His ratio was still correct if you accept his original numbers as being correct. The actual mass is irrelevent to what he was saying. It's like how I can say that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, even though the oxygen atom is much larger than the hydrogen atom.
Christ, that happened to me back in about 2002 or 2003, I think. I was with Earthlink DSL for a while but their downtime was well over 50% and I just couldn't take it anymore. They made what semed to me at the time an honest attempt at fixing it, but it just didn't work. It was literally down more often than not, so I cancelled.
(This illustrates what I was saying before -- I gave them a chance to fix the problem, they couldn't, so I dealt with it, rather than staying with them and whining constantly. It's also a decent example of my price-point argument -- at fifty dollars a month, assuming they pay their helpdesk monkeys ten dollars an hour, me spending five hours a month on the phone griping about the problem means I'm wasting more money than I'm giving them, and they'd have been wise to terminate me. Obviously I did not do that, but my point was, SO MANY people do, and fail to realise that they are not longer of any value as customers to the business in question.)
Anyway, so I cancelled Earthlink, and got Bellsouth DSL (who was not a hell of a lot better, but that's another story -- I think the phone wiring in my building just sucked). But there was a gap of a week between terminating Earthlink and when Bellsouth would connect me, so I figured I'd grab one of those free-trial AOL CDs and use dialup for a week. This was in the days before ubiquitous wireless and aircrack and free dialup, you understand.
Bellsouth hooked me up, I no longer needed AOL, so I cancelled the "free trial" thing. But they continued billing me. Worse, they were attaching the bill to my monthly phone bill, so every month I'd get this huge bill for no reason. Being rather poor at the time, I couldn't afford this, and since i couldn't pay, the phone company disconnected me. I had to go through an ungodly hassle to get the whole thing straightened out, including dealing with credit collectors and everything.
Right, but the reason I suggest you phrase it this way is to make it clear to the customer that you are actually in the process of cancelling the account, right at that moment. It also gives them a few seconds to realise what you're doing, at which point they furiosly backpedal and have an unbelievable attitude reversal.
I've used this trick many times, and it goes like this: the customer has some ridiculous, often imaginary problem, or a problem that simply cannot be supported because it has nothing to do with us, or it is a real problem but it's going to take time to fix and that's just the way it is. At this point the conversation goes:
THIS IS RIDICULOUS AND IF YOU CAN'T FIX IT BY 5PM TODAY I AM CANCELLING MY SERVICE
I'm sorry to hear that, sir. As I've explained we can't do anything about your problem, and I've also explained why. Since we're unable to fix it, I'll cancel your account as you requested. Hang on a moment and I'll get your confirmation number.
WAIT, WHAT
It'll only take a moment, sir.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE CANCELLING ME
You said that if we can't fix the problem you're cancelling. We can't fix the problem, so I'm cancelling you.
OH NO NO NO WAIT A SECOND YOU CAN'T DO THAT
I can, and I'm doing it right now.
BUT I DON'T WANT TO CANCEL
You just told me you did. Are you saying you wish to remain a customer?
YES, LOOK, I JUST WANT THIS THING TO WORK
And I've explained to you why the problem cannot be fixed by us, and told you who to contact / what to do / why it's not even an actual problem. So you have a decision to make: You can follow the avenues I've suggested, or you can cancel, or you can stay with us, but we can no longer address this issue for you, and no more calls about it will be accepted. I'll leave it up to you to decide what you want to do. Anything else? (Make it clear you're wrapping up the conversation.)
UH OKAY I'LL SEE WHAT I CAN DO, THANKS, BYE
And that's it. Letting customers push you around is a sucker's game and calling their bluff is a highly effective tactic to get them to stop wasting your time. In my experience, 90% or better of these customers never call back about that problem and never cancel. You just have to make it totally clear that their one "bargaining chip" is useless, at which point they have no further ammo. Remain polite but firm.
Thankfully I don't have to deal with customers anymore, but for a while there, I was the "escalations guy", meaning any ticket that went through the normal tier two guys and wasn't fixed would get bumped to me, and only me, where my job was to put an end to the situation once and for all, either by fixing it or by telling the customer why it's not going to get fixed. I found this strategy to be the best.
That's not always true. In certain situations a customer becomes far more trouble than he is worth; a liability rather than an asset. In my job I have had to tell many customers that their options were to cancel the service, or stop complaining. Most of them opted for the latter.
All this depends on the product you're offering, the price point, the customer, and the nature of the complaint, but at a certain price, a customer who is just a chronic complainer is no longer worth it.
This is not just my own attitude, either; it is a business decision. At some point an endlessly griping customer is taking up a disproportionate amount of your or your employee's time, often for total BS non-issues, and it makes no business sense to keep humoring them for the sake of their next month's invoice when that time could be better spent dealing with other customers who have legitimate problems. A company is totally justified in telling the customer to cancel or shut up.
As a side note, in my industry, it's been my experience that the customers who will take their business elsewhere are the ones from whom you never hear. They'll quietly deal with the situation on their own. On the other hand, the chronic complainers are the ones who have absolutely no intention of going to a competitor. It's also easy to call customer bluffs: When they threaten to cancel if you don't do XYZ impossible thing, you say "Okay, sir, since I can't accomodate you, I'll cancel your service right now. Hang on a moment and I'll get your confirmation number." It is truely remarkably how quickly they backpedal.
In short, just because you're charging for something doesn't mean the customer gets to stomp all over you. Companies need to grow spines sometimes.
The other day I actually saw somebody get nailed for "failure to yield to a pedestrian".
It amazes me that people think a little paint on the road grants them magical protection from the laws of physics. If you walk out into traffic, you are basically doing one of the dumbest things a human can do, and the law isn't going to protect your 150 pounds of flesh from two tons of 40mph steel.
Pedestrian right-of-way is an idiotic law that should be revoked immediately, as it makes people believe they can blindly stumble out into traffic and be okay. In reality, if you're walking, do what your mother told you to do and LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING THE STREET. If there are cars coming, DON'T WALK -- it doesn't matter that you have "the right of way". Stay put until the cars are gone.
This really isn't hard, and yet idiots continue to wander into moving traffic on a daily basis.
No, Twitter can contain a link to the original article, as I mentioned, but most of it is just pointless babble. The fact that you can make shortened URLs through link-rotting BS organisations like bitly doesn't mean Twitter is anything like RSS. They're not even meant to be, and if you think that's the purpose of twitter, or even what people tend to use it for, you're deluded.
In conclusion, just because some idiots occasionally post tinyurls or bitlys does not grant legitimacy to Twitter, or mean that it is a useful means of communication. And frankly, why you'd want to sort through 500 "bitlys" a day from random jackasses posting nonsense is beyond me.
See for yourself. This is what people are calling revolutionary, an exciting new medium, and proves that Twitter is awesome. Of course, when you look, it's nothing but vapid third-hand "information" based on what people who weren't even there are seeing on their own TVs or other news reports. Reading this, you get absolutely zero context, or even any real idea about what was going on, other than a vague sense that, well, the situation was bad and lots of people were fighting. In, it seems, a hotel. That tells us nothing.
I can turn the TV on and watch the news just as well as you can. I don't need "tweets" telling me about it. What mindless gibberish.
But hey, you keep pretending that anonymous hearsay is "information", champ.
They can, but this is for residential service, where most people don't have ethernet jacks in the walls, but rather, just have a router somewhere and their computers are typically nowhere near it thanks to wireless. So how is the average yob going to get his phone connected to the router on the other side of the house? Now he doesn't need to worry about it, since he can just plug it into his computer, which is probably on his desk anyway.
Twitter is communication. It's a poor man's RSS feed. You do know RSS, right?
Yes, smartass. How Twitter is a "poor man's" version is unknown, though, considering they're both free. RSS lets you actually view a story or article. You know, information. Twitter is just a few words about "situation bad, everyone fighting" that tells you absolutely nothing. It is not at all analogous. At most, someone can put a "bit.ly" or other cutesy 2.0 BS shortened link up, but hey, if I was going to bother looking at that, why wouldn't I just, I don't know, USE RSS?
I was careful to define meaningful communication in my diatribe, something you apparently failed to notice. Graffiti on a bathroom wall is, if you want to get technical, a form of communication, but it's essentially meaningless. Twitter is the exact same thing -- short, incoherent messages from anonymous nobodies, about nothing, that provide no value to anyone, anywhere.
Twitter is the answer to a question nobody asked, and will never amount to anything of worth.
Communication saves lives. Always has, always will.
Twitter is not communication in any meaningful sense of the word. It never will be.
I've had this argument before so I'll be brief: Yes, I've gone through the BS twitter logs of the Iranian crap and the Mumbai crap, the two incidents twitter-defenders love to bring up as examples of how twitter is a useful communications mechanism.
You illustrate this quite nicely:
When the zombie attack comes, I'll definitely hear about it before you.
No, you won't. Oh, maybe you'll hear about it, but you won't have any information that I won't. You'll know that "zombies are in the streets" and "reports of zombie attack in downtown" and "more zombies on the way". You won't know where, who, how, or anything else -- you'll know that zombies are "somewhere". And you'll act smug because you're so much ahead of the curve as the rest of us.
Here's a scenario for you to consider: While you're busy "tweeting" about the zombies your brains will get eaten because you were busy staring at your cellphone. I'll be the one getting away because I wasn't obsessing over freaking Twitter. Now what?
Without fail twitter is totally devoid of content or context. Every "tweet" is nothing but "situation is bad, lots of people fighting" rephrased in some form, or "reports of blah blah blah at something something something" because the user is "tweeting" what he's watching on TV or hearing on the radio, which means that information is already out there.
The Mumbai one was particularly awful, since every tweet was along the lines of "terrorists driving around shooting, no word yet if apprehended" or similarly pithy nonsense. You can't tell what's going on from such garbage. A report by an anonymous nobody that something bad is happening at some unspecified location in a vaguely defined geographical area is not information. It is not communication in the normal sense of the word, as nothing is being communicated.
That example is not cherry-picked either. The logs are freely available so anyone can do their own homework. "Tweets" that you call communication are in reality devoid of context, devoid of content, devoid of detail, and deliver absolutely zero insight into what's really going on.
The whole world knew what was going on in Iran through normal media channels without twitter. Twitter did nothing to facilitate understanding. Nor has it in any other situation, nor will it ever. As a medium, twitter is fundamentally worthless. Pretending like it's some grand new communications forum that will revolutionise the oppressed and impoverished is wishful Kool-Aid drinking.
Speaking for myself, I will be quite merry when Twitter finally collapses as the moronic fad that it is, just so people will shut up about it.
Sales count for a lot for minor artists, who make up the vast majority of musicians. Many of them will perform for free just in the hopes of getting some exposure and maybe some merchandise sales.
This is purely anecdotal, so it's not evidence as such, and I won't name names but I know someone who opened for KMFDM one night. KMFDM is, to put it mildy, huge in the industrial scene. It cost just over ten grand for the club to book them for one night. You'd think anyone who had fame enough to open for them would at least be compensated for their time.
Such was not the case. The club offered this artist nothing. The money made was purely from merch and publicity.
Don't tell me that money is made in concert tickets. That may be true for the top 0.1% who are lucky enough to hit the big time, but the rest are making next to nothing for their efforts. A couple hundred torrents instead of a couple dozen itunes downloads is significant.
You're also failing to factor in the legitimacy issue. An artist wishing to further their career can go to a label and point out that they've done very well on iTunes or Amazon mp3 sales, and have real, hard numbers, representing actual cash-paying customers, to back that up. An artist saying that they're really popular on piratebay is going to get laughed out of the office. These things matter to someone trying to make a career.
Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously? Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"?
I used to read quite a lot on an old Palm III that I acquired. It was easy to upload text to it, and then I could take it anywhere. It was certainly easy enough to read.
That's only true if you believe your vote matters. I don't. Not to get too George Carlin on this, but the country was bought, sold, and paid for a long time ago and shuffling things around every few years doesn't make a lick of difference.
In response a lot of people like to suggest that Gore, unlike Bush, would not have instigated the war in Iraq, for example. But the truth is we were already in Iraq and bombing the hell out of them on a weekly basis and had been since the Gulf War. Bush certainly escalated the situation but variances of degrees isn't such a fundamental shift in policy as we like to pretend it is.
Furthermore, thanks to the antiquated electoral college, I can rest assured that my vote will be rendered 100% meaningless, simply because I happen to live in one arbitrarily defined boundary on a map and not another. Where I live is perhaps the least significant factor about me, yet it's what's used to determine whether or not my vote matters. I am not a fan of conservatives or Republicans, but since I live in Atlanta, which means Georgia, any vote I'd place for a Democrat would be nullified.
I might start caring more if the electoral college system was demolished, or at least, used in a sane way. I share real concerns about the economy and healthcare and social security and foreign policy with people in my age group or income bracket, for example -- those two factors, while not perfect, at least group me with people who are in the same boat as I am when it comes to such matters. The fact I happen to live near some other people, however, does not mean I share anything in common with them.
In the end, though, voting is stupid, and a lack of participation is not, in and of itself, a "vote for the system". It's a lack of participation in that system, and that's as much as I can do against the system short of taking up arms and mounting some kind of revolution.
There's no security value to NAT. NAT does provide a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections, but you can do that just as well without NAT, and with a great deal more flexibility.
You can. I can. Aunt Myrtle can't. I for one am glad that most home users are behind NAT these days. It's better than nothing. Unfortunately, it does tend to cause issues with SIP, which is my industry, but I've learned to live with that.
I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions.
Perhaps, but that doesn't really matter if nobody is buying the songs because they can just download them instead, does it? Unless the musician is just making music for the glory of having his name out there, then the increased exposure means very little unless it translates to sales.
Not me, man. I didn't put these clowns in office. On election day, I refuse to vote. Anyone who goes to the polls, whether they voted for the person who eventually won or not, is party to the system that legitimises this crap. People who vote put these morons in office. Since I don't vote, I have absolutely no part whatsoever in this mess.
The only way I'm responsible is that some of my tax dollars are helping fund this lunacy but since my tax dollars are collected at gunpoint I don't feel responsible for it.
Around 1985 my father recorded all the Star Trek reruns on VHS as they aired nightly, so growing up, those are what I watched. And honestly, they're way better than any DVD or Bluray or whatever futuristic medium might come along. Why? Because of the commercials. They are absolutely hilarious. Jason Alexander prancing around in the street singing the praises the McDLT from McDonald's. Jingles about milk. Announcers solemnly explaining the state-of-the-art technology in the new Nissan Sentra. Circuit City's offer to beat any competitor's price, illustrated by a clerk giving a kid extra change back when the kid showed him a competitor's ad. Lisa Lisa live at the Omnidome -- get your tickets now. The Radio Shack Color Computer. Great stuff. Give me those old tapes over the Bluray's any day.
It's also interesting how short commercial breaks were then. There'd be two, maybe three very short commercials, then back to the show. The interruption was never more than a minute and a half.
Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases.
I was also thinking about what Trent Reznor has been doing lately. He'll release music you can download absolutely free on his website, but you can also pay and get a higher-quality mp3, or a DVD with extra stuff, and the album artwork and so forth. Many people are content with the 128kbps free versions, but he made a killing off the number of people who were willing to pay for better copies and the extras. Clearly, that doesn't translate directly to the business of book distribution, but he did show that it's entirely possible to release art for free and still make quite a nice bit of money.
The awesome bar, for starters. I start Firefox, type "s" in the address bar, and have to wait for-bloody-ever while it sifts through uncountable megabytes looking for any page I may have visited in the past ten days where the URL or even the title might contain the letter S. Not begin with the letter S -- just contain it somewhere in the url string or title. This is freaking ridiculous.
They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle.
Where did you get the idea that we can't handle it, other than pointless fear-mongering from babbling political blowhards? The US has vast areas of desert where we've been test-detonating nuclear weapons for decades. Blast a huge hole miles deep out in the middle of nowhere, line it with concrete, and dump the waste. It's not going anywhere and even if it did, who cares, it's miles beneath the surface. And that's just off the top of my head.
Meanwhile, burning coal releases radiation as well, plus tons of smoke containing all kinds of vile pollutants, but we're happy to just release that freely to the atmosphere and not worry about it? It's this kind of idiotic thinking that got us where we are.
We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely.
Did it occur to you that the economies of scale mean that centralising power generation and distribution is a lot more safe and efficient and cheap than each neighborhood having their own reactor or coal plant or whatever? Until we have Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactors that can be put in every basement or utility closet, it makes no sense to decentralise.
Atheism states that there is no higher power in the world. That there is no god, gods or any higher form of life.... if there was no god, gods or higher forms of life other than man...
That does not follow logically. "I have no belief in a supernatural entity" does not necessarily flow to "Humans are the highest form of life." It may seem that way to us, but there's no logical connection to those statements whatsoever. You may find an atheist who firmly believes that bacteria represent a form of life far superior to that of humans, and there are many arguments that could be made to that effect.
Atheism, as a label, announces one thing and one thing only: The disagreement with, or denial of, the idea that something can exist outside the natural, knowable universe. Anything else, whatsoever, is not part and parcel of atheism as such.
It is not, as you put it, a "natural conclusion" that atheism means that man's life is meant to benefit man. That's an interpretation you invented on your own and has nothing to do with the disbelief in the supernatural.
Not a smartbook, not a sub-notebook, etc. Those are just market-droid's attempts to re-brand and differentiate from past models of the same thing. It's a netbook.
And "netbook" isn't also just a vague marketing term? What are you talking about?
Re:As a 49 year old feminist grandmother
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First, we have more than enough food to feed the masses right now. There's no need to spend more. They're not starving because there's some shortage; they're starving because of distribution problems. It also doesn't help that we can't just waltz in and give food to the people -- we give it to their governments, who are often corrupt, and hoarde it for themselves or sell it.
Second, giving them more food sounds like a great idea, but it also leads to population growth in an area that can't sustain even the population they currently have.
Does it still have that godawful "awesome bar" which, through some supernatural force, manages to be even worse than Firefox's? Does it still think it knows better than me why I opened a new tab? Does it still look ugly as sin? Does it still silently install stupid google updaters alongside without asking or telling me?
Nothing it can ever do, in my mind, will make up for these atrocities. Ditch the "awesome bar", give me a BLANK SCREEN when I open a new tab, integrate well with my current DE, don't install anything alongside, and I'll consider trying it again. Until then, Chrome is a complete disaster in my eyes.
Of course, using a browser from a company that has a profit motive for keeping track of where I'm going and what I'm doing seems like a bloody stupid idea to begin with.
You know, nevermind. Even if they get rid of all that crap, I will never use Chrome. They had their chance to make a good first impression and failed, and I've come to loathe every product Google has ever produced past their actual search engine and perhaps their news aggregator.
Depends on the application, I guess. Years ago, I was out of work, and so my phone got shut off, along with my DSL, leaving me with no useful way of communicating with the world. If I put a laptop on this certain part of the kitchen counter I could get a really weak wireless signal from one of the neighbors, but not enough to be useful. So I put a wok next to the antenna of the computer, and with a little adjustment in direction here and there, got a signal that way, decent enough to actually stream video most of the time.
It was an ancient 233mhz laptop with Windows 2000, so I enabled ICS and ran a cable from it to my router, which then fed the rest of my network. I did this for two months, which was very useful for sending out resumes and such. Without the wok, it didn't work at all; with the wok, it was fairly reliable.
So, yes, you may be better off with a wok or something similar, if your needs are modest. I did have a cantenna, built by my friend, but didn't feel like opening the laptop case to figure out how to connect the wires properly, and that would have been even more directional than the wok with no good way to prop it up to aim.
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His ratio was still correct if you accept his original numbers as being correct. The actual mass is irrelevent to what he was saying. It's like how I can say that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, even though the oxygen atom is much larger than the hydrogen atom.
Christ, that happened to me back in about 2002 or 2003, I think. I was with Earthlink DSL for a while but their downtime was well over 50% and I just couldn't take it anymore. They made what semed to me at the time an honest attempt at fixing it, but it just didn't work. It was literally down more often than not, so I cancelled.
(This illustrates what I was saying before -- I gave them a chance to fix the problem, they couldn't, so I dealt with it, rather than staying with them and whining constantly. It's also a decent example of my price-point argument -- at fifty dollars a month, assuming they pay their helpdesk monkeys ten dollars an hour, me spending five hours a month on the phone griping about the problem means I'm wasting more money than I'm giving them, and they'd have been wise to terminate me. Obviously I did not do that, but my point was, SO MANY people do, and fail to realise that they are not longer of any value as customers to the business in question.)
Anyway, so I cancelled Earthlink, and got Bellsouth DSL (who was not a hell of a lot better, but that's another story -- I think the phone wiring in my building just sucked). But there was a gap of a week between terminating Earthlink and when Bellsouth would connect me, so I figured I'd grab one of those free-trial AOL CDs and use dialup for a week. This was in the days before ubiquitous wireless and aircrack and free dialup, you understand.
Bellsouth hooked me up, I no longer needed AOL, so I cancelled the "free trial" thing. But they continued billing me. Worse, they were attaching the bill to my monthly phone bill, so every month I'd get this huge bill for no reason. Being rather poor at the time, I couldn't afford this, and since i couldn't pay, the phone company disconnected me. I had to go through an ungodly hassle to get the whole thing straightened out, including dealing with credit collectors and everything.
I've used this trick many times, and it goes like this: the customer has some ridiculous, often imaginary problem, or a problem that simply cannot be supported because it has nothing to do with us, or it is a real problem but it's going to take time to fix and that's just the way it is. At this point the conversation goes:
And that's it. Letting customers push you around is a sucker's game and calling their bluff is a highly effective tactic to get them to stop wasting your time. In my experience, 90% or better of these customers never call back about that problem and never cancel. You just have to make it totally clear that their one "bargaining chip" is useless, at which point they have no further ammo. Remain polite but firm.
Thankfully I don't have to deal with customers anymore, but for a while there, I was the "escalations guy", meaning any ticket that went through the normal tier two guys and wasn't fixed would get bumped to me, and only me, where my job was to put an end to the situation once and for all, either by fixing it or by telling the customer why it's not going to get fixed. I found this strategy to be the best.
That's not always true. In certain situations a customer becomes far more trouble than he is worth; a liability rather than an asset. In my job I have had to tell many customers that their options were to cancel the service, or stop complaining. Most of them opted for the latter.
All this depends on the product you're offering, the price point, the customer, and the nature of the complaint, but at a certain price, a customer who is just a chronic complainer is no longer worth it.
This is not just my own attitude, either; it is a business decision. At some point an endlessly griping customer is taking up a disproportionate amount of your or your employee's time, often for total BS non-issues, and it makes no business sense to keep humoring them for the sake of their next month's invoice when that time could be better spent dealing with other customers who have legitimate problems. A company is totally justified in telling the customer to cancel or shut up.
As a side note, in my industry, it's been my experience that the customers who will take their business elsewhere are the ones from whom you never hear. They'll quietly deal with the situation on their own. On the other hand, the chronic complainers are the ones who have absolutely no intention of going to a competitor. It's also easy to call customer bluffs: When they threaten to cancel if you don't do XYZ impossible thing, you say "Okay, sir, since I can't accomodate you, I'll cancel your service right now. Hang on a moment and I'll get your confirmation number." It is truely remarkably how quickly they backpedal.
In short, just because you're charging for something doesn't mean the customer gets to stomp all over you. Companies need to grow spines sometimes.
The other day I actually saw somebody get nailed for "failure to yield to a pedestrian".
It amazes me that people think a little paint on the road grants them magical protection from the laws of physics. If you walk out into traffic, you are basically doing one of the dumbest things a human can do, and the law isn't going to protect your 150 pounds of flesh from two tons of 40mph steel.
Pedestrian right-of-way is an idiotic law that should be revoked immediately, as it makes people believe they can blindly stumble out into traffic and be okay. In reality, if you're walking, do what your mother told you to do and LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING THE STREET. If there are cars coming, DON'T WALK -- it doesn't matter that you have "the right of way". Stay put until the cars are gone.
This really isn't hard, and yet idiots continue to wander into moving traffic on a daily basis.
No, Twitter can contain a link to the original article, as I mentioned, but most of it is just pointless babble. The fact that you can make shortened URLs through link-rotting BS organisations like bitly doesn't mean Twitter is anything like RSS. They're not even meant to be, and if you think that's the purpose of twitter, or even what people tend to use it for, you're deluded.
In conclusion, just because some idiots occasionally post tinyurls or bitlys does not grant legitimacy to Twitter, or mean that it is a useful means of communication. And frankly, why you'd want to sort through 500 "bitlys" a day from random jackasses posting nonsense is beyond me.
See for yourself. This is what people are calling revolutionary, an exciting new medium, and proves that Twitter is awesome. Of course, when you look, it's nothing but vapid third-hand "information" based on what people who weren't even there are seeing on their own TVs or other news reports. Reading this, you get absolutely zero context, or even any real idea about what was going on, other than a vague sense that, well, the situation was bad and lots of people were fighting. In, it seems, a hotel. That tells us nothing.
I can turn the TV on and watch the news just as well as you can. I don't need "tweets" telling me about it. What mindless gibberish.
But hey, you keep pretending that anonymous hearsay is "information", champ.
They can, but this is for residential service, where most people don't have ethernet jacks in the walls, but rather, just have a router somewhere and their computers are typically nowhere near it thanks to wireless. So how is the average yob going to get his phone connected to the router on the other side of the house? Now he doesn't need to worry about it, since he can just plug it into his computer, which is probably on his desk anyway.
Twitter is communication. It's a poor man's RSS feed. You do know RSS, right?
Yes, smartass. How Twitter is a "poor man's" version is unknown, though, considering they're both free. RSS lets you actually view a story or article. You know, information. Twitter is just a few words about "situation bad, everyone fighting" that tells you absolutely nothing. It is not at all analogous. At most, someone can put a "bit.ly" or other cutesy 2.0 BS shortened link up, but hey, if I was going to bother looking at that, why wouldn't I just, I don't know, USE RSS?
I was careful to define meaningful communication in my diatribe, something you apparently failed to notice. Graffiti on a bathroom wall is, if you want to get technical, a form of communication, but it's essentially meaningless. Twitter is the exact same thing -- short, incoherent messages from anonymous nobodies, about nothing, that provide no value to anyone, anywhere.
Twitter is the answer to a question nobody asked, and will never amount to anything of worth.
Twitter is not communication in any meaningful sense of the word. It never will be.
I've had this argument before so I'll be brief: Yes, I've gone through the BS twitter logs of the Iranian crap and the Mumbai crap, the two incidents twitter-defenders love to bring up as examples of how twitter is a useful communications mechanism.
You illustrate this quite nicely:
No, you won't. Oh, maybe you'll hear about it, but you won't have any information that I won't. You'll know that "zombies are in the streets" and "reports of zombie attack in downtown" and "more zombies on the way". You won't know where, who, how, or anything else -- you'll know that zombies are "somewhere". And you'll act smug because you're so much ahead of the curve as the rest of us.
Here's a scenario for you to consider: While you're busy "tweeting" about the zombies your brains will get eaten because you were busy staring at your cellphone. I'll be the one getting away because I wasn't obsessing over freaking Twitter. Now what?
Without fail twitter is totally devoid of content or context. Every "tweet" is nothing but "situation is bad, lots of people fighting" rephrased in some form, or "reports of blah blah blah at something something something" because the user is "tweeting" what he's watching on TV or hearing on the radio, which means that information is already out there.
The Mumbai one was particularly awful, since every tweet was along the lines of "terrorists driving around shooting, no word yet if apprehended" or similarly pithy nonsense. You can't tell what's going on from such garbage. A report by an anonymous nobody that something bad is happening at some unspecified location in a vaguely defined geographical area is not information. It is not communication in the normal sense of the word, as nothing is being communicated.
That example is not cherry-picked either. The logs are freely available so anyone can do their own homework. "Tweets" that you call communication are in reality devoid of context, devoid of content, devoid of detail, and deliver absolutely zero insight into what's really going on.
The whole world knew what was going on in Iran through normal media channels without twitter. Twitter did nothing to facilitate understanding. Nor has it in any other situation, nor will it ever. As a medium, twitter is fundamentally worthless. Pretending like it's some grand new communications forum that will revolutionise the oppressed and impoverished is wishful Kool-Aid drinking.
Speaking for myself, I will be quite merry when Twitter finally collapses as the moronic fad that it is, just so people will shut up about it.
Sales count for a lot for minor artists, who make up the vast majority of musicians. Many of them will perform for free just in the hopes of getting some exposure and maybe some merchandise sales.
This is purely anecdotal, so it's not evidence as such, and I won't name names but I know someone who opened for KMFDM one night. KMFDM is, to put it mildy, huge in the industrial scene. It cost just over ten grand for the club to book them for one night. You'd think anyone who had fame enough to open for them would at least be compensated for their time.
Such was not the case. The club offered this artist nothing. The money made was purely from merch and publicity.
Don't tell me that money is made in concert tickets. That may be true for the top 0.1% who are lucky enough to hit the big time, but the rest are making next to nothing for their efforts. A couple hundred torrents instead of a couple dozen itunes downloads is significant.
You're also failing to factor in the legitimacy issue. An artist wishing to further their career can go to a label and point out that they've done very well on iTunes or Amazon mp3 sales, and have real, hard numbers, representing actual cash-paying customers, to back that up. An artist saying that they're really popular on piratebay is going to get laughed out of the office. These things matter to someone trying to make a career.
Wait, so do you want a stupid photo or an interesting one? Make up your mind.
Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously? Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"?
I used to read quite a lot on an old Palm III that I acquired. It was easy to upload text to it, and then I could take it anywhere. It was certainly easy enough to read.
That's only true if you believe your vote matters. I don't. Not to get too George Carlin on this, but the country was bought, sold, and paid for a long time ago and shuffling things around every few years doesn't make a lick of difference.
In response a lot of people like to suggest that Gore, unlike Bush, would not have instigated the war in Iraq, for example. But the truth is we were already in Iraq and bombing the hell out of them on a weekly basis and had been since the Gulf War. Bush certainly escalated the situation but variances of degrees isn't such a fundamental shift in policy as we like to pretend it is.
Furthermore, thanks to the antiquated electoral college, I can rest assured that my vote will be rendered 100% meaningless, simply because I happen to live in one arbitrarily defined boundary on a map and not another. Where I live is perhaps the least significant factor about me, yet it's what's used to determine whether or not my vote matters. I am not a fan of conservatives or Republicans, but since I live in Atlanta, which means Georgia, any vote I'd place for a Democrat would be nullified.
I might start caring more if the electoral college system was demolished, or at least, used in a sane way. I share real concerns about the economy and healthcare and social security and foreign policy with people in my age group or income bracket, for example -- those two factors, while not perfect, at least group me with people who are in the same boat as I am when it comes to such matters. The fact I happen to live near some other people, however, does not mean I share anything in common with them.
In the end, though, voting is stupid, and a lack of participation is not, in and of itself, a "vote for the system". It's a lack of participation in that system, and that's as much as I can do against the system short of taking up arms and mounting some kind of revolution.
There's no security value to NAT. NAT does provide a stateful firewall that disallows inbound connections, but you can do that just as well without NAT, and with a great deal more flexibility.
You can. I can. Aunt Myrtle can't. I for one am glad that most home users are behind NAT these days. It's better than nothing. Unfortunately, it does tend to cause issues with SIP, which is my industry, but I've learned to live with that.
I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions.
Perhaps, but that doesn't really matter if nobody is buying the songs because they can just download them instead, does it? Unless the musician is just making music for the glory of having his name out there, then the increased exposure means very little unless it translates to sales.
Not me, man. I didn't put these clowns in office. On election day, I refuse to vote. Anyone who goes to the polls, whether they voted for the person who eventually won or not, is party to the system that legitimises this crap. People who vote put these morons in office. Since I don't vote, I have absolutely no part whatsoever in this mess.
The only way I'm responsible is that some of my tax dollars are helping fund this lunacy but since my tax dollars are collected at gunpoint I don't feel responsible for it.
Around 1985 my father recorded all the Star Trek reruns on VHS as they aired nightly, so growing up, those are what I watched. And honestly, they're way better than any DVD or Bluray or whatever futuristic medium might come along. Why? Because of the commercials. They are absolutely hilarious. Jason Alexander prancing around in the street singing the praises the McDLT from McDonald's. Jingles about milk. Announcers solemnly explaining the state-of-the-art technology in the new Nissan Sentra. Circuit City's offer to beat any competitor's price, illustrated by a clerk giving a kid extra change back when the kid showed him a competitor's ad. Lisa Lisa live at the Omnidome -- get your tickets now. The Radio Shack Color Computer. Great stuff. Give me those old tapes over the Bluray's any day.
It's also interesting how short commercial breaks were then. There'd be two, maybe three very short commercials, then back to the show. The interruption was never more than a minute and a half.
Stephen King already demonstrated a tactic for turning a profit on eBooks: serial releases.
I was also thinking about what Trent Reznor has been doing lately. He'll release music you can download absolutely free on his website, but you can also pay and get a higher-quality mp3, or a DVD with extra stuff, and the album artwork and so forth. Many people are content with the 128kbps free versions, but he made a killing off the number of people who were willing to pay for better copies and the extras. Clearly, that doesn't translate directly to the business of book distribution, but he did show that it's entirely possible to release art for free and still make quite a nice bit of money.
The awesome bar, for starters. I start Firefox, type "s" in the address bar, and have to wait for-bloody-ever while it sifts through uncountable megabytes looking for any page I may have visited in the past ten days where the URL or even the title might contain the letter S. Not begin with the letter S -- just contain it somewhere in the url string or title. This is freaking ridiculous.
They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle.
Where did you get the idea that we can't handle it, other than pointless fear-mongering from babbling political blowhards? The US has vast areas of desert where we've been test-detonating nuclear weapons for decades. Blast a huge hole miles deep out in the middle of nowhere, line it with concrete, and dump the waste. It's not going anywhere and even if it did, who cares, it's miles beneath the surface. And that's just off the top of my head.
Meanwhile, burning coal releases radiation as well, plus tons of smoke containing all kinds of vile pollutants, but we're happy to just release that freely to the atmosphere and not worry about it? It's this kind of idiotic thinking that got us where we are.
We want a decentralized energy production to become independent from big energy companies and to produce the energy more safely.
Did it occur to you that the economies of scale mean that centralising power generation and distribution is a lot more safe and efficient and cheap than each neighborhood having their own reactor or coal plant or whatever? Until we have Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactors that can be put in every basement or utility closet, it makes no sense to decentralise.
Hang on a second.
... if there was no god, gods or higher forms of life other than man...
Atheism states that there is no higher power in the world. That there is no god, gods or any higher form of life.
That does not follow logically. "I have no belief in a supernatural entity" does not necessarily flow to "Humans are the highest form of life." It may seem that way to us, but there's no logical connection to those statements whatsoever. You may find an atheist who firmly believes that bacteria represent a form of life far superior to that of humans, and there are many arguments that could be made to that effect.
Atheism, as a label, announces one thing and one thing only: The disagreement with, or denial of, the idea that something can exist outside the natural, knowable universe. Anything else, whatsoever, is not part and parcel of atheism as such.
It is not, as you put it, a "natural conclusion" that atheism means that man's life is meant to benefit man. That's an interpretation you invented on your own and has nothing to do with the disbelief in the supernatural.
Not a smartbook, not a sub-notebook, etc. Those are just market-droid's attempts to re-brand and differentiate from past models of the same thing. It's a netbook.
And "netbook" isn't also just a vague marketing term? What are you talking about?
First, we have more than enough food to feed the masses right now. There's no need to spend more. They're not starving because there's some shortage; they're starving because of distribution problems. It also doesn't help that we can't just waltz in and give food to the people -- we give it to their governments, who are often corrupt, and hoarde it for themselves or sell it.
Second, giving them more food sounds like a great idea, but it also leads to population growth in an area that can't sustain even the population they currently have.
Does it still have that godawful "awesome bar" which, through some supernatural force, manages to be even worse than Firefox's? Does it still think it knows better than me why I opened a new tab? Does it still look ugly as sin? Does it still silently install stupid google updaters alongside without asking or telling me?
Nothing it can ever do, in my mind, will make up for these atrocities. Ditch the "awesome bar", give me a BLANK SCREEN when I open a new tab, integrate well with my current DE, don't install anything alongside, and I'll consider trying it again. Until then, Chrome is a complete disaster in my eyes.
Of course, using a browser from a company that has a profit motive for keeping track of where I'm going and what I'm doing seems like a bloody stupid idea to begin with.
You know, nevermind. Even if they get rid of all that crap, I will never use Chrome. They had their chance to make a good first impression and failed, and I've come to loathe every product Google has ever produced past their actual search engine and perhaps their news aggregator.
Depends on the application, I guess. Years ago, I was out of work, and so my phone got shut off, along with my DSL, leaving me with no useful way of communicating with the world. If I put a laptop on this certain part of the kitchen counter I could get a really weak wireless signal from one of the neighbors, but not enough to be useful. So I put a wok next to the antenna of the computer, and with a little adjustment in direction here and there, got a signal that way, decent enough to actually stream video most of the time.
It was an ancient 233mhz laptop with Windows 2000, so I enabled ICS and ran a cable from it to my router, which then fed the rest of my network. I did this for two months, which was very useful for sending out resumes and such. Without the wok, it didn't work at all; with the wok, it was fairly reliable.
So, yes, you may be better off with a wok or something similar, if your needs are modest. I did have a cantenna, built by my friend, but didn't feel like opening the laptop case to figure out how to connect the wires properly, and that would have been even more directional than the wok with no good way to prop it up to aim.