Comment Idea. (Score 1) 324
Hey, can we maybe put some effort into cracking down on government spending, too? I mean, it has only been like 240 years. Maybe it's about time we finally do some snipping?
Hey, can we maybe put some effort into cracking down on government spending, too? I mean, it has only been like 240 years. Maybe it's about time we finally do some snipping?
I can't figure out if I'm just too old and grumpy or if operating systems are just desperately uninspired. I remember how exciting a new OS used to be. Couldn't wait to learn about it. To get your hands on it. To install it. To customize it. To get things just right. It has been a good decade since an OS -- OSX, Windows, Linux, etc -- made me do much more than groan and think "maybe I can skip this one and the next one will be interesting". The most thought I find myself giving any of them, now, is to wonder just how much stuff they're going to fuck up that I'm going to have to learn to deal with.
I think the last thing I ever got excited about, OS-wise, was when I gave up on everything and said "I'm sticking with XFCE as much as possible" -- and that was less glee than exasperation.
All the goggles are accomplishing is wrapping an image around your face. Until touch, movement, smell, and sound are also adequately reproduced, it's not virtual reality anymore than the Hard Drivin' arcade machine from the 90s was. And replication of those elements are not coming in our life time; likely won't come until we've figured out a way to trick the brain into doing the work for us.
Also -- holy shit, the pink eye this is going to cause. Gross.
But then we need another layer of catwalks to watch the watchers.
Now that people aren't watching live television, probably aren't even watching *television*, and don't use television as the delivery method for their entertainment and are dropping cable, they want to roll out a la carte?
Thanks, but it's not 1999-2003, anymore. You need to deliver the content I want, when I want it, on whatever device I want it, through whatever delivery method I want it, for a very reasonable price. Cable subscriptions, live television, and television-bound viewing is something I ditched a decade ago and you're not getting me back.
I'd say you should look into these other demands from consumers, but frankly we all know that by the time you get around to delivering what we want today, *that* will be something we no longer care about, either.
For a buck, I'd buy it. Hell, I'd buy it for $20 or $30, even though it's within the confines of Amazon. It's not like the entire phone is going to be locked down to just Amazon. You'd surely still have a browser and apps to do various things outside of Amazon. And probably wifi service if you wanted to connect it to your home network or something.
It's the phone contract that does it in for me. In an age where I can use Ting as my phone service for an average of $12/mo with no contract, why in the hell would I want to get a two year expensive contract with one of the old phone companies?!
You'll notice that whenever companies engage in discussions about this sort of thing, they seem to be talking about households of one person. I have no idea how 10MBPS would suffice in a house of, say, four people. If two people are watching HQ videos (netflix, youtube, etc), that's easily 8-10mbps *minimum*. Figure the other two are listening to music and playing online games and maybe you have a guest who is using skype or something... bandwidth just doesn't go very far in today's world, unless you're living like it's still the late 90s as far as your entertainment consumption and communication.
No, it's the same argument as telling people that if you want something to remain private and within your control, don't stick it on the internet. Believe it or not, you can be *both* the victim of something *and* an idiot for not taking better precautions to protect yourself from being the victim of it.
Unfortunately, you live in the real world where your laptop is going to be stolen out of your car if you leave it visible on the front passenger seat while you go shopping in the mall. The thief is responsible for committing the crime and you didn't deserve to be the victim of that crime, but you *are* responsible for the circumstances which made it possible by not taking reasonable precautions like keeping your laptop out of site (or out of your car entirely).
Passwords, door locks, security systems, and safes exist for a reason.
Maybe don't give your toddler your $800 cell phone?
Name the amendments that *restrict* people's freedoms rather than serve to limit government over-reach.
Which is why any discussion or legislation of it is pointless.
All of these agencies have been doing what they want, with complete disregard for the Constitution. As a result, they have paid . . . absolutely no price. How would enacting legislation that says "no, really, you totally have to be bound by the Constitution like fucking everyone else" change anything? They've always disregarded it, so why would they change? If anything were to happen, it would simply be to drive them to further clandestine levels to cover up the shit they're doing.
Besides, it's all over anyway, come the next 9/11. All America needs is a second significant terrorist attack on its soil and the population will fold like a deck chair. Once was scary. We caved into a lot as it was. One more time, it'll be a pattern and we'll always just be waiting for the next attack to come. To avoid that, we'll let you install video cameras in our home and inject us with transponders, for all we care.
Our destination is sadly inevitable. It's only a question of how quickly we arrive there.
Welcome to modern video game journalism, where people endlessly navel-gaze about how amazingly mature things like adult relations and romances in games are, because you can choose to fuck the chick with the gas mask on her face *or* the chick with the tattoos *or* the chick with the booty in Mass Effect.
Not really. School is used less as a tool for actual enlightenment and education and critical thinking skills and more for indoctrination and acclimation to submission to authority throughout most of the world.
I agree that Chrome browser has a generally pleasant interface (to the point that other browsers feel cluttered, to me). However, look at everything else Google touches. It's always cluttered, clunky, and misleading. G+, youtube, youtube mobile clients, youtube clients on consoles and roku and other devices. Google Docs. Even Gmail to a degree. Google has two things that are pleasing as interfaces: Chrome and Google.com's main page. Everything else feels like an engineer tossed it together in a day after working on the backend for two years.
Granted, this is but one man's opinion. Maybe everyone else loves these interfaces...?
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.