I have bought almost exclusively from Mwave for over 10 years as well, and they never cease to impress me with their fantastic service and support. They don't have the selection of NewEgg (my second-favorite), but their prices are reasonable, their service fast, and they handle returns and even building support (for when things don't go as smoothly as they should).
I've been relying on their mobo/CPU/RAM bundles for system building for years. They'll also put the parts together and bench them to make sure they all work and all work together before you get it, or they'll just ship them put together. I think this costs like $5.
It's not like you can't just slap the stuff together yourself, it's just kinda nice when you're doing a new system build to know for sure that the mobo, CPU, and RAM are all known-good, so if you have any issues along the way, you can safely assume it's not them. It's also nice for novice builders who are uncomfortable putting the expensive parts together.
I live in Japan. The TV here is both more banal and pointless than that of the US, and infinitely more entertaining, without making me feel dirty afterward. I can sit down for an hour of London Boots or Downtown Deluxe or Toneruzu (Tunnels) and when it's up, I'm like, "whoah, nothing happened in the last hour, the TV station spent about $1.27 on the show, and I giggled and guffawed and sometimes felt real empathy for the people I was watching."
While they don't have the sometimes fantastic episodic storytelling we've developed in the US, they have talk shows and other unscripted TV down pat.
There's mad cash to be made in asking people not to drive their cars or run their AC so much. Telling people to stop spending money on energy is big bucks, man.
Amen. I liked the game fine, but come on: it's just a regular shooter. It was just System Shock 2 with better hardware available. SS2 was innovative in the day, but now it just kind of felt blah.
I can't get SMS from people who aren't on the same carrier, let alone in another country.
In fact, I was really surprised recently to find out that anyone could SMS people in other countries (I knew the same-carrier business was just Japan).
This has absolutely nothing to do with "West" vs. "East." It's different companies deciding what services to offer or not. Sheesh.
I didn't say I hadn't heard of them; I said I hadn't heard anything about them. As in, "who the hell cares what RIM and Nokia are working on; they're stagnant."
a washed-up, gothy 'heroine' from the previous game
Um, yeah, that would be April Ryan, the main character of the series. She didn't start out washed up or cynical, and her character arc is very well written to get her to that point. And, um... Not gothy. I say this as a recovering goth myself.
...a generically plucky artist...
Let's see... Zoe has a failed relationship, a strained friendship, family problems, and is being sucked into a corporate/technological/mystical conspiracy... Yeah, I guess she was pretty plucky, considering. Also, she is a doppelganger of April Ryan in the first game. She's a little more fleshed out as a character, but the point is pitting what is basically who April used to be against who she has become. It's, um, pretty ambitious for a video game. Things haven't worked out for April; will they work out differently for Zoe? Will they work out at all?
...and a generically honorable warrior who discovers that his government is corrupt.
You can't just put "generically" in front of anything and suddenly make it cliche. Kian is not very well-developed as a character, to be sure, but I think he is going to be the main one for the next installment. However, I'm trying to think of how many times in literature I've run into a holy warrior (this isn't just a government; it's a religious government, obviously referring to Islamic theocracies under Sharia Law, but if they expanded like the Catholic church) who is losing faith in his bosses, but for whom that also means losing his faith in his religion...
I started out this post kind of wanting to just poke fun at you, but now as I write it, I'm wondering: Do you even know what "generic" means? I can't think of a single generic thing about The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. I'm sure there are other stories that have similar elements, but it's not like a typical FPS "story" where there's a maverick warrior who doesn't take no guff or something. These are very well-developed characters, especially considering the nascent state of the medium.
They inhabit a story that wanders at best, is never resolved in any way, and cuts off at not just one, but three separate cliffhangers.
Let's see... Three characters, three cliffhangers... Third installment in the works... Do you even know what a cliffhanger is for?
I mean, if you didn't like the game, that's fair enough, but... Ummm... It was anything but "generic."
In my opinion, Ragnar Tornquist is one of the only guys taking video games seriously as a narrative medium, and is doing a great job.
1) A LAN party? Are you serious? Is it 1998? Don't they have broadband where you live? And Skype? Who the hell still does LAN parties?
2) You're going to let 60 people you don't know into your house, along with thousands of dollars of equipment that sucks a lot of power, and you're worried that someone is going to swipe your Bed Head (theft's a lot less awesome when it's happening to you)? There are many, many failure points for what you are proposing; theft actually seems pretty low on the list.
3) Finally, even in the olden days when I used to organize these things, we stopped doing them in people's houses years before we stopped altogether. If someone lives in a complex with a clubhouse, check that out. Or hell, rent a conference room at a local hotel. The former works great because they usually have kitchens with fridges, etc.
My 1.5 year MacBook still looks brand new, and I take it to work with me every day. It's my main work machine, in fact, and it's been all over the world with me, and is headed off to a conference in Germany the day after tomorrow...
The law specifically includes "depictions" of child pornography under the umbrella of "child pornography," which very clearly indicates to me that these laws have nothing to do with protecting children (which is what we all want), but, rather, with thoughtcrime (which is what Christofascists want).
When I had a band, I wanted to call our next EP "This is Child Pornography," but none of my bandmates thought it was a good idea.
But that, right there, is why these issues aren't solved. People are offended by child pornography. Or, actually, I think, since they keep finding people who have it, people know that they are supposed to be offended by it. No one wants to come out and say the bleeding obvious, that these laws have way overstepped their bounds and are eating into our basic human rights and do nothing to protect children anyway, because it looks like you're defending people who screw little kids and take pictures of it (I also am upset by the fact that "child" here is often extended to people well into their teens who are likely sexually active anyway).
Anyway, I hope this gets put to bed. If they want to get in there that badly, they can brute-force it, just like a safe. Hell, as long as they can break the encryption before the statute of limitations runs out, they'll be fine. But compelling the guy to cough up the password is a pretty clear violation of the 5th amendment.
Easy. The lexicogrammar of "begs the question" makes far more sense in its common usage as being synonymous with "raises the question." Some situation seems to be begging for someone to ask a particular question. The original meaning of this idiomatic expression, having to do with circular logic, does not as clearly follow from the individual meanings of those words. Also, to be honest, I have never, ever heard a usage of the original meaning. Ever.
I am an applied linguist by training and trade, and you know what? I have heard this "incorrectly" used at conferences. Face it. The meaning has changed. No one even knows what the original was.
"Intensive purposes" is different because it makes no sense. When we say "for all intents and purposes," we are making a large, sweeping, general claim. This is the opposite of what is implied by "intensive purposes," which would denote some sort of specific, focused usage of whatever it is we're talking about.
Also, someone who uses "intensive purposes" needs their hearing checked. There is no/v/ in there. When someone uses "intensive purposes," it implies that they not only don't listen closely but that they also don't even think about what they are saying. It implies a sort of illiteracy. It does not reflect well on someone's education, because educated people do not talk like that.
Educated people do, however, use "begs the question" "incorrectly." So it gets a pass.
Language is one of the clearest tribal identifiers. Standard usage identifies to others that you are the same tribe and affords you the benefits thereof. We can yammer on about elitism, but that's just plain how it works. In every society. Learning to use language in a standard way tells others who have done the same that you are brethren and, like them, have spent the time and effort "correcting" your behavior.
None of this is really about "correct" usage, it's about "standard" and "accepted" usage. "Begs the question" passes; "intensive purposes" doesn't. The former is an interesting evolution of the usage of an idiomatic phrase; the latter, indication that someone is kinda a moron.
I retouch photos not so that I don't remember the people (okay, let's be clear here: ex-girlfriends) in them, but so that I'm the only one who does. I started editing my parents physical photo albums years and years ago.
Here was my thinking: At some point, I'm going to get married. And at some point, my mom is going to whip this album out to show my wife, and there are going to be pictures of the girl I almost married on a family trip. It's going to be awkward and I will be expected to comment somehow on that picture. I don't want to do that.
So I just remove the girl.
Now that memory belongs only to me. I don't have to disavow my feelings at the time or faux-chuckle at how young I was. The awkward little scene never happens, and I can keep my memory--my bittersweet memory. That trip, as I really experienced it, becomes mine and mine alone. No one, I feel, has a right to share in it if I don't want them to. And I don't want them to.
Looking through my photographic history, you'd think the only girl I ever dated was my wife. The public record is cleaned, and other people's memories can fade. My wife doesn't need to know about my relationships before I met her. She doesn't want to know. And when the record has been cleaned, she doesn't have to know.
But I can remember the happy times, the sad times, the troubled and confused times. I keep those with me. They're mine. They are a part of me, and I don't want to forget. I don't want to change them, and if no one asks about them, I don't have to.
If a photo is causing me undue pain, I seldom throw it away. I just file it. At some point, I can look at it again and it won't hurt. When I die, someone will find the box, I'm sure, and wonder who these people were. And that's the best of all. They won't know. They don't need to know. They're mine.
Yeah... I don't want to talk to the person behind the counter. I use the machine whenever possible.
My wife can't figure them out, though.
Where I want a social experience in a store is when I want to ask someone where something is because they move things around every night, sometimes according to utterly bizarre logic. Then I can't find anyone.
By the way do they love it because they're trying to justify the big spend to themselves?
Y'know, I'm not saying that it's perfect; I'm not even saying it's great. I don't know; I don't have one. But I am so tired of reading this ridiculous theory on Slashdot.
The vast, vast, vast majority of people do not care about the same things as the Slashdot readership. They do not care about how many arcane features a product has. They care about how well it does what they want it to do.
People whine on about the iPod's lack of features, like the fact it doesn't play FLAC or Ogg. But you know what? No one uses those formats. Just geeks.
Again, don't get me wrong; I wish it played FLAC--I don't like having to rip to Apple Lossless, which means I may have rip it again in the future if I move to something else, but the simple fact of the matter is that I'm in a tiny minority there. Hell, I'm in a tiny minority of people who change the default ripping settings in iTunes, or even know where they are or what they do.
Apple products are expensive (well, except the iPhone 3G, which is what we're talking about here --The phone is a zero-yen phone here in Japan!), yet people still buy them and buy them again and buy them again. They have many chances not to buy them, but they do the math and decide that what they like about the devices is worth the money. Feature lists do not a good product make. Ease of use of useful features do.
My phone right now does more than the iPhone, aside from the browser. But even as a geek, I don't use much of anything other than the phone. Why? Because it's such a hassle to use and get around in its horrid menu structure that it's just plain not worth the time and frustration. When I look at the iPhone, I can find what I'm looking for right away without ever having used the device before.
People like this.
I have no doubt whatsoever that there are "better phones out there"... for you. But you are not most people. You have a specific feature list in your head that you view as essential. Fine. Most people just want a phone that doesn't frustrate them to the point of throwing it.
Finally, just for the record, all my iPhone-carrying friends? All six of them? Every one of them is a professional software developer, most of which work for really big IT companies. They have far more tech-geek cred than I do, and know a lot more about cellphones than I do. And yet, they love the phone.
The connectivity issue is a big one... For the people experiencing it. My friends aren't. Also, here in Japan, I've heard nothing about the issue. Not a peep. And I spent awhile this morning searching the Japanese support forums. I found one thread complaining about low signal strength, with a bunch of replies saying they didn't have any trouble. But we've had 3G for a really long time here. I suspect that's the difference really. Network woes.
Japanese is a language isolate, which some linguists have attempted to group under the Altaic umbrella (e.g. Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian languages) but with little acceptance.
1) I am an applied (not theoretical, I'll admit) linguist, and I was taught in several classes in both my undergrad and grad programs that Japanese is an Altaic language. Maybe that's a sampling error, but as a fellow linguist, I have never witnessed any controversy over this. Granted, it isn't my area. A quick Wikipedia check mentions controversy, but also points out that most Altaicists include Korean, Japanese, and even Ainu in the Altaic family. It doesn't really sound to me like there is "little acceptance" of this classification.
2) The Altaic family is still the best fit, however, as it has the language moving over northeast Asia, down the Korean peninsula, and then hopping down to Kyushu (the southernmost main island of the Japanese archipelago), where the Korean population exploded due to the much better conditions for rice farming and the application of the rice farming techniques they had developed in the much harsher Korean climate. They started moving northward, taking the land over from the Ainu and incorporating some of their lexicon (just as we Americans did with the Native Americans) as they went. Finally, as an established political power, they began interfacing with China frequently, and adopted their writing system, bringing in Chinese lexicon and morphology, allowing for new Japanese words built from Chinese morphemes (just as English regularly does with Greek morphemes). The lexicon is an interesting hybrid, but the syntactic structure is, and always has been, pretty obviously of Korean origin, and I don't think it's terribly uncontroversial to say that Korean is part of the Altaic family.
3) Finally, whether linguists get sick of hearing language grouping identified with genes or not (I work with nothing but linguists, and it's the first time I've ever heard anyone bemoan this kind of comment) doesn't really matter. Languages are spoken by people. They pass them on to their children during the critical period of language acquisition (now we're getting into my field). Languages do not, of course, have anything to do with genes, but they are highly correlated with them. People breed with those who speak the same language as they most frequently. They then pass that language on to their children. Of course language follows genes. That doesn't mean you can't get genetically different groups speaking the same language family, because of course you can, but to imply that it has nothing to do with genes is silly. Languages don't move by themselves. People carry them. And as people move, and time passes, different populations start to become genetically distinct. None of this is controversial.
I'd be a lot more thankful if they minded their own business a lot more. We have laws to deal with problems. If there isn't a problem, law enforcement doesn't need to worry about it. When a problem happens, we want police to come and enforce the laws we made to deal with the problems.
Laws are not intended to be edicts from on high that must be followed all the time everywhere. Example: We criminalize drugs because people do stupid shit on them. So if you get caught doing stupid shit (i.e. causing a problem), and we find out that you have drugs on you, now we have a rule to point to to solve the problem. Looking around for drugs where there are no problems is ridiculous.
We have laws against drink driving because it causes problems. But stopping every single person on a road and breathalyzing them is actually causing a problem, not solving it. (Cue someone whose mom was killed by a drunk driver and blah blah blah -- it's impossible to stop problems before they begin because we have no idea when there is actually going to be a problem -- don't complain to me, complain to physics; I didn't invent linear time).
So why don't people thank the cops that much? Because most of our run-ins with them are negative.
Over here in Japan, the cops are useless. Useless. But at least they are usually very polite and professional and quick with a smile and walking around on foot. They also have super-detailed maps. I think a huge part of their job is giving directions. They suck at the "protect" part, but I have to say, if I have to choose, I'll take the "serve" over the "protect." This is all the more true in the US, where we can carry guns and we have pretty decent self-defense protections.
I'm sure their jobs suck, but no one held a gun to their head and told them to go to police academy, and they certainly don't have to take it out on me.
It doesn't matter WHY something doesn't work right; it only matters that it doesn't work right.
I got off the Mac 10 years ago because I got sick of trying to explain why I couldn't do X, Y or Z and realized I didn't care why. When you think offering a reason for a failure excuses the failure, you are a zealot. All Linux users and most Mac users are zealots. They don't care if the cat catches the mouse, only that the cat is a penguin or a... blue face or something.
That being said, as of 6 months ago, I'm back on the Mac for the same reasons I left it. I got tired of not being able to do things on Windows, and Apple's hardware has taken a nice leap forward in its move to Intel and OSX is damned nice now.
Linux, although I have installed it many times, although I now keep an Ubuntu virtual machine in VMware Fusion, has never been an option. I don't care why it doesn't work. I don't care to spend a week digging through manpages and forums "learning" just so I can watch a DVD. The simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't work perfectly, and no one but a hobbyist/zealot cares why.
When Linux outpaces OSX in what it offers, hassle-free, then I'll happily switch. That's my ideal future, in fact. I don't like being Apple's bitch any more than I did MS's. But Linux is just plain Not Ready for the Desktop.
Cue a bunch of people who know C and/or are sysadmins talking about how they have been using it on their desktops for five years, completely missing the point...
China's economy is pretty precarious as it is, it's not going to take a lot for them to see the sort of downturn which we in the US can only dream of.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to back that up.
The RMB is seriously undervalued. The PRC government has tacked it to 8 RMB to the USD. So whether the dollar goes up or down, building things in China costs the same.
So, that added to the fact that Chinese factories have gotten very serious about delivering whatever you want for a great price (everything from crappy little plastic trinkets to textiles to high-tech products) with unbelievable turnaround means that they will continue to get all of our manufacturing business.
But here's the thing. When you build your iPhone in China, those people learn how to build iPhones. Even ignoring knockoffs, there is a massive leak of expertise going into China. The Chinese government has also made high-tech research a major goal, and funds it lavishly. They are soaking up the world's knowledge.
What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing! In fact, it's wonderful! The more minds we have playing the tech game, the faster we as a species can develop!
The problem, however, is that it's not just soaking up knowledge. It's soaking up dependency and money. If the PRC were to open the RMB right now, its value would rise significantly, and it'd start being cheaper to build elsewhere, so they don't. Bad for the locals, good for the foreigners.
So what happens when all the manufacturing and knowledge is pretty safely situated in China?
Open the RMB. Its value skyrockets, and now we (first-worlders) can't afford to build stuff there, we don't have any factories ourselves (and couldn't run them out of a wet paper bag even if we did), and most of the advanced research and development is done in China.
Congratulations, greedy corporations, you just sunk Western society and made us the economic slaves of China. We can only hope they will be as kind a superpower as the US has been (because, as massive superpowers go, the US really is probably the most benevolent), but Chinese history does not really bear that out.
Never trust a country whose name means "central nation."
I don't want to be a fearmonger, but as a guy who has many, many college credits in Chinese history, I think I see where this is going. Don't get me wrong--China is an amazing country, and Chinese people's business sense is highly compatible with that of the West. I'm so glad to see them on the rise, after 500 years of decline. But we need to protect our hydes a bit more, IMO.
There's nothing we can do about China becoming the Next Big Thing, but we need to make sure that when it happens we don't turn into The Thing That Died.
Slashdot Mirror
I am so happy this is the first posting up.
I have bought almost exclusively from Mwave for over 10 years as well, and they never cease to impress me with their fantastic service and support. They don't have the selection of NewEgg (my second-favorite), but their prices are reasonable, their service fast, and they handle returns and even building support (for when things don't go as smoothly as they should).
I've been relying on their mobo/CPU/RAM bundles for system building for years. They'll also put the parts together and bench them to make sure they all work and all work together before you get it, or they'll just ship them put together. I think this costs like $5.
It's not like you can't just slap the stuff together yourself, it's just kinda nice when you're doing a new system build to know for sure that the mobo, CPU, and RAM are all known-good, so if you have any issues along the way, you can safely assume it's not them. It's also nice for novice builders who are uncomfortable putting the expensive parts together.
Highly, highly recommend.
I live in Japan. The TV here is both more banal and pointless than that of the US, and infinitely more entertaining, without making me feel dirty afterward. I can sit down for an hour of London Boots or Downtown Deluxe or Toneruzu (Tunnels) and when it's up, I'm like, "whoah, nothing happened in the last hour, the TV station spent about $1.27 on the show, and I giggled and guffawed and sometimes felt real empathy for the people I was watching."
While they don't have the sometimes fantastic episodic storytelling we've developed in the US, they have talk shows and other unscripted TV down pat.
Cory Doctorow has enough publicity for his shitty books, thanks.
Global Warming Industry
There's mad cash to be made in asking people not to drive their cars or run their AC so much. Telling people to stop spending money on energy is big bucks, man.
Amen. I liked the game fine, but come on: it's just a regular shooter. It was just System Shock 2 with better hardware available. SS2 was innovative in the day, but now it just kind of felt blah.
Now Mass Effect... That's some good gaming.
I live in Japan.
I can't get SMS from people who aren't on the same carrier, let alone in another country.
In fact, I was really surprised recently to find out that anyone could SMS people in other countries (I knew the same-carrier business was just Japan).
This has absolutely nothing to do with "West" vs. "East." It's different companies deciding what services to offer or not. Sheesh.
I didn't say I hadn't heard of them; I said I hadn't heard anything about them. As in, "who the hell cares what RIM and Nokia are working on; they're stagnant."
a washed-up, gothy 'heroine' from the previous game
Um, yeah, that would be April Ryan, the main character of the series. She didn't start out washed up or cynical, and her character arc is very well written to get her to that point. And, um... Not gothy. I say this as a recovering goth myself.
...a generically plucky artist...
Let's see... Zoe has a failed relationship, a strained friendship, family problems, and is being sucked into a corporate/technological/mystical conspiracy... Yeah, I guess she was pretty plucky, considering. Also, she is a doppelganger of April Ryan in the first game. She's a little more fleshed out as a character, but the point is pitting what is basically who April used to be against who she has become. It's, um, pretty ambitious for a video game. Things haven't worked out for April; will they work out differently for Zoe? Will they work out at all?
...and a generically honorable warrior who discovers that his government is corrupt.
You can't just put "generically" in front of anything and suddenly make it cliche. Kian is not very well-developed as a character, to be sure, but I think he is going to be the main one for the next installment. However, I'm trying to think of how many times in literature I've run into a holy warrior (this isn't just a government; it's a religious government, obviously referring to Islamic theocracies under Sharia Law, but if they expanded like the Catholic church) who is losing faith in his bosses, but for whom that also means losing his faith in his religion...
I started out this post kind of wanting to just poke fun at you, but now as I write it, I'm wondering: Do you even know what "generic" means? I can't think of a single generic thing about The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. I'm sure there are other stories that have similar elements, but it's not like a typical FPS "story" where there's a maverick warrior who doesn't take no guff or something. These are very well-developed characters, especially considering the nascent state of the medium.
They inhabit a story that wanders at best, is never resolved in any way, and cuts off at not just one, but three separate cliffhangers.
Let's see... Three characters, three cliffhangers... Third installment in the works... Do you even know what a cliffhanger is for?
I mean, if you didn't like the game, that's fair enough, but... Ummm... It was anything but "generic."
In my opinion, Ragnar Tornquist is one of the only guys taking video games seriously as a narrative medium, and is doing a great job.
This whole thing is baffling. Here's why:
1) A LAN party? Are you serious? Is it 1998? Don't they have broadband where you live? And Skype? Who the hell still does LAN parties?
2) You're going to let 60 people you don't know into your house, along with thousands of dollars of equipment that sucks a lot of power, and you're worried that someone is going to swipe your Bed Head (theft's a lot less awesome when it's happening to you)? There are many, many failure points for what you are proposing; theft actually seems pretty low on the list.
3) Finally, even in the olden days when I used to organize these things, we stopped doing them in people's houses years before we stopped altogether. If someone lives in a complex with a clubhouse, check that out. Or hell, rent a conference room at a local hotel. The former works great because they usually have kitchens with fridges, etc.
Silliest question ever.
My 1.5 year MacBook still looks brand new, and I take it to work with me every day. It's my main work machine, in fact, and it's been all over the world with me, and is headed off to a conference in Germany the day after tomorrow...
So um... YMMV?
The law specifically includes "depictions" of child pornography under the umbrella of "child pornography," which very clearly indicates to me that these laws have nothing to do with protecting children (which is what we all want), but, rather, with thoughtcrime (which is what Christofascists want).
When I had a band, I wanted to call our next EP "This is Child Pornography," but none of my bandmates thought it was a good idea.
But that, right there, is why these issues aren't solved. People are offended by child pornography. Or, actually, I think, since they keep finding people who have it, people know that they are supposed to be offended by it. No one wants to come out and say the bleeding obvious, that these laws have way overstepped their bounds and are eating into our basic human rights and do nothing to protect children anyway, because it looks like you're defending people who screw little kids and take pictures of it (I also am upset by the fact that "child" here is often extended to people well into their teens who are likely sexually active anyway).
Anyway, I hope this gets put to bed. If they want to get in there that badly, they can brute-force it, just like a safe. Hell, as long as they can break the encryption before the statute of limitations runs out, they'll be fine. But compelling the guy to cough up the password is a pretty clear violation of the 5th amendment.
Easy. The lexicogrammar of "begs the question" makes far more sense in its common usage as being synonymous with "raises the question." Some situation seems to be begging for someone to ask a particular question. The original meaning of this idiomatic expression, having to do with circular logic, does not as clearly follow from the individual meanings of those words. Also, to be honest, I have never, ever heard a usage of the original meaning. Ever.
I am an applied linguist by training and trade, and you know what? I have heard this "incorrectly" used at conferences. Face it. The meaning has changed. No one even knows what the original was.
"Intensive purposes" is different because it makes no sense. When we say "for all intents and purposes," we are making a large, sweeping, general claim. This is the opposite of what is implied by "intensive purposes," which would denote some sort of specific, focused usage of whatever it is we're talking about.
Also, someone who uses "intensive purposes" needs their hearing checked. There is no /v/ in there. When someone uses "intensive purposes," it implies that they not only don't listen closely but that they also don't even think about what they are saying. It implies a sort of illiteracy. It does not reflect well on someone's education, because educated people do not talk like that.
Educated people do, however, use "begs the question" "incorrectly." So it gets a pass.
Language is one of the clearest tribal identifiers. Standard usage identifies to others that you are the same tribe and affords you the benefits thereof. We can yammer on about elitism, but that's just plain how it works. In every society. Learning to use language in a standard way tells others who have done the same that you are brethren and, like them, have spent the time and effort "correcting" your behavior.
None of this is really about "correct" usage, it's about "standard" and "accepted" usage. "Begs the question" passes; "intensive purposes" doesn't. The former is an interesting evolution of the usage of an idiomatic phrase; the latter, indication that someone is kinda a moron.
Is it American chauvinism that makes so many here discount RIM & Nokia?
No... I imagine it has something to do with the fact that I haven't heard either of those company names since I-don't-know-when.
I retouch photos not so that I don't remember the people (okay, let's be clear here: ex-girlfriends) in them, but so that I'm the only one who does. I started editing my parents physical photo albums years and years ago.
Here was my thinking: At some point, I'm going to get married. And at some point, my mom is going to whip this album out to show my wife, and there are going to be pictures of the girl I almost married on a family trip. It's going to be awkward and I will be expected to comment somehow on that picture. I don't want to do that.
So I just remove the girl.
Now that memory belongs only to me. I don't have to disavow my feelings at the time or faux-chuckle at how young I was. The awkward little scene never happens, and I can keep my memory--my bittersweet memory. That trip, as I really experienced it, becomes mine and mine alone. No one, I feel, has a right to share in it if I don't want them to. And I don't want them to.
Looking through my photographic history, you'd think the only girl I ever dated was my wife. The public record is cleaned, and other people's memories can fade. My wife doesn't need to know about my relationships before I met her. She doesn't want to know. And when the record has been cleaned, she doesn't have to know.
But I can remember the happy times, the sad times, the troubled and confused times. I keep those with me. They're mine. They are a part of me, and I don't want to forget. I don't want to change them, and if no one asks about them, I don't have to.
If a photo is causing me undue pain, I seldom throw it away. I just file it. At some point, I can look at it again and it won't hurt. When I die, someone will find the box, I'm sure, and wonder who these people were. And that's the best of all. They won't know. They don't need to know. They're mine.
Yeah... I don't want to talk to the person behind the counter. I use the machine whenever possible.
My wife can't figure them out, though.
Where I want a social experience in a store is when I want to ask someone where something is because they move things around every night, sometimes according to utterly bizarre logic. Then I can't find anyone.
By the way do they love it because they're trying to justify the big spend to themselves?
Y'know, I'm not saying that it's perfect; I'm not even saying it's great. I don't know; I don't have one. But I am so tired of reading this ridiculous theory on Slashdot.
The vast, vast, vast majority of people do not care about the same things as the Slashdot readership. They do not care about how many arcane features a product has. They care about how well it does what they want it to do.
People whine on about the iPod's lack of features, like the fact it doesn't play FLAC or Ogg. But you know what? No one uses those formats. Just geeks.
Again, don't get me wrong; I wish it played FLAC--I don't like having to rip to Apple Lossless, which means I may have rip it again in the future if I move to something else, but the simple fact of the matter is that I'm in a tiny minority there. Hell, I'm in a tiny minority of people who change the default ripping settings in iTunes, or even know where they are or what they do.
Apple products are expensive (well, except the iPhone 3G, which is what we're talking about here --The phone is a zero-yen phone here in Japan!), yet people still buy them and buy them again and buy them again. They have many chances not to buy them, but they do the math and decide that what they like about the devices is worth the money. Feature lists do not a good product make. Ease of use of useful features do.
My phone right now does more than the iPhone, aside from the browser. But even as a geek, I don't use much of anything other than the phone. Why? Because it's such a hassle to use and get around in its horrid menu structure that it's just plain not worth the time and frustration. When I look at the iPhone, I can find what I'm looking for right away without ever having used the device before.
People like this.
I have no doubt whatsoever that there are "better phones out there"... for you. But you are not most people. You have a specific feature list in your head that you view as essential. Fine. Most people just want a phone that doesn't frustrate them to the point of throwing it.
Finally, just for the record, all my iPhone-carrying friends? All six of them? Every one of them is a professional software developer, most of which work for really big IT companies. They have far more tech-geek cred than I do, and know a lot more about cellphones than I do. And yet, they love the phone.
The connectivity issue is a big one... For the people experiencing it. My friends aren't. Also, here in Japan, I've heard nothing about the issue. Not a peep. And I spent awhile this morning searching the Japanese support forums. I found one thread complaining about low signal strength, with a bunch of replies saying they didn't have any trouble. But we've had 3G for a really long time here. I suspect that's the difference really. Network woes.
Um. Everyone I know who has one loves it? And none of them are Mac users?
My first thought was human sacrifice. Buried alive.
Japanese is a language isolate, which some linguists have attempted to group under the Altaic umbrella (e.g. Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian languages) but with little acceptance.
1) I am an applied (not theoretical, I'll admit) linguist, and I was taught in several classes in both my undergrad and grad programs that Japanese is an Altaic language. Maybe that's a sampling error, but as a fellow linguist, I have never witnessed any controversy over this. Granted, it isn't my area. A quick Wikipedia check mentions controversy, but also points out that most Altaicists include Korean, Japanese, and even Ainu in the Altaic family. It doesn't really sound to me like there is "little acceptance" of this classification.
2) The Altaic family is still the best fit, however, as it has the language moving over northeast Asia, down the Korean peninsula, and then hopping down to Kyushu (the southernmost main island of the Japanese archipelago), where the Korean population exploded due to the much better conditions for rice farming and the application of the rice farming techniques they had developed in the much harsher Korean climate. They started moving northward, taking the land over from the Ainu and incorporating some of their lexicon (just as we Americans did with the Native Americans) as they went. Finally, as an established political power, they began interfacing with China frequently, and adopted their writing system, bringing in Chinese lexicon and morphology, allowing for new Japanese words built from Chinese morphemes (just as English regularly does with Greek morphemes). The lexicon is an interesting hybrid, but the syntactic structure is, and always has been, pretty obviously of Korean origin, and I don't think it's terribly uncontroversial to say that Korean is part of the Altaic family.
3) Finally, whether linguists get sick of hearing language grouping identified with genes or not (I work with nothing but linguists, and it's the first time I've ever heard anyone bemoan this kind of comment) doesn't really matter. Languages are spoken by people. They pass them on to their children during the critical period of language acquisition (now we're getting into my field). Languages do not, of course, have anything to do with genes, but they are highly correlated with them. People breed with those who speak the same language as they most frequently. They then pass that language on to their children. Of course language follows genes. That doesn't mean you can't get genetically different groups speaking the same language family, because of course you can, but to imply that it has nothing to do with genes is silly. Languages don't move by themselves. People carry them. And as people move, and time passes, different populations start to become genetically distinct. None of this is controversial.
Sorry, but you just quoted McCain being facetious as though he were serious, meaning you didn't get the joke. It's funny. Laugh.
His technological platform, however... Not so funny.
their job is entirely thankless.
I'd be a lot more thankful if they minded their own business a lot more. We have laws to deal with problems. If there isn't a problem, law enforcement doesn't need to worry about it. When a problem happens, we want police to come and enforce the laws we made to deal with the problems.
Laws are not intended to be edicts from on high that must be followed all the time everywhere. Example: We criminalize drugs because people do stupid shit on them. So if you get caught doing stupid shit (i.e. causing a problem), and we find out that you have drugs on you, now we have a rule to point to to solve the problem. Looking around for drugs where there are no problems is ridiculous.
We have laws against drink driving because it causes problems. But stopping every single person on a road and breathalyzing them is actually causing a problem, not solving it. (Cue someone whose mom was killed by a drunk driver and blah blah blah -- it's impossible to stop problems before they begin because we have no idea when there is actually going to be a problem -- don't complain to me, complain to physics; I didn't invent linear time).
So why don't people thank the cops that much? Because most of our run-ins with them are negative.
Over here in Japan, the cops are useless. Useless. But at least they are usually very polite and professional and quick with a smile and walking around on foot. They also have super-detailed maps. I think a huge part of their job is giving directions. They suck at the "protect" part, but I have to say, if I have to choose, I'll take the "serve" over the "protect." This is all the more true in the US, where we can carry guns and we have pretty decent self-defense protections.
I'm sure their jobs suck, but no one held a gun to their head and told them to go to police academy, and they certainly don't have to take it out on me.
I have no idea what you're talking about. When I bought this Mac Pro a few months back, I just moved all my drives into it from my old PC.
Straight across.
Just like that.
It's SATA and ATA, you see...
God bless you.
It doesn't matter WHY something doesn't work right; it only matters that it doesn't work right.
I got off the Mac 10 years ago because I got sick of trying to explain why I couldn't do X, Y or Z and realized I didn't care why. When you think offering a reason for a failure excuses the failure, you are a zealot. All Linux users and most Mac users are zealots. They don't care if the cat catches the mouse, only that the cat is a penguin or a... blue face or something.
That being said, as of 6 months ago, I'm back on the Mac for the same reasons I left it. I got tired of not being able to do things on Windows, and Apple's hardware has taken a nice leap forward in its move to Intel and OSX is damned nice now.
Linux, although I have installed it many times, although I now keep an Ubuntu virtual machine in VMware Fusion, has never been an option. I don't care why it doesn't work. I don't care to spend a week digging through manpages and forums "learning" just so I can watch a DVD. The simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't work perfectly, and no one but a hobbyist/zealot cares why.
When Linux outpaces OSX in what it offers, hassle-free, then I'll happily switch. That's my ideal future, in fact. I don't like being Apple's bitch any more than I did MS's. But Linux is just plain Not Ready for the Desktop.
Cue a bunch of people who know C and/or are sysadmins talking about how they have been using it on their desktops for five years, completely missing the point...
China's economy is pretty precarious as it is, it's not going to take a lot for them to see the sort of downturn which we in the US can only dream of.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to back that up.
The RMB is seriously undervalued. The PRC government has tacked it to 8 RMB to the USD. So whether the dollar goes up or down, building things in China costs the same.
So, that added to the fact that Chinese factories have gotten very serious about delivering whatever you want for a great price (everything from crappy little plastic trinkets to textiles to high-tech products) with unbelievable turnaround means that they will continue to get all of our manufacturing business.
But here's the thing. When you build your iPhone in China, those people learn how to build iPhones. Even ignoring knockoffs, there is a massive leak of expertise going into China. The Chinese government has also made high-tech research a major goal, and funds it lavishly. They are soaking up the world's knowledge.
What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing! In fact, it's wonderful! The more minds we have playing the tech game, the faster we as a species can develop!
The problem, however, is that it's not just soaking up knowledge. It's soaking up dependency and money. If the PRC were to open the RMB right now, its value would rise significantly, and it'd start being cheaper to build elsewhere, so they don't. Bad for the locals, good for the foreigners.
So what happens when all the manufacturing and knowledge is pretty safely situated in China?
Open the RMB. Its value skyrockets, and now we (first-worlders) can't afford to build stuff there, we don't have any factories ourselves (and couldn't run them out of a wet paper bag even if we did), and most of the advanced research and development is done in China.
Congratulations, greedy corporations, you just sunk Western society and made us the economic slaves of China. We can only hope they will be as kind a superpower as the US has been (because, as massive superpowers go, the US really is probably the most benevolent), but Chinese history does not really bear that out.
Never trust a country whose name means "central nation."
I don't want to be a fearmonger, but as a guy who has many, many college credits in Chinese history, I think I see where this is going. Don't get me wrong--China is an amazing country, and Chinese people's business sense is highly compatible with that of the West. I'm so glad to see them on the rise, after 500 years of decline. But we need to protect our hydes a bit more, IMO.
There's nothing we can do about China becoming the Next Big Thing, but we need to make sure that when it happens we don't turn into The Thing That Died.
I live in the Tokyo area, and have spent a week in Beijing, in January.
Tokyo is easily a million, billion times cleaner.
It. Is. Smog. Blow your nose after a day of walking around just about any Chinese city. "Mist" doesn't leave black streaks in your mucus.