Maybe you're the Slashdotter whose post to the same effect convinced me 6 months ago to switch my whole house to CFLs. If so, thank you for an entire house full of bulbs that start out so dim you can hardly see by them and take around 5 minutes to get all the way on.
Thank you for the need to turn on my bathroom mirror lights before I get into the shower else I won't be able to see to shave afterward.
Thank you for, despite buying the "warmest" CFLs available, my house being lit now in a soul-crushing bluish hue with sharp, mean shadows.
Listen up folks: CFLs SUCK. Do not buy them for any other reason than environmental sentimentality. They won't change your electrical bill if you don't really have that many (and certainly not enough to offset their initial cost) and will make your house look like crap. Oh, and after all that money and trouble, you won't be able to convince your wife to let you switch back until the damned things die--which will be after you, since the flourescent hell you'll be living in will have driven you to suicide long before.
They are only slave wages if you convert them into "first-world" currency. Chinese workers are paid very competitively within their economy. Just wish people would stop saying that. We have cheap products because we're paying for them in RMB! The pollution point is totally valid, however.
I think the peaks and valleys really help. I am teaching uni now, and after 2 years of this, I can't figure out how anyone could work full-time all the time. I still work during the vacations, but it's a few hours a day, as needed/desired. It gives me a chance to pursue other interests, hang out with my wife, and re-focus for the next semester. I live in a tiny apartment. We have a bed and a sofa and a dining room table. I have a desk and a couple guitars. All our stuff is nice--there just isn't very much of it. Cleaning the house takes 45 minutes, tops.
More people would be wise to "simplify, simplify," just as Thoreau and the Buddha and Jesus suggested.
Um, he WAS doing something suspicious. He was illegally making millions of dollars while ostensibly here (I live in Japan) studying. He's an ass. Also, you have to understand that in Japan a lot of the human and drug trafficking is done by Chinese Triads. If you are a bank worker here (probably the post office bank), and you have a 20something Chinese guy coming in every few weeks and sending tens of thousands of dollars to China, yeah, you're gonna be suspicious.
How exactly is this not entrapment? I'd love for those with a legal education to explain to me how and why this is not a Thought Crime.
I don't think it can be done. This is entrapment, pure and simple. It is a thought crime, pure and simple.
I have a friend whose brother-in-law, aged 19, just out of high school, not that bright, thought he had a girlfriend he met online. They'd been chatting and flirting for months. She finally arranged a meetup; he got all dandied up and drove down to finally meet her, and was arrested. Because the 14-year-old high school freshman was actually a police officer.
So now he's on sex offender lists, and is considered a sexual predator. But on top of all this legal stuff, he is suffering a broken heart, because he actually thought he had a girlfriend (again, he's not very bright, and very naive). Even if this guy did go meet up with a real high school freshman, where the hell is the harm? A girl chats you up for months and then wants to see you, why wouldn't you? Especially if she's only 5 years your junior? This is entrapment.
Even if he were 45, though, it'd be entrapment. We might not like the idea of 45-year-old guys picking up 14-year-old girls, but in any case, we are dealing with two people who are, biologically speaking, adults, and who, in not too many years past, might have even been eligible for marriage to one another. The age difference does not magically make a sexual liaison between them "rape," and in these cases, the guy probably has no intention of forcing himself upon the girl; he thinks he's being invited. People's basic sexual drives will always trump legality with a little enticement, and these cops give way more than a little. I don't care what age it is; this is dirty pool entrapment.
It is also a thought crime. Basically, we are arresting these people for wanting to have sex with people the law and their parents have decided is too young for them to have sex with. Even if we as a society have decided that physical sexual maturity does not imply ownership of one's body (something I find baffling, and which seems to have a lot more to do with puritanical superstition than logic--but I'm in the minority there), no one is having any sex in this case.
This is part of the "easier target" syndrome I see in police work all the time. We as a society don't like older people having sex with people still in public education, but those people are hard to catch, so let's arrest people who can be convinced to meet up with a girl after months of enticement because this identifies them as the type of person who might do that. We as a society don't like parents who sexually abuse their kids, but those people are hard to find, so let's go after people who look at pictures of them doing it (much easier target because there are more of them, due to the endless non-destructive copying ability of computers and the internet), because those people seem to be turned on by that kind of thing. We as a society don't like people who peddle poison, but those people are hard to find, so let's go after the people who buy it, because they are a lot more numerous. We as a society don't like people who hijack planes and crash them into buildings, but those people are hard to find, so let's just treat everyone who gets on a plane like a terrorist.
I agree with or understand most of the rules and laws of society, and subject myself to them even if I don't, because that is what being a member of society means. But where I start to lose my willingness to support them is when they are so hard to enforce that we actually have to search for people violating them. Rules and laws are simply meant to keep the peace. They are not meant to be moral edicts. Basically, if no one is complaining, there is no problem. Laws are meant to deal with problems. More and more, police work seems to be focused on causing problems so that they can enforce the law.
What you're talking about there is called "problem-based learning," which is used extensively in law and med school, but not many other places. At the uni where I teach language, we use it for that, with some success. The problem is that it requires a high degree of intrinsic motivation on the part of the students. Students who really launch into whatever ridiculously hard problem you give them (usually done in groups) get TONS from it; students who don't not only don't get anything, they screw up the whole group.
Education is one of these things that everyone has an opinion on, but until you jump into the classroom and give it a shot, you have no idea how frickin' difficult it is. There are so many factors to deal with, it's insane. It gets easier as you get up the levels, though, because you are dealing with an ever more rarified and self-selected group of learners.
I would probably lose a lot of respect from some of my more altruistic peers if they read this, but the "problem" with education is, and always has been, bad students. This is not to say bad PEOPLE, but people who don't really care about learning but whom we try to get to do it anyway because a learned society is better to live in than an unlearned one. At the early levels of education, this seems to have a lot to do with home environment--learned attitudes toward education, but at the higher levels it has more to do with people who just want the piece of paper, but who probably don't really deserve it.
The value of a college education decreases to zero when we expect--almost require--everyone to have one. In truth, there are not many jobs whose duties benefit much from what is learned in college. Vocational schools should really take their place, but there is a stigma attached to them. It's a neverendingly complex problem, education.
Thank god for some sanity. I'd also like to point out that we're all geeks here, and if you can't figure out how to open your iPod yourself and replace the battery (or the hard drive--my 4th gen. is now 40GB after I destroyed the old hard drive with a very nasty drop with many bounces afterward), you need to turn in your geek badge. All it takes to open an iPod is a thin screwdriver and some guitar picks.
You are a moron. I'd like to be more civil about it, but, really... Wow, you're really stupid.
Let me just try to enumerate the ways, although I am sure to miss many.
If you're a programmer, do you get to grade your programming?
Are you honestly comparing educating human beings to programming computers? Would that it were so simple! People are not great databases waiting for entries; they are complex biological organisms who just happen to have evolved the ability to do fairly advanced computation and store vast amounts of information. Our cognitive are a side-effect of evolution, and are therefore rather difficult to use to our advantage.
Information is not passed from the teacher to the student, or from the book to the student; it is passed from the student's experience of it to the student himself. The job of a teacher is to attempt to enhance that otherwise natural input to improve the chances of it being encoded with some other experience--an emotion, for example--which is likely to make an appropriately-strong neurological/chemical trace as to make the data retrievable (or, to be more precise, to make it more reconstructable) at some future time. The ability to do a statistically significantly better/faster/more complete job of that than just looking at a book is far more art than science, and is in no small part predicted by experience as well as innate talent. It also helps if the teacher is funny (seriously--people will encode the funniness and information simultaneously).
The idea that a teacher causes learning is--anecdotally and empirically speaking--ludicrous. Even the best teachers simply make the students more likely to learn by themselves.
Furthermore, tests only measure students' ability to perform well on the tests. True, we (and I'm wearing my psychometric hat here) work hard to ensure that, for example, a vocabulary test appears to address a different "construct" (the technical term for a field of knowledge which may or may not exist in reality but has been socially constructed and is therefore meaningful) than a grammar test. We do not want to see those numbers all mixed up and overly predictive of each other. But at the end of the day, we're never 100% certain that our tests show anything at all, except that the people who get high scores do seem to be better at something than those who don't.
In the case above, however, I'm referring (very briefly) to the kind of work one does on medium-to-high-stakes tests. The amount of research involved can be daunting for every single item on the test. But if the test in question is supposed to do something like decide who will be good at this college or that college, then it's important that it not have too many problems (there are always a few, and by "a few" I mean "a lot").
The case of in-class achievement assessment measures, however, is totally different. These are low-stakes tests. They are intended to give the teacher (and only the teacher) an idea what his/her students got from his/her classes. Although they may be used for grading, their real purpose is to assess the class' effectiveness. We've all had teachers forgive a test or curve it after the fact; this is not due to stupidity or laziness; this is due to the fact that if the teacher sees a negative trend in the scores that cannot be accounted for by any other known factor, the likelihood is that something went wrong in the class (it could have been poor teaching; it could have been poor timing; it could have rained that day). One hopes that he/she attempts to address the gap between the expectations and the performance.
In the case of these low-stakes tests, the only person who can adequately do the assessment is the teacher.
In the case of what you seem to be talking about, criterion-referenced tests--perhaps exit criteria? I don't know if you even know what you mean--these are not given by the teachers. They are administered by the teachers, and not even
I've declared personal war on "rediculous" because it seems to me to be the most ridiculous of spelling mistakes on Slashdot. A lot of spelling errors are just poor memory or due to some sort of spelling pattern exception, and those are easily forgiven. But not this one. This one is indicative of taking the joke pronunciation "REE-diculous" as the real pronunciation (ruining the joke), and ignoring the fact that the word is the obvious morphological derivative of "ridicule." It's just the stupidest word to misspell.
I live in Japan. YOU wanna complain about lock-in? I'm stuck using phones no one else in the world has ever heard of, that are friggin' huge, friggin' heavy, and whose features are so locked down to prevent me using them without more money that I've been thinking of just giving up. When I first moved over here in 1998, I was blown away by the coolness of the phones. But the US has long since pulled ahead in hardware and service, while we over here in the land of the rising sun have our trousers falling 'round our knees from our giant telephones with tons of features we can't access. Don't complain!
Oh, and I'm gonna look at that remote. "Except the USA" is a little too sweeping a statement for my liking...
Remember, not everyone leases with a dollar buyout to ride the write off. There are many businesses that are working on a small(er) budget that will definately pay more for the transition.
The nitpicking line is now open... fire away.
Okay, since you asked, how 'bout this:
DEFINITELY!!! --And it doesn't matter how many Slashdotters spell it wrong, it just doesn't even make any sense with an A. You are making a statement that is limited and free of ambiguity --a FINITE statement, as opposed to the opposite, an IN-DE-FINITE statement.
Ummm... Except 100% on a console is only 100% on a PC for 6 months after the console first ships. The PC's 100% keeps moving. Granted, that's an added expense (the main one) of PC gaming, but until HDTV came out, it really didn't matter what graphics card your console had under the hood, you were going to be looking at crappy-ass TV resolution.
With the advent of HDTV, a lot of the arguments about resolution have been laid to rest... But it has actually re-opened the one about cost. I don't have an HDTV, and don't plan on buying one until my current, very nice, regular widescreen TV dies. And that's not going to be for a long time. I like my TV, and it was only $400 5 years ago (slightly used). I'm not too stoked about dropping $1k+ for a similar-sized HDTV, and replacing all my other stuff to take advantage of the HD-ness. We're talking a couple grand, and that's more than I really want to put into my living room. And I'm far from alone.
My PC, however, I use all day for work, keeping in touch with friends/family, reading, watching news... And the whole "rig" (excuse the fanboy term) cost me around $1k. Granted, I like to put a new $200 video card in it every year or so, but as I get older and become more of a casual gamer, I find that I'm a lot less worried about getting the best image in the world, because it's already so damned great.
All told, the quality argument is silly for technical reasons, and the technical reasons have now killled the cost argument as well! Even staying with the curve on the PC, the two likely balance out on cost, and the PC still edges out the console on quality.
All that being said, I'm hoping my wife gets me an Xbox360 for my birthday... There are some games on it I'd really like to play!
No, I meant hyperbolically. As in, "saying these cars get 3mpg is hyperbole." It is exagggerrrrated to make a point. Get your head out of the maths gutter.
It's a fair point you make, but which is worse? Driving a less efficient car for 20 years or a more efficient car for 20 years? They likely had comparable initial energy costs at the outset, but shouldn't the reduced energy cost of the newer vehicle be taken into account for the OVERALL energy cost of the vehicle? Even if we didn't personally drive these cars for that long (we've both sold since then), they are going to be on the road for that long, most likely (we're talking about Toyotas here).
There is no doubt that there are more economical things than buying a new car, but this discussion is limited to those who DO.
It's kind of unfair to say (hyperbolically, even) that these cars get 3mpg. Due to a lot of innovation in engines, the efficiency of some of these SUVs is comparable to older, much smaller cars. A couple years ago, my brother decided to buy a Toyota Harrier (sorry, I can't remember the US name for that--Lexus letters-and-numbers--it's the Lexus SUV with the clear taillights). I gave him the standard liberal anti-SUV lecture. He pulled the mpg stats on the Harrier and on my older Camry and emailed them to me. That SUV was a more economical car than my little sedan. I had to admit that it was ME, with my liberal/Buddhist "who needs newer stuff?" attitude that was actually doing more damage to the environment and to the geopolitical landscape. Oops.
...Yeah... See, you can't post 4 vague sentences and get angry at someone who shows all the holes in them. You needed to clarify; he doesn't particularly need to apologise. Also, I'm still not seeing any kind of reference to this study... Where was it published? I'd like to look at the numbers myself now, because these results don't fit with the experience or desires of anyone I know with an iPod... But that could be generational; I'm old. How 'bout a nice little reference to help us along?
I used to work in Powerbook support. Apple buyers are the most whiny, nitpicky, arrogant piece of crap customers you could ever have the misfortune to deal with. ANY LITTLE THING THAT DIDN'T LIVE UP TO THEIR IMPOSSIBLE EXPECTATIONS warranted a call to me (example: The lid squeaks when I open it. Give me a new one.). So now that they have the option of whining to the world when their mass-produced, sweatshop-supporting, oil guzzling, consumer toys aren't quite the Platonic ideal of whatever they are, you are going to see lists of complaints like this. I worked for Apple when their build quality was in the toilet (the 5300s) and even then, to be honest, they weren't that bad. The MacPress is just viscious. Apple products tend to be good. It's just that that reputation has driven a lot of whiny dorks in turtlenecks and tiny spectacles to bitch about every little thing that occupies their unburdened mind during their voluminous spare time.
Get whatever you LIKE, but don't listen to Apple customers. They are insane.
Taps is played without valves on a trumpet. Any trumpet player can play Taps on a bugle. That's why everyone is talking about trumpet players. Because they know more than you, not less.
Re:From the article
on
I, Woz
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I used to do tech support for Apple (outsourced). The official policy (from Apple) was "If Woz calls, give him whatever he wants and don't ask any questions." And one day I got him on the phone, he read me a list of SNs for out-of-warranty PowerBooks he needed repaired (he does something with PBs and disabled kids--or at least did in 1995), and I sent him the appropriate number of Airborne Express boxes for them to be pulled into NY for repair. It was one of the coolest calls I handled, cooler than when Howard Stern called for his friend who couldn't speak English. Both guys, BTW, were really really nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're the Slashdotter whose post to the same effect convinced me 6 months ago to switch my whole house to CFLs. If so, thank you for an entire house full of bulbs that start out so dim you can hardly see by them and take around 5 minutes to get all the way on.
Thank you for the need to turn on my bathroom mirror lights before I get into the shower else I won't be able to see to shave afterward.
Thank you for, despite buying the "warmest" CFLs available, my house being lit now in a soul-crushing bluish hue with sharp, mean shadows.
Listen up folks: CFLs SUCK. Do not buy them for any other reason than environmental sentimentality. They won't change your electrical bill if you don't really have that many (and certainly not enough to offset their initial cost) and will make your house look like crap. Oh, and after all that money and trouble, you won't be able to convince your wife to let you switch back until the damned things die--which will be after you, since the flourescent hell you'll be living in will have driven you to suicide long before.
They are only slave wages if you convert them into "first-world" currency. Chinese workers are paid very competitively within their economy. Just wish people would stop saying that. We have cheap products because we're paying for them in RMB! The pollution point is totally valid, however.
Next up: The rare element EXPLOSIUM is added to the list of prohibited items on planes!!!
I think the peaks and valleys really help. I am teaching uni now, and after 2 years of this, I can't figure out how anyone could work full-time all the time. I still work during the vacations, but it's a few hours a day, as needed/desired. It gives me a chance to pursue other interests, hang out with my wife, and re-focus for the next semester. I live in a tiny apartment. We have a bed and a sofa and a dining room table. I have a desk and a couple guitars. All our stuff is nice--there just isn't very much of it. Cleaning the house takes 45 minutes, tops.
More people would be wise to "simplify, simplify," just as Thoreau and the Buddha and Jesus suggested.
Um, he WAS doing something suspicious. He was illegally making millions of dollars while ostensibly here (I live in Japan) studying. He's an ass. Also, you have to understand that in Japan a lot of the human and drug trafficking is done by Chinese Triads. If you are a bank worker here (probably the post office bank), and you have a 20something Chinese guy coming in every few weeks and sending tens of thousands of dollars to China, yeah, you're gonna be suspicious.
How exactly is this not entrapment? I'd love for those with a legal education to explain to me how and why this is not a Thought Crime.
I don't think it can be done. This is entrapment, pure and simple. It is a thought crime, pure and simple.
I have a friend whose brother-in-law, aged 19, just out of high school, not that bright, thought he had a girlfriend he met online. They'd been chatting and flirting for months. She finally arranged a meetup; he got all dandied up and drove down to finally meet her, and was arrested. Because the 14-year-old high school freshman was actually a police officer.
So now he's on sex offender lists, and is considered a sexual predator. But on top of all this legal stuff, he is suffering a broken heart, because he actually thought he had a girlfriend (again, he's not very bright, and very naive). Even if this guy did go meet up with a real high school freshman, where the hell is the harm? A girl chats you up for months and then wants to see you, why wouldn't you? Especially if she's only 5 years your junior? This is entrapment.
Even if he were 45, though, it'd be entrapment. We might not like the idea of 45-year-old guys picking up 14-year-old girls, but in any case, we are dealing with two people who are, biologically speaking, adults, and who, in not too many years past, might have even been eligible for marriage to one another. The age difference does not magically make a sexual liaison between them "rape," and in these cases, the guy probably has no intention of forcing himself upon the girl; he thinks he's being invited. People's basic sexual drives will always trump legality with a little enticement, and these cops give way more than a little. I don't care what age it is; this is dirty pool entrapment.
It is also a thought crime. Basically, we are arresting these people for wanting to have sex with people the law and their parents have decided is too young for them to have sex with. Even if we as a society have decided that physical sexual maturity does not imply ownership of one's body (something I find baffling, and which seems to have a lot more to do with puritanical superstition than logic--but I'm in the minority there), no one is having any sex in this case.
This is part of the "easier target" syndrome I see in police work all the time. We as a society don't like older people having sex with people still in public education, but those people are hard to catch, so let's arrest people who can be convinced to meet up with a girl after months of enticement because this identifies them as the type of person who might do that. We as a society don't like parents who sexually abuse their kids, but those people are hard to find, so let's go after people who look at pictures of them doing it (much easier target because there are more of them, due to the endless non-destructive copying ability of computers and the internet), because those people seem to be turned on by that kind of thing. We as a society don't like people who peddle poison, but those people are hard to find, so let's go after the people who buy it, because they are a lot more numerous. We as a society don't like people who hijack planes and crash them into buildings, but those people are hard to find, so let's just treat everyone who gets on a plane like a terrorist.
I agree with or understand most of the rules and laws of society, and subject myself to them even if I don't, because that is what being a member of society means. But where I start to lose my willingness to support them is when they are so hard to enforce that we actually have to search for people violating them. Rules and laws are simply meant to keep the peace. They are not meant to be moral edicts. Basically, if no one is complaining, there is no problem. Laws are meant to deal with problems. More and more, police work seems to be focused on causing problems so that they can enforce the law.
To be honest, I don't care if an
What you're talking about there is called "problem-based learning," which is used extensively in law and med school, but not many other places. At the uni where I teach language, we use it for that, with some success. The problem is that it requires a high degree of intrinsic motivation on the part of the students. Students who really launch into whatever ridiculously hard problem you give them (usually done in groups) get TONS from it; students who don't not only don't get anything, they screw up the whole group.
Education is one of these things that everyone has an opinion on, but until you jump into the classroom and give it a shot, you have no idea how frickin' difficult it is. There are so many factors to deal with, it's insane. It gets easier as you get up the levels, though, because you are dealing with an ever more rarified and self-selected group of learners.
I would probably lose a lot of respect from some of my more altruistic peers if they read this, but the "problem" with education is, and always has been, bad students. This is not to say bad PEOPLE, but people who don't really care about learning but whom we try to get to do it anyway because a learned society is better to live in than an unlearned one. At the early levels of education, this seems to have a lot to do with home environment--learned attitudes toward education, but at the higher levels it has more to do with people who just want the piece of paper, but who probably don't really deserve it.
The value of a college education decreases to zero when we expect--almost require--everyone to have one. In truth, there are not many jobs whose duties benefit much from what is learned in college. Vocational schools should really take their place, but there is a stigma attached to them. It's a neverendingly complex problem, education.
Are you daft? A FLEET (of icebergs) IS heading north from Antarctica.
Don't do the Grammar Goosestep if you can't do the Subject-Verb Agreement... dance... of pain...
Thank god for some sanity. I'd also like to point out that we're all geeks here, and if you can't figure out how to open your iPod yourself and replace the battery (or the hard drive--my 4th gen. is now 40GB after I destroyed the old hard drive with a very nasty drop with many bounces afterward), you need to turn in your geek badge. All it takes to open an iPod is a thin screwdriver and some guitar picks.
You are a moron. I'd like to be more civil about it, but, really... Wow, you're really stupid.
Let me just try to enumerate the ways, although I am sure to miss many.
If you're a programmer, do you get to grade your programming?
Are you honestly comparing educating human beings to programming computers? Would that it were so simple! People are not great databases waiting for entries; they are complex biological organisms who just happen to have evolved the ability to do fairly advanced computation and store vast amounts of information. Our cognitive are a side-effect of evolution, and are therefore rather difficult to use to our advantage.
Information is not passed from the teacher to the student, or from the book to the student; it is passed from the student's experience of it to the student himself. The job of a teacher is to attempt to enhance that otherwise natural input to improve the chances of it being encoded with some other experience--an emotion, for example--which is likely to make an appropriately-strong neurological/chemical trace as to make the data retrievable (or, to be more precise, to make it more reconstructable) at some future time. The ability to do a statistically significantly better/faster/more complete job of that than just looking at a book is far more art than science, and is in no small part predicted by experience as well as innate talent. It also helps if the teacher is funny (seriously--people will encode the funniness and information simultaneously).
The idea that a teacher causes learning is--anecdotally and empirically speaking--ludicrous. Even the best teachers simply make the students more likely to learn by themselves.
Furthermore, tests only measure students' ability to perform well on the tests. True, we (and I'm wearing my psychometric hat here) work hard to ensure that, for example, a vocabulary test appears to address a different "construct" (the technical term for a field of knowledge which may or may not exist in reality but has been socially constructed and is therefore meaningful) than a grammar test. We do not want to see those numbers all mixed up and overly predictive of each other. But at the end of the day, we're never 100% certain that our tests show anything at all, except that the people who get high scores do seem to be better at something than those who don't.
In the case above, however, I'm referring (very briefly) to the kind of work one does on medium-to-high-stakes tests. The amount of research involved can be daunting for every single item on the test. But if the test in question is supposed to do something like decide who will be good at this college or that college, then it's important that it not have too many problems (there are always a few, and by "a few" I mean "a lot").
The case of in-class achievement assessment measures, however, is totally different. These are low-stakes tests. They are intended to give the teacher (and only the teacher) an idea what his/her students got from his/her classes. Although they may be used for grading, their real purpose is to assess the class' effectiveness. We've all had teachers forgive a test or curve it after the fact; this is not due to stupidity or laziness; this is due to the fact that if the teacher sees a negative trend in the scores that cannot be accounted for by any other known factor, the likelihood is that something went wrong in the class (it could have been poor teaching; it could have been poor timing; it could have rained that day). One hopes that he/she attempts to address the gap between the expectations and the performance.
In the case of these low-stakes tests, the only person who can adequately do the assessment is the teacher.
In the case of what you seem to be talking about, criterion-referenced tests--perhaps exit criteria? I don't know if you even know what you mean--these are not given by the teachers. They are administered by the teachers, and not even
I've declared personal war on "rediculous" because it seems to me to be the most ridiculous of spelling mistakes on Slashdot. A lot of spelling errors are just poor memory or due to some sort of spelling pattern exception, and those are easily forgiven. But not this one. This one is indicative of taking the joke pronunciation "REE-diculous" as the real pronunciation (ruining the joke), and ignoring the fact that the word is the obvious morphological derivative of "ridicule." It's just the stupidest word to misspell.
Ridiculous. Not Rediculous. Please.
I live in Japan. YOU wanna complain about lock-in? I'm stuck using phones no one else in the world has ever heard of, that are friggin' huge, friggin' heavy, and whose features are so locked down to prevent me using them without more money that I've been thinking of just giving up. When I first moved over here in 1998, I was blown away by the coolness of the phones. But the US has long since pulled ahead in hardware and service, while we over here in the land of the rising sun have our trousers falling 'round our knees from our giant telephones with tons of features we can't access. Don't complain!
Oh, and I'm gonna look at that remote. "Except the USA" is a little too sweeping a statement for my liking...
The nitpicking line is now open... fire away.
Okay, since you asked, how 'bout this:
DEFINITELY!!! --And it doesn't matter how many Slashdotters spell it wrong, it just doesn't even make any sense with an A. You are making a statement that is limited and free of ambiguity --a FINITE statement, as opposed to the opposite, an IN-DE-FINITE statement.
Get it? Now, 50 times on the chalkboard, please.
With the advent of HDTV, a lot of the arguments about resolution have been laid to rest... But it has actually re-opened the one about cost. I don't have an HDTV, and don't plan on buying one until my current, very nice, regular widescreen TV dies. And that's not going to be for a long time. I like my TV, and it was only $400 5 years ago (slightly used). I'm not too stoked about dropping $1k+ for a similar-sized HDTV, and replacing all my other stuff to take advantage of the HD-ness. We're talking a couple grand, and that's more than I really want to put into my living room. And I'm far from alone.
My PC, however, I use all day for work, keeping in touch with friends/family, reading, watching news... And the whole "rig" (excuse the fanboy term) cost me around $1k. Granted, I like to put a new $200 video card in it every year or so, but as I get older and become more of a casual gamer, I find that I'm a lot less worried about getting the best image in the world, because it's already so damned great.
All told, the quality argument is silly for technical reasons, and the technical reasons have now killled the cost argument as well! Even staying with the curve on the PC, the two likely balance out on cost, and the PC still edges out the console on quality.
All that being said, I'm hoping my wife gets me an Xbox360 for my birthday... There are some games on it I'd really like to play!
Preach it!
Well said.
No, I meant hyperbolically. As in, "saying these cars get 3mpg is hyperbole." It is exagggerrrrated to make a point. Get your head out of the maths gutter.
It's a fair point you make, but which is worse? Driving a less efficient car for 20 years or a more efficient car for 20 years? They likely had comparable initial energy costs at the outset, but shouldn't the reduced energy cost of the newer vehicle be taken into account for the OVERALL energy cost of the vehicle? Even if we didn't personally drive these cars for that long (we've both sold since then), they are going to be on the road for that long, most likely (we're talking about Toyotas here).
There is no doubt that there are more economical things than buying a new car, but this discussion is limited to those who DO.
It's kind of unfair to say (hyperbolically, even) that these cars get 3mpg. Due to a lot of innovation in engines, the efficiency of some of these SUVs is comparable to older, much smaller cars. A couple years ago, my brother decided to buy a Toyota Harrier (sorry, I can't remember the US name for that--Lexus letters-and-numbers--it's the Lexus SUV with the clear taillights). I gave him the standard liberal anti-SUV lecture. He pulled the mpg stats on the Harrier and on my older Camry and emailed them to me. That SUV was a more economical car than my little sedan. I had to admit that it was ME, with my liberal/Buddhist "who needs newer stuff?" attitude that was actually doing more damage to the environment and to the geopolitical landscape. Oops.
No.
...Yeah... See, you can't post 4 vague sentences and get angry at someone who shows all the holes in them. You needed to clarify; he doesn't particularly need to apologise. Also, I'm still not seeing any kind of reference to this study... Where was it published? I'd like to look at the numbers myself now, because these results don't fit with the experience or desires of anyone I know with an iPod... But that could be generational; I'm old. How 'bout a nice little reference to help us along?
I used to work in Powerbook support. Apple buyers are the most whiny, nitpicky, arrogant piece of crap customers you could ever have the misfortune to deal with. ANY LITTLE THING THAT DIDN'T LIVE UP TO THEIR IMPOSSIBLE EXPECTATIONS warranted a call to me (example: The lid squeaks when I open it. Give me a new one.). So now that they have the option of whining to the world when their mass-produced, sweatshop-supporting, oil guzzling, consumer toys aren't quite the Platonic ideal of whatever they are, you are going to see lists of complaints like this. I worked for Apple when their build quality was in the toilet (the 5300s) and even then, to be honest, they weren't that bad. The MacPress is just viscious. Apple products tend to be good. It's just that that reputation has driven a lot of whiny dorks in turtlenecks and tiny spectacles to bitch about every little thing that occupies their unburdened mind during their voluminous spare time.
Get whatever you LIKE, but don't listen to Apple customers. They are insane.
Beat me to it. In fact, it wasn't too long ago that we were talking about that correlation on this here internets...
Taps is played without valves on a trumpet. Any trumpet player can play Taps on a bugle. That's why everyone is talking about trumpet players. Because they know more than you, not less.
I used to do tech support for Apple (outsourced). The official policy (from Apple) was "If Woz calls, give him whatever he wants and don't ask any questions." And one day I got him on the phone, he read me a list of SNs for out-of-warranty PowerBooks he needed repaired (he does something with PBs and disabled kids--or at least did in 1995), and I sent him the appropriate number of Airborne Express boxes for them to be pulled into NY for repair. It was one of the coolest calls I handled, cooler than when Howard Stern called for his friend who couldn't speak English. Both guys, BTW, were really really nice.