There's a difference between everything in your entire list, and the aliens. They're a rather special case, as everything else there has a limited domain; they reside in a lake, a mountain range, or earth, all places where we can actually go. The aliens have a much greater place where they can be: space. They logically would have technology that lets them get here and back to their planet in a lifetime, or have probes that can move at a decent speed. We even came up with this idea for a show called "Star Trek" about interfering with planets that can't travel the way we can. OTOH, santa claus and the tooth fairy are things that people are known to have made up as kids' stories, as every kid finds out at one point. Santa is also said to have reindeer pull a flying sleigh full of toys, be a fat guy who comes down a chimney, and has elves working for him at the north pole. You really can't put alien visitation in the same category as those things given the likelihood of each actually happening, now can you?
Evidence of gravity was there, long before it was acknowledged that it was there. We had evidence of electricity for lots of time, before we acknowledged that it was there.
The point is, your attitude is one of dismissal, just as the GP was talking about. Your approach, like many people out there, is "Let's not investigate because I believe it can't happen or be true.". The more reasonable approach would be "There's a massive amount of space in the universe, and we haven't explored even the most minuscule fraction of it, and many of our calculations say there's bound to be something else out there. We should examine a random sample of these people to see if there's any evidence of them being in contact with aliens." This changee in attitude would lead to a massive amount of new findings, as people wouldn't dismiss things based on belief, which is exactly what you did to the possibility of aliens visiting us.
I don't think so. I'm not too familiar with it, but I know that there are "sprites", "elves", "blue jets", and "gigantic jets" related to lightning. The reddish ones are the sprites, while jets are typically blue. Sprites tend to be less focused than a jet; jets are more like lighting, in a line, whereas the sprites are more spread. The pictures I've seen show them as more of a mushroom cloud-shaped thing.
ID it not a theory, it is a religious/political ideology being presented as a theory that aims to explain the perceived weaknesses of science in order to advance the interests of certain groups and individuals.
Ever seen a bullshit statistic? Why do people make technologies that make their own lives easier (every technology was invented for this reason, BTW)? How about a company patenting an idea based on new research that they funded so they can profit?
Science is used to advance the interests of individuals just as much as ID. It just depends which side you're blind to. Religion is based on the premise "God loves everything". Science is based on "Let's learn". Both sides, at the core, are pure things, but they get corrupted by people into tools for their own benefit.
Anyone who has even heard the word iPod for like 5 years before the touch came out immediately thought "Music". Nobody went into the store to buy an iPod not having that in their head. The iPod touch isn't marketed or meant to be a phone. It's meant to play music.
OTOH, you'd be hard-pressed to find many people outside of tech circles that would even know about the N-series. There's no mainstream marketing for it, and it doesn't have a name that's a synonym for its' function.
My point is, Apple never had a hump to get over with the iPod touch. Nokia doesn't have a hump to get over with the N900 in terms of customers having the wrong expectations. Nokia does have to get the word out about this thing, but that's not quite what you were talking about.
But he's not. In fact, the App Store has been around long enough for the MTA to have made their own app and started selling it with ads on it. It's their fault for not jumping on an opportunity.
Doesn't matter what press the MTA faces. There's no other way to get that many people all around NYC. Roads are congested as-is. Take away the biggest form of mass transit there, and everyone will run back because nobody can get anywhere.
Lockups are a symptom, not a problem. The symptom could very well be associated with a USB IO problem, a (separate) wireless problem, and the famous "my-nose-is-stuffy" problem.
VISA and MC do NOT do chargebacks. Your finance company does.
On a side note, why does nobody know who is giving them credit? Everyone here seems to think it's Visa's/MC's fault. Visa doesn't do that. They issue the card system that banks and other financial divisions use to process credit, they don't actually issue the credit. Did anyone ever apply to Visa for a card? NO. Everyone in the history of Visa and Mastercard (AmEx is mostly a charge card company, and Discover uses its own bank for most of their cards) has applied to a financial division, whether that was a bank (Chase, Citi, etc.), or a financial division of a company (Sony has one, Dell does, etc.). Seriously, why does nobody seem to know who is trusting them with their money????
You do realize that banks run the support for your cards and that Visa/MC are pretty much just integration and processing companies, right? Did you think there was no reason why nobody in the world has a Visa or MC card that doesn't have a bank or company's name on it? Visa and MC have 0 to do with giving you credit. They have everything to do with making sure you can use them all over the place, and that every member bank and company communicates effectively through their system.
That's actually a good idea to implement as an option (with a fee for PayPal to do this, like you said) for purchases over. Thus, it will never happen under PayPal. Most likely, some startup will do it, and be bought out by PayPal, wherein the quality of the service continually falls.
Efficiency also includes how fast the code is written, and how hard it is to write. If it takes a month extra to save one cycle of clock time on code that doesn't do a large number of calculations, that's not efficiency. If it takes you 5 more employees with M.A.'s, that might not be efficient monetarily.
Coins are also heavier. Carry around 100 bucks in a $20 denomination of coins and of bills. Granted, it's not a huge amount of weight for your average person, but what would drug dealers do when they deal with full suitcases of money?
If they speed up economically, they have to speed up in the "think for yourselves" department, too. I mean, has anyone ever considered that Islamic culture in the area from Israel to Pakistan may not know things we take for granted? Our culture is completely overwhelmed with comedy; I don't know if they even really have comedy because of the large amount of crap they put up with on a daily basis. When people are struggling to survive, comedy doesn't really exist, and definitely not in the fashion we think of it. Therefore, when someone depicts Mohamed in a political cartoon or jokes about an old Imam or whatever, even though the statement is the same regardless of language, they don't have a context on which to put it other than "it's an insult to our religion". When their situation improves, they'll slowly realize that we didn't mean it as harm, as we have a much, much different culture than they do.
I think his point was that if you don't have capitalistic opportunity, you don't have the ability to make money via computers, thus it won't help 3rd world nations without said opportunity whatsoever economically to have computers.
Now, indirectly, I think computers would help them, but not over the shot term. Whenever information spreads, it helps to topple dictators. Computers facilitate this, so it could very well help them out of their situation, but not in such a clear-cut way as economically.
Honestly, if a company is going to completely add a new continent to a game (i.e. WoW), then that's fair game for an expansion pack. When you pull some shit like Microsoft did with MechWarrior 4 (5 new mechs for 15 bucks! They pulled this one TWICE!), you're on the other extreme. There's a very blurred, large gray area between these two. If you're going to add 50% more hours of gameplay, with 30% more new types of enemies, and a large smattering of new weapons and armor, you're probably in the clear for an expansion pack. It's when the expansion pack becomes tiny, doesn't add anything to the actual gameplay, and they charge an extraordinary amount of money for a little nothing of content that it becomes stupid. Let's put it this way: if you can build the content in a week on a moddable platform, it's probably not worth 1/6th of the cost of the game.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between everything in your entire list, and the aliens. They're a rather special case, as everything else there has a limited domain; they reside in a lake, a mountain range, or earth, all places where we can actually go. The aliens have a much greater place where they can be: space. They logically would have technology that lets them get here and back to their planet in a lifetime, or have probes that can move at a decent speed. We even came up with this idea for a show called "Star Trek" about interfering with planets that can't travel the way we can. OTOH, santa claus and the tooth fairy are things that people are known to have made up as kids' stories, as every kid finds out at one point. Santa is also said to have reindeer pull a flying sleigh full of toys, be a fat guy who comes down a chimney, and has elves working for him at the north pole. You really can't put alien visitation in the same category as those things given the likelihood of each actually happening, now can you?
Evidence of gravity was there, long before it was acknowledged that it was there. We had evidence of electricity for lots of time, before we acknowledged that it was there.
The point is, your attitude is one of dismissal, just as the GP was talking about. Your approach, like many people out there, is "Let's not investigate because I believe it can't happen or be true.". The more reasonable approach would be "There's a massive amount of space in the universe, and we haven't explored even the most minuscule fraction of it, and many of our calculations say there's bound to be something else out there. We should examine a random sample of these people to see if there's any evidence of them being in contact with aliens." This changee in attitude would lead to a massive amount of new findings, as people wouldn't dismiss things based on belief, which is exactly what you did to the possibility of aliens visiting us.
I don't think so. I'm not too familiar with it, but I know that there are "sprites", "elves", "blue jets", and "gigantic jets" related to lightning. The reddish ones are the sprites, while jets are typically blue. Sprites tend to be less focused than a jet; jets are more like lighting, in a line, whereas the sprites are more spread. The pictures I've seen show them as more of a mushroom cloud-shaped thing.
Might this be the "equal and opposite reaction" to a lightning strike?
If you were him, this would be very similar to you being normal, and competing against people with mild physical handicaps.
It's a good actor.
ID it not a theory, it is a religious/political ideology being presented as a theory that aims to explain the perceived weaknesses of science in order to advance the interests of certain groups and individuals.
Ever seen a bullshit statistic? Why do people make technologies that make their own lives easier (every technology was invented for this reason, BTW)? How about a company patenting an idea based on new research that they funded so they can profit?
Science is used to advance the interests of individuals just as much as ID. It just depends which side you're blind to. Religion is based on the premise "God loves everything". Science is based on "Let's learn". Both sides, at the core, are pure things, but they get corrupted by people into tools for their own benefit.
pre-N900 series Primary Function: PC
iPod Touch Primary Function: Music Player
Anyone who has even heard the word iPod for like 5 years before the touch came out immediately thought "Music". Nobody went into the store to buy an iPod not having that in their head. The iPod touch isn't marketed or meant to be a phone. It's meant to play music.
OTOH, you'd be hard-pressed to find many people outside of tech circles that would even know about the N-series. There's no mainstream marketing for it, and it doesn't have a name that's a synonym for its' function.
My point is, Apple never had a hump to get over with the iPod touch. Nokia doesn't have a hump to get over with the N900 in terms of customers having the wrong expectations. Nokia does have to get the word out about this thing, but that's not quite what you were talking about.
But he's not. In fact, the App Store has been around long enough for the MTA to have made their own app and started selling it with ads on it. It's their fault for not jumping on an opportunity.
But the Japanese make all the good watches!
Doesn't matter what press the MTA faces. There's no other way to get that many people all around NYC. Roads are congested as-is. Take away the biggest form of mass transit there, and everyone will run back because nobody can get anywhere.
Lockups are a symptom, not a problem. The symptom could very well be associated with a USB IO problem, a (separate) wireless problem, and the famous "my-nose-is-stuffy" problem.
We'd need a robot to throw a 300lb robot for us.
VISA and MC do NOT do chargebacks. Your finance company does.
On a side note, why does nobody know who is giving them credit? Everyone here seems to think it's Visa's/MC's fault. Visa doesn't do that. They issue the card system that banks and other financial divisions use to process credit, they don't actually issue the credit. Did anyone ever apply to Visa for a card? NO. Everyone in the history of Visa and Mastercard (AmEx is mostly a charge card company, and Discover uses its own bank for most of their cards) has applied to a financial division, whether that was a bank (Chase, Citi, etc.), or a financial division of a company (Sony has one, Dell does, etc.). Seriously, why does nobody seem to know who is trusting them with their money????
You do realize that banks run the support for your cards and that Visa/MC are pretty much just integration and processing companies, right? Did you think there was no reason why nobody in the world has a Visa or MC card that doesn't have a bank or company's name on it? Visa and MC have 0 to do with giving you credit. They have everything to do with making sure you can use them all over the place, and that every member bank and company communicates effectively through their system.
That's actually a good idea to implement as an option (with a fee for PayPal to do this, like you said) for purchases over. Thus, it will never happen under PayPal. Most likely, some startup will do it, and be bought out by PayPal, wherein the quality of the service continually falls.
Efficiency also includes how fast the code is written, and how hard it is to write. If it takes a month extra to save one cycle of clock time on code that doesn't do a large number of calculations, that's not efficiency. If it takes you 5 more employees with M.A.'s, that might not be efficient monetarily.
Still trying to come up with a good wholesome name for liters -- any suggestions?
Pints, for the lulz.
Federal Law != Terms of a Contract
So, how can they enforce this? I'd imagine they're not handing out packets with information on the agreement made by using the ticket.
Coins are also heavier. Carry around 100 bucks in a $20 denomination of coins and of bills. Granted, it's not a huge amount of weight for your average person, but what would drug dealers do when they deal with full suitcases of money?
The Nazis didn't get nukes, but neither did the US by the point that Germany surrendered. The argument is null and void.
If they speed up economically, they have to speed up in the "think for yourselves" department, too. I mean, has anyone ever considered that Islamic culture in the area from Israel to Pakistan may not know things we take for granted? Our culture is completely overwhelmed with comedy; I don't know if they even really have comedy because of the large amount of crap they put up with on a daily basis. When people are struggling to survive, comedy doesn't really exist, and definitely not in the fashion we think of it. Therefore, when someone depicts Mohamed in a political cartoon or jokes about an old Imam or whatever, even though the statement is the same regardless of language, they don't have a context on which to put it other than "it's an insult to our religion". When their situation improves, they'll slowly realize that we didn't mean it as harm, as we have a much, much different culture than they do.
I think his point was that if you don't have capitalistic opportunity, you don't have the ability to make money via computers, thus it won't help 3rd world nations without said opportunity whatsoever economically to have computers.
Now, indirectly, I think computers would help them, but not over the shot term. Whenever information spreads, it helps to topple dictators. Computers facilitate this, so it could very well help them out of their situation, but not in such a clear-cut way as economically.
Honestly, if a company is going to completely add a new continent to a game (i.e. WoW), then that's fair game for an expansion pack. When you pull some shit like Microsoft did with MechWarrior 4 (5 new mechs for 15 bucks! They pulled this one TWICE!), you're on the other extreme. There's a very blurred, large gray area between these two. If you're going to add 50% more hours of gameplay, with 30% more new types of enemies, and a large smattering of new weapons and armor, you're probably in the clear for an expansion pack. It's when the expansion pack becomes tiny, doesn't add anything to the actual gameplay, and they charge an extraordinary amount of money for a little nothing of content that it becomes stupid. Let's put it this way: if you can build the content in a week on a moddable platform, it's probably not worth 1/6th of the cost of the game.