I'm trying to think of other businesses that have that kind of uniform/plainclothes distinction. Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch.
Those people aren't wearing a uniform because they're viewed as less important employees, but rather, for the other reason you mentioned -- they're the ones out in the field. Having them wear a uniform does a few things: It keeps the company image visible to the public, and it also provides customers with at least some insurance that the random doofus knocking on their door or asking to be let into the office is, in fact, there for a legitimate reason.
In some cases the "uniform" is less to maintain a uniform appearance among employees and more of a practical consideration. You offered mechanics at dealerships as an example. They're wearing coveralls because that's the only practical garment for someone who will be tinkering with grease and oil-covered engines all day. What would you suggest they wear, a suit? Besides, any dealership worth a damn appreciates skilled mechanics.
Similarly, a chef's clothes are practical as well, at least to an extent. The crisp white looks clean and hygenic and that's important for people to see from a chef. The pockets along the sleeves and shirtfront are useful for carrying thermometers and other tools, and the double-breasted construction can be reversed to hide any accidental stains. And you'd better believe that in any fine restaurant, the chef is highly valued.
Another notable counterexample to your list is an airline pilot, who, particularly the more senior ones, can command an impressive salary with all kinds of perks and benefits, and is obviously nowhere near the bottom of the totem pole.
Pretty much anyone in uniform is on the lower end of the totem pole.
Perhaps, but at least in our culture, people expect service personnel to be in uniform. Your examples are all service personnel. And the truth is, helpdesk is the lowest end of the totem pole in IT.
Having worked helpdesk before I naturally balk at the idea, but in most places, I don't see how helpdesk is fundamentally any different from the waiters, cashiers, bus drivers, skycaps, security guards, and so forth, all of whom we expect to be in uniform.
We can't even get the masses to understand things like "stop forwarding that stupid chain email" and "stop downloading and running every random thing you see on the web" and "those emails aren't really coming from your bank, okay?"
Now you want them to buy another computer and set up a KVM switch so they can use both on the same desk and actually remember which one is which and why they need to do this?
rumor hype will excite people to impossibly high standards, and when the actual product comes out, forums will be filled with sarcastic bitching
Or grasping-at-straws rationalisation as to why, despite the objective observation that it is a very mediocre product, it is in fact the greatest thing that has ever been invented since the last thing Apple did, and how you're a fool for not seeing that.
What kind of brainwashing and delusions made him think he could take down an airliner with a bag of stuff he regurgitated and cooked up in a plane toilet? This guy was a clown.
Perhaps, but remember, the weapon of a terrorist is not a gun, or a bomb, or a knife, or even crashing planes into buildings. Those are all only incidental. The terrorist's weapon is terror. Fear. His goal is to disrupt and cause panic in a society, which will then in turn pressure its government to do something. In that respect, some clown lighting his pants on fire was pretty effective.
Think about it -- a couple of guys crash planes into buildings one time (well, three times, but you know what I mean). For the next ten years and beyond they don't have to lift another finger. They don't have to plant one more bomb, fire one more shot, or issue one more threat. Their target country did a fine job of working itself into a tizzy, curtailing the freedoms of millions, overlooking its own laws, spending itself into massive debt, and completely tarnishing its image on the world stage, all on its own, without any further "encouragement" from the responsible parties.
That, to me, is astonishing.
It's also astonishing how the same people who advocate all this War On Terror nonsense are usually the same ones who whine about how if we don't do this and that, the terrorists win. The terrorists already won. They got exactly the reaction they wanted and we played into their hands.
I'm not suggesting that reasonable steps shouldn't have been taken, or that we should have just pretended nothing happened. Deploy your troops to Afgahnistan with the mission of arresting (or, failing that, killing) the responsible parties, and maybe review your security procedures a bit. Fine. But the paranoia leading to two massive, ongoing wars, secret arrests, stuff like Gitmo, and slowly stripping both liberty and dignity from your own citizenry.. that's just the reaction they were trying to provoke.
A stark white screen with black text focuses the mind wonderfully.
Almost. But it's also like staring into a light bulb.
I kind of miss those ancient word processors with white or green text on a black background that ran on old DOS machines. Great for just writing something with a bit of formatting thrown in, and fools the world over had no way to crap up their documents with fifty different font sizes, colors, and faces.
he abbreviation "SoCal" long predates recent abbreviations such as you mention, going back at least into the 1980s.
That doesn't make it right, useful, or clever; it just means something stupid has been around a bit longer than something else stupid. Of course, silliness like "rents" and "vaca" have been around since at least the 80s as well, used primarily by teenagers trying to sound cool. Your rationalisation of earlier origins justifies those too.
At no point was I trying to imply that you, personally, use such words as "Brangelina" -- I was using them as examples of how ridiculous these types of portmanteaus can be.
However, I find it interesting that you take such harsh exception to that sort of thing, while claiming that "SoCal" is perfectly acceptable, merely because it slightly predates the other examples.
As for origins, you realise the dunderheads that brought us "Brangelina" are of the same stock as the chowderheads who brought us "SoCal" slightly earlier?
A silly word being invented by media twits in an effort to appear cool is no more legitimate than another silly word being invented by media twits in an effort to appear cool just because the first media twits invented their silly word twenty years prior to the second media twits.
It showed very short clips of bits of play so you had little idea of what was actually going on with some crazy overexcited presenter yelling for the entire thing.
I don't think soccer matches are much different. This is pretty accurate.
Stop. Just stop. If you must bastardise the language like that, at least go find "Brangelina" or "Tomkat" and tell them about it first. In return maybe they'll tell you about what hot new "romcom" they're going to star in next. They may be on "vaca" though, so you might want to call their "rents" to see when they're expected back.
If all that's too much trouble, you could just stop talking like a thirteen year old girl.
That said, I agree. In Atlanta, the merest hint that a light dusting of snow might be in the forecast is greeted with panic-stricken weathermen beating the HOLY EMERGENCY! drum for three days in advance, advising everyone not to drive, and to stock up on essentials. As a result the idiot masses hit the stores and buy enormous quantities of the two most perishable items they can find -- bread and milk, because god forbid you get snowed in for a day or two and don't have those. Of course, in my thirty years here, I've seen actual crippling snow exactly once, and crippling ice exactly once. Otherwise, every year we get maybe one snowfall annually, which amounts to barely an inch and is usually melted by noon the next day. Insanity.
The biggest problem with using modems was that you had to let everyone in the house know you were on the "modem". This meant, sticking post-it notes to every phone in the house
Ah, smart. My solution was to just bellow really loudly that everyone should stay off the phone so I could use the modem. This was usually followed by my parents telling me to use the intercom instead of yelling, or telling me to stop tying up the phones, or asking if I'd done my homework yet.
You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service... You also had to remember, if you were one of those people that had it, disable call waiting
No way man. The call-waiting thing was, to me, a feature. It meant that I could assure my parents that I wouldn't be tying up the phone lines and preventing people from calling. It was an enormous hassle when the thing disconnected but it meant my parents couldn't use that as an excuse to tell me not to use it.
When I was 14 or so my parents felt comfortable enough to leave me home alone for four days when they went out of town. Still, they asked my uncle to check up on me periodically. Of course, since I didn't care about missing calls, I fired up the modem, logged on, and kept the call-waiting disabled. This meant that my uncle got a busy signal for a day and a half when he was trying to call to see how I was doing, until he finally drove over to see if I was just tying up the line with the modem, or if I was dead on the floor after a brutal break-in that knocked the phone off the hook.
Pointless nostalgia now concluded. More pointless nostalgia on this topic may be found here if anyone's interested.
Uhm, no. Data said that with synthehol, the "intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed". That means it does intoxicate you -- it's just that you can shake off the intoxication somehow.
Plus, Scotty was whining about the lack of any real alcohol. If a member of the crew was off-duty, why shouldn't he or she be allowed to have a real drink? Synthehol was a replacement to alcohol.
Synthehol is what Starfleet crews can drink while on duty because it tastes like the real thing but DOESN'T give you a buzz or get you drunk.
While on duty? Pretty sure Starfleet doesn't want their crews drinking anything that could intoxicate them while ON DUTY, even if you can dismiss the effects.
At the Fort Hood shooting, who took out the shooter? He started the shooting in the middle of a group of well trained, but unarmed individuals. Who took him out? An armed civilian.
You make it sound like it was just some random Joe who happened to have a gun. In fact, it was a cop. The news reports make sure to say "civilian police officer" so you won't think it was the local MPs, but I trust you understand the difference between a cop and a civilian.
Though perhaps your example suggests that maybe the solution is more federal air marshals.
Despite reports to the contrary I have a really hard time believing Apple actually wants anything kept under total wraps. The only explanation for that would be that Jobs' ego needs the reinforcement when he gets to hold one of his unveilings and everyone tells him how great he is for putting out such a cool new product. But I think even that gets outweighed by how much Apple profits from obsessive loons furtively trading inane rumors and hyping themselves into a frenzy months before whatever it is even comes out.
Probably because they've seen everyone do it a thousand times. Anyway, that's the software. I'm talking about hardware. It's my firm belief that touchscreens are terrible interfaces to anything. When I say they're an answer to a question no one asked, it's because I cannot conceive of a sane human actually wishing they didn't have to press a button, but instead press a screen. Fact is that various manufacturers have been trying to make consumers adopt touchscreens on various devices, including computers, for ages and ages, and have each time been unsuccessful because everyone realises they're awful. The iPhone isn't much of an exception, I think -- people are just willing to put up with the stupid screen because they like the other features. (Which is another whole rant.)
The button fetish of the PC user is something that needs to be studied.
Yeah, it's a "fetish", and makes me completely insane, to state that I'd rather press a button that I can feel actually click, instead of wiping my fingers across a smudgy screen and not being able to interact with it without staring down at the screen like an ape.
I've used touchscreens on everything from POS terminals to cash registers to tablets to iphones. Without exception, they all suck. Touchscreens are an answer to a question nobody asked.
A useless company offering a useless service bought a worthless company that produces a tack-on worthless service to the first company's useless service, using investor's money since they have no revenue of their own and seemingly never will.
Which proves my point. That screensaver didn't come from the repo, did it? You had to actively seek out and download it off the web, which is not something most Linux users will ever have to do. The repo-based model actually discourages doing such things, whereas the Windows model actively encourages, and even requires it.
I hope you'll also note that was an isolated incident. One or two examples doesn't even begin to compare to the tens of thousands of Windows viruses, trojans, spyware, and other junk out there.
The problem was also discovered and corrected quickly. Compare this to waiting for Microsoft to even acknowledge the problem, nevermind waiting for them to get off their asses and release a patch, if they ever do. There are tons of vulnerabilities that have been known about forever but Microsoft has yet to do a damn thing about them.
Holding up rare cases like this and trying to say Linux is just as insecure as Windows is just sour grapes
Like I said before, any information medium is going to have it's garbage and it's useful content.
That's obvious. The problem is that twitter is really like reading the graffiti on a bathroom wall. It's random nobodies spewing mostly gibberish. "Call Kate for a good time" may be useful information to someone. It may even be factual. But you have absolutely no idea who said it or if it's true.
Perhaps you're a gamer and would find links to articles about new video games very useful even though I wouldn't be too interested in them.
"Bioshock is the bestest game ever!" "Guys nobody buy Fallout it sucks lol http://bit.ly/273hd"
Yeah, real useful.
If I want information on games, or sports, or the attacks on Mumbai, I'll visit news sites or forums where there's some semblence of coherency and cohesion to the information. And more than that, I can get actual details. You illustrate that quite nicely:
You're going to tell me that "Hi jacked police vehicle had terrorists firing on innocent citizens and drove around Mumbai. No reports if have been apprehended" didn't contain *ANY* useful information?
Yes, I'm going to tell you that. Some guy says that some vehicle, somewhere, had terrorists. Fascinating. Oh, and he adds that he doesn't know if they've been caught. You know, I could have told you that and I wasn't even there. And since you have no idea who I am, my information is about as reliable as his, since you have no idea who he is either.
I don't see how that is functionally any different from "Situation bad, people are fighting," really. There's no context, no accountability, no details, and no actual information beyond some guy claiming that bad guys are driving around shooting. That's not information. That's nonsense. You don't even know where this guy is allegedly getting his information. Was he there? Did he see it? Or he just overheard someone talking about it? Who knows?
Frankly, from looking at that, it seems like he was just "tweeting" what he was hearing on the news. Well, I can turn on the news just as easily as he can.
Everything there was completely devoid of context, and almost completely devoid of information. "more fires". "heard more explosions". "reports of terrorists". "police on the scene".
This tells me nothing. It's aimless rambling from some unknown guy with unknown sources, and quite honestly, reading that gave me zero insight into what was going on in Mumbai beyond a vague sense that, well, the situation was bad and lots of people were fighting. At a hotel, it seems.
Historians use something like Anne Frank's diary to better understand the plight and turmoil of people who lived through that era, because it contained actual information, details, and most of all, context. Do you really think that, decades from now, someone's going to be able to sift through the avalanche of garbage on twitter and come out with a better understanding of the problems in Mumbai because some anonymous twit said that he heard there were terrorists in police cars, or that hospitals need blood?
it just seems unfair to condemn a communications method and everyone who uses it simply because you don't see a use for it for you.
My point is that I have yet to see a use for it for anyone, even when people like you earnestly try to rationalise it. You just stepped up to the plate and the best examples you could find were "I heard someone's driving around shooting" and "Newsflash, hospitals could use more blood."
Having seen that, and countless other examples of the allegedly "useful" information being disseminated on twitter, I've concluded that twitter, as a medium, is abjectly worthless and of no real value to anyone, nor will it ever be. That may sound like a stubborn, heavy-handed, and sweeping conclusion, but I stand by it. It is all vapid, mindless drivel of barely-coherent sentence fragments. It's complete trash.
Oh please. Twitter has never been used to convey useful information. Everyone likes to point at the Iranian election fiasco, or things like the Mumbai situation you just linked, but that's nonsense. The "tweets" amount to little more than "Situation is bad. Everyone is fighting." They tell you absolutely nothing of value. You may be able to point to one or two examples where something of use was said, but that would be one or two instances in a sea of several hundred thousand instances PER DAY of absolutely pure garbage.
Your point about how the web at large is also full of nonsense is not applicable. It's true, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much, much, much worse at twitter.. and considering how absurd the web is, that's really saying something.
My point is that twitter is basically without any redeeming value at all, and pointing out how someone used it to gripe about civil unrest in their part of the world is absurd since the gripes really never amount to anything more significant than "this sucks" and "total chaos".
Twitter is the answer to a question nobody asked; it's a solution looking for a problem. Attempting to defend it makes you look like, well, a twit.
sigh. I used to work with a guy who said "electronical" all the time. He was working helpdesk, too, which made it even more obnoxious, since I'd overhear him blaming this electronical device or that electronical device for the problem.
who the fuck going to connect a Windows box to the internet without NAT/Firewall?
Teeming multitudes of clueless users who only have one computer and therefore never got a router. Every one of their boxes is totally owned, but they're oblivious.
So exactly how do you propose that an operating system prevent a user from downloading malware that can destroy the users files?
Partly because the notion of distro-maintained repositories, containing tens of thousands of packages, vetted and verified by people who know way more than you or I, and subsequently checked by thousands of people who use them and examine them, is an inherently safer method than the Microsoft ecosystem method of "search the web and download unknown binary installers from god-knows-where which will do god-knows-what to your system".
Yes, with Ubuntu you can download random, untrusted nonsense and run it. But it's essentially never necessary; there's just no reason. The Windows model, on the other hand, actively encourages such stupid behavior. Big surprise, people end up installing dumb things even without realising it.
Even when you think you know and trust the source you can get burned. When Chrome came out I installed it to see what all the fuss was about (nothing; it's a piece of garbage). Hey, it's Google, they're good guys, I know them, right? Right. So imagine my annoyance when it silently installed some "Google Updater" alongside, without asking or telling me, and was sending fuck-knows-what information to fuck-knows-who for fuck-knows-what reasons. And it wouldn't uninstall when I got rid of Chrome. I ended up having to manually remove its directory because it kept coming back. That, to me, is the very definition of spyware, and I thought I knew where I was getting this allegedly safe software.
Things like this are why Windows is vastly inferior in every aspect of security. The idea of downloading and running random, untrustable, closed binaries from random, untrustable sites is a fantastic way to get infected. It's the single largest vector of infection there is, by a ridiculous margin. The Linux model of package management eliminates this.
Even Obi-Wan comments that he's heard Luke has become quite a good pilot, like his father. I thought it was pretty well-established that Luke knows what he's doing when it comes to flying -- there were quite a number of references to his piloting skills.
What the review is wrong about is focussing on the story plotholes.
It wasn't just about the plotholes. Those were usually asides, like "Why is there a child-sized helmet and goggles in the cockpit?" The narrative was illustrating how completely incoherent the plot was, in its entirety. The first movie was about a real, tangible enemy -- Vader, the Death Star, the Empire at large -- whereas Phantom Menace is about some idiots squabbling about tax rates. No one cares, and even if we did, the argument makes no sense, the goals make no sense, the plans and actions to obtain those goals make no sense, and we have no real idea what the motive was behind anything that happens. As such, we stop caring about the story or the characters.
Nitpicking plot holes is fun, but that wasn't what this guy did. He was pointing out that the first three movies were fantastic because the plots were relatively simple, identifiable, easy to understand, and the characters were fleshed out in a way that you knew why they were doing what they were doing, and they had distinct personalities.
The prequels in general, and Phantom Menace in particular, have none of that. The plot of Phantom Menace is a long, droning, boring bickerfest about votes and trade negotiations that don't even make sense, and the characters are all idiots. It's rather like watching CSPAN.
Another thing that annoyed me about the prequels, which the guy just kind of touched on but didn't really get into, was the total overuse of CGI. I know that's been discussed to death. But really, if you look at, say, the sail barge scene in Return of the Jedi, the actors are actually standing on some kind of prop. It's worn, charred in places.. the thing's clearly seen use. And so it looks real, and I found myself thinking "How are Luke and his friends going to get out of this?"
On the other hand, watching the CGI eye candy on the prequels just made me think "Wow! Awesome special effects!" Not a thought about the story.
Slashdot Mirror
"Works On My Machine!"
I'm trying to think of other businesses that have that kind of uniform/plainclothes distinction. Delivery drivers, pest control people, UPS, the people who go out in the field wear the uniform. They're also the lowest paid of the bunch.
Those people aren't wearing a uniform because they're viewed as less important employees, but rather, for the other reason you mentioned -- they're the ones out in the field. Having them wear a uniform does a few things: It keeps the company image visible to the public, and it also provides customers with at least some insurance that the random doofus knocking on their door or asking to be let into the office is, in fact, there for a legitimate reason.
In some cases the "uniform" is less to maintain a uniform appearance among employees and more of a practical consideration. You offered mechanics at dealerships as an example. They're wearing coveralls because that's the only practical garment for someone who will be tinkering with grease and oil-covered engines all day. What would you suggest they wear, a suit? Besides, any dealership worth a damn appreciates skilled mechanics.
Similarly, a chef's clothes are practical as well, at least to an extent. The crisp white looks clean and hygenic and that's important for people to see from a chef. The pockets along the sleeves and shirtfront are useful for carrying thermometers and other tools, and the double-breasted construction can be reversed to hide any accidental stains. And you'd better believe that in any fine restaurant, the chef is highly valued.
Another notable counterexample to your list is an airline pilot, who, particularly the more senior ones, can command an impressive salary with all kinds of perks and benefits, and is obviously nowhere near the bottom of the totem pole.
Pretty much anyone in uniform is on the lower end of the totem pole.
Perhaps, but at least in our culture, people expect service personnel to be in uniform. Your examples are all service personnel. And the truth is, helpdesk is the lowest end of the totem pole in IT.
Having worked helpdesk before I naturally balk at the idea, but in most places, I don't see how helpdesk is fundamentally any different from the waiters, cashiers, bus drivers, skycaps, security guards, and so forth, all of whom we expect to be in uniform.
We can't even get the masses to understand things like "stop forwarding that stupid chain email" and "stop downloading and running every random thing you see on the web" and "those emails aren't really coming from your bank, okay?"
Now you want them to buy another computer and set up a KVM switch so they can use both on the same desk and actually remember which one is which and why they need to do this?
It's not going to happen.
rumor hype will excite people to impossibly high standards, and when the actual product comes out, forums will be filled with sarcastic bitching
Or grasping-at-straws rationalisation as to why, despite the objective observation that it is a very mediocre product, it is in fact the greatest thing that has ever been invented since the last thing Apple did, and how you're a fool for not seeing that.
What kind of brainwashing and delusions made him think he could take down an airliner with a bag of stuff he regurgitated and cooked up in a plane toilet? This guy was a clown.
Perhaps, but remember, the weapon of a terrorist is not a gun, or a bomb, or a knife, or even crashing planes into buildings. Those are all only incidental. The terrorist's weapon is terror. Fear. His goal is to disrupt and cause panic in a society, which will then in turn pressure its government to do something. In that respect, some clown lighting his pants on fire was pretty effective.
Think about it -- a couple of guys crash planes into buildings one time (well, three times, but you know what I mean). For the next ten years and beyond they don't have to lift another finger. They don't have to plant one more bomb, fire one more shot, or issue one more threat. Their target country did a fine job of working itself into a tizzy, curtailing the freedoms of millions, overlooking its own laws, spending itself into massive debt, and completely tarnishing its image on the world stage, all on its own, without any further "encouragement" from the responsible parties.
That, to me, is astonishing.
It's also astonishing how the same people who advocate all this War On Terror nonsense are usually the same ones who whine about how if we don't do this and that, the terrorists win. The terrorists already won. They got exactly the reaction they wanted and we played into their hands.
I'm not suggesting that reasonable steps shouldn't have been taken, or that we should have just pretended nothing happened. Deploy your troops to Afgahnistan with the mission of arresting (or, failing that, killing) the responsible parties, and maybe review your security procedures a bit. Fine. But the paranoia leading to two massive, ongoing wars, secret arrests, stuff like Gitmo, and slowly stripping both liberty and dignity from your own citizenry.. that's just the reaction they were trying to provoke.
A stark white screen with black text focuses the mind wonderfully.
Almost. But it's also like staring into a light bulb.
I kind of miss those ancient word processors with white or green text on a black background that ran on old DOS machines. Great for just writing something with a bit of formatting thrown in, and fools the world over had no way to crap up their documents with fifty different font sizes, colors, and faces.
he abbreviation "SoCal" long predates recent abbreviations such as you mention, going back at least into the 1980s.
That doesn't make it right, useful, or clever; it just means something stupid has been around a bit longer than something else stupid. Of course, silliness like "rents" and "vaca" have been around since at least the 80s as well, used primarily by teenagers trying to sound cool. Your rationalisation of earlier origins justifies those too.
At no point was I trying to imply that you, personally, use such words as "Brangelina" -- I was using them as examples of how ridiculous these types of portmanteaus can be.
However, I find it interesting that you take such harsh exception to that sort of thing, while claiming that "SoCal" is perfectly acceptable, merely because it slightly predates the other examples.
As for origins, you realise the dunderheads that brought us "Brangelina" are of the same stock as the chowderheads who brought us "SoCal" slightly earlier?
A silly word being invented by media twits in an effort to appear cool is no more legitimate than another silly word being invented by media twits in an effort to appear cool just because the first media twits invented their silly word twenty years prior to the second media twits.
I don't think soccer matches are much different. This is pretty accurate.
In SoCal, we
Stop. Just stop. If you must bastardise the language like that, at least go find "Brangelina" or "Tomkat" and tell them about it first. In return maybe they'll tell you about what hot new "romcom" they're going to star in next. They may be on "vaca" though, so you might want to call their "rents" to see when they're expected back.
If all that's too much trouble, you could just stop talking like a thirteen year old girl.
That said, I agree. In Atlanta, the merest hint that a light dusting of snow might be in the forecast is greeted with panic-stricken weathermen beating the HOLY EMERGENCY! drum for three days in advance, advising everyone not to drive, and to stock up on essentials. As a result the idiot masses hit the stores and buy enormous quantities of the two most perishable items they can find -- bread and milk, because god forbid you get snowed in for a day or two and don't have those. Of course, in my thirty years here, I've seen actual crippling snow exactly once, and crippling ice exactly once. Otherwise, every year we get maybe one snowfall annually, which amounts to barely an inch and is usually melted by noon the next day. Insanity.
The biggest problem with using modems was that you had to let everyone in the house know you were on the "modem". This meant, sticking post-it notes to every phone in the house
... You also had to remember, if you were one of those people that had it, disable call waiting
Ah, smart. My solution was to just bellow really loudly that everyone should stay off the phone so I could use the modem. This was usually followed by my parents telling me to use the intercom instead of yelling, or telling me to stop tying up the phones, or asking if I'd done my homework yet.
You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service
No way man. The call-waiting thing was, to me, a feature. It meant that I could assure my parents that I wouldn't be tying up the phone lines and preventing people from calling. It was an enormous hassle when the thing disconnected but it meant my parents couldn't use that as an excuse to tell me not to use it.
When I was 14 or so my parents felt comfortable enough to leave me home alone for four days when they went out of town. Still, they asked my uncle to check up on me periodically. Of course, since I didn't care about missing calls, I fired up the modem, logged on, and kept the call-waiting disabled. This meant that my uncle got a busy signal for a day and a half when he was trying to call to see how I was doing, until he finally drove over to see if I was just tying up the line with the modem, or if I was dead on the floor after a brutal break-in that knocked the phone off the hook.
Pointless nostalgia now concluded. More pointless nostalgia on this topic may be found here if anyone's interested.
Uhm, no. Data said that with synthehol, the "intoxicating effects can be easily dismissed". That means it does intoxicate you -- it's just that you can shake off the intoxication somehow.
Plus, Scotty was whining about the lack of any real alcohol. If a member of the crew was off-duty, why shouldn't he or she be allowed to have a real drink? Synthehol was a replacement to alcohol.
Synthehol is what Starfleet crews can drink while on duty because it tastes like the real thing but DOESN'T give you a buzz or get you drunk.
While on duty? Pretty sure Starfleet doesn't want their crews drinking anything that could intoxicate them while ON DUTY, even if you can dismiss the effects.
At the Fort Hood shooting, who took out the shooter? He started the shooting in the middle of a group of well trained, but unarmed individuals. Who took him out? An armed civilian.
You make it sound like it was just some random Joe who happened to have a gun. In fact, it was a cop. The news reports make sure to say "civilian police officer" so you won't think it was the local MPs, but I trust you understand the difference between a cop and a civilian.
Though perhaps your example suggests that maybe the solution is more federal air marshals.
Despite reports to the contrary I have a really hard time believing Apple actually wants anything kept under total wraps. The only explanation for that would be that Jobs' ego needs the reinforcement when he gets to hold one of his unveilings and everyone tells him how great he is for putting out such a cool new product. But I think even that gets outweighed by how much Apple profits from obsessive loons furtively trading inane rumors and hyping themselves into a frenzy months before whatever it is even comes out.
Probably because they've seen everyone do it a thousand times. Anyway, that's the software. I'm talking about hardware. It's my firm belief that touchscreens are terrible interfaces to anything. When I say they're an answer to a question no one asked, it's because I cannot conceive of a sane human actually wishing they didn't have to press a button, but instead press a screen. Fact is that various manufacturers have been trying to make consumers adopt touchscreens on various devices, including computers, for ages and ages, and have each time been unsuccessful because everyone realises they're awful. The iPhone isn't much of an exception, I think -- people are just willing to put up with the stupid screen because they like the other features. (Which is another whole rant.)
The button fetish of the PC user is something that needs to be studied.
Yeah, it's a "fetish", and makes me completely insane, to state that I'd rather press a button that I can feel actually click, instead of wiping my fingers across a smudgy screen and not being able to interact with it without staring down at the screen like an ape.
I've used touchscreens on everything from POS terminals to cash registers to tablets to iphones. Without exception, they all suck. Touchscreens are an answer to a question nobody asked.
A useless company offering a useless service bought a worthless company that produces a tack-on worthless service to the first company's useless service, using investor's money since they have no revenue of their own and seemingly never will.
Fascinating.
What's Twitter good for? How about crowd sourcing control of your Christmas tree.
No, that still doesn't make Twitter good for anything.
Which proves my point. That screensaver didn't come from the repo, did it? You had to actively seek out and download it off the web, which is not something most Linux users will ever have to do. The repo-based model actually discourages doing such things, whereas the Windows model actively encourages, and even requires it.
I hope you'll also note that was an isolated incident. One or two examples doesn't even begin to compare to the tens of thousands of Windows viruses, trojans, spyware, and other junk out there.
The problem was also discovered and corrected quickly. Compare this to waiting for Microsoft to even acknowledge the problem, nevermind waiting for them to get off their asses and release a patch, if they ever do. There are tons of vulnerabilities that have been known about forever but Microsoft has yet to do a damn thing about them.
Holding up rare cases like this and trying to say Linux is just as insecure as Windows is just sour grapes
Like I said before, any information medium is going to have it's garbage and it's useful content.
That's obvious. The problem is that twitter is really like reading the graffiti on a bathroom wall. It's random nobodies spewing mostly gibberish. "Call Kate for a good time" may be useful information to someone. It may even be factual. But you have absolutely no idea who said it or if it's true.
Perhaps you're a gamer and would find links to articles about new video games very useful even though I wouldn't be too interested in them.
"Bioshock is the bestest game ever!" "Guys nobody buy Fallout it sucks lol http://bit.ly/273hd"
Yeah, real useful.
If I want information on games, or sports, or the attacks on Mumbai, I'll visit news sites or forums where there's some semblence of coherency and cohesion to the information. And more than that, I can get actual details. You illustrate that quite nicely:
You're going to tell me that "Hi jacked police vehicle had terrorists firing on innocent citizens and drove around Mumbai. No reports if have been apprehended" didn't contain *ANY* useful information?
Yes, I'm going to tell you that. Some guy says that some vehicle, somewhere, had terrorists. Fascinating. Oh, and he adds that he doesn't know if they've been caught. You know, I could have told you that and I wasn't even there. And since you have no idea who I am, my information is about as reliable as his, since you have no idea who he is either.
I don't see how that is functionally any different from "Situation bad, people are fighting," really. There's no context, no accountability, no details, and no actual information beyond some guy claiming that bad guys are driving around shooting. That's not information. That's nonsense. You don't even know where this guy is allegedly getting his information. Was he there? Did he see it? Or he just overheard someone talking about it? Who knows?
Frankly, from looking at that, it seems like he was just "tweeting" what he was hearing on the news. Well, I can turn on the news just as easily as he can.
Everything there was completely devoid of context, and almost completely devoid of information. "more fires". "heard more explosions". "reports of terrorists". "police on the scene".
This tells me nothing. It's aimless rambling from some unknown guy with unknown sources, and quite honestly, reading that gave me zero insight into what was going on in Mumbai beyond a vague sense that, well, the situation was bad and lots of people were fighting. At a hotel, it seems.
Historians use something like Anne Frank's diary to better understand the plight and turmoil of people who lived through that era, because it contained actual information, details, and most of all, context. Do you really think that, decades from now, someone's going to be able to sift through the avalanche of garbage on twitter and come out with a better understanding of the problems in Mumbai because some anonymous twit said that he heard there were terrorists in police cars, or that hospitals need blood?
it just seems unfair to condemn a communications method and everyone who uses it simply because you don't see a use for it for you.
My point is that I have yet to see a use for it for anyone, even when people like you earnestly try to rationalise it. You just stepped up to the plate and the best examples you could find were "I heard someone's driving around shooting" and "Newsflash, hospitals could use more blood."
Having seen that, and countless other examples of the allegedly "useful" information being disseminated on twitter, I've concluded that twitter, as a medium, is abjectly worthless and of no real value to anyone, nor will it ever be. That may sound like a stubborn, heavy-handed, and sweeping conclusion, but I stand by it. It is all vapid, mindless drivel of barely-coherent sentence fragments. It's complete trash.
End of rant.
Oh please. Twitter has never been used to convey useful information. Everyone likes to point at the Iranian election fiasco, or things like the Mumbai situation you just linked, but that's nonsense. The "tweets" amount to little more than "Situation is bad. Everyone is fighting." They tell you absolutely nothing of value. You may be able to point to one or two examples where something of use was said, but that would be one or two instances in a sea of several hundred thousand instances PER DAY of absolutely pure garbage.
Your point about how the web at large is also full of nonsense is not applicable. It's true, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much, much, much worse at twitter.. and considering how absurd the web is, that's really saying something.
My point is that twitter is basically without any redeeming value at all, and pointing out how someone used it to gripe about civil unrest in their part of the world is absurd since the gripes really never amount to anything more significant than "this sucks" and "total chaos".
Twitter is the answer to a question nobody asked; it's a solution looking for a problem. Attempting to defend it makes you look like, well, a twit.
sigh. I used to work with a guy who said "electronical" all the time. He was working helpdesk, too, which made it even more obnoxious, since I'd overhear him blaming this electronical device or that electronical device for the problem.
who the fuck going to connect a Windows box to the internet without NAT/Firewall?
Teeming multitudes of clueless users who only have one computer and therefore never got a router. Every one of their boxes is totally owned, but they're oblivious.
So exactly how do you propose that an operating system prevent a user from downloading malware that can destroy the users files?
Partly because the notion of distro-maintained repositories, containing tens of thousands of packages, vetted and verified by people who know way more than you or I, and subsequently checked by thousands of people who use them and examine them, is an inherently safer method than the Microsoft ecosystem method of "search the web and download unknown binary installers from god-knows-where which will do god-knows-what to your system".
Yes, with Ubuntu you can download random, untrusted nonsense and run it. But it's essentially never necessary; there's just no reason. The Windows model, on the other hand, actively encourages such stupid behavior. Big surprise, people end up installing dumb things even without realising it.
Even when you think you know and trust the source you can get burned. When Chrome came out I installed it to see what all the fuss was about (nothing; it's a piece of garbage). Hey, it's Google, they're good guys, I know them, right? Right. So imagine my annoyance when it silently installed some "Google Updater" alongside, without asking or telling me, and was sending fuck-knows-what information to fuck-knows-who for fuck-knows-what reasons. And it wouldn't uninstall when I got rid of Chrome. I ended up having to manually remove its directory because it kept coming back. That, to me, is the very definition of spyware, and I thought I knew where I was getting this allegedly safe software.
Things like this are why Windows is vastly inferior in every aspect of security. The idea of downloading and running random, untrustable, closed binaries from random, untrustable sites is a fantastic way to get infected. It's the single largest vector of infection there is, by a ridiculous margin. The Linux model of package management eliminates this.
Even Obi-Wan comments that he's heard Luke has become quite a good pilot, like his father. I thought it was pretty well-established that Luke knows what he's doing when it comes to flying -- there were quite a number of references to his piloting skills.
What the review is wrong about is focussing on the story plotholes.
It wasn't just about the plotholes. Those were usually asides, like "Why is there a child-sized helmet and goggles in the cockpit?" The narrative was illustrating how completely incoherent the plot was, in its entirety. The first movie was about a real, tangible enemy -- Vader, the Death Star, the Empire at large -- whereas Phantom Menace is about some idiots squabbling about tax rates. No one cares, and even if we did, the argument makes no sense, the goals make no sense, the plans and actions to obtain those goals make no sense, and we have no real idea what the motive was behind anything that happens. As such, we stop caring about the story or the characters.
Nitpicking plot holes is fun, but that wasn't what this guy did. He was pointing out that the first three movies were fantastic because the plots were relatively simple, identifiable, easy to understand, and the characters were fleshed out in a way that you knew why they were doing what they were doing, and they had distinct personalities.
The prequels in general, and Phantom Menace in particular, have none of that. The plot of Phantom Menace is a long, droning, boring bickerfest about votes and trade negotiations that don't even make sense, and the characters are all idiots. It's rather like watching CSPAN.
Another thing that annoyed me about the prequels, which the guy just kind of touched on but didn't really get into, was the total overuse of CGI. I know that's been discussed to death. But really, if you look at, say, the sail barge scene in Return of the Jedi, the actors are actually standing on some kind of prop. It's worn, charred in places.. the thing's clearly seen use. And so it looks real, and I found myself thinking "How are Luke and his friends going to get out of this?"
On the other hand, watching the CGI eye candy on the prequels just made me think "Wow! Awesome special effects!" Not a thought about the story.