard linking, which Bash supports.
I aliased "path" to be "echo $PATH". Whenever I type "path" in bash, I get the executable search path of the current user. I aliased "lpdiff" to print a diff of two files in a landscaped printer-friendly layout. There are plenty more.
Where your comparison has any merit is that Bash doesn't have aliases set up for you, unlike Windows 7, which appears to have many common commands set up as aliases. In Bash (and *NIX system in general) you have to set them all up yourself. I sort of agree, that it'd be nice if del and delete was aliased to rm, and dir was aliased to ls (it is in many configurations) out of the box, but to say that the ability doesn't exist is merely ignorant of the basic capabilities of Bash (oh, and I'm not talking about fancy Bash 4.0, but this feature has been in the Bourne Shell in fact, and really all POSIX shells have had something similar for many decades).
Now, regarding this "ip address" action itself, frankly, I would have been more impressed if "ip address" was linked to ipconfig, but that's just because when I type a command to get a text answer, I expect a text answer rather than a fancy dialog box containing the text answer somewhere, possibly, hopefully in the default tab. I wouldn't mind, say, if you typed in "properties C:\Windows" and it popped up the properties dialog box of the Windows directory in C:, but again, that's just me and my expectations.
Actually, I think it'd be awesome to have keywords linked to certain executables (being able to manipulate it would be a plus). That way, I can just type "ip" and get two or three options that would allow me to either manipulate or display my IP address and its associated information. Then again, any more than two or three options and users tune out, so maybe it shouldn't be easy for a 3rd party to manipulate them, or there should be some checks in place to make sure programs don't go keyword crazy, especially in the same way that they typically go desktop icon crazy.
Anyway, I digress. The little program search bar in Windows 7 is still a complete UI win, if only because (as I said in another post above) I can run commands off of it like it's a simple command prompt, and I don't have to go though a hundred folders in "Programs" to locate the one I want.
Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows 7 (personally, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole and a hazmat suit), but they got the little search/run bar in the start menu right.
Want a program? Type in its name, pick from the list, done. Want to run a command? Type in the command line, done. It's the best of both worlds. Simple, elegant, and you can still do all the advanced CLI stuff with it.
There are probably better ways to manage windows. But removing them outright isn't it. Some people need simultaneous windows. Some people like setting things up exactly as they want them. One of my major peeves about Windows' windows was that every time you opened up a program, its position would change. Now, it's a good security feature in that it prevents "hidden" windows from nefariously running behind the main one. But there are better ways of doing it, e.g. having it pop up where the user put it last time, and then putting elsewhere the subsequent new instances that had never existed before.
But just because a part of the UI is a mess doesn't mean all of it is. And just because it's a mess for the basic user doesn't mean it's a mess for the intermediate or advanced user and vice versa. And somewhere is a middle ground that the default for all systems should be. Nobody's really there yet, and sadly, it seems fewer and fewer UI projects are trying for it.
I don't know if what Einstein said is exactly what he meant or how it's interpreted, and if it is, I don't know if it's entirely accurate.
Revolutionary ideas don't come from years of study. One doesn't spend twenty years studying black holes just to figure out a way for them to not exist (some however, do hedge their bets by making wagers against themselves). Revolutionary ideas come from knowing only the abstractions, looking only at the data points, and then coming up with ideas as to why it is the way it is. The real science of showing the idea holds comes afterwards.
That's how revolutions happen in knowledge. Everything else is just refinement, evolution. It moves the field forward. But it doesn't change the field.
It's important, nonetheless, to have a solid foundation. Without knowing what a photon is, one cannot develop a new theory of light. Without knowing how to do arithmetic, one cannot know how to quantify what's otherwise just still an idea, no matter how brilliant. But the fifty years spent studying one subject, while it may produce extraordinary results, is unlikely to redefine the entire field.
And when Einstein says "great contribution to science," that's the kind of contribution he might be alluding to.
Yeah, let them have cake instead, right?
When you see someone suspicious eyeing the underneath of a car, and then later that person sees something they don't know about there, have the bomb squad called in. You don't know it isn't a terrorist's car bomb. That's how Oklahoma City happened after all, wasn't it?
I wonder if it counts as joining the mile-high club if it's with a hand.
There are free speech issues at play here. An individual (not corporation) can still purchase air time on television to endorse that person's preferred candidate. Even if banning non-human entities from political speech, it still gives an unfair advantage to those who have money.
The only defense against corruption is education. The most corrupt governments are also in nations with a poorly educated populace. And it's not a cause-effect relationship, but worse: a vicious cycle. Poor education leads to government corruption which leads to even worse education.
Conversely, an informed (and non-apathetic) populace will result in an accountable government. As this is the information age, the populace should be more informed, not less. Yet, because of an inability to separate information from disinformation brought about by poor primary and secondary education, the populace is actually significantly more misinformed than it ever has been before (it's important to not confuse uninformed with misinformed here, because while the former damages the system through a lack of action, the latter causes damage through negative actions, and is much worse).
Everything else is just skirting the real problem. Sure, it'll help. But only if the primary problem gets resolved.
Most of your boards, the components on your boards (capacitors, etc.), and the raw materials thereof all had their share of time in a Chinese factory. The high-skill parts certainly are manufactured in Japan, Korea, the Americas, or Europe, but no small amount of the raw materials for those parts came from China. Most of the minor parts came from China. A lot of your boards are assembled by Taiwanese companies, who have all outsourced the majority of their factories to mainland China.
Do you really think anything's "Made in x" where x is not China anymore? There are varying regulations (or none at all) on what that means, depending on the product, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Americans are just chumps
This is what happens when your populace becomes a bunch of uneducated couch potatoes. Some very smart people realized at the same time that you can't market effectively to smart people, and that dumb people are easy to trick. So they take an already-failing education system and make it as bad as it possibly can be. Today, there are still a lot of people able to recognize society's problems. In twenty years, nobody'll know what happened or what's going on, only that somewhere, somehow, they got the short end of the stick. Soon enough, those wall street protests will turn into riots. And that's when we lose, and the rich and powerful finally win.
You can actually draw a lot of parallels between the state of the U.S. and the end of the Roman Empire. Towards the end, the populace was so distracted with entertainment that they couldn't see the world around them crumbling into dust. It'll be the same here all over again.
People still make phone calls these days? What are we, in the 20th century?
Yeah, that downside is in survivability.
Intelligence is a luxury, especially incredibly high intelligence. Physical prowess is still the most important trait for survival. That, and intelligent people tend to have fewer children.
It's usually the (sometimes dubious) work of real law enforcement.
The TSA needs to be dismantled. In its place should be competent local law enforcement. I mean, you don't see huge security lines at the train station or bus depot. The most you'll encounter are M16's and bomb-sniffing dogs, and that's on a bad day. The dogs alone do more to discourage explosive-carrying terrorists than anything else.
But in the end, it's all about shutting down the cell before it can carry out its plans, and shutting down the funding before even that.
batshit crazy and allergic to shellfish.
Even if you were the creator of BASIC itself, you're in no danger of an imminent natural death. However, you may still want to go into hiding. I hear there are a lot of angry former BASIC programmers out there.
What about:
"Can you give me the closest McDonalds west of here?"
or
"Is there a McDonalds nearby?"
or
"How do I get to the nearest McDonalds while avoiding the less reputable parts of town?"
or
"Is the Burger King or McDonalds closer if I driver? What if I walk?"
or
"What's the best burger joint within walking distance?"
I'm certain a good natural language processor can recognize multiple forms of one thing. The real test is how many things it can recognize, and how many it can string up to form a query that's still sensible.
Comparing him to Steve Jobs is a bit disingenuous. They did two very different, but both key functions that led to this modern age of information.
Dennis Ritchie laid the groundwork for modern computing.
Steve Jobs popularized it.
But how? These are the demands. Where are the solutions?
There are plenty of lawyer-types out there protesting. Draft some bills. Send them to Washington.
Maybe half the laws have to be thrown out. Then throw them out. But identify the half of the laws that should be thrown out. The system is currently not working. Then figure out where the defective parts are and fix them.
But just complaining about it does nothing productive. Proposing actual fixes does. Figure out which sections of which acts need to be repealed. Find out what bits of legislation need to be added to make the list above happen. Just shouting loudly does nothing but make people turn up their stereos.
Each invitee should have been able to invite all of their friends immediately--and optionally--automatically. By making it exclusive and limited, they're not increasing their appeal but the opposite. A budding social network is not a new phone where blanket limiting its adoption increases its desirability. A social network requires others to socialize with.
The whole real names thing has turned more people off than on. It's more work than it's worth, especially people who have strange names. Google thought they were the top dog who could dictate what happens on their service. Unfortunately, when they're breaking into a new market already saturated by a reasonably function competitor, they are crawling their way up from the bottom. It's the other way around; they're at the users' mercy. And once the bad word gets out, it's over. Those who are using it already will leave, because their friends aren't going to be on it in the near future.
Others can speak for the competing features or lack thereof. I'm not a user of any such services. But from a business perspective alone, they've failed to the point where even the "Google" brand cannot save the product. They're a tech company, certainly, but it seems there's no one with any business savvy working for them at all--only engineers and marketing people calling all of the shots. The only thing I have to say about features is that in order to draw people away from a competing service, they need both to replicate the competition's most used feature set, to make improvements in all aspects thereof; and they need at least one killer feature. Privacy controls may be a selling point, but it should have been clearly not enough. Since so many people are using Facebook albeit grudgingly, it's obvious the privacy aspect cannot be the killer feature, only an additional point of consideration.
There are other companies who botch their products by neutering them in the same or a similar way on launch. It's usually the mark of inept, unrealistic management. Knowing a little about Google's organization structure, in this case, it may be because of an outright lack of management.