$400? For an extra one hundred you can get a 100gb PVR I understand flash memory is more expensive than a real hard drive, but it's not like hard drives are incredibly huge or unreliable in most cases, that cool factor surely diminishes when you are paying a bunch of extra money just to have it on your keychain versus putting it in your pocket.
I mean, we've been on the planet as long as all other creatures have been. Monkeys evolve just as much as we do and everything is as complex as we are to survive in their own environments.
I think evolution is fundamentally misunderstood by people. If you think about it a modern disease, ape, plant, bird, etc. isn't any less advanced than a modern human. Everything adapts to its environment, so we all gain complexity as we move toward survival and reproduction. It's a tree structure, not a simple line, we aren't the top of the totem pole or anything, we are simply leaves of one branch of animals. People tend to think themselves superior to other animals, but evolutionary theory isn't all about superiority based on mental capacity or based on ability to produce huge structures. Genetic diversity and complexity are just basic properties of things evolving to adapt to their environment so nature really doesn't share our bias.
There are no ethics anymore. Instead of people striving to be ethical, they just strive to find other people being unethical so they can excuse their own unethical behavior.
I think this is an extremely important thing to realize. People have been able to justify things way too easily nowadays. When a politician lies they say "well they all lie" and just accept it as part of the territory. Instead of striving toward excellence and taking exception at the failures of striving toward this ideal, the American public seems to like just putting up with mediocrity by thinking that everyone is corrupt liars who steal and the crook you know is better than the one you don't so why even bother punishing them for it. It's a ridiculous mindset. Unethical is unethical, it's the adult equivalent of the "Well Jimmy's dad said he could" argument.
Most places these days don't have real sales commissions, which is a double-edged sword. But it does mean that sales staff will be more likely to tell you the most correct option instead of the most profitable in most cases (unless you are talking about warranties). Seeing as this nation is becoming a giant shopping mall with limited interaction anywhere else and life just a series of transactions, maybe it would be better for you to actually shop with a person instead of a computer. Something less commodifying about it, that is, until they replace the sales staff with a terminal instead.
Take the human interactions while you can get them, because one day they'll all be gone.
Actually, obtaining files that are copyrighted isn't a crime anywhere (that I know of) even the US. It's reproducing (ie: uploading) that's illegal, not the downloading.
That's all fine and dandy, but the definition of "downloading" is blurred using Bittorrent. You are both downloading and uploading the file at the same time, in this respect it could be seen legally as both receiving and reproduction at the same time if you stretched the definition far enough, and therefore illegal.
Google, Inc. bundled e-mail client (Gmail), shared calendaring environment (Google Calendar), instant messaging client (GTalk) and HTML page generator (Google Page Creator) to be used across specific domains.
After all of this talk of an office suite, columns and opinions about whether or not Google is going to ship an office suite, they are calling this an office suite?
Someone tell me how a web email client, a calendar, an instant messager and a HTML application is a full office suite? Then allow me to beat you over the head with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Powerpoint. OpenOffice is an Office suite, this is media hype. But we can't plug OpenOffice in the general media though, because general knowledge that home users are paying hundreds of dollars for something they could just as easily get for free might slow down commerce.
Lumalive fabrics feature flexible arrays of colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs) fully integrated into the fabric - without compromising the softness or flexibility of the cloth. These light emitting textiles make it possible to create materials that can carry dynamic messages, graphics or multicolored surfaces. Fabrics like drapes, cushions or sofa coverings become active when they illuminate in order to enhance the observer's mood and positively influence his/her behavior.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want my sofa covering to influence my behavior at all...
Yes, I'm sure that's not a big deal to you, but you have to realize that all of that is pretty daunting to anybody who's never owned a computer before (or never set up their own, at least).
And they are going to find it less daunting to have to learn an entirely new (to them) set of menus while trying to set up their AOL dial up account? Or a new way of doing things when they do anything else? I do tech support for these kind of users, most of them don't want anything to change because they barely know how to perform the minimal tasks they do already, and that would primarily include the OS. They wouldn't want to have to switch types of machines when they can barely get by on the one they already have, they just want to download and print their photos and browse the internet and move on with their lives. For users like this it's always price too that's a factor, another thing Apple doesn't have: cost effectiveness.
I'm not saying that Apple OS X isn't better, but this advertisement just gives people already using Macs a chance to snicker, and those using PCs to say "what the hell is the difference between the Mac and my Dell over there? I just want the Internet anyway..." That's not liable to change anything.
E.g., in many government offices the water coolers are paid for by members of the "water club;" if you want to drink water, you pay $10 at the beginning of the quarter and get your name put on a list that's taped to the front of the water cooler (or simply made known to everyone else).
There's a club with dues just to get water at government jobs nowadays? What the hell is wrong with these people?
I'm must glad the connection between sony & ericsson looks to be ok LOL. Last couple of SE cell phones I've had work perfectly. Currently using the W810i which is probably the best phone I've ever used!
Oh yeah, sony ericsson phones are spectacular! I love how when you press the side buttons (what should be volume) the "status" pops up, it's a good thing that they made the status so easy to get to because I have a need to check that my "profile" is "okay" on a normal basis. I also love the great features like having "yes and no" buttons which coincide with the call and hang up buttons so when I think I'm saying yes to a question it calls the person. That's a great feature! And it's good that the outside clock displays a digital version of an analog clock by default, and that the backlight shuts off while the phone is still open, but if you want to turn it to "on" all the time, the outside light also stays on constantly, what a nice way to save battery!
That's enough of the sarcasm.
Sony Ericsson phones are the absolute worst things I've ever seen. And I should know, I own one.
...that bands could be holding out on iTunes because they disagree with their particular setup and monopolistic like practices, and all the alternatives that exist are barely comparable compensation wise?
Re:SOCIALIST lies, IQ is genetic!
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Capitalism needs this lie. I understand the original underlying intention of course: everyone gets the same rights. But often capitalism pushes this idea to the fact that everyone through hard work can succeed at things. That way bums are just lazy, middle class workers are just people who work just hard enough to be able to keep their job, etc. etc. The successful, who by far and large are not just one but a combination of hard work, luck, position and influence use it to make it seem as if everyone could be them. The fact of the matter is that some peoples' abilities will never match up to other peoples'. While it's good to try things, and even invest a bit of hard work into these things, the fact of the matter is that some people actually need help (in terms of bums) or don't posess the ability to be Einsteins and Mozarts, and that laziness isn't the real factor.
It's a nice lie we like to tell ourselves in a capitalistic society so that we can justify 1% of the population owning most of everything: they are the harder workers. Please.
But compare this to language: we know that children learn languages very fast during a 'critical period' of childhood. Children who don't learn a language at that age cannot learn one later in life.
This is going to come off a little, I don't know, nitpicky I guess. However, we don't know that for sure. We've only had two cases where children were picked up having not learned a language and tried to be taught to learn, Victor and Genie, partially because the idea of the experiment could never ethically be done on purpose. That being said, these two children who became adults without learning language are hardly representative of anything in and of themselves. Yes, neither one was able to learn a language, but experts suggested in Genie's case that she was probably partially mentally retarded, or at least possibly mentally retarded. They could never distinguish between these theories and so in the end there was nothing really conclusive. Two examples in the history of science don't necessarily fully support any hypotheses you might draw from them, but they do give you a bit of support.
Case and point: we don't know that for certain, it's a theory, and one founded off of weaker evidence than evolution =P
Read it, here it is.
Not quite sure how that's supposed to cheer me up though. That's like telling someone going down on the Titanic to relax, because everyone's about to die. More people being lonely doesn't really help. That's why I never understood why that line at the end of "message in a bottle" where millions of bottles wash up on the shore was supposed to be some type of consolation. Who cares how many people are isolated if you are already on the island yourself. You could say "you're in good company," but that's just an expression. The problem is that nobody is in good company. Now we resort to meeting each other via IM and secretly harboring suspicions that the person on the other end is some type of serial killer.
I agree and I face this situation on a daily basis. Every potential social outlet has been closed off in the face of shopping malls and such and it seems like the only place to meet anyone is at the bar where you have the choice between the girl with tatoos or one of the girls grinding to "shoot it in her eye" by the bang bang boys. It's getting quite desperate. It's actually getting me to think about going back to school or joining some type of community service organization just to meet people. The world has turned into a lonely, lonely place. Online socializing isn't the solution though, I've learned that much. But it is the symptom of a larger problem that will probably not be going away anytime soon.
Our country in general has a lack of understanding about what science is, how the scientific method works and just what exactly a scientific theory is. As is often said in the scientistic community, "facts change more than theories." Theories are in fact just a unification of a lot of observations that is usable to make predictions that are testable, and proven. Theories aren't hypotheses, they are thoroughly tested throughout the scientific community and the old one isn't even thrown away until there's a new theory that explains more, even if its inconsistent.
Evolution has been proven in many, many ways. Just the other day I heard about scientists reversing evolution in lab rats and then re-evolving them. (Removing a gene and then watching that gene reproduce into the population). Many facets of science such as genetics are concretely tied to the study of evolution and it is not going anywhere soon. It's a "theory" sure, but the meaning of theory isn't the same in the scientific community. God farted us all out of his ass 2 seconds ago with memories and everything intact 2 seconds ago is a "theory" in layman's terms, but it certainly isn't one in science. It does nothing to explain or predict anything at all and so it's useless to the scientific community, as is "intelligent design" or its elder sheep in wolve's clothing mother named "creation science."
There's been a backward campaign from this administration to make evolution to appear as things it is not, because I honestly believe that the people who are fighting the battle have no idea what science truly is. Most people here don't, that's why we are dwindling in scientists and mathematicians. The ignorance will never change until those posing the debate no longer appeal to religion or emotions to win over the masses, and we all know when that will happen.
What the hell are children even doing with their own email address? Seems to me they could get by fine 10 years ago without one, now we have to play nanny on the Internet for children who have no real business with it anyway. How about this? Tell the little kids to get outside and develop real social skills instead of emailing friends back and forth. I'm sick of people standing behind children to justify things. I can see having a do-not-email list, but the Internet is bigger than Michigan, so good luck trying to get a company based in some tiny country to conform to your laws. Nobody likes spam, but I'm so sick of the "my kid might see some porn" issue. Watch your kid, protect your computer from them and tell them to get outside. Children have no real business on the Internet unsupervised anyway.
Since I got my computer science bachelor's and hadn't been able to find a programming job with it, I thought maybe I could take said degree and become a middle manager at a fast food joint or something. Only now it appears that job is going to be taken: BY A COMPUTER!
Bad analogy. A better way to phrase it would be not allowing running with scissors as a law, cuz you might accidentally stab yourself or someone else.
It's all just to raise the profits of the police officers and make it so you can get pulled over for minor infractions, and then they can sniff their way around your car and try to get you for even more penalties, resulting in even more fines and even more of a police state.
I think they are already overstepping their boundaries, and giving police any more cause to pull people over is bullshit. We've cracked down on the DUI thing to the point where you don't even really have to be drunk to get a DUI, and now we are going to make it a crime to use a cell phone or an ipod in a car. Piss off already.
I'm so sick of the distractions while driving mantra. The thing about it is that I believe everyone should do what they can to the best of their ability. The fact is if I can manage to change tracks on my portable music player, and answer cell phones while driving I should be able to. Instead of impuning me by making "potentially risky" behavior illegal, when there's nothing inherently awful about it, maybe you should impune those who get in the crashes. I'm sick of this line of crap that a cell phone makes you crash your car, I have never had a problem talking on a cell phone while driving, and I have had an MP3 player for years and been able to change tracks without driving with no issues. As long as you pick the boring times to do these things, and put the distractions away when they are unmanageable, I don't see a real problem. Idiots will find ways to be idiots and if accidents aren't caused by one thing they'll find a new distraction. I find it irritating that people feel they need to parent me and tell me what I can have going on in my car while I'm driving. We're big boys now, we drive, and we can be responsible for our own actions. I don't need big brother government protecting me from every "danger" and limiting my freedom in the process. Plus, assholes have enough problems just driving to get into an accident with a normal reaction time, knowledgeable adult. You can ban all the ipods you want, most of the idiots out there crashing into you are just shit for brains to begin with.
Wouldn't this give you a glimpse of what death is like? Or at least non-existance? Or maybe it would just be like a black-out on alcohol. Maybe that's what those other things are like too then though....
Slashdot Mirror
$400? For an extra one hundred you can get a 100gb PVR I understand flash memory is more expensive than a real hard drive, but it's not like hard drives are incredibly huge or unreliable in most cases, that cool factor surely diminishes when you are paying a bunch of extra money just to have it on your keychain versus putting it in your pocket.
I mean, we've been on the planet as long as all other creatures have been. Monkeys evolve just as much as we do and everything is as complex as we are to survive in their own environments.
I think evolution is fundamentally misunderstood by people. If you think about it a modern disease, ape, plant, bird, etc. isn't any less advanced than a modern human. Everything adapts to its environment, so we all gain complexity as we move toward survival and reproduction. It's a tree structure, not a simple line, we aren't the top of the totem pole or anything, we are simply leaves of one branch of animals. People tend to think themselves superior to other animals, but evolutionary theory isn't all about superiority based on mental capacity or based on ability to produce huge structures. Genetic diversity and complexity are just basic properties of things evolving to adapt to their environment so nature really doesn't share our bias.
I think this is an extremely important thing to realize. People have been able to justify things way too easily nowadays. When a politician lies they say "well they all lie" and just accept it as part of the territory. Instead of striving toward excellence and taking exception at the failures of striving toward this ideal, the American public seems to like just putting up with mediocrity by thinking that everyone is corrupt liars who steal and the crook you know is better than the one you don't so why even bother punishing them for it. It's a ridiculous mindset. Unethical is unethical, it's the adult equivalent of the "Well Jimmy's dad said he could" argument.
Most places these days don't have real sales commissions, which is a double-edged sword. But it does mean that sales staff will be more likely to tell you the most correct option instead of the most profitable in most cases (unless you are talking about warranties). Seeing as this nation is becoming a giant shopping mall with limited interaction anywhere else and life just a series of transactions, maybe it would be better for you to actually shop with a person instead of a computer. Something less commodifying about it, that is, until they replace the sales staff with a terminal instead.
Take the human interactions while you can get them, because one day they'll all be gone.
Will they use the technology to turn all the phasers into walkie talkies?
That's all fine and dandy, but the definition of "downloading" is blurred using Bittorrent. You are both downloading and uploading the file at the same time, in this respect it could be seen legally as both receiving and reproduction at the same time if you stretched the definition far enough, and therefore illegal.
Why do people keep modding these people up?
Google owns stock in AOL, it can hardly be considered a direct competitor.
After all of this talk of an office suite, columns and opinions about whether or not Google is going to ship an office suite, they are calling this an office suite?
Someone tell me how a web email client, a calendar, an instant messager and a HTML application is a full office suite? Then allow me to beat you over the head with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Powerpoint. OpenOffice is an Office suite, this is media hype. But we can't plug OpenOffice in the general media though, because general knowledge that home users are paying hundreds of dollars for something they could just as easily get for free might slow down commerce.
Because Google has a real interest in taking down AOL considering that they paid a billion just to do business with them.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want my sofa covering to influence my behavior at all...
And they are going to find it less daunting to have to learn an entirely new (to them) set of menus while trying to set up their AOL dial up account? Or a new way of doing things when they do anything else? I do tech support for these kind of users, most of them don't want anything to change because they barely know how to perform the minimal tasks they do already, and that would primarily include the OS. They wouldn't want to have to switch types of machines when they can barely get by on the one they already have, they just want to download and print their photos and browse the internet and move on with their lives. For users like this it's always price too that's a factor, another thing Apple doesn't have: cost effectiveness.
I'm not saying that Apple OS X isn't better, but this advertisement just gives people already using Macs a chance to snicker, and those using PCs to say "what the hell is the difference between the Mac and my Dell over there? I just want the Internet anyway..." That's not liable to change anything.
There's a club with dues just to get water at government jobs nowadays? What the hell is wrong with these people?
Oh yeah, sony ericsson phones are spectacular! I love how when you press the side buttons (what should be volume) the "status" pops up, it's a good thing that they made the status so easy to get to because I have a need to check that my "profile" is "okay" on a normal basis. I also love the great features like having "yes and no" buttons which coincide with the call and hang up buttons so when I think I'm saying yes to a question it calls the person. That's a great feature! And it's good that the outside clock displays a digital version of an analog clock by default, and that the backlight shuts off while the phone is still open, but if you want to turn it to "on" all the time, the outside light also stays on constantly, what a nice way to save battery!
That's enough of the sarcasm.
Sony Ericsson phones are the absolute worst things I've ever seen. And I should know, I own one.
The Internet...duh!
...that bands could be holding out on iTunes because they disagree with their particular setup and monopolistic like practices, and all the alternatives that exist are barely comparable compensation wise?
Capitalism needs this lie. I understand the original underlying intention of course: everyone gets the same rights. But often capitalism pushes this idea to the fact that everyone through hard work can succeed at things. That way bums are just lazy, middle class workers are just people who work just hard enough to be able to keep their job, etc. etc. The successful, who by far and large are not just one but a combination of hard work, luck, position and influence use it to make it seem as if everyone could be them. The fact of the matter is that some peoples' abilities will never match up to other peoples'. While it's good to try things, and even invest a bit of hard work into these things, the fact of the matter is that some people actually need help (in terms of bums) or don't posess the ability to be Einsteins and Mozarts, and that laziness isn't the real factor.
It's a nice lie we like to tell ourselves in a capitalistic society so that we can justify 1% of the population owning most of everything: they are the harder workers. Please.
Case and point: we don't know that for certain, it's a theory, and one founded off of weaker evidence than evolution =P
Read it, here it is. Not quite sure how that's supposed to cheer me up though. That's like telling someone going down on the Titanic to relax, because everyone's about to die. More people being lonely doesn't really help. That's why I never understood why that line at the end of "message in a bottle" where millions of bottles wash up on the shore was supposed to be some type of consolation. Who cares how many people are isolated if you are already on the island yourself. You could say "you're in good company," but that's just an expression. The problem is that nobody is in good company. Now we resort to meeting each other via IM and secretly harboring suspicions that the person on the other end is some type of serial killer.
I agree and I face this situation on a daily basis. Every potential social outlet has been closed off in the face of shopping malls and such and it seems like the only place to meet anyone is at the bar where you have the choice between the girl with tatoos or one of the girls grinding to "shoot it in her eye" by the bang bang boys. It's getting quite desperate. It's actually getting me to think about going back to school or joining some type of community service organization just to meet people. The world has turned into a lonely, lonely place. Online socializing isn't the solution though, I've learned that much. But it is the symptom of a larger problem that will probably not be going away anytime soon.
Our country in general has a lack of understanding about what science is, how the scientific method works and just what exactly a scientific theory is. As is often said in the scientistic community, "facts change more than theories." Theories are in fact just a unification of a lot of observations that is usable to make predictions that are testable, and proven. Theories aren't hypotheses, they are thoroughly tested throughout the scientific community and the old one isn't even thrown away until there's a new theory that explains more, even if its inconsistent.
Evolution has been proven in many, many ways. Just the other day I heard about scientists reversing evolution in lab rats and then re-evolving them. (Removing a gene and then watching that gene reproduce into the population). Many facets of science such as genetics are concretely tied to the study of evolution and it is not going anywhere soon. It's a "theory" sure, but the meaning of theory isn't the same in the scientific community. God farted us all out of his ass 2 seconds ago with memories and everything intact 2 seconds ago is a "theory" in layman's terms, but it certainly isn't one in science. It does nothing to explain or predict anything at all and so it's useless to the scientific community, as is "intelligent design" or its elder sheep in wolve's clothing mother named "creation science."
There's been a backward campaign from this administration to make evolution to appear as things it is not, because I honestly believe that the people who are fighting the battle have no idea what science truly is. Most people here don't, that's why we are dwindling in scientists and mathematicians. The ignorance will never change until those posing the debate no longer appeal to religion or emotions to win over the masses, and we all know when that will happen.
What the hell are children even doing with their own email address? Seems to me they could get by fine 10 years ago without one, now we have to play nanny on the Internet for children who have no real business with it anyway. How about this? Tell the little kids to get outside and develop real social skills instead of emailing friends back and forth. I'm sick of people standing behind children to justify things. I can see having a do-not-email list, but the Internet is bigger than Michigan, so good luck trying to get a company based in some tiny country to conform to your laws. Nobody likes spam, but I'm so sick of the "my kid might see some porn" issue. Watch your kid, protect your computer from them and tell them to get outside. Children have no real business on the Internet unsupervised anyway.
Since I got my computer science bachelor's and hadn't been able to find a programming job with it, I thought maybe I could take said degree and become a middle manager at a fast food joint or something. Only now it appears that job is going to be taken: BY A COMPUTER!
Screwed again.
Bad analogy. A better way to phrase it would be not allowing running with scissors as a law, cuz you might accidentally stab yourself or someone else. It's all just to raise the profits of the police officers and make it so you can get pulled over for minor infractions, and then they can sniff their way around your car and try to get you for even more penalties, resulting in even more fines and even more of a police state. I think they are already overstepping their boundaries, and giving police any more cause to pull people over is bullshit. We've cracked down on the DUI thing to the point where you don't even really have to be drunk to get a DUI, and now we are going to make it a crime to use a cell phone or an ipod in a car. Piss off already.
I'm so sick of the distractions while driving mantra. The thing about it is that I believe everyone should do what they can to the best of their ability. The fact is if I can manage to change tracks on my portable music player, and answer cell phones while driving I should be able to. Instead of impuning me by making "potentially risky" behavior illegal, when there's nothing inherently awful about it, maybe you should impune those who get in the crashes. I'm sick of this line of crap that a cell phone makes you crash your car, I have never had a problem talking on a cell phone while driving, and I have had an MP3 player for years and been able to change tracks without driving with no issues. As long as you pick the boring times to do these things, and put the distractions away when they are unmanageable, I don't see a real problem. Idiots will find ways to be idiots and if accidents aren't caused by one thing they'll find a new distraction. I find it irritating that people feel they need to parent me and tell me what I can have going on in my car while I'm driving. We're big boys now, we drive, and we can be responsible for our own actions. I don't need big brother government protecting me from every "danger" and limiting my freedom in the process. Plus, assholes have enough problems just driving to get into an accident with a normal reaction time, knowledgeable adult. You can ban all the ipods you want, most of the idiots out there crashing into you are just shit for brains to begin with.
Wouldn't this give you a glimpse of what death is like? Or at least non-existance? Or maybe it would just be like a black-out on alcohol. Maybe that's what those other things are like too then though....