This roughly matches my experience with Siri. You spend too much time trying to figure out what sequence of words she'll understand (interspersed with round trips to the server). It'd be quicker to just punch the thing into google - which is apparently all I can get Siri to do anyway.
On the other hand, it is amusing* to try and find joke phrases she'll respond to.
Your speculation pales in comparison to the kinds of hey-nonny-nonny that can be committed with binary bits on a computer system by someone with a malicious intent.
No mod points, so instead I'll toss out a here here. Serious hey-nonny-nonny.
So? People that stupid deserve to have their votes invalidated.
Whether you like it or not, everyone gets to vote or you don't get to claim it's 'by the people'. That includes stupid people (or any other group you may decide shouldn't matter).
I think you may want a technocracy. I'm not sure that there are any countries currently employing that form of government at the moment however...
Good web design takes as many possible outcomes into mind as feasible.
In the more general sense; if your design depends on a specific attribute being set, you should specify it and not rely on a default value while crossing your fingers.
While "atheism" may only claim the first, there are plenty of atheists (and most of the prominent, outspoken atheists fall into this camp) which loudly claim the last, and that's what tends to upset people.
So, just like every other group of similarly minded people - no matter the subject - there are a few extremists who are loud enough to convince the rest of the world that they represent the entire group. Why people lend credence to these people is beyond me.
The reality is that there are a lot of different people who believe a lot of different things. There are also a lot of people who feel the need to tell other people what they should believe. These two groups are orthogonal.
You have the right to not be offended, if can not afford to be offended, the court will provide someone to be offended for you.
You should never go for the court appointed offender if you can avoid it. They really don't have your interests at heart, tend to be overworked and generally don't care. Hire your own offender to be sure you're properly offended. It may cost a bit, but it's well worth it.
I clicked through looking for a solution to blocking these myself. There doesn't seem to be a way to block them in the user settings that I can see. Anyone had any luck?
I don't have high hopes since these are pretty obviously revenue generators for the site. It just seems incongruous to offer users a 'block ads' option and then turn around to make these slashvertisements unblockable.
To be honest, if there were an option to 'block all videos' I'd take that. I dislike this trend of locking information in a format I can't search, skim, read at work, use while also listening to music, etc.
GURPS and Palladium are two completely different systems and had nothing to do with each other.
Of course, you're right. I was pulling from memory, and they were similar enough movements (i.e., unified rules across multiple games) at the time that I munged them together. Perhaps it was all the Car Wars and Illuminati side adventures.
All said and done, I'd take Steve Jackson and Palladium back in a heartbeat. Have they seen what's going on over on kickstarter, do you think?
The Palladium roleplaying game was pretty awesome too
Completely agreed on that one.
It was GURPS based, so somewhat interchangeable with other systems. Not exactly a hard core RPG since it was pretty easy to cheese out an overpowered character, but my group found it a refreshing change of pace to our long running D&D campaign.
You could slap together a hack and slash, come up with some crazy mutations and skills for your new characters and charge through in a night. Half the fun was rolling characters, so we tended to run one-off scenarios.
Also, the comics are edgy and fun - more so than the cartoon.
For serious work with spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel has the competition beat hands-down, and that's proving to be their single strongest app in their Office suite. Apple's Numbers app is really more suitable for someone who's not even a "numbers person" to begin with, but finds him/herself with the occasional need to generate some basic spreadsheets anyway. It can produce results that look really nice, but it doesn't have the raw number crunching power of Excel (gets VERY slow with large spreadsheets), and lacks the power Excel had to do complex calculations with Visual Basic macros attached to cells.
This has been my biggest sticking point with Numbers as well. It doesn't even have to be a particularly large spreadsheet to bog it down, though. Throw some cross indexed lookup based calculations on it across multiple tables and you'll wish you had just pulled out Excel in the first place. I really want to like and use Numbers, but it's just not in the same class.
Sure, you're not paying interest (suposedly... every that I've heard say that before comes back with "Oh, except that one time, and the other time..."), but you could be EARNING interest on that money. Right now, Ally gives 0.8% on it's CHECKING accounts... more than any brick & mortar banks are giving on even their savings or 1year CDs right now...
Or do both like I do. Put all your expenses on your rewards card, keep your cash in an interest bearing checking account (credit unions usually offer these with pretty decent rates). When the card bill comes due, pay it off. The result is that you have, on average, a higher bank account balance over the billing cycle than if you were paying for all of those things throughout the month individually.
As a bonus, this helps reinforce the safe practice of using a payment method directly attached to your bank account as infrequently as possible. In case of fraud, you'd rather have 'money you owe' tied up in dispute than 'money you have'.
If crack was legal and crackheads could buy the stuff for a dollat an ounce they wouldn't have to break into my house to support their habits.
Hang on, how is a crack-head's addiction a consequence of the war on drugs? There are alcoholics even though alcohol is legal.
How'd you get there from his statement? The related problem he's referring to is the robbery, not the drug use.
I'm not saying people need to stop taking drugs full stop: like I said earlier it's your choice. But you've got to acknowledge the consequences of that choice further back in the production line.
The politicians pushed the back end of the production lines into the black market, thus forcing the moral dilemma onto the user? I'm with you on the personal responsibility angle, but that doesn't make the current situation right.
not that our washing machines and TVs need to be *quite* that well-engineered, but still, there's a lot of room for improvement.
This level of quality exists for almost anything you would care to buy. These items costs a bit more and they don't carry them at Walmart, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein
Falsifiability is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to adjust your concepts of how the world works as new information is discovered. Religious groups have been using it as a means to discount the scientific view of reality, however, by claiming that the scientific method can't determine facts. Technically, they are correct.
I recall reading an article that said that all of Facebook's (then) hundreds of programmers all have full access to the live system data. Especially on top of the announcement that they want to double their employees in the next year or whatever, it sort of makes it hopeless to expect any sort of privacy there if anyone actually gets interested in you.
Why are people still laboring under the presumption that anything you say on Facebook will ever be private or even semi-private? Knock it off! Under no circumstances should you assume that what Facebook says in their privacy policy means a damned thing. They can change their mind on a whim. They employ programmers that make mistakes. They can outright ignore the privacy policy, sell your information to anyone and there's nothing you can do. And if that's not enough, any one of your friends can relay information about you circumventing your 'privacy'.
Every word you say, every action you perform on Facebook say to yourself "I am screaming this to the world!". If for some reason you don't like that and instead you don't want the whole world to know about it, then for God's sake don't put it on Facebook!
Sales tax is already required to be paid - by the purchaser based on where they live - no matter where the sale takes place. The purchaser is bound by the laws of the state within which they reside. No other state's laws are involved. This makes it constitutionally legal with respect to states' rights.
Additionally there are regulations in place within states that help enforce the sales tax by collecting it at the point of sale. This is accurate for a vast majority of sales that happen at a physical location, but there are obviously exceptions when people travel. Consequently there are methods to adjust the collected amount, both up and down, to the correct tax amounts by filing appropriate paperwork.
As an Oregonian (with no sales tax) that sometimes purchases things in Washington (with a sales tax), I can file paperwork to get BACK all of the sales tax that was collected from me in Washington. I've even been exempted at point of sale by showing my Oregon driver's license and filling out some paperwork at some businesses.
The internet doesn't change this aside from the fact that it allows 'travel' to happen as a much greater proportion of purchases exacerbating the 'wrong tax automatically collected' problem. So far, online sellers have sidestepped the issue by simply not dealing with it and assuming the purchaser will file the correct use taxes as required for their location. This increases the error rate for automatic sales tax collection dramatically - and in order for the taxes to be collected the purchaser must be relied on to correctly file those taxes.
This isn't happening, even though it is already a legal requirement to do so. This proposed law won't actually change anything with respect to the amount of sales tax that is owed to the government by a purchaser. What it does do is switch the error rate from 'purchaser wins if they don't follow the law about filing requirements' to 'government wins if they don't follow the law about filing requirements'. I can certainly understand why the various levels of government want this, but I'm not sure the improvements in tax collection accuracy are worth the tradeoffs that happen.
First, you have the federal government stepping in and interacting with state laws - which gives me the willies. Second, the federal government would be inserting itself into the money collection process. Even holding that money for a short time before distributing it to the correct states means the federal government is siphoning interest income from the states. Even more willies. Finally the government is pushing the cost burden of tracking and collecting taxes in these error cases onto the seller, which seems unfair to the seller.
I can see that the various levels of government have a valid position for wanting legislation of this nature - it's unrealistic to expect your populace to voluntarily submit taxes due for purchases made in a virtually undetectable manner. I don't, however, see an easy way around it without trampling on states' rights or small business owners.
Except there is no benefit to Apple locking out 3rd party applications from the OS, but plenty of benefit to offering a safe and highly visible way for my mom to find new applications for her computer.
As a developer, I can target either market - or both. If I'd like to be in the list of safe and highly visible applications my mom sees, then I have to play by Apple's rules. Or I can make a.dmg available from Sourceforge, MacUpdate, cnet or just hope Google indexes my private site well enough. My choice.
But if I follow a link to http://example.com/something.jpg, should it just download the image and open an image viewer, or should it display the image in my browser? Images can be inline elements in an html document, or they can be linked to on their own.
Users' choice. A link to an image opens a new document - and that document (html, pdf, jpg, etc) can end up in a new tab, new window or a different app - whatever the user prefers.
I'm not arguing against having a PDF viewer built into the browser - but I've got a much more full featured PDF viewer that I'd prefer to use. Taking the choice away sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been 70+ and sunny for two weeks. An amazing event rolls in and BAM - cloudy. Ah, the northwest...
This roughly matches my experience with Siri. You spend too much time trying to figure out what sequence of words she'll understand (interspersed with round trips to the server). It'd be quicker to just punch the thing into google - which is apparently all I can get Siri to do anyway.
On the other hand, it is amusing* to try and find joke phrases she'll respond to.
* For very small values of amusing.
No mod points, so instead I'll toss out a here here. Serious hey-nonny-nonny.
Whether you like it or not, everyone gets to vote or you don't get to claim it's 'by the people'. That includes stupid people (or any other group you may decide shouldn't matter).
I think you may want a technocracy. I'm not sure that there are any countries currently employing that form of government at the moment however...
This is exactly the kind of thinking that you would have learned had you actually gone to Harvard business school, further legitimizing your claim.
Four! I mean Five! I mean FIRE!
In the more general sense; if your design depends on a specific attribute being set, you should specify it and not rely on a default value while crossing your fingers.
So, just like every other group of similarly minded people - no matter the subject - there are a few extremists who are loud enough to convince the rest of the world that they represent the entire group. Why people lend credence to these people is beyond me.
The reality is that there are a lot of different people who believe a lot of different things. There are also a lot of people who feel the need to tell other people what they should believe. These two groups are orthogonal.
You should never go for the court appointed offender if you can avoid it. They really don't have your interests at heart, tend to be overworked and generally don't care. Hire your own offender to be sure you're properly offended. It may cost a bit, but it's well worth it.
I clicked through looking for a solution to blocking these myself. There doesn't seem to be a way to block them in the user settings that I can see. Anyone had any luck?
I don't have high hopes since these are pretty obviously revenue generators for the site. It just seems incongruous to offer users a 'block ads' option and then turn around to make these slashvertisements unblockable.
To be honest, if there were an option to 'block all videos' I'd take that. I dislike this trend of locking information in a format I can't search, skim, read at work, use while also listening to music, etc.
Sorry for the off topic.
Of course, you're right. I was pulling from memory, and they were similar enough movements (i.e., unified rules across multiple games) at the time that I munged them together. Perhaps it was all the Car Wars and Illuminati side adventures.
All said and done, I'd take Steve Jackson and Palladium back in a heartbeat. Have they seen what's going on over on kickstarter, do you think?
Completely agreed on that one.
It was GURPS based, so somewhat interchangeable with other systems. Not exactly a hard core RPG since it was pretty easy to cheese out an overpowered character, but my group found it a refreshing change of pace to our long running D&D campaign.
You could slap together a hack and slash, come up with some crazy mutations and skills for your new characters and charge through in a night. Half the fun was rolling characters, so we tended to run one-off scenarios.
Also, the comics are edgy and fun - more so than the cartoon.
This has been my biggest sticking point with Numbers as well. It doesn't even have to be a particularly large spreadsheet to bog it down, though. Throw some cross indexed lookup based calculations on it across multiple tables and you'll wish you had just pulled out Excel in the first place. I really want to like and use Numbers, but it's just not in the same class.
Six of what? Don't leave me hanging!
Seriously, how did you get to a point where you needed to censor the word 'sex'?!
Or do both like I do. Put all your expenses on your rewards card, keep your cash in an interest bearing checking account (credit unions usually offer these with pretty decent rates). When the card bill comes due, pay it off. The result is that you have, on average, a higher bank account balance over the billing cycle than if you were paying for all of those things throughout the month individually.
As a bonus, this helps reinforce the safe practice of using a payment method directly attached to your bank account as infrequently as possible. In case of fraud, you'd rather have 'money you owe' tied up in dispute than 'money you have'.
This is a copy/paste job stealing from the AC in this post made three minutes earlier.
Gratuitous link to video where he says this: Louis CK honors George Carlin.
How'd you get there from his statement? The related problem he's referring to is the robbery, not the drug use.
The politicians pushed the back end of the production lines into the black market, thus forcing the moral dilemma onto the user? I'm with you on the personal responsibility angle, but that doesn't make the current situation right.
This level of quality exists for almost anything you would care to buy. These items costs a bit more and they don't carry them at Walmart, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein
Falsifiability is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to adjust your concepts of how the world works as new information is discovered. Religious groups have been using it as a means to discount the scientific view of reality, however, by claiming that the scientific method can't determine facts. Technically, they are correct.
Disingenuous, yes - but technically correct.
Why are people still laboring under the presumption that anything you say on Facebook will ever be private or even semi-private? Knock it off! Under no circumstances should you assume that what Facebook says in their privacy policy means a damned thing. They can change their mind on a whim. They employ programmers that make mistakes. They can outright ignore the privacy policy, sell your information to anyone and there's nothing you can do. And if that's not enough, any one of your friends can relay information about you circumventing your 'privacy'.
Every word you say, every action you perform on Facebook say to yourself "I am screaming this to the world!". If for some reason you don't like that and instead you don't want the whole world to know about it, then for God's sake don't put it on Facebook!
Worse, his links go to an advertisement based link shortener that won't let you see the content until you sign up. Riiiiight.
Sales tax is already required to be paid - by the purchaser based on where they live - no matter where the sale takes place. The purchaser is bound by the laws of the state within which they reside. No other state's laws are involved. This makes it constitutionally legal with respect to states' rights.
Additionally there are regulations in place within states that help enforce the sales tax by collecting it at the point of sale. This is accurate for a vast majority of sales that happen at a physical location, but there are obviously exceptions when people travel. Consequently there are methods to adjust the collected amount, both up and down, to the correct tax amounts by filing appropriate paperwork.
As an Oregonian (with no sales tax) that sometimes purchases things in Washington (with a sales tax), I can file paperwork to get BACK all of the sales tax that was collected from me in Washington. I've even been exempted at point of sale by showing my Oregon driver's license and filling out some paperwork at some businesses.
The internet doesn't change this aside from the fact that it allows 'travel' to happen as a much greater proportion of purchases exacerbating the 'wrong tax automatically collected' problem. So far, online sellers have sidestepped the issue by simply not dealing with it and assuming the purchaser will file the correct use taxes as required for their location. This increases the error rate for automatic sales tax collection dramatically - and in order for the taxes to be collected the purchaser must be relied on to correctly file those taxes.
This isn't happening, even though it is already a legal requirement to do so. This proposed law won't actually change anything with respect to the amount of sales tax that is owed to the government by a purchaser. What it does do is switch the error rate from 'purchaser wins if they don't follow the law about filing requirements' to 'government wins if they don't follow the law about filing requirements'. I can certainly understand why the various levels of government want this, but I'm not sure the improvements in tax collection accuracy are worth the tradeoffs that happen.
First, you have the federal government stepping in and interacting with state laws - which gives me the willies. Second, the federal government would be inserting itself into the money collection process. Even holding that money for a short time before distributing it to the correct states means the federal government is siphoning interest income from the states. Even more willies. Finally the government is pushing the cost burden of tracking and collecting taxes in these error cases onto the seller, which seems unfair to the seller.
I can see that the various levels of government have a valid position for wanting legislation of this nature - it's unrealistic to expect your populace to voluntarily submit taxes due for purchases made in a virtually undetectable manner. I don't, however, see an easy way around it without trampling on states' rights or small business owners.
Except there is no benefit to Apple locking out 3rd party applications from the OS, but plenty of benefit to offering a safe and highly visible way for my mom to find new applications for her computer.
As a developer, I can target either market - or both. If I'd like to be in the list of safe and highly visible applications my mom sees, then I have to play by Apple's rules. Or I can make a .dmg available from Sourceforge, MacUpdate, cnet or just hope Google indexes my private site well enough. My choice.
Users' choice. A link to an image opens a new document - and that document (html, pdf, jpg, etc) can end up in a new tab, new window or a different app - whatever the user prefers.
I'm not arguing against having a PDF viewer built into the browser - but I've got a much more full featured PDF viewer that I'd prefer to use. Taking the choice away sucks.