You realize that *eventually* we'll probably need to synthesize various sorts of hydrocarbon-based fuels, right? Our natural supplies aren't going to replenish themselves or last forever, and there isn't a viable fuel replacement for some types of applications, like aviation or boating.
Besides which, we need to process our sewage anyhow. Why not turn it into something useful? Certainly worth a test plant to see how well it can work.
A co-worker of mine actually wrote a piece of software that did this just for himself. His program took a snapshot of the screen about every fifteen seconds and saved it in a delta-compressed format he invented himself, and then archived it away on a large NAS drive sorted by date and time. Then, he could go back and look at exactly what code or project he was working on at any time, almost like a long term video replay. Of course, it was just visual data, so he couldn't search by anything but dates and times.
Personally, my projects' source control (Git or Mercurial) is good enough for the purpose of long-term work archiving, as I don't really care about anything else, like chats or e-mails or random browsing. I have no need to keep a record of my slashdot postings or what porn pics I peek at. And I certainly don't want it recording financial data from my bank, etc.
Linux on the desktop is viable if you don't have any non-mission-critical Windows-only software to run, or are willing/able to use an emulation layer to run that software. I have nothing against Linux, but it's foolish to pretend that Windows doesn't have a lock on the desktop for a reason, which is the massive legacy software ecosystem.
Generally speaking, if someone is able to abandon Windows, there's a good chance they may be able to abandon PCs altogether and simply use a tablet with a keyboard attached or even a smartphone for day to day computing and communications tasks. And that's why the PC is a declining market. It's becoming the industrial-sized truck of computing hardware. Powerful and useful, yes, but most people these days don't really need one.
I thought Microsoft got rid of program manager 20 years ago.
MS doesn't get rid of anything*, they just call it something different. When people started bad-mouthing Window's DOS usage under the hood as obsolete, they started calling it something like the "powerful command shell interface manager" or "command explorer" instead of DOS.
It's a little more complicated than that. Windows originally ran on top of DOS up to the 3.1 versions. Windows 95 used DOS as a bootloader and for 16-bit driver compatibility, but took over many of its functions by interjecting itself into and replacing most of DOS's internals on startup. So, it wasn't exactly technically correct to say that Windows simply ran on top of DOS anymore, but it did appear that way to users. After the switch to NT, the DOS command prompt was just a shell with DOS-compatible commands and presented legacy software with a virtual DOS environment.
There you go. Waaay more than you ever wanted to know about DOS+Windows.
I don't think this has anything to do with flip phones or even bendable devices. I'd bet that this is all about creating components that can be more easily bent and squeezed into tiny spaces, such as you find in many of today's consumer electronics devices. Think about the advantages of being able to roll your circuit board up and stuffing it into a pen-type device.
Apparently so, because it seems they have no serious interest with creating or updating decent pro hardware. The company I work for just recently had to buy several three-year obsolete Mac Pro machines as servers (!!!). Old, expensive, and a nightmare to install as rack-mount machines, all because we need reasonably fast mac build machines. We knew there might be a hardware refresh soon, but we needed those machines now. It's fine for Apple to sell appliances, but they really should take responsibility for regularly refreshing those appliances at reasonable intervals.
Mac hardware is beautifully designed and is typically very forward-looking. Backwards compatibility has *never* been a high priority for them. Recently though, even more than ever, they seem to be catering to the crowd that values aesthetics and future-tech above everything else, though. You see this trend with the iPhone, getting rid of that old, ugly phone jack port (eye roll), and the insane quest to shave off millimeters of thickness at the expense of battery life. You see it with the Mac Pro, creating an interesting-looking trash can enclosure instead of a *practical* box. You see it now with the MacBook pros, eliminating "legacy" USB ports, no matter that there are billions of older USB devices that work perfectly well, but now need a dongle to connect.
Still, given Apple's profits, it's hard to argue that there isn't a significant market of people who care more about aesthetics and simplicity of use than anything else. It's certainly not the slashdot crowd for the most part, of course. I remember how slashdotters bemoaned that the iPod wasn't any technically better than their Gizmodo 2000 player, which was hackable and played Ogg Vorbis files, and.... no one else gave a shit, because the iPod was beautiful and easy to use, and didn't require 4 firmware patches before it worked properly.
Did they double-check the mirror this time? And compensate for zero-G?
The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.
Yikes. Isn't that sort of like announcing that your vehicle doesn't have seatbelts, so instead you're going to drive very, very carefully? Well, I guess that's not unusual for rocket science.
"Our lessons learned from the Hubble [telescope incident] were, if you really care about something, you've got to measure it at least twice," Mather added. "And if you don't get the same answer, you'd better figure out why."
Maybe they should have talked to a carpenter?
Ok, kidding aside... I really do hope it fares much better than Hubble's initial deployment. There's certainly a lot that can go wrong during development or deployment. But if all goes well, I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
That's because you probably work in the US, amid middle class or higher folks income-wise. Just in the US alone, iPhones account for 40% of smartphones. By the time you factor in your income and job, it's likely a much higher percentage.
And it's not just poor people that buy Android phones, of course. I bought a rather expensive HTC One (m7) Android phone as my first smart phone, and still enjoy using it. At the time, I didn't own any Apple products, and saw no reason to jump into their ecosystem. On the other hand, I already had a gmail account for my personal mail. I figured if nothing else, an Android phone was guaranteed to work well with that. Plus, of course, I figured I'd have a bit more control over my phone with Android. Of course, that was before I realized Verizon sent me a phone with apps that I couldn't uninstall. Doh. Well, at least I can still load unauthorized apps if I want to.
My next phone may be an iPhone simply to round out my personal development platforms. Alternatively, it may be a Pixel, expensive as it is, simply because I'm sick of carriers pushing their shit that I don't want on my phone (unwanted apps), and NOT pushing the shit I actually DO want (security updates). I haven't quite decided yet.
Good point. Still, there are two parts to this story - first, that app makers will try to get away with anything and everything, and second, that Google (and certainly Apple) will step in when they're perceived as crossing the line, as they don't want to damage their own ecosystem's reputation.
Also, finding apps that don't ask for every permission under the sun is certainly possible if you're willing to dig a bit. Unfortunately, my guess is that most people don't pay attention to this, or really don't understand the significance of the permissions they're granting.
Several ways to get "shopkick" or whatever onto phones: * embed into a popular game * pay carriers/phone sellers to preload it
Have you heard about any of these nefarious methods being used in practice, or is that just hypothetical? Because I'm reasonably sure that unless I give an app explicit permissions, a normal app can't simply install random adware to run in the background and listen to the microphone. Smartphone OSes silo apps pretty well, unlike traditional PC-based OS permission models.
Besides, it would be difficult to hide something like this, and would likely kick off a massive shitstorm once it was inevitably discovered (e.g. Lenovo & Superfish).
Another point I haven't heard anyone mentioning. It's possible these ultrasound beacons might be very uncomfortable for animals that have exceptional hearing range and sensitivity, such as seeing-eye dogs. If so, this sort of thing might actually run afoul of ADA laws.
Regardless of the humanitarian merits of high wages, good benefits, and better safety regulations (which I'd hope everyone agrees is a good thing), the simple fact is that those all increase the cost of labor, which in turn provides a greater incentive to automate production as much as possible, reducing production costs.
Automation of labor-intensive tasks is a difficult thing. A high degree of automation tends to benefit the economy as a whole by producing more consumer goods for less cost, increasing the purchasing power of the common citizen. Unfortunately, it also has an immediate detrimental effect on the directly affected workers. I think this is why most people agree that it's critical to provide a safety net with unemployment and retraining, to help minimize the human impact of disruptive change like this.
For the most part, I think societies have been reasonably adept at finding other employment for workers as old industries scale down and other industries ramp up or spring into existence. For instance, my job (a videogame programmer) simply didn't exist a generation ago, and is largely possible because many people now have a bit of extra money to spend on a PC, videogame console, and the occasional $60 videogame. We just have to hope that trend continues - that these sort of advancements and transitions occur, but not so fast as to be too disruptive to society as a whole.
It's absolutely different. He was purportedly planning to turn this in to Apple for a bug bounty, and in order to claim a bounty, a viable proof-of-concept is actually required by Apple. Except in this case, the young man was foolishly careless with the software weapon he created. I'm certainly not advocating that he not be appropriately punished for a very dangerous mistake he made, but neither do I think it's fair to automatically assign ill motives to him.
The "accident" was that he sent out malware links to a 911 dialer instead of an annoying popup generator to his friends, both of which he had created. Given that it would be blindingly obvious that he was the perpetrator, as he made no effort to conceal his identity, it seems improbable to me that he'd have sent out the 911 dialer deliberately. Besides which, one would assume you generally wouldn't want to cause trouble for your friends by forcing their phones to repeatedly call 911, unless you're a really terrible friend. I don't think anyone would dispute the weaponized code was created deliberately, of course.
So, a rather stupid mistake, yes, but I doubt this was done maliciously.
A similar situation happened with Microsoft temp/contract employees a number of years ago. They sued MS because they were essentially "permanent temps". As a result, they're now (if I recall correctly) required to take at least six months off after a maximum of 18 months of employment. So, unfortunately, their situation didn't really improve, as I presume they were hoping to get benefits, etc, as full time employees. Microsoft was obviously using long-term contract employees to avoid paying benefits or taking responsibility of employment, but now as a result of the lawsuit, all the temp / contract employees seem to be worse off than before.
I'll be curious to see what happens with Uber employees in the UK. My guess is something similar.
Honestly, I sort of tend to view that as a limitation of the time in which the original show was created, rather than actual canon. In fact, one could justify this by the existence of Majel's character in the pilot, who was only removed due to executive meddling. I'm willing to concede Kirk's rough-and-tumble attitude, as that's a bit more charming than Starfleet's implied glass ceiling for women and minorities at the time.
It looks like this may indeed be illegal according to current law.
(2) Persons placing advertisements.
A failure by persons placing advertisements to use the criteria contained in this part, when found in connection with the investigation of a complaint alleging the making or use of discriminatory advertisements, will be considered by the General Counsel in making a determination of reasonable cause, and by the Assistant Secretary in making determinations that there is no reasonable cause, to believe that a discriminatory housing practice has occurred or is about to occur.
It goes on to talk about how advertising only in the English language only may be considered discriminatory, or (a) Selective geographical advertisement, (b) Selective use of equal opportunity logo (i.e. using the logo in some advertisements but not in others), or (c) Selective advertisement using specific human models (i.e. only using white models).
Given all that, I can't see how this could *possibly* be legal, as the intent of the law seems quite clear. With one exception, of course.
(b) Affirmative advertising efforts.
Nothing in this part shall be construed to restrict advertising efforts designed to attract persons to dwellings who would not ordinarily be expected to apply, when such efforts are pursuant to an affirmative marketing program or undertaken to remedy the effects of prior discrimination in connection with the advertising or marketing of dwellings.
The people who only do web, e-mail, etc... many are ditching PCs altogether and using their smartphones or tablets. That's why desktop PCs are a declining market (although that's very different from 'dying', which escapes many pundits). Essentially, a significant percentage of number of people don't actually *need* a fully powered computers unless:
a) They require specialty software. A lot of line of business / internal software runs on Windows stacks, and it makes sense for people to have compatible systems at home. Or maybe you have a digital audio workstation with Cakewalk Sonar installed. Linux isn't an option for specialized software like that where you can't afford compatibility glitches.
b) They want a high-end gaming machine, in which case Windows is still king. Yes, Linux is making strides, but it's still nowhere close to Windows. Even Mac seems to have a better selection of games, as far as I can tell.
I attribute Windows success these days due to simple inertia more than anything, as well as being well-entrenched in business and enterprise. It's extremely difficult and costly to make a wholesale switch to a new OS on a mass scale, with completely new infrastructure, software, and support.
I wasn't angry. I'd say I was just a bit disappointed.
Star Trek was always attractive for me because of it's positive outlook on the potential future of humanity, where we manage to overcome many of our baser instincts and natural prejudices. I was hoping that Star Trek, of all series, had become post-gender and post-racial in at least its casting as well as in the fictional universe. It had been moving that way for several decades, it seemed to me, overcoming casting barriers with each new series. Well, maybe that was a bit naive of me.
I did read about how it's based on Majel's "number one" character, which seems like a pretty interesting idea.
Look at what happened to the Aral Sea under the Soviets. The sea doesn't really exist anymore! (except as two small pocket remnants)
Sure, we can also look at the horrible pollution in China, or environmental disasters right here at home (thankfully rarer these days). I'm not saying that there aren't real issues. But I think some caution must be employed with proclaiming potential worst-case doomsday scenarios as an expected result. The more often scientists or experts predict the end of the world and it doesn't come to pass, the more people will stop trusting science in the first place, and that seems like a very bad thing to me.
In fact, I think we're already starting to witness this phenomenon, as many, many people believe global warming is a complete hoax. It's a little hard to dissuade them when they can see for themselves that dire predictions made just a decade or two ago have been laughably overstated. Why believe the current predictions then? If earlier predictions had been even slightly more accurate, they'd have no justification in doubting the current science. Trust is earned, and climatologists have done a terrible job at earning that trust with effective predictions so far.
It's a non-issue inasmuch as we're easily able to feed all the people on this planet, which was the expected result of a global population explosion. Hunger is primarily caused by politics and corruption these days, not a lack of food - it's essentially a distribution issue. Poverty is a different issue that needs addressing, but isn't intrinsically related to or caused by dense populations.
In other words, it doesn't make you a humanitarian to wring your hands and berate others about issues that have no real consequence. It just makes you an ignorant, self-righteous fool.
I just read the linked Wikipedia article. Apparently, they've already decided that the protagonist is a "female minority". So... that was one of the writer/producers' overriding concern about the new series, I guess? Making a social statement instead of just finding a great actor to carry the series? Well, Star Trek has always been an ensemble affair, and has been reasonably progressive in matters of casting without being too distracting about it (mostly), so hopefully it won't matter too much.
I never really liked the decision split the Trek universes' timeline - which always seemed a bit ham-handed to me to begin with. But now, having made the decision, now they're just sticking to the old timeline? WTF? Guys, pick a timeline and go with it. I'm getting tired of "universe reboots".
I'm trying to keep my expectations reasonable-to-low, but part of me can't help but look forward to a new Trek series anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that *eventually* we'll probably need to synthesize various sorts of hydrocarbon-based fuels, right? Our natural supplies aren't going to replenish themselves or last forever, and there isn't a viable fuel replacement for some types of applications, like aviation or boating.
Besides which, we need to process our sewage anyhow. Why not turn it into something useful? Certainly worth a test plant to see how well it can work.
A co-worker of mine actually wrote a piece of software that did this just for himself. His program took a snapshot of the screen about every fifteen seconds and saved it in a delta-compressed format he invented himself, and then archived it away on a large NAS drive sorted by date and time. Then, he could go back and look at exactly what code or project he was working on at any time, almost like a long term video replay. Of course, it was just visual data, so he couldn't search by anything but dates and times.
Personally, my projects' source control (Git or Mercurial) is good enough for the purpose of long-term work archiving, as I don't really care about anything else, like chats or e-mails or random browsing. I have no need to keep a record of my slashdot postings or what porn pics I peek at. And I certainly don't want it recording financial data from my bank, etc.
Linux on the desktop is viable if you don't have any non-mission-critical Windows-only software to run, or are willing/able to use an emulation layer to run that software. I have nothing against Linux, but it's foolish to pretend that Windows doesn't have a lock on the desktop for a reason, which is the massive legacy software ecosystem.
Generally speaking, if someone is able to abandon Windows, there's a good chance they may be able to abandon PCs altogether and simply use a tablet with a keyboard attached or even a smartphone for day to day computing and communications tasks. And that's why the PC is a declining market. It's becoming the industrial-sized truck of computing hardware. Powerful and useful, yes, but most people these days don't really need one.
MS doesn't get rid of anything*, they just call it something different. When people started bad-mouthing Window's DOS usage under the hood as obsolete, they started calling it something like the "powerful command shell interface manager" or "command explorer" instead of DOS.
It's a little more complicated than that. Windows originally ran on top of DOS up to the 3.1 versions. Windows 95 used DOS as a bootloader and for 16-bit driver compatibility, but took over many of its functions by interjecting itself into and replacing most of DOS's internals on startup. So, it wasn't exactly technically correct to say that Windows simply ran on top of DOS anymore, but it did appear that way to users. After the switch to NT, the DOS command prompt was just a shell with DOS-compatible commands and presented legacy software with a virtual DOS environment.
There you go. Waaay more than you ever wanted to know about DOS+Windows.
I don't think this has anything to do with flip phones or even bendable devices. I'd bet that this is all about creating components that can be more easily bent and squeezed into tiny spaces, such as you find in many of today's consumer electronics devices. Think about the advantages of being able to roll your circuit board up and stuffing it into a pen-type device.
Apparently so, because it seems they have no serious interest with creating or updating decent pro hardware. The company I work for just recently had to buy several three-year obsolete Mac Pro machines as servers (!!!). Old, expensive, and a nightmare to install as rack-mount machines, all because we need reasonably fast mac build machines. We knew there might be a hardware refresh soon, but we needed those machines now. It's fine for Apple to sell appliances, but they really should take responsibility for regularly refreshing those appliances at reasonable intervals.
Mac hardware is beautifully designed and is typically very forward-looking. Backwards compatibility has *never* been a high priority for them. Recently though, even more than ever, they seem to be catering to the crowd that values aesthetics and future-tech above everything else, though. You see this trend with the iPhone, getting rid of that old, ugly phone jack port (eye roll), and the insane quest to shave off millimeters of thickness at the expense of battery life. You see it with the Mac Pro, creating an interesting-looking trash can enclosure instead of a *practical* box. You see it now with the MacBook pros, eliminating "legacy" USB ports, no matter that there are billions of older USB devices that work perfectly well, but now need a dongle to connect.
Still, given Apple's profits, it's hard to argue that there isn't a significant market of people who care more about aesthetics and simplicity of use than anything else. It's certainly not the slashdot crowd for the most part, of course. I remember how slashdotters bemoaned that the iPod wasn't any technically better than their Gizmodo 2000 player, which was hackable and played Ogg Vorbis files, and.... no one else gave a shit, because the iPod was beautiful and easy to use, and didn't require 4 firmware patches before it worked properly.
Did they double-check the mirror this time? And compensate for zero-G?
The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.
Yikes. Isn't that sort of like announcing that your vehicle doesn't have seatbelts, so instead you're going to drive very, very carefully? Well, I guess that's not unusual for rocket science.
"Our lessons learned from the Hubble [telescope incident] were, if you really care about something, you've got to measure it at least twice," Mather added. "And if you don't get the same answer, you'd better figure out why."
Maybe they should have talked to a carpenter?
Ok, kidding aside... I really do hope it fares much better than Hubble's initial deployment. There's certainly a lot that can go wrong during development or deployment. But if all goes well, I'm looking forward to seeing what images are captured from the edge of the visible universe.
Nearly everyone I know owns an iPhone.
That's because you probably work in the US, amid middle class or higher folks income-wise. Just in the US alone, iPhones account for 40% of smartphones. By the time you factor in your income and job, it's likely a much higher percentage.
And it's not just poor people that buy Android phones, of course. I bought a rather expensive HTC One (m7) Android phone as my first smart phone, and still enjoy using it. At the time, I didn't own any Apple products, and saw no reason to jump into their ecosystem. On the other hand, I already had a gmail account for my personal mail. I figured if nothing else, an Android phone was guaranteed to work well with that. Plus, of course, I figured I'd have a bit more control over my phone with Android. Of course, that was before I realized Verizon sent me a phone with apps that I couldn't uninstall. Doh. Well, at least I can still load unauthorized apps if I want to.
My next phone may be an iPhone simply to round out my personal development platforms. Alternatively, it may be a Pixel, expensive as it is, simply because I'm sick of carriers pushing their shit that I don't want on my phone (unwanted apps), and NOT pushing the shit I actually DO want (security updates). I haven't quite decided yet.
Good point. Still, there are two parts to this story - first, that app makers will try to get away with anything and everything, and second, that Google (and certainly Apple) will step in when they're perceived as crossing the line, as they don't want to damage their own ecosystem's reputation.
Also, finding apps that don't ask for every permission under the sun is certainly possible if you're willing to dig a bit. Unfortunately, my guess is that most people don't pay attention to this, or really don't understand the significance of the permissions they're granting.
Several ways to get "shopkick" or whatever onto phones:
* embed into a popular game
* pay carriers/phone sellers to preload it
Have you heard about any of these nefarious methods being used in practice, or is that just hypothetical? Because I'm reasonably sure that unless I give an app explicit permissions, a normal app can't simply install random adware to run in the background and listen to the microphone. Smartphone OSes silo apps pretty well, unlike traditional PC-based OS permission models.
Besides, it would be difficult to hide something like this, and would likely kick off a massive shitstorm once it was inevitably discovered (e.g. Lenovo & Superfish).
Another point I haven't heard anyone mentioning. It's possible these ultrasound beacons might be very uncomfortable for animals that have exceptional hearing range and sensitivity, such as seeing-eye dogs. If so, this sort of thing might actually run afoul of ADA laws.
Regardless of the humanitarian merits of high wages, good benefits, and better safety regulations (which I'd hope everyone agrees is a good thing), the simple fact is that those all increase the cost of labor, which in turn provides a greater incentive to automate production as much as possible, reducing production costs.
Automation of labor-intensive tasks is a difficult thing. A high degree of automation tends to benefit the economy as a whole by producing more consumer goods for less cost, increasing the purchasing power of the common citizen. Unfortunately, it also has an immediate detrimental effect on the directly affected workers. I think this is why most people agree that it's critical to provide a safety net with unemployment and retraining, to help minimize the human impact of disruptive change like this.
For the most part, I think societies have been reasonably adept at finding other employment for workers as old industries scale down and other industries ramp up or spring into existence. For instance, my job (a videogame programmer) simply didn't exist a generation ago, and is largely possible because many people now have a bit of extra money to spend on a PC, videogame console, and the occasional $60 videogame. We just have to hope that trend continues - that these sort of advancements and transitions occur, but not so fast as to be too disruptive to society as a whole.
4. Publicly disclosing the vulnerability instead of responsibly disclosing it, thereby invalidating any chance of getting a bug bounty from Apple.
Because this time it would be real
Well... unless Elon is correct. In that case, the traditional notion of "God" would probably be closer to the truth.
It's absolutely different. He was purportedly planning to turn this in to Apple for a bug bounty, and in order to claim a bounty, a viable proof-of-concept is actually required by Apple. Except in this case, the young man was foolishly careless with the software weapon he created. I'm certainly not advocating that he not be appropriately punished for a very dangerous mistake he made, but neither do I think it's fair to automatically assign ill motives to him.
The "accident" was that he sent out malware links to a 911 dialer instead of an annoying popup generator to his friends, both of which he had created. Given that it would be blindingly obvious that he was the perpetrator, as he made no effort to conceal his identity, it seems improbable to me that he'd have sent out the 911 dialer deliberately. Besides which, one would assume you generally wouldn't want to cause trouble for your friends by forcing their phones to repeatedly call 911, unless you're a really terrible friend. I don't think anyone would dispute the weaponized code was created deliberately, of course.
So, a rather stupid mistake, yes, but I doubt this was done maliciously.
Glass is tougher than most people think.
A similar situation happened with Microsoft temp/contract employees a number of years ago. They sued MS because they were essentially "permanent temps". As a result, they're now (if I recall correctly) required to take at least six months off after a maximum of 18 months of employment. So, unfortunately, their situation didn't really improve, as I presume they were hoping to get benefits, etc, as full time employees. Microsoft was obviously using long-term contract employees to avoid paying benefits or taking responsibility of employment, but now as a result of the lawsuit, all the temp / contract employees seem to be worse off than before.
I'll be curious to see what happens with Uber employees in the UK. My guess is something similar.
Honestly, I sort of tend to view that as a limitation of the time in which the original show was created, rather than actual canon. In fact, one could justify this by the existence of Majel's character in the pilot, who was only removed due to executive meddling. I'm willing to concede Kirk's rough-and-tumble attitude, as that's a bit more charming than Starfleet's implied glass ceiling for women and minorities at the time.
It looks like this may indeed be illegal according to current law.
(2)
Persons placing advertisements.
A failure by persons placing advertisements to use the criteria contained in this part, when found in connection with the investigation of a complaint alleging the making or use of discriminatory advertisements, will be considered by the General Counsel in making a determination of reasonable cause, and by the Assistant Secretary in making determinations that there is no reasonable cause, to believe that a discriminatory housing practice has occurred or is about to occur.
It goes on to talk about how advertising only in the English language only may be considered discriminatory, or (a) Selective geographical advertisement, (b) Selective use of equal opportunity logo (i.e. using the logo in some advertisements but not in others), or (c) Selective advertisement using specific human models (i.e. only using white models).
Given all that, I can't see how this could *possibly* be legal, as the intent of the law seems quite clear. With one exception, of course.
(b)
Affirmative advertising efforts.
Nothing in this part shall be construed to restrict advertising efforts designed to attract persons to dwellings who would not ordinarily be expected to apply, when such efforts are pursuant to an affirmative marketing program or undertaken to remedy the effects of prior discrimination in connection with the advertising or marketing of dwellings.
The people who only do web, e-mail, etc... many are ditching PCs altogether and using their smartphones or tablets. That's why desktop PCs are a declining market (although that's very different from 'dying', which escapes many pundits). Essentially, a significant percentage of number of people don't actually *need* a fully powered computers unless:
a) They require specialty software. A lot of line of business / internal software runs on Windows stacks, and it makes sense for people to have compatible systems at home. Or maybe you have a digital audio workstation with Cakewalk Sonar installed. Linux isn't an option for specialized software like that where you can't afford compatibility glitches.
b) They want a high-end gaming machine, in which case Windows is still king. Yes, Linux is making strides, but it's still nowhere close to Windows. Even Mac seems to have a better selection of games, as far as I can tell.
I attribute Windows success these days due to simple inertia more than anything, as well as being well-entrenched in business and enterprise. It's extremely difficult and costly to make a wholesale switch to a new OS on a mass scale, with completely new infrastructure, software, and support.
I wasn't angry. I'd say I was just a bit disappointed.
Star Trek was always attractive for me because of it's positive outlook on the potential future of humanity, where we manage to overcome many of our baser instincts and natural prejudices. I was hoping that Star Trek, of all series, had become post-gender and post-racial in at least its casting as well as in the fictional universe. It had been moving that way for several decades, it seemed to me, overcoming casting barriers with each new series. Well, maybe that was a bit naive of me.
I did read about how it's based on Majel's "number one" character, which seems like a pretty interesting idea.
Look at what happened to the Aral Sea under the Soviets. The sea doesn't really exist anymore! (except as two small pocket remnants)
Sure, we can also look at the horrible pollution in China, or environmental disasters right here at home (thankfully rarer these days). I'm not saying that there aren't real issues. But I think some caution must be employed with proclaiming potential worst-case doomsday scenarios as an expected result. The more often scientists or experts predict the end of the world and it doesn't come to pass, the more people will stop trusting science in the first place, and that seems like a very bad thing to me.
In fact, I think we're already starting to witness this phenomenon, as many, many people believe global warming is a complete hoax. It's a little hard to dissuade them when they can see for themselves that dire predictions made just a decade or two ago have been laughably overstated. Why believe the current predictions then? If earlier predictions had been even slightly more accurate, they'd have no justification in doubting the current science. Trust is earned, and climatologists have done a terrible job at earning that trust with effective predictions so far.
It's a non-issue inasmuch as we're easily able to feed all the people on this planet, which was the expected result of a global population explosion. Hunger is primarily caused by politics and corruption these days, not a lack of food - it's essentially a distribution issue. Poverty is a different issue that needs addressing, but isn't intrinsically related to or caused by dense populations.
In other words, it doesn't make you a humanitarian to wring your hands and berate others about issues that have no real consequence. It just makes you an ignorant, self-righteous fool.
I just read the linked Wikipedia article. Apparently, they've already decided that the protagonist is a "female minority". So... that was one of the writer/producers' overriding concern about the new series, I guess? Making a social statement instead of just finding a great actor to carry the series? Well, Star Trek has always been an ensemble affair, and has been reasonably progressive in matters of casting without being too distracting about it (mostly), so hopefully it won't matter too much.
I never really liked the decision split the Trek universes' timeline - which always seemed a bit ham-handed to me to begin with. But now, having made the decision, now they're just sticking to the old timeline? WTF? Guys, pick a timeline and go with it. I'm getting tired of "universe reboots".
I'm trying to keep my expectations reasonable-to-low, but part of me can't help but look forward to a new Trek series anyhow.