Nothing kills productivity more than IM. I'm astonished that businesses use it, it makes very little sense.
In addition to what the other posts said, IM is good for sending bits of code to other programmers to look at. Sending code over the phone doesn't work as well.
Also, time travel was used precisely once, required an entire planet worth of power generation to implement, and spanned three episodes: one near the end of the first season, and a two-parter in the middle of the third season; henceforth, it was never used again.
The other key to the Babylon Squared/War Without End time travel is that it stays consistent. In Star Trek, characters are repeatedly traveling backwards in time to fix or prevent something. In B5, everything happened because they went back in time, and going back in time simply ensured that what happened did happen.
Television has any number of tropes... One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time.
Isn't that more realistic than thinking that human nature will drastically change in the next 200 years? Sure, culture changes, societal norms change, stuff like that, but basic human nature stays the same. I think this is why I object to his inclusion of Babylon 5 in his list. B5 was never supposed to be about science and technology, but about the characters and the story. One of the fundamental premises of the story is that human nature won't change: there will always be friends and foes, people will start relationships, people will end relationships, and as we see in one episode (A View From the Gallery), there will always be the little guys that just want to do their jobs and live their lives.
The thing with infinite resources is that you can give A, B, and C diamond rings for their wives, and you still have infinite resources remaining to give to X, Y, and Z. And if someone that was that big of an asshole to withhold resources from a group of people for no reason (after all, that asshole can give the people whatever they want and still have infinite resources left for himself), all it would take is one or two charities with a few replicators to fill in the gap. Then again, it would also only take one group of freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on who you ask) with a couple replicators to make some guns and overthrow the asshole.
The majority of conflicts in human history have been over resources. Take away the competition for resources and you take away a lot (but most likely not all) of the conflict between people. So all we need to do is invite a method for generating infinite resources.
Would her updates appearing on his web page get her arrested for 'contacting' him?
Probably not, for two reasons: one, it's easy for him to prevent them from showing up (two, maybe three clicks), and two, she can't control how Facebook shows her status updates to other people.
What about if he were subscribed to a mailing list or newsgroup that she posted in?
No, because mailing lists would probably be considered a public space. This is similar to how she wouldn't get arrested if he walked into a grocery store where she was shopping.
What about if she had one of those Facebook apps that likes to spam send him a message saying something like, "I know a secret about you! Click here to learn it!"?
If it was an automated message, I doubt she'd be arrested, though the police and/or court might tell her to fix her account so that it doesn't happen again.
But doesn't the need for support indicate that whoever wrote the documentation or designed the software in the first place was not competent, because it either confuses people
Make something more idiot-proof, and all you'll get for it is bigger idiots.
or keeps needing to be fixed?
Bugs exist, no matter how good your development staff is. I'm not trying to say that customers should have to pay for bug fixes, but you do need to keep around at least a few programmers to fix bugs. Obviously this is cheaper for most open-source projects, since the programmers don't normally need to be paid, but you could charge a customer a little money to give to a programmer to make a specific bug a higher priority.
You're also forgetting that many customers will pay for new features to be implemented or some specific tweaking that they want done for their version.
If you can somehow persuade humans to stop being lazy and greedy, then pretty much any system of government will suffice.
To be fair to Star Trek, it wasn't a change in human nature that brought about their Utopian society, but the discovery/invention of a way of having practically unlimited resources. Redistribution of wealth will work just fine when the total available wealth is far beyond what the entire population could possibly use in their entire lifetimes.
A lot of software companies are figuring this out now, which is why they have cheap, or sometimes even free, licenses for educational purposes. When I was in school, both the CS and ECE departments had unlimited licenses for just about every Microsoft product that they could give out to students, and it cost the department some ridiculously small amount of money.
That's fine that after 10-15 years your craft is no longer your highest interest
Other than sleep, what else do you do for 40 hours per week? If someone loves their job, I'd say that spending 1/4 of your time doing it makes it your "highest interest".
I'm 25, but my first coding experience was 22 years ago.
Playing with the Speak and Spell doesn't qualify as "coding".
I think 3 years old is a bit too young, but it's not far off from when I started tweaking some C64 and GWBasic games (my grandfather got us a C64 when I was 4, and I was hacking at some game code and other really simple stuff by the time I was 5 or 6). Sure, you most likely aren't submitting any kernel patches at that age, but by about 5 years old, a kid with high natural intelligence can find a few numbers in the code for a game that make the explosions bigger or have different colors. I was asked recently why I decided to go into computer science, and it was actually a bit hard to answer; playing with computers and programming is stuff that I've just always done, so by the time I was in high school, there wasn't really a conscious decision to make.
A private company ignores its customers at its peril.
Really? Most large corporations ignore their customers all the time, and they aren't in any peril. Besides, elected representatives should be in the exact same peril of being voted out if they ignore their constituents.
Unless you meant the Castle Anthrax definition of peril.
whereas a battery is an array of electrochemical cells for electricity storage.
Let me elevate the level of pedantic for you. A battery is an array of anything, not just electrochemical cells. The reason it was called a battery in the first place was because of the fact that it was made up of a series of cells. A series of these radioactive decay cells can also be legitimately called a battery, though it would probably be called something like a "nuclear battery" in order to avoid confusion with the word "battery" itself being commonly assumed to mean an electrochemical battery.
Random note:
The emails you do get from various online institutions don't look all that more legit than the ones from the scamers. I have received 2 notices that an account of mine had been compromised, and I was prompted to login (via a link) and reset my password. One of these was my EBay account I hadn't touched in years. I nearly just binned the email with out even opening it, but curiosity got the better of me and I read through it, checked the links, etc etc, and everything seemed legit, despite looking like a classic phishing attempt.
I had a similar thing happen to me a couple years ago. I assumed the emails were all just phishing attempts, since I hadn't used Paypal for at least a few years, and I don't think I've ever used eBay, so I ignored the emails. A month later, I started seeing charges on my credit card.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing kills productivity more than IM. I'm astonished that businesses use it, it makes very little sense.
In addition to what the other posts said, IM is good for sending bits of code to other programmers to look at. Sending code over the phone doesn't work as well.
Also, time travel was used precisely once, required an entire planet worth of power generation to implement, and spanned three episodes: one near the end of the first season, and a two-parter in the middle of the third season; henceforth, it was never used again.
The other key to the Babylon Squared/War Without End time travel is that it stays consistent. In Star Trek, characters are repeatedly traveling backwards in time to fix or prevent something. In B5, everything happened because they went back in time, and going back in time simply ensured that what happened did happen.
Mimbari
Argh! Minbari! It's Minbari!
Television has any number of tropes... One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time.
Isn't that more realistic than thinking that human nature will drastically change in the next 200 years? Sure, culture changes, societal norms change, stuff like that, but basic human nature stays the same. I think this is why I object to his inclusion of Babylon 5 in his list. B5 was never supposed to be about science and technology, but about the characters and the story. One of the fundamental premises of the story is that human nature won't change: there will always be friends and foes, people will start relationships, people will end relationships, and as we see in one episode (A View From the Gallery), there will always be the little guys that just want to do their jobs and live their lives.
The thing with infinite resources is that you can give A, B, and C diamond rings for their wives, and you still have infinite resources remaining to give to X, Y, and Z. And if someone that was that big of an asshole to withhold resources from a group of people for no reason (after all, that asshole can give the people whatever they want and still have infinite resources left for himself), all it would take is one or two charities with a few replicators to fill in the gap. Then again, it would also only take one group of freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on who you ask) with a couple replicators to make some guns and overthrow the asshole.
The majority of conflicts in human history have been over resources. Take away the competition for resources and you take away a lot (but most likely not all) of the conflict between people. So all we need to do is invite a method for generating infinite resources.
i'd go for the cleaner syntax of ruby instead.
Hahahahaha.
-deep breath-
Hahahahahahahahaha
Would her updates appearing on his web page get her arrested for 'contacting' him?
Probably not, for two reasons: one, it's easy for him to prevent them from showing up (two, maybe three clicks), and two, she can't control how Facebook shows her status updates to other people.
What about if he were subscribed to a mailing list or newsgroup that she posted in?
No, because mailing lists would probably be considered a public space. This is similar to how she wouldn't get arrested if he walked into a grocery store where she was shopping.
What about if she had one of those Facebook apps that likes to spam send him a message saying something like, "I know a secret about you! Click here to learn it!"?
If it was an automated message, I doubt she'd be arrested, though the police and/or court might tell her to fix her account so that it doesn't happen again.
non-cannon (mostly in the bust department).
Machine gun jumblies?
I'll take your word for it. I was fairly young when TNG was on, and I pretty much stopped paying attention after the clusterfuck they called Voyager.
But doesn't the need for support indicate that whoever wrote the documentation or designed the software in the first place was not competent, because it either confuses people
Make something more idiot-proof, and all you'll get for it is bigger idiots.
or keeps needing to be fixed?
Bugs exist, no matter how good your development staff is. I'm not trying to say that customers should have to pay for bug fixes, but you do need to keep around at least a few programmers to fix bugs. Obviously this is cheaper for most open-source projects, since the programmers don't normally need to be paid, but you could charge a customer a little money to give to a programmer to make a specific bug a higher priority.
You're also forgetting that many customers will pay for new features to be implemented or some specific tweaking that they want done for their version.
If you can somehow persuade humans to stop being lazy and greedy, then pretty much any system of government will suffice.
To be fair to Star Trek, it wasn't a change in human nature that brought about their Utopian society, but the discovery/invention of a way of having practically unlimited resources. Redistribution of wealth will work just fine when the total available wealth is far beyond what the entire population could possibly use in their entire lifetimes.
A lot of software companies are figuring this out now, which is why they have cheap, or sometimes even free, licenses for educational purposes. When I was in school, both the CS and ECE departments had unlimited licenses for just about every Microsoft product that they could give out to students, and it cost the department some ridiculously small amount of money.
I never knew L. Ron Hubbard posted on Slashdot.
Playboy was a magazine that adolescent boys used to...um...read before the invention of Internet porn.
But only for the articles.
Is there a wikipedia article on subject-verb agreement?
The subject (batteries) and verb (degrade) agree fine. It's the subject and pronoun that disagree.
</even_more_pedantic>
That's fine that after 10-15 years your craft is no longer your highest interest
Other than sleep, what else do you do for 40 hours per week? If someone loves their job, I'd say that spending 1/4 of your time doing it makes it your "highest interest".
I'm 25, but my first coding experience was 22 years ago.
Playing with the Speak and Spell doesn't qualify as "coding".
I think 3 years old is a bit too young, but it's not far off from when I started tweaking some C64 and GWBasic games (my grandfather got us a C64 when I was 4, and I was hacking at some game code and other really simple stuff by the time I was 5 or 6). Sure, you most likely aren't submitting any kernel patches at that age, but by about 5 years old, a kid with high natural intelligence can find a few numbers in the code for a game that make the explosions bigger or have different colors. I was asked recently why I decided to go into computer science, and it was actually a bit hard to answer; playing with computers and programming is stuff that I've just always done, so by the time I was in high school, there wasn't really a conscious decision to make.
because telepathy is a non scientific concept with no basis in reality
Wouldn't a significant inference from this experiment be a reality-based, scientific explanation of how telepathy could work?
If I have to pay excessive costs for healthcare, better to pay the drug companies than some worthless middle manager.
Because as we all know, private companies never have any worthless middle managers.
A private company ignores its customers at its peril.
Really? Most large corporations ignore their customers all the time, and they aren't in any peril. Besides, elected representatives should be in the exact same peril of being voted out if they ignore their constituents.
Unless you meant the Castle Anthrax definition of peril.
whereas a battery is an array of electrochemical cells for electricity storage.
Let me elevate the level of pedantic for you. A battery is an array of anything, not just electrochemical cells. The reason it was called a battery in the first place was because of the fact that it was made up of a series of cells. A series of these radioactive decay cells can also be legitimately called a battery, though it would probably be called something like a "nuclear battery" in order to avoid confusion with the word "battery" itself being commonly assumed to mean an electrochemical battery.
given that the nearest star is about 8 light years away
Minor correction: Alpha Centauri is a little over 4 light years away.
Except that still doesn't solve the problem of lookalike domains.
It's not that hard to fucking sign an email.
I keep trying, but my pen doesn't write on the screen very well.
Random note: The emails you do get from various online institutions don't look all that more legit than the ones from the scamers. I have received 2 notices that an account of mine had been compromised, and I was prompted to login (via a link) and reset my password. One of these was my EBay account I hadn't touched in years. I nearly just binned the email with out even opening it, but curiosity got the better of me and I read through it, checked the links, etc etc, and everything seemed legit, despite looking like a classic phishing attempt.
I had a similar thing happen to me a couple years ago. I assumed the emails were all just phishing attempts, since I hadn't used Paypal for at least a few years, and I don't think I've ever used eBay, so I ignored the emails. A month later, I started seeing charges on my credit card.