That aside, all it takes is a little fear at the right time to turn a democracy into an authoritarian state "for your protection".
No, it really doesn't. People who make arguments like that point to the early century dictatorships like Germany or Italy, without considering that neither of those countries had any real democratic tradition, like the US has had for two centuries with our republic. A history of rule by authoritarian monarchs makes it pretty easy to transition to a dictatorship, because they're really the same thing, except the former has a bit more history to give it legitimacy.
Also, it appears you haven't been truly paying attention to the dynamics in the other party. The Republican establishment loathes Trump. He's going to have to take a conciliatory stance if he wants to get *anything* passed by Congress. Everyone's all smiles right now because they won, but I guarantee you there's going to be plenty of friction among them.
You do realize that statement merely shows that you are among the exceptionally easily manipulated.
You do realize with that little diatribe, you've demonstrated that you're among those that have their panties in a twist about this particular topic. Unless you have no sense of humor at all, of course.
6) Get fed up and go back to being a "denier" just to spite those that keep shoving the almost-daily environmental doom and gloom reports down our throats, when we're just here for interesting tech news.
Rational adults don't pack up and move to Canada when an election doesn't go their way, nor do they build a bunker, collecting guns and freeze-dried food in preparation for some sort of Armageddon. Donald Trump may be an arrogant bastard who thinks of attractive women as trophies to fondle, but he's not Anti-Christ-Hitler-Stalin-Pol-Pot. The fringe right also said a lot of idiotic things when Obama was elected, only the mainstream press was having a collective liberalgasm over electing our first black President, and so probably didn't care as much about reporting it.
Any law passed can also be repealed, and the President can be ousted every four years if he gets to be too unpopular. In truth, very little can be done to significantly change things without Congress' approval (you know, that "balance of powers" thing), and the Republicans have a *very* slim majority in the Senate.
A year from now, when the country hasn't actually imploded, all this angst is going to look a bit silly in retrospect.
I don't think it's a matter of the characteristics of the drone so much that it's intruding on it's territory. Birds can be quite territorial. I've seen smaller birds spend days attacking a "rival male" in its territory, banging into a window over and over (and over and over... I was getting close to pulling a shotgun on the little bastard).
Honestly, I'm not really convinced there's much of anything to be done short of making a stealth drone so quiet and tiny that it won't be noticed (good luck with that, as there's a reason for the phrase "eagle-eyed"), or using a drone so large and intimidating it won't be attacked.
Try using the Gimp, it is very easy to communicate directly with he developers - and you don't even need a Microsoft O/S, as it works fine on Linux!
CorelDRAW is not a paint program.
Besides, while a lot of free software is amazing, FLOSS can certainly have its own issues. I've heard it said, "if ever you are unsatisfied with the software, please feel free to return it for a full refund of the purchase price." That's a nice way of saying that if you don't like the software, you really have no recourse or even a right to complain, because you paid nothing for it.
If you ever want to be disabused of the notion that free software is always more responsive to it's users, then just read this thread. It's ten pages of users begging for a workaround to a problem they're having, and the developer essentially telling them to piss off.
I'm not picking on free software. After all, my first two examples were of commercial software. I'm just saying that it's prone to the same shitty customer service, although I suspect it may be often for different reasons.
I think this is a result of so many companies making it nearly impossible to get in contact with them, or only providing a forum on their website and saying to customers "you guys figure it out on your own." Okay, I get it that there's support costs. But I would LOVE to reach out to an engineer at Amazon to tell them about a very irritating and easy-to-repro bug in their Android Kindle app when using it to play audiobooks. Or I'd love to contact Corel to tell them that they're alienating someone who's been buying and using CorelDRAW literally since version 1 with their current marketing shenanigans. But alas, there's no direct and simple way to provide feedback (at least that I've seen), and their products suffer as a result from lack of feedback.
Interestingly enough, I have to give credit to the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for actually doing it right. They have a feedback tool built right into Visual Studio which can give both positive or negative feedback, report bugs, and even take a screenshot right from within the program. Too bad the Windows team doesn't seem to follow their example in listening to feedback. Or more likely, they're simply told by management to implement all the shitty things they've done to their users.
One of these days, I'm waiting for a decently-large company to figure out that they can stand out from the crowd by providing outstanding customer service - that always seems to be the first to go when a company gets large. I'd think customers would actually want to support such a novel enterprise. Of course, the trick is that if your products are crap, your support costs skyrocket. So rather than fix products, it's easier for companies to simply shut down or outsource their support.
The problem with the new Macbook Pro isn't that it's too expensive. It's that the high-end laptops are effectively capped at those somewhat modest specs, and though they're fine for most people, there are a lot of "pros" who would like a more powerful laptop. Apple, I feel, has a responsibility for properly maintaining and supporting it's ecosystem, because unlike with PCs, users of MacOS software have only one choice of vendor for their Mac hardware. It's fine if Apple wants to build non-upgradeable appliances instead of upgradeable computers, but in doing so, they're also doing their customers a disservice by failing to refresh their hardware in a timely fashion to help keep their product line more useful.
It's not just the Macbook product line either. Their last Mac Mini was hardly a bump at all, their Mac Pro isn't all that impressive for the price these days, even by Apple standards, and both are *years* old. If you needed a computer this year, you just had to bite the bullet and get the older hardware, and unless someone's heard differently, we still don't know what may be coming next. My company needed a bunch of Mac build servers... the minis were too slow, so we had to buy a bunch of expensive, obsolete, and very rack-unfriendly Mac Pros earlier this year.
So, when you talk about matching hardware to what you want it to do, that's all fine, but you're speaking in a PC world when you can scale the nearly infinite choice in hardware up or down as much as you want. With Macs, there's zero choice if you wanted a more powerful laptop. And when you're heavily invested in Apple's OS, software, and workflow, simply choosing a different platform is often not a very realistic choice, unless you're willing to endure a *lot* of pain and expense during the transition.
I really don't think it would take all that much to keep Apple customers happy (well, relatively speaking). Just offer a slightly broader range from entry-level to the high end, and refresh their hardware with upgrades a bit more often to help keep their lines more relevant between major releases.
Note: I'm not really an Apple guy myself, but I've been doing more Mac programming these days, so I pay a bit more attention to the Mac platform. Just my 2 bytes.
We do have large monitor displays in our conference rooms, but I don't own a laptop that can hook up to them. Again, I should point out, it's unusual for me to have to do this, which is why I don't own a laptop. On other occasions, our producer either keeps track of things on her laptop on our behalf (which is pretty much her job description), or our QA member has used it during bug triage for the group. But most of the time, we just discuss the issues on our agenda without any sort of visual aids, as it doesn't seem necessary to actually view them. We also don't have remote workers, so our requirements are a bit simpler than yours.
More to the point, I'm something of a pragmatist. Sometimes it's simply easier to print out a few hard-copies than to fiddle with a more complicated system for a one-off situation. I never really thought about whether we're "paperless" or not. Whatever works best and easiest for us, we'll use it. In your case, it sounds like you found a pretty nice solution for your meetings.
Paperless is already the norm in offices where I work, and has been for the last decade. Then again, I make videogames for a living, so maybe people who create a product made up of bits and bytes are used to working entirely electronically. Our internal documents are online in Wikis or Confluence, we use online bug trackers, we use e-mail and instant messaging and web chat to communicate. And of course, the work we do is entirely digital too.
Sure, we occasionally print things out for convenience, but that's the rare exception, not the rule. I can think of perhaps two occasions in the last six months I've done so, both times for meetings in which I needed everyone to follow along with my presentation. Not everyone has a portable electronic device that's synced to company e-mail (I prefer to keep my phone personal). If that ever becomes the norm, then I'd have just e-mailed everyone the docs ahead of time.
"Telemetry" isn't necessarily antithetical to privacy. It just means companies can see how their users collectively use their products. Effective telemetry really has no use for personally identifiable data anyhow, because it's most often analyzed collectively. For instance, you might look at percentage of users who keep x number of tabs open on average, or how long those tabs tend to stay open, or how often a user digs into advance settings. Knowing things like this can help to design better user interfaces... Okay, maybe that's a bad example with Mozilla, but you get the idea.
Unfortunately, we can thank Microsoft for turning "telemetry" into a dirty word by stuffing it down users' throats and not giving people a way of opting out.
This is what happens when something turns into an -ism. I think opposition to nuclear is based more on dogma and irrational fear than anything else at this point.
Here's a thought: maybe we should listen to specialists (say, nuclear scientists and engineers, and throw in some statisticians to tally up safety records) about whether modern nuclear power is safe and effective enough to use. Because, I'm pretty sure the science is settled at this point. Should we also should start calling opponents "nuclear deniers"?
So, you believe that even in the next century or two we won't figure out how to deal with the waste? That seems a bit unlikely to me. And what if the result of a stubborn opposition to nuclear power is that we simply hang onto our coal plants? That would seem like a rather Pyrrhic victory. It really feels like opponents to nuclear are risking the life of the forest to save a single tree.
I can't speak for France's trust (or lack thereof) of Hollande. But one thing the US could do in emulating France is to start replacing our coal plants with more nuclear, especially in areas where solar or wind aren't a good fit. It's not like it isn't a proven, feasible technology. I still can't understand how environmentalists could be opposed to it, if they truly believe what scientists are telling us about what's happening with AGW and what the long term effects may be. Yes, nuclear is a compromise. We have to extract ore, it's potentially dangerous, and it generates very nasty waste products. But wouldn't it be worth compromising on this point a bit to get to carbon neutrality faster? We have the rest of history to start phasing nuke power plants out with better technologies, and there are theoretical ways to deal with the waste products other than simply burying it in the ground.
Maybe we should tell Trump that building a bunch of nuclear plants would really piss off the wacko environmentalists, create a bunch of new 'murican jobs, and help lessen oil dependency from all those foreign commies and terrorists. Sometimes, you just have to sell these things with your target audience in mind.
One of my grandparents watched his comrades get slaughtered around him, and the other was forced into a labor camp, all because they didn't have a military that could stand up to the German armed forces. Don't lecture me about history.
Agreed. What I'd like to know is what makes anyone think that he's got the answers to our future when everyone else who's made such far-sighted doomsday predictions has so far demonstrated to be ridiculously wrong. Remember, by now billions were supposed to be starving to death, we'd be out of oil, the ice caps were supposed to be gone, and/or we'd have destroyed ourselves in nuclear hellfire.
I do agree that we should strive to spread out into space, so as to avoid leaving all our eggs in one basket, but unless its something completely out of our control, like a massive cosmic event, then sorry, I'm not buying the doom and gloom anymore. We've got plenty of serious problems we need to deal with without resorting to hysterics. Even if it doesn't mean the end of humanity, there are still some potentially bad scenarios we'd like to avoid. But every time scientists or environmentalists make wackadoo doomsday predictions that don't come true, it actually HURTS credibility of those that were more responsible.
Thing is, we (Canada) are not only directly beside the US, but we're also the buffer between the US and Russia. The hell does the US care about the UK for, especially if they're no longer contributing back in the occasional "coalitions of the willing"?
The US has, at least recently in our history, had very close national ties with both the UK and Canada, as well as the Aussies and Kiwis, perhaps due to our shared Anglo culture and heritage. I guess you could think of us as "sibling" countries, with the UK as the "parent", I guess? I'm not sure how else to explain it. So, yeah, I think the US does tend to care about it's collective Anglo "family".
I don't care that major media outlets are biased. What I find troubling is that media outlets continue to claim to be unbiased when they they are obviously are not (both left and right).
Slashdot Mirror
That aside, all it takes is a little fear at the right time to turn a democracy into an authoritarian state "for your protection".
No, it really doesn't. People who make arguments like that point to the early century dictatorships like Germany or Italy, without considering that neither of those countries had any real democratic tradition, like the US has had for two centuries with our republic. A history of rule by authoritarian monarchs makes it pretty easy to transition to a dictatorship, because they're really the same thing, except the former has a bit more history to give it legitimacy.
Also, it appears you haven't been truly paying attention to the dynamics in the other party. The Republican establishment loathes Trump. He's going to have to take a conciliatory stance if he wants to get *anything* passed by Congress. Everyone's all smiles right now because they won, but I guarantee you there's going to be plenty of friction among them.
Thank you for taking the comment in good humor, and responding in kind. You're a rare breed these days.
You do realize that statement merely shows that you are among the exceptionally easily manipulated.
You do realize with that little diatribe, you've demonstrated that you're among those that have their panties in a twist about this particular topic. Unless you have no sense of humor at all, of course.
Good luck with that, and lighten up, Francis.
6) Get fed up and go back to being a "denier" just to spite those that keep shoving the almost-daily environmental doom and gloom reports down our throats, when we're just here for interesting tech news.
Rational adults don't pack up and move to Canada when an election doesn't go their way, nor do they build a bunker, collecting guns and freeze-dried food in preparation for some sort of Armageddon. Donald Trump may be an arrogant bastard who thinks of attractive women as trophies to fondle, but he's not Anti-Christ-Hitler-Stalin-Pol-Pot. The fringe right also said a lot of idiotic things when Obama was elected, only the mainstream press was having a collective liberalgasm over electing our first black President, and so probably didn't care as much about reporting it.
Any law passed can also be repealed, and the President can be ousted every four years if he gets to be too unpopular. In truth, very little can be done to significantly change things without Congress' approval (you know, that "balance of powers" thing), and the Republicans have a *very* slim majority in the Senate.
A year from now, when the country hasn't actually imploded, all this angst is going to look a bit silly in retrospect.
I don't think it's a matter of the characteristics of the drone so much that it's intruding on it's territory. Birds can be quite territorial. I've seen smaller birds spend days attacking a "rival male" in its territory, banging into a window over and over (and over and over... I was getting close to pulling a shotgun on the little bastard).
Honestly, I'm not really convinced there's much of anything to be done short of making a stealth drone so quiet and tiny that it won't be noticed (good luck with that, as there's a reason for the phrase "eagle-eyed"), or using a drone so large and intimidating it won't be attacked.
Try using the Gimp, it is very easy to communicate directly with he developers - and you don't even need a Microsoft O/S, as it works fine on Linux!
CorelDRAW is not a paint program.
Besides, while a lot of free software is amazing, FLOSS can certainly have its own issues. I've heard it said, "if ever you are unsatisfied with the software, please feel free to return it for a full refund of the purchase price." That's a nice way of saying that if you don't like the software, you really have no recourse or even a right to complain, because you paid nothing for it.
If you ever want to be disabused of the notion that free software is always more responsive to it's users, then just read this thread. It's ten pages of users begging for a workaround to a problem they're having, and the developer essentially telling them to piss off.
I'm not picking on free software. After all, my first two examples were of commercial software. I'm just saying that it's prone to the same shitty customer service, although I suspect it may be often for different reasons.
My guess would be... the annoying drone buzzing around in its territory?
I think this is a result of so many companies making it nearly impossible to get in contact with them, or only providing a forum on their website and saying to customers "you guys figure it out on your own." Okay, I get it that there's support costs. But I would LOVE to reach out to an engineer at Amazon to tell them about a very irritating and easy-to-repro bug in their Android Kindle app when using it to play audiobooks. Or I'd love to contact Corel to tell them that they're alienating someone who's been buying and using CorelDRAW literally since version 1 with their current marketing shenanigans. But alas, there's no direct and simple way to provide feedback (at least that I've seen), and their products suffer as a result from lack of feedback.
Interestingly enough, I have to give credit to the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for actually doing it right. They have a feedback tool built right into Visual Studio which can give both positive or negative feedback, report bugs, and even take a screenshot right from within the program. Too bad the Windows team doesn't seem to follow their example in listening to feedback. Or more likely, they're simply told by management to implement all the shitty things they've done to their users.
One of these days, I'm waiting for a decently-large company to figure out that they can stand out from the crowd by providing outstanding customer service - that always seems to be the first to go when a company gets large. I'd think customers would actually want to support such a novel enterprise. Of course, the trick is that if your products are crap, your support costs skyrocket. So rather than fix products, it's easier for companies to simply shut down or outsource their support.
If you didn't have to consult a lawyer and sign a few contracts, then you didn't "buy into" Oracle.
Silly? Yes and no.
The problem with the new Macbook Pro isn't that it's too expensive. It's that the high-end laptops are effectively capped at those somewhat modest specs, and though they're fine for most people, there are a lot of "pros" who would like a more powerful laptop. Apple, I feel, has a responsibility for properly maintaining and supporting it's ecosystem, because unlike with PCs, users of MacOS software have only one choice of vendor for their Mac hardware. It's fine if Apple wants to build non-upgradeable appliances instead of upgradeable computers, but in doing so, they're also doing their customers a disservice by failing to refresh their hardware in a timely fashion to help keep their product line more useful.
It's not just the Macbook product line either. Their last Mac Mini was hardly a bump at all, their Mac Pro isn't all that impressive for the price these days, even by Apple standards, and both are *years* old. If you needed a computer this year, you just had to bite the bullet and get the older hardware, and unless someone's heard differently, we still don't know what may be coming next. My company needed a bunch of Mac build servers... the minis were too slow, so we had to buy a bunch of expensive, obsolete, and very rack-unfriendly Mac Pros earlier this year.
So, when you talk about matching hardware to what you want it to do, that's all fine, but you're speaking in a PC world when you can scale the nearly infinite choice in hardware up or down as much as you want. With Macs, there's zero choice if you wanted a more powerful laptop. And when you're heavily invested in Apple's OS, software, and workflow, simply choosing a different platform is often not a very realistic choice, unless you're willing to endure a *lot* of pain and expense during the transition.
I really don't think it would take all that much to keep Apple customers happy (well, relatively speaking). Just offer a slightly broader range from entry-level to the high end, and refresh their hardware with upgrades a bit more often to help keep their lines more relevant between major releases.
Note: I'm not really an Apple guy myself, but I've been doing more Mac programming these days, so I pay a bit more attention to the Mac platform. Just my 2 bytes.
We do have large monitor displays in our conference rooms, but I don't own a laptop that can hook up to them. Again, I should point out, it's unusual for me to have to do this, which is why I don't own a laptop. On other occasions, our producer either keeps track of things on her laptop on our behalf (which is pretty much her job description), or our QA member has used it during bug triage for the group. But most of the time, we just discuss the issues on our agenda without any sort of visual aids, as it doesn't seem necessary to actually view them. We also don't have remote workers, so our requirements are a bit simpler than yours.
More to the point, I'm something of a pragmatist. Sometimes it's simply easier to print out a few hard-copies than to fiddle with a more complicated system for a one-off situation. I never really thought about whether we're "paperless" or not. Whatever works best and easiest for us, we'll use it. In your case, it sounds like you found a pretty nice solution for your meetings.
Paperless is already the norm in offices where I work, and has been for the last decade. Then again, I make videogames for a living, so maybe people who create a product made up of bits and bytes are used to working entirely electronically. Our internal documents are online in Wikis or Confluence, we use online bug trackers, we use e-mail and instant messaging and web chat to communicate. And of course, the work we do is entirely digital too.
Sure, we occasionally print things out for convenience, but that's the rare exception, not the rule. I can think of perhaps two occasions in the last six months I've done so, both times for meetings in which I needed everyone to follow along with my presentation. Not everyone has a portable electronic device that's synced to company e-mail (I prefer to keep my phone personal). If that ever becomes the norm, then I'd have just e-mailed everyone the docs ahead of time.
"Telemetry" isn't necessarily antithetical to privacy. It just means companies can see how their users collectively use their products. Effective telemetry really has no use for personally identifiable data anyhow, because it's most often analyzed collectively. For instance, you might look at percentage of users who keep x number of tabs open on average, or how long those tabs tend to stay open, or how often a user digs into advance settings. Knowing things like this can help to design better user interfaces... Okay, maybe that's a bad example with Mozilla, but you get the idea.
Unfortunately, we can thank Microsoft for turning "telemetry" into a dirty word by stuffing it down users' throats and not giving people a way of opting out.
This is what happens when something turns into an -ism. I think opposition to nuclear is based more on dogma and irrational fear than anything else at this point.
Here's a thought: maybe we should listen to specialists (say, nuclear scientists and engineers, and throw in some statisticians to tally up safety records) about whether modern nuclear power is safe and effective enough to use. Because, I'm pretty sure the science is settled at this point. Should we also should start calling opponents "nuclear deniers"?
So, you believe that even in the next century or two we won't figure out how to deal with the waste? That seems a bit unlikely to me. And what if the result of a stubborn opposition to nuclear power is that we simply hang onto our coal plants? That would seem like a rather Pyrrhic victory. It really feels like opponents to nuclear are risking the life of the forest to save a single tree.
I can't speak for France's trust (or lack thereof) of Hollande. But one thing the US could do in emulating France is to start replacing our coal plants with more nuclear, especially in areas where solar or wind aren't a good fit. It's not like it isn't a proven, feasible technology. I still can't understand how environmentalists could be opposed to it, if they truly believe what scientists are telling us about what's happening with AGW and what the long term effects may be. Yes, nuclear is a compromise. We have to extract ore, it's potentially dangerous, and it generates very nasty waste products. But wouldn't it be worth compromising on this point a bit to get to carbon neutrality faster? We have the rest of history to start phasing nuke power plants out with better technologies, and there are theoretical ways to deal with the waste products other than simply burying it in the ground.
Maybe we should tell Trump that building a bunch of nuclear plants would really piss off the wacko environmentalists, create a bunch of new 'murican jobs, and help lessen oil dependency from all those foreign commies and terrorists. Sometimes, you just have to sell these things with your target audience in mind.
Learn history Dutch Gun.
One of my grandparents watched his comrades get slaughtered around him, and the other was forced into a labor camp, all because they didn't have a military that could stand up to the German armed forces. Don't lecture me about history.
Agreed. What I'd like to know is what makes anyone think that he's got the answers to our future when everyone else who's made such far-sighted doomsday predictions has so far demonstrated to be ridiculously wrong. Remember, by now billions were supposed to be starving to death, we'd be out of oil, the ice caps were supposed to be gone, and/or we'd have destroyed ourselves in nuclear hellfire.
I do agree that we should strive to spread out into space, so as to avoid leaving all our eggs in one basket, but unless its something completely out of our control, like a massive cosmic event, then sorry, I'm not buying the doom and gloom anymore. We've got plenty of serious problems we need to deal with without resorting to hysterics. Even if it doesn't mean the end of humanity, there are still some potentially bad scenarios we'd like to avoid. But every time scientists or environmentalists make wackadoo doomsday predictions that don't come true, it actually HURTS credibility of those that were more responsible.
Thing is, we (Canada) are not only directly beside the US, but we're also the buffer between the US and Russia. The hell does the US care about the UK for, especially if they're no longer contributing back in the occasional "coalitions of the willing"?
The US has, at least recently in our history, had very close national ties with both the UK and Canada, as well as the Aussies and Kiwis, perhaps due to our shared Anglo culture and heritage. I guess you could think of us as "sibling" countries, with the UK as the "parent", I guess? I'm not sure how else to explain it. So, yeah, I think the US does tend to care about it's collective Anglo "family".
Not that we'd ever admit that to a canucklehead.
A military is sort of like an insurance policy. It's a huge waste of money until you actually need it.
And of course, when I say "they they are obviously are not", I'm simply referring to the prevailing two political parties in proper newspeak grammar.
I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I'm betting the GPL would prohibit that.
I don't care that major media outlets are biased. What I find troubling is that media outlets continue to claim to be unbiased when they they are obviously are not (both left and right).
I was sort of thinking the same thing. But realistically... Occam's razor leads me to the same probable conclusion as the Consumerist report.
It's not that this is new, either. I'm not sure if you're old enough to remember the Sears auto repair scandal quite a few years ago? Same thing really.