So you're saying it's beyond the capabilities of Apple to have an option buried somewhere deep in the settings saying "Allow multitasking" (or something obscure so that non-geeks won't think it sounds awesome and tick it for fun)?
Maybe you're right, I only know my closest experience to using a system like this was buying a pretty high powered iPaq back in 2004 and being immensely disappointed that it didn't work the way I wanted it to, and in fact worked pretty closely to how the iPad probably will. I don't see why they can't put their fisher price front-end on a standard OS back-end and at least give the users who want to do more the opportunity. I'd love to buy one of these if it did what I wanted it to, but my experience has been tainted.
Not only that, prolonged laptop/netbook usage has been shown to lower fertility, so eventually all the weak laptop users will die out while the strong tablet users will dominate and... oh... my... god... they're engineering the entire human race...
[...] they probably figured out that by pissing off the small percentage of people like you they could provide a sellable experience to everyone else.
I agree with you except for this part, because it seems that by playing on the massive hype, Apple have disappointed more than a small percentage of people, meanwhile the "everyone else" that this will appeal to is likely to be a much smaller niche market. You can't afford to disappoint a massive section of your potential/existing market even if it does gain you the undying adoration of a very small majority of said market. At least the previous devices (iPod, Air, iPhone, et al) had more than niche market appeal.
My understanding (and IANALaserologist) is that fusion only generates low level nuclear waste, the sort of stuff you get as a by product of various machines in hospitals and... relatively... safe to handle, so I guess the real question is about the quantity, whether it's within the bounds we already deal with or exceeds those by several order of magnitudes could be the key factor.
There's nothing wrong with a pay off in decades other than it will effectively kill off the investment that's required now. The governments and heads of corporations don't want to feather someone else's nest, so they'll constantly make short term decisions. I really wish we could have political parties who looked to the future good of our countries instead of their short term political survival, but experience seems to indicate otherwise. They'll rarely decide to potentially gift their rivals 30 years in the future with incredibly cheap, clean fuel. It's part of the reason we don't have an abundance of nuclear reactors today (and also partly due to the green/Simpsons effects, oh and that explody thing that happened in Chernobyl). Hopefully the big fuel companies will be shifting more investment into these technologies if they want to avoid being redundant when oil is too expensive to obtain.
What's really scary, being a kid at the time the movies came out, is that pretty soon the "future" they visit in the second movie will be our past (we're only five years away)...
I have to admit I didn't even notice the facebook/twitter links at first, and even after reading the first few comments I didn't notice them and had to scroll up and search the page for 30 seconds to see the two tiny icons. What's slightly more intrusive are the seemingly endless "Why the facebook/twitter link" comments (which, annoyingly, can't be turned off with a little bit of custom css).
Then take steps that will actually encourage people to be aware of the problem, like teaching them about the bystander effect. But punishing people who most likely didn't even know such a law exists does nothing but give us satisfaction with the thought that we wouldn't do that sort of thing, when of course, we likely would.
Prosecuting people for such cases usually gets a lot of media coverage and brings attention to the issue. I'm not sure I agree with such a tactic, but in all honesty a lot of people don't notice moral issues unless they have some sort of incentive (positive or negative) to do so.
Then as GP said, give them a bloody positive encouragement/incentive. This isn't prehistory where human sacrifice is acceptable, "We know you technically had no more reason to know about this law than the next guy, but we need a sacrifice for the good of all, so your ass is going to gaol", doesn't sound like the right approach to me. I know our governments seem to think only the stick can ever work, but they could at least try the carrot.
I don't know about you but my first instinct when someone disagrees with me (and prevents me from doing something) is to knock him/her out of the way. If that leads to any reaction other than submission my instinct is to beat the crap out of the asshole.
How exactly would a democracy work if people acted like that in general ?
It seems to me a LOT of instincts involve the application of direct physical violence. I'm sure that's just me.
Erm... yeah I think it may be. I'm mid thirties and I'm no peaceful hippie type, but I can probably count the number of times I've actually considered using physical violence, outside of being a very young child and not realising the consequences, (even just pushing someone aside) on my fingers. Seriously, if someone even disagrees with you your instinct is to physically harm them?
That's true. Quite often in civil law the test is the "reasonable man" - i.e. did you do something that the reasonable man wouldn't have done, if so, then you may be liable - and in the case of people who have special, relevant skills (doctors, etc), the test becomes the reasonable man with those skills/that knowledge, i.e. did you act as the reasonable doctor would have done.
The law is full of gray areas, just like life, but I believe that we can START at if you have a cellphone you're obligated to take the incredibly arduous step of pressing 4 whole buttons to save a life.
So long as it's tempered with reason - such as the obligation isn't there or you will be afforded all the protection you need if you believe reporting the crime will put you at risk. Otherwise if you say every crime must be reported in every instance, a lot of the time you're just going to have two murders instead of saving one life (why would the people who just murdered that guy care if they also had to murder you to stop you reporting the crime, after all).
More importantly the government should enact the will of the people. If it's the people's will that certain actions are enforced, for the good of all, there is nothing wrong with the government forcing people to do things (such as not murder, pay taxes, obey the driving laws, etc). It's when the government starts forcing you to do things which are against the will of the people that we should worry.
Forcing people with medical training to stop and help is fine so long as there is something in place to protect those people. My gf is a nurse and she has a duty to stop and render assistance if she sees someone in need of help. If she doesn't do this and someone finds out, she can lose the right to practise as a nurse. On the other hand there's very little protection in place for her if she does help and something does go wrong, she can still end up losing her career because she is held to a higher duty of care than everyone else (and never mind that they might have just finished a double shift and be physically and mentally exhausted, possibly they've had a few drinks to unwind, maybe like my gf they only deal with kids and this is an adult, etc).
That being the case, if you're a doctor and you see someone having a heart attack or choking or whatever - (and you know your particular skills won't be any use whatsoever over someone with first aid training - let's say you're a brain surgeon) it must take an incredible degree of courage to risk everything you've worked for to help out some guy you've never met before and will never see again.
In that situation, forcing people to do something on pain of punishment/repercussions if they don't is going to encourage a number of people to remain anonymous and slip away. On the other hand, enabling them to help (and most of them want to help, that's why they joined a caring industry) by removing the threats and barriers is likely to be the better option. Not everything has to be about forcing people into a particular action, especially when it's generally an action most people would like to take if they knew they were protected. People generally don't learn CPR unless they want to use it to help - instead of forcing them to help or become criminals, which will likely just reduce the number of people willing to learn CPR, why not look at what's preventing them from helping and fix that?
While I don't agree with the strict interpretation of that list (I believe governments should be providing things like education and health care), there still have to be some limits. If the government claimed everyone had to remain in their homes at all times without a special license for the purposes of ensuring their safety, that would be going too far, just as if the government said murder was no longer a crime would be them not going far enough.
Finding criminals is a worthy cause to ensure public safety, but making criminals of people who don't report crimes is a very grey area - there could be any number of reasons why they didn't report, they might have seen five other witnesses who saw more than them already making the calls, they might be scared for their safety or that of their fammilies, the crime might be one against them that they see no point in reporting because there's zero chance of anything being done about it.
Say a kid throws a rock at some guy, he's not seriously hurt and he wants to just leave it at that, but his wife is there to witness it. Does she have to report this even knowing the husband doesn't want to do anything and that the kid will get off because of his age; knowing she'll face a ton of hassle reporting it and being called as a witness, not to mention possible future retribution from the kid or his friends? Blindly applying this law would make the husband the victim, the wife the criminal and the kid walks away free. It's a very grey area.
This is fine so long as you give everyone rudimentary CPR training so they at least have a vague understanding of what they're doing. If you take a populace who are largely not trained to perform CPR (I'd say it's like that here in the UK) then you just give a bunch of amateurs a free license to "have a go" free of consequence, you're going to cause a hell of a lot of damage. Emergency services here advise nobody to perform CPR unless they know what they're doing specifically because it can make the situation worse (or even transform a serious injury into a fatality) for the victim than waiting a couple more minutes for an ambulance.
Seems like it's a poor interpretation of a law by a mobile provider - the law being that the phone must alert the user that an emergency call is in progress. I guess they did it so that if you accidentally dialled emergency services while the phone was in your pocket or bag, it would let you know and you could tell the operator it was a mistake (rather than them trying to trace your location or, more likely, punish you for prank calling), but it really seems like they've not thought of the possible consequences.
Probably aimed at the kind of idiots who film this stuff on their phones and post it to youtube but don't even think twice about calling the relevant authorities.
Especially if you live in an area where gang related violence is high, the perpetrators know who you are, they know you're the only witness, and they have lots of friends who can make sure your family suffer if you ever testify. You're right, I can't see a single problem with criminalising people who fail to report crimes.
It's two-fold, firstly to ensure you're paying attention to the instructions (the first instruction is always to read all the others before doing anything) and secondly to teach the value of reading ahead so that you can make informed decisions (which is a particularly useful tip when taking tests that a lot of people seem to ignore).
As a kid, also in the UK, I came across this a couple of times in various classes, and one time at a party (yes, it was an incredibly dull party).
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying it's beyond the capabilities of Apple to have an option buried somewhere deep in the settings saying "Allow multitasking" (or something obscure so that non-geeks won't think it sounds awesome and tick it for fun)?
Maybe you're right, I only know my closest experience to using a system like this was buying a pretty high powered iPaq back in 2004 and being immensely disappointed that it didn't work the way I wanted it to, and in fact worked pretty closely to how the iPad probably will. I don't see why they can't put their fisher price front-end on a standard OS back-end and at least give the users who want to do more the opportunity. I'd love to buy one of these if it did what I wanted it to, but my experience has been tainted.
Not only that, prolonged laptop/netbook usage has been shown to lower fertility, so eventually all the weak laptop users will die out while the strong tablet users will dominate and... oh... my... god... they're engineering the entire human race...
[...] they probably figured out that by pissing off the small percentage of people like you they could provide a sellable experience to everyone else.
I agree with you except for this part, because it seems that by playing on the massive hype, Apple have disappointed more than a small percentage of people, meanwhile the "everyone else" that this will appeal to is likely to be a much smaller niche market. You can't afford to disappoint a massive section of your potential/existing market even if it does gain you the undying adoration of a very small majority of said market. At least the previous devices (iPod, Air, iPhone, et al) had more than niche market appeal.
My understanding (and IANALaserologist) is that fusion only generates low level nuclear waste, the sort of stuff you get as a by product of various machines in hospitals and... relatively... safe to handle, so I guess the real question is about the quantity, whether it's within the bounds we already deal with or exceeds those by several order of magnitudes could be the key factor.
There's nothing wrong with a pay off in decades other than it will effectively kill off the investment that's required now. The governments and heads of corporations don't want to feather someone else's nest, so they'll constantly make short term decisions. I really wish we could have political parties who looked to the future good of our countries instead of their short term political survival, but experience seems to indicate otherwise. They'll rarely decide to potentially gift their rivals 30 years in the future with incredibly cheap, clean fuel. It's part of the reason we don't have an abundance of nuclear reactors today (and also partly due to the green/Simpsons effects, oh and that explody thing that happened in Chernobyl). Hopefully the big fuel companies will be shifting more investment into these technologies if they want to avoid being redundant when oil is too expensive to obtain.
What's really scary, being a kid at the time the movies came out, is that pretty soon the "future" they visit in the second movie will be our past (we're only five years away)...
I have to admit I didn't even notice the facebook/twitter links at first, and even after reading the first few comments I didn't notice them and had to scroll up and search the page for 30 seconds to see the two tiny icons. What's slightly more intrusive are the seemingly endless "Why the facebook/twitter link" comments (which, annoyingly, can't be turned off with a little bit of custom css).
Although if they crash a lot it'll get renamed the IE, after the noise the pilots make on the way down, "AAAAAIIIIEEEEEE........."
If it's a stealth plane that nobody knows about, I'd think that would be a major marketing boon.
Or just put one of those balls on it that people put on their car aerials so they can see where they parked in a busy car park.
I'm sure the police would like that.
Prosecuting people for such cases usually gets a lot of media coverage and brings attention to the issue. I'm not sure I agree with such a tactic, but in all honesty a lot of people don't notice moral issues unless they have some sort of incentive (positive or negative) to do so.
Then as GP said, give them a bloody positive encouragement/incentive. This isn't prehistory where human sacrifice is acceptable, "We know you technically had no more reason to know about this law than the next guy, but we need a sacrifice for the good of all, so your ass is going to gaol", doesn't sound like the right approach to me. I know our governments seem to think only the stick can ever work, but they could at least try the carrot.
I don't know about you but my first instinct when someone disagrees with me (and prevents me from doing something) is to knock him/her out of the way. If that leads to any reaction other than submission my instinct is to beat the crap out of the asshole.
How exactly would a democracy work if people acted like that in general ?
It seems to me a LOT of instincts involve the application of direct physical violence. I'm sure that's just me.
Erm... yeah I think it may be. I'm mid thirties and I'm no peaceful hippie type, but I can probably count the number of times I've actually considered using physical violence, outside of being a very young child and not realising the consequences, (even just pushing someone aside) on my fingers. Seriously, if someone even disagrees with you your instinct is to physically harm them?
That's true. Quite often in civil law the test is the "reasonable man" - i.e. did you do something that the reasonable man wouldn't have done, if so, then you may be liable - and in the case of people who have special, relevant skills (doctors, etc), the test becomes the reasonable man with those skills/that knowledge, i.e. did you act as the reasonable doctor would have done.
The law is full of gray areas, just like life, but I believe that we can START at if you have a cellphone you're obligated to take the incredibly arduous step of pressing 4 whole buttons to save a life.
So long as it's tempered with reason - such as the obligation isn't there or you will be afforded all the protection you need if you believe reporting the crime will put you at risk. Otherwise if you say every crime must be reported in every instance, a lot of the time you're just going to have two murders instead of saving one life (why would the people who just murdered that guy care if they also had to murder you to stop you reporting the crime, after all).
More importantly the government should enact the will of the people. If it's the people's will that certain actions are enforced, for the good of all, there is nothing wrong with the government forcing people to do things (such as not murder, pay taxes, obey the driving laws, etc). It's when the government starts forcing you to do things which are against the will of the people that we should worry.
Forcing people with medical training to stop and help is fine so long as there is something in place to protect those people. My gf is a nurse and she has a duty to stop and render assistance if she sees someone in need of help. If she doesn't do this and someone finds out, she can lose the right to practise as a nurse. On the other hand there's very little protection in place for her if she does help and something does go wrong, she can still end up losing her career because she is held to a higher duty of care than everyone else (and never mind that they might have just finished a double shift and be physically and mentally exhausted, possibly they've had a few drinks to unwind, maybe like my gf they only deal with kids and this is an adult, etc).
That being the case, if you're a doctor and you see someone having a heart attack or choking or whatever - (and you know your particular skills won't be any use whatsoever over someone with first aid training - let's say you're a brain surgeon) it must take an incredible degree of courage to risk everything you've worked for to help out some guy you've never met before and will never see again.
In that situation, forcing people to do something on pain of punishment/repercussions if they don't is going to encourage a number of people to remain anonymous and slip away. On the other hand, enabling them to help (and most of them want to help, that's why they joined a caring industry) by removing the threats and barriers is likely to be the better option. Not everything has to be about forcing people into a particular action, especially when it's generally an action most people would like to take if they knew they were protected. People generally don't learn CPR unless they want to use it to help - instead of forcing them to help or become criminals, which will likely just reduce the number of people willing to learn CPR, why not look at what's preventing them from helping and fix that?
While I don't agree with the strict interpretation of that list (I believe governments should be providing things like education and health care), there still have to be some limits. If the government claimed everyone had to remain in their homes at all times without a special license for the purposes of ensuring their safety, that would be going too far, just as if the government said murder was no longer a crime would be them not going far enough.
Finding criminals is a worthy cause to ensure public safety, but making criminals of people who don't report crimes is a very grey area - there could be any number of reasons why they didn't report, they might have seen five other witnesses who saw more than them already making the calls, they might be scared for their safety or that of their fammilies, the crime might be one against them that they see no point in reporting because there's zero chance of anything being done about it.
Say a kid throws a rock at some guy, he's not seriously hurt and he wants to just leave it at that, but his wife is there to witness it. Does she have to report this even knowing the husband doesn't want to do anything and that the kid will get off because of his age; knowing she'll face a ton of hassle reporting it and being called as a witness, not to mention possible future retribution from the kid or his friends? Blindly applying this law would make the husband the victim, the wife the criminal and the kid walks away free. It's a very grey area.
This is fine so long as you give everyone rudimentary CPR training so they at least have a vague understanding of what they're doing. If you take a populace who are largely not trained to perform CPR (I'd say it's like that here in the UK) then you just give a bunch of amateurs a free license to "have a go" free of consequence, you're going to cause a hell of a lot of damage. Emergency services here advise nobody to perform CPR unless they know what they're doing specifically because it can make the situation worse (or even transform a serious injury into a fatality) for the victim than waiting a couple more minutes for an ambulance.
Seems like it's a poor interpretation of a law by a mobile provider - the law being that the phone must alert the user that an emergency call is in progress. I guess they did it so that if you accidentally dialled emergency services while the phone was in your pocket or bag, it would let you know and you could tell the operator it was a mistake (rather than them trying to trace your location or, more likely, punish you for prank calling), but it really seems like they've not thought of the possible consequences.
Probably aimed at the kind of idiots who film this stuff on their phones and post it to youtube but don't even think twice about calling the relevant authorities.
Well, in a way, if it helps the police to clear up crimes more quickly and efficiently (and assuming you pay taxes) then that could be the net effect.
Especially if you live in an area where gang related violence is high, the perpetrators know who you are, they know you're the only witness, and they have lots of friends who can make sure your family suffer if you ever testify. You're right, I can't see a single problem with criminalising people who fail to report crimes.
It's two-fold, firstly to ensure you're paying attention to the instructions (the first instruction is always to read all the others before doing anything) and secondly to teach the value of reading ahead so that you can make informed decisions (which is a particularly useful tip when taking tests that a lot of people seem to ignore).
As a kid, also in the UK, I came across this a couple of times in various classes, and one time at a party (yes, it was an incredibly dull party).