Interestingly enough a four blade and then a FIVE blade razor came out in 2005, so SNL decided to pay homage to the old parody 30 years later with a commercial about an EIGHT blade razor...it would "strip you to the bone in one pass"!
Making the box bigger makes it harder to think outside the box. Being unable to think outside the box kills creativity.
[vox Yoda]Lack of creativity leads to prophecies of doom, and such prophecies are tools of the Dark Side.[/vox]
Come off it, you're seriously suggesting that better tools stifle creativity? Increases in storage space are a Good Thing. The ideal (as anybody who works regularly with digital photos or video will tell you) is uncompressed. No loss, no artifacts, much easier to work with... the only drawback is large files. Huge files. MASSIVE files. Compression doesn't exist because it is a good idea for its own sake, compression exists because current storage options aren't realistic for delivery of uncompressed files.
And this says nothing of the creativity that goes into making a 5" shiny disc hold 100GB in the first place. No, I do believe I'll hold off on the "immanent death predicted" sandwich board.
Also if you have a comprehensive backup plan [...]
But for home users, anything that resembles a backup at all is typically a vast improvement over the nothing that tends to be done. Cloning your PC to a large external drive once a month and storing it in a fireproof lockbox is plenty secure enough for Joe Average.
But it wouldn't be proprietary if you gave it to them...
I think you're missing an important part "custom hardware" mentioned by the previous post. Say I've built a custom device, for whatever reason, and I write a driver to make it do its widgety little things. I have no desire to mass produce my widget, there is no market for my widget even if I did want to go into production... but it serves whatever special need.
I'm going to submit my driver... why? What are the chances, really, that this driver will be accepted for inclusion in the tree to run a device that nobody but me will ever even see, much less use?
The answer you're looking for is "none - no chance whatsoever". And for good reason.
So again I echo the sentiment - what is so evil about a stable API? It doesn't have to be the preferred method. It doesn't even have to be efficient. It just has to be there.
And in light of your "modification" of my original question I'll ask you do you really expect to get something that is so hard to make for free?
Who said free? I know R&D isn't cheap, I know synthesis of some of these drugs is delicate but... let me back up for a minute.
I like coffee. I really, really like coffee. It's my drug of choice. I don't feel functional in the morning until I've had a cup or two, but in spite of any words to the contrary I may say while indulging, my life does not depend on it. I will not die from the lack thereof.
I am acquainted with the process that gets this wonderful stuff in my morning mug. The plants only grow in very certain climates, with very certain soil conditions. Picking the berries is done by hand. The process of removing the flesh from the bean, curing, drying, roasting, etc. etc. etc. is time consuming and very labor intensive. Each step is its own delicate art, and a screwup in any one of the steps will hose a whole batch. Make no mistake, coffee is very hard to make.
$3.99/lb.
The R&D budgets of the junk food industry are every bit as large as the R&D budgets for the drug companies, and the competition is every bit as serious. A company may go through anywhere from a dozen to a couple hundred variations on a new recipe while trying to get the desired reaction from a test group before settling on the composition and appearance of a new product. Their labs are staffed with a combination of chemists and professional chefs.
$0.50 for a pack of Twinkies. $3.50 for a bag of cookies.
My Grandmother is taking a drug for a heart condition. Her life DOES depend on it. If she cannot or does not take this medicine, she will die. 1 pill twice a day.
$56.45 per dose. That's a steak dinner and a bottle of wine for two, twice a day. That's 29 pounds of coffee per day. That's 220 packs of Twinkies per day. Do you see where I'm going here?
The process of finding the right molecule to treat a certain disease is time consuming and expensive. The process of synthesizing that molecule once you find it quite often is no more difficult than introducing the right chemicals together and collecting the percipitant. Sometimes the process approaches the complexity of getting coffee from plant to market.
The difference is that, with a drug, you have a captive audience. You are in the luxurious position of having somebody's life by the balls and can demand almost any silly price you can dream up because, what, they're going to tell you "No" and die instead?
You're damned right I question their motivations. I question the motivations of any person or industry that routinely holds people's health, and sometimes lives, hostage to prices they know are burdensome at least, if not impossible, not because they have to, but simply because they can, when instead they could just as easily charge something on par with a dose of Twinkie. But why should they? Those shareholder's dividends are way more important than my Grandmother's life, don't you think?
So to answer your question - yes, actually, I do care.
So we should be killing and eating mentally disturbed humans who we deem incapable of undertanding their own rights? Or better yet should we be farming them in herds to be killed and eaten?
WalMart HR respectfully requests that you leave their hiring practices out of this debate.
Do you really care what a doctor's motivations were as long as they make a cure or treatment for something available to those rich enough to afford it as fast as they possibly can?
Indeed. My answer was incomplete, perhaps misleading (re: implied cause & effect of a cow's diet vs. a diet of cows), but it did serve the purpose of illustrating that Citizen was flat wrong on both counts (that most of what we eat are herbivores, and that eating herbivores is somehow inherently healthier).
It occurs to me that all of the animals we commonly eat are herbivores. I guess this is good for disease prevention (in addition to the animals being easier to handle).
Swine are omnivores. Chickens eat bugs. Fish are typically omnivores or carnivores, and cannibals if the opportunity presents itself. Beef is the only thing we commonly eat that is exclusively an herbivore, and to hear a dietician tell it, probably the worst choice health-wise compared to pork, chicken, or seafood.
I am replying to remove moderation. I fumble-fingered this into an off-topic, which it is not. There is no undo. I reuqested the moderation be removed, but it looks like that's not going to happen.
I sincerely apologize for this. I don't want to be responsible for the ding to simm's karma.
Your argument has the undeniable aroma of "respect means esteem". I am under no obligation to grant a belief I do not share any position of esteem, nor are you, nor should you. The applicable definition is "deference", meaning I acknowledge that "you" hold such a belief, and not much more.
I find no fundamental incongruity between Genesis and the Big Bang, nor do I find any fundamental incongruity between Darwin and Creation (that is, who says a Creator can't use evolution as one of his tools).
There, then, comes the problem - the Creationists insist that there's an impass, and that evolution is some unprovable fairy-tale that's going to have us all burning in Hell.
But the scientific community, and the vast majority of society, are intolerant and lacking respect for holding ground. I'm just not seeing it.
I'm utterly amazed at the complete intolerance towards Christians these days.
It has nothing to do with Christian beliefs or teachings. It has everything to do with the attempt to usurp science in an effort to replace it with these beliefs. If you care to notice, the classroom gives no traction to flat-earthers or stacks of turtles, either.
Believe what you want. Teach what you want in church. The last time I checked, though, my school does not have a steeple.
I beg to differ. Political Correctness is a systematic Orwellian torturing of the language under the guise of civility, when it has nothing whatsoever to do with that. A label of "vertically challenged" is just so much meaningless noise if I continue to think less of you, and treat you worse, for being short.
Manners and civility are the grease that make the make the machinery of society go forth. PC puts the focus on word choice rather than intent, and is sand in the gears.
Is that a feature that you can count on working indefinitely?
To the extent that Google supports standards, yes.
RFC2822 allows A-Z,a-z (case insensitive, 0-9, the chars ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~ and . (assuming the period is not the first or last char) Any server that rejects an email address for containing one or more of the above characters is in violation of RFC2822, and should be considered broken. Hotmail and Exchange are both broken in this regard, though they are far from alone.
Many servers implement "plus addressing" as gmail does by convention, though it is not explicitly required.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, only 8?
[vox Yoda]Lack of creativity leads to prophecies of doom, and such prophecies are tools of the Dark Side.[/vox]
Come off it, you're seriously suggesting that better tools stifle creativity? Increases in storage space are a Good Thing. The ideal (as anybody who works regularly with digital photos or video will tell you) is uncompressed. No loss, no artifacts, much easier to work with... the only drawback is large files. Huge files. MASSIVE files. Compression doesn't exist because it is a good idea for its own sake, compression exists because current storage options aren't realistic for delivery of uncompressed files.
And this says nothing of the creativity that goes into making a 5" shiny disc hold 100GB in the first place. No, I do believe I'll hold off on the "immanent death predicted" sandwich board.
But for home users, anything that resembles a backup at all is typically a vast improvement over the nothing that tends to be done. Cloning your PC to a large external drive once a month and storing it in a fireproof lockbox is plenty secure enough for Joe Average.
I think you're missing an important part "custom hardware" mentioned by the previous post. Say I've built a custom device, for whatever reason, and I write a driver to make it do its widgety little things. I have no desire to mass produce my widget, there is no market for my widget even if I did want to go into production... but it serves whatever special need.
I'm going to submit my driver... why? What are the chances, really, that this driver will be accepted for inclusion in the tree to run a device that nobody but me will ever even see, much less use?
The answer you're looking for is "none - no chance whatsoever". And for good reason.
So again I echo the sentiment - what is so evil about a stable API? It doesn't have to be the preferred method. It doesn't even have to be efficient. It just has to be there.
Do you care?
And in light of your "modification" of my original question I'll ask you do you really expect to get something that is so hard to make for free?
Who said free? I know R&D isn't cheap, I know synthesis of some of these drugs is delicate but... let me back up for a minute.
I like coffee. I really, really like coffee. It's my drug of choice. I don't feel functional in the morning until I've had a cup or two, but in spite of any words to the contrary I may say while indulging, my life does not depend on it. I will not die from the lack thereof.
I am acquainted with the process that gets this wonderful stuff in my morning mug. The plants only grow in very certain climates, with very certain soil conditions. Picking the berries is done by hand. The process of removing the flesh from the bean, curing, drying, roasting, etc. etc. etc. is time consuming and very labor intensive. Each step is its own delicate art, and a screwup in any one of the steps will hose a whole batch. Make no mistake, coffee is very hard to make.
$3.99/lb.
The R&D budgets of the junk food industry are every bit as large as the R&D budgets for the drug companies, and the competition is every bit as serious. A company may go through anywhere from a dozen to a couple hundred variations on a new recipe while trying to get the desired reaction from a test group before settling on the composition and appearance of a new product. Their labs are staffed with a combination of chemists and professional chefs.
$0.50 for a pack of Twinkies. $3.50 for a bag of cookies.
My Grandmother is taking a drug for a heart condition. Her life DOES depend on it. If she cannot or does not take this medicine, she will die. 1 pill twice a day.
$56.45 per dose. That's a steak dinner and a bottle of wine for two, twice a day. That's 29 pounds of coffee per day. That's 220 packs of Twinkies per day. Do you see where I'm going here?
The process of finding the right molecule to treat a certain disease is time consuming and expensive. The process of synthesizing that molecule once you find it quite often is no more difficult than introducing the right chemicals together and collecting the percipitant. Sometimes the process approaches the complexity of getting coffee from plant to market.
The difference is that, with a drug, you have a captive audience. You are in the luxurious position of having somebody's life by the balls and can demand almost any silly price you can dream up because, what, they're going to tell you "No" and die instead?
You're damned right I question their motivations. I question the motivations of any person or industry that routinely holds people's health, and sometimes lives, hostage to prices they know are burdensome at least, if not impossible, not because they have to, but simply because they can, when instead they could just as easily charge something on par with a dose of Twinkie. But why should they? Those shareholder's dividends are way more important than my Grandmother's life, don't you think?
So to answer your question - yes, actually, I do care.
WalMart HR respectfully requests that you leave their hiring practices out of this debate.
Do you really care what a doctor's motivations were as long as they make a cure or treatment for something available to those rich enough to afford it as fast as they possibly can?
There, fixed it for you.
Indeed. My answer was incomplete, perhaps misleading (re: implied cause & effect of a cow's diet vs. a diet of cows), but it did serve the purpose of illustrating that Citizen was flat wrong on both counts (that most of what we eat are herbivores, and that eating herbivores is somehow inherently healthier).
Swine are omnivores. Chickens eat bugs. Fish are typically omnivores or carnivores, and cannibals if the opportunity presents itself. Beef is the only thing we commonly eat that is exclusively an herbivore, and to hear a dietician tell it, probably the worst choice health-wise compared to pork, chicken, or seafood.
Typo.
Evar.
The problem with the "bleeding edge" is that most people overlook the "bleeding" part.
I'm sorry, you must be looking for the "undefinity" article. Down the hall, to the left.
mini-projector eyeglasses + nightshot spycam with filter = FINALLY REAL X-RAY SPECS THAT WORK!! Huzzah!
Now imagine a whole clone army of Natalie Portmans running Linux,
So, you're suggesting we imagine a babeowulf cluster of these?
If the capacity is there, somebody will fill it. That somebody will likely make games.
... or operating systems. I remember installing W95 the first time from a stack of 21 3.5" floppies.
Of course, at the same time, the stack of floppies needed to install OS/2 made this look reasonable.
I am replying to remove moderation. I fumble-fingered this into an off-topic, which it is not. There is no undo. I reuqested the moderation be removed, but it looks like that's not going to happen. I sincerely apologize for this. I don't want to be responsible for the ding to simm's karma.
To borrow from the GP, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Your argument has the undeniable aroma of "respect means esteem". I am under no obligation to grant a belief I do not share any position of esteem, nor are you, nor should you. The applicable definition is "deference", meaning I acknowledge that "you" hold such a belief, and not much more.
I find no fundamental incongruity between Genesis and the Big Bang, nor do I find any fundamental incongruity between Darwin and Creation (that is, who says a Creator can't use evolution as one of his tools).
There, then, comes the problem - the Creationists insist that there's an impass, and that evolution is some unprovable fairy-tale that's going to have us all burning in Hell.
But the scientific community, and the vast majority of society, are intolerant and lacking respect for holding ground. I'm just not seeing it.
It has nothing to do with Christian beliefs or teachings. It has everything to do with the attempt to usurp science in an effort to replace it with these beliefs. If you care to notice, the classroom gives no traction to flat-earthers or stacks of turtles, either.
Believe what you want. Teach what you want in church. The last time I checked, though, my school does not have a steeple.
I beg to differ. Political Correctness is a systematic Orwellian torturing of the language under the guise of civility, when it has nothing whatsoever to do with that. A label of "vertically challenged" is just so much meaningless noise if I continue to think less of you, and treat you worse, for being short.
Manners and civility are the grease that make the make the machinery of society go forth. PC puts the focus on word choice rather than intent, and is sand in the gears.
on the other hand if you're within 60 feet you can probably SEE her with your own EYES.
You, sir, are making some seriously optimistic assumptions about my visual acuity.
No where did I leave my damned glasses?
Bucketing all errors to prompt one page is not improvement - its obfuscation, its stupidity, its annoyance.
It's "friendly", according to the option to turn it on and off...
Sorry, but ClearType is not something I consider life-improving.
Nor is it original - I was using Adobe Type Manager back on Windows 3.0
Have you actually read their EULA? It's almost impossible not to violate it in some manner or other, short of never turning on the machine.
Is that a feature that you can count on working indefinitely?
To the extent that Google supports standards, yes.
RFC2822 allows A-Z,a-z (case insensitive, 0-9, the chars ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~ and . (assuming the period is not the first or last char) Any server that rejects an email address for containing one or more of the above characters is in violation of RFC2822, and should be considered broken. Hotmail and Exchange are both broken in this regard, though they are far from alone.
Many servers implement "plus addressing" as gmail does by convention, though it is not explicitly required.