what i find interesting is that people who ascribe moronic connections: skin color and intelligence, for example, are, by definition of making that ignorant connection and taking it seriously, stupid people. you have to be low iq to be racist. so when they prescribe exclusionary social engineering to "fix" society of the problem of undesireables, they should take their own medicine and not breed, thereby vastly increasing the iq of the population. that's some good eugenics to improvie the "race"

besides, most african americans aren't really african: too many of them were raped. analyze any of their genetics and chances are you find german, irish, english, etc heritage

so, by the "logic" of how racists think, the real race problem is that all europeans are rapists. i don't believe that. i'm just demonstrating how fucking ignorant and low iq racist "thinking" is

what's crazier than lame algorithms is trolls and racists having so much time and energy to devote to mental vomit generation

when attempting to understand something pathetic and useless, do not think "it has to be a machine," you give humanity too much credit. never underestimate how much of a depraved loser someone can become

exactly, thank you for the demonstration

no

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

words drift in meaning all the time. nobody owns a language. what a word means is pretty much what people use it for. that's the only rule

as RC aircraft, especially quadcopters, have exploded in popularity, the term drone has come into common use to refer to this burgeoning sector

therefore, drone is a perfectly acceptable term now for this new generation of RC aircraft definition. no other authority needed, because there is no authority at all

neither you nor anyone else can say otherwise

people "misuse" the term hacker too. and certain mentally fragile and rigid, socially maladaptive folk get really upset about the semantic change for some reason. it's alternatively confusing and funny, that people get so upset at the simple and common notion that words change in meaning

don't be bad at adapting to change in your world. the word's new meaning continues on without you, your protestations mean nothing and simply marginalize you

languages are living things, get used to it

Yeah, "back in the day". Welcome to the new age of gps in trucks, and in company issued phones with fleet tracking.

Consider this: They're paying you to spend a full day at each gas station doing firmware updates. If they care about the time it takes you should be able to get them to spring for a bunch of laptops so you can load all the pumps at once, properly, without resorting to VMs and trickery. Issuing you 16 laptops so you can do three or four stations in a day is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring three or four more technicians as babysitters. Argue your case from that perspective and don't bother with the half-ass solution. If they don't go for it, then find a good book and keep doing it one pump at a time. They've decided that you're worth the expense.

This is pretty much the thing, at least here in Michigan. For the sake of argument I won't even accuse politicians of spending on pet projects -- schools are partly funded by gas taxes. Average fuel economy is going up, which means that average gas tax revenue is going down. We just had a big referendum to try to fix the problem. Trouble is, everything is interconnected. Change the law so more gas tax goes to roads and the schools suffer, so you raise the regular sales tax to restore funding to the schools, but the sales tax just goes into the general fund, so you need rules to assure that schools don't get stolen from by other general-fund needs, and so on. What we got was a huge clusterfuck of interconnected laws that nobody could make head or tail of. What was presented as a vote to fund road repair turned into a major shell game and nobody was sure where the money was actually going to end up. People didn't just vote "No", they voted "Hell, no!"

Anyway, I think the Oregon idea has merit. There is a privacy issue, but they're addressing that: "Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking." It might still track out-of-state miles, though. They could easily add a GPS that records nothing and is only used to trigger when the odometer should be running. The state would get the number of in-state taxable miles and no other information. They could also make a sliding rate based on vehicle weight, and even give a further discount for hybrids and electric vehicles if they wanted to provide environmental incentives. It could work without getting all Big Brothery.

Yep, I read it the other way.

The fact that the gender wasn't mentioned in the summary at all let alone the sentence he singled out; led me to initially assume he'd just assumed it was a boy. So I read it as:

I read it as:

  "A boy did this, so what?... why wouldn't a girl be able to?"

I realized as the thread developed that he meant:

  "A girl did this; why would we think she couldn't?"

And he originally replied to the thread himself essentially confirming this and also WTFing the fact that the gender he thought was in the summary wasn't actually present. /shrug. one of those cases where I wish I could at least edit posts or add an update to them after the fact...

So they publish their minimum requirements. And then if the user wants to try it on a system older than that or there is hardware in the system no longer officially supported by the OS, then that's up to the user. Windows

And even on phones, all you needed was the option to go back. Its not like there was any reason that you should have had to "live through that hell".

That is not a contradiction.

No more than regulations are "essentially essentially a form of planned economy"

They are; but the presence of some regulations does not mean free market capitalism is all gone.

The world is not black and white.

Which is why civilized nations protect their citizens with import tarifs etc.

And yes, the TPP is an idiotic move that will further erode local industry.

Not really. As 'far as the hardware will allow' is frequently that apple has decided to drop support for a chipset or io controller or something. And the old hardware would run have run the new software just fine if they hadn't simply dropped support for it.

You can't drop support for a chipset from the OS, and then turn around then say your OS doesn't run on it because the hardware won't allow it. Apple does exactly that all the time.

In other cases they've set completely arbitrary limits on old hardware, and I myself have on several occasions used 3rd party shims to get new versions of OSX onto older hardware that apple had decided was no longer supported -- and they ran just fine -- in some cases they ran better (as for a while OSX was becoming faster with successive releases (lepard to snow leopard in particular). And if the older hardware had been a high spec unit (with extra ram from the factory) or had aftermarket ram upgrades they ran just fine.

Apple certainly isn't the worst offender by a long shot. But they are hardly the golden boy here.

No, not quite. Messages on iphone CAN use SMS to communicate with other phones but that's about it. So yes a dumbphone can reason an iphone with sms, and the iphone will display the sms in messages and let the iphone user use messages to reply... but that''s it.

For example, what if the person you are trying to reach from your 'dumb phone' however is NOT using an iphone with an SMS plan? Or what if they are using messages on an iPod touch or macbook pro? These can't "fail over to SMS" to receive messages from an android or dumb phone. And since the android and dumb phone can't use messages native protocol they can't communicate.

I've been up and down this mess several times already. My daughters friends have a mix of hand me down iphones, ipod touches, and ipads that they chat on with messages. If I give my daughter an android, which would be my preference -- she would not be able to chat with her friends unless they ALL moved over to an alternative messaging app (such as skype), which would be difficult for her to make happen. (In some cases the kids are using a 'family' ipad; and would need their parents permission to even install another app... so the whole group is basically captured on messages and ios or lose the ability to talk to these kids.)

Agreed his particular example wasn't great. However you can use skype on everything from smart TVs to blackberries to linux desktops. Yes, it is end to end a microsoft software product, and not truly open, but it runs on pretty much anything.

That's wrong. Microsoft has finanicial incentive not to... they'd prefer you ran windows and xbox and windows phones; you might argue they HAVE to support ios or become irrelevant; but that doesn't explain their support for osx, blackberry, or linux...

Similarly, apple messages+facetime, by being apple only IS hurting it. Lots of people use it on their mac or ipad, but they all have to have something else installed to talk to the other half of the planet who isn't running an apple product. If messages+facetime was x-plat it could well become as ubiquitous as skype; and it would be a good halo product to attract people to the apple hardware. As it is, it's mostly within-family product because no large organization or heterogenous group of people are ever ALL running just Apple products. There's always someone with a Windows computer or Android phone... and usually lots of people like that.

Even in my daughters group; as the kids are getting older and starting to get phones -- i fully expect the 'apple monopoly' on their communications is going to end. Because as they advance in their teens they'll all soon have phones etc. And they'll have permission to install apps etc. They'll all but inevitably shift to hangouts or skype or something as a group. I can already see it beginning; and my daughters next phone won't be an iphone -- none of the upcoming handme downs are iphones so unless she get a job buys it herself but that's still a few years out yet.

What are you talking about? A girl did do this.

show me where and when rights granted to religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities is as good or was better in as large an area for as large a time, in any previous time period or location

it never was. not even remotely close

oh yes, there were fleeting utopian fragile experiments in tiny areas, or fragile decrees by enlightened rulers that the status quo thugs quickly erased

but what we have now is a large amount of dominant powers in the world and large areas of the world granting a robust spectrum of rights, and have been doing so for some time now, extending them every year

the rights we grant people today was never extended to so many, over as wide an area, for as great a time. never. not even remotely as close and not even remotely as robust as the rights we have now

not that our rights aren't threatened today. our rights are always threatened and always will be. rights require maintenance. we don't live in a utopia, and we can certainly do better

but we are definitely doing better than any other time period in any other location, by a long shot

learn your history, don't subscribe to ignorant mythologizing

But messages and facetime are both not, which would be the relevant products here.