Will I be able to get an HTML5 video blocker to do what the Flashblock plugin currently does? I'd hate to go back to the days when multiple YouTube browser tabs all started playing as soon as the pages loaded. My DVD player doesn't start playing a disc when I turn the power on - why should a web page start playing the video as soon as it loads?
Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage. These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales. More sales means more profits.
The part you're missing there is that the money you give to the employee needs to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from people who would have done something more useful with it than the employee spending it on consumption.
"More useful" by whose definition? Money is llike water - it can only generate power if it's moving. That 'useful stuff' you speak of often looks like putting the money behind a dam, where it does nothing to stimulate the economy. Consumption, on the other hand, drives the economy.
Not that I'm in favour of this state of affairs - the entire economy is a pyramid scheme/shell game, and the sooner everybody realizes that, the sooner we can put in place something sensible that minimizes the wealth gap and drastically reduces our senseless raping of Earth.
Why couldn't the trains simply be equipped with GPS connected to the on-board computers that control the throttle and brakes? Seems like a pretty simple programming exercise to say "hey, our current coordinates indicate the need for reduced speed", then adjust throttle and/or brakes as required. I understand the need for integration into the greater system to prevent accidents from trains following too closely, etc, but even using GPS as a failsafe mechanism could have prevented this derailment.
I was asking similar questions after the Lac Megantic disaster. Having a train a) apply its own brakes if the train is moving when it shouldn't be, and b) send out a distress call if it can't stop itself, isn't rocket science; and it isn't even expensive. Why is the whole railroad industry on this continent so far behind the technology curve?
...that the data stolen belonged to people whose privacy was already being grossly invaded, rather than to the fuckwits who thought it was a good idea to spy on their family members.
Local. Storage.
Yes, I know that battery technology isn't quite there yet, a tall water tower for every house or neighbourhood is impractical, and the whole flywheel-in-a-vacuum-can concept hasn't yet lived up to its promise. But really, we NEED to start moving away from 'the grid' as the primary power distribution system. Such a move would hasten the development of viable, economical energy storage methods; incidentally, it would also make moot the arguments about feeding power from household solar panels to the local electrical utility.
The grid is OK as a fallback position, and to provide power to heavy industry because local power storage on that scale probably won't be practical for a long while yet. But the only way we're going to have a resilient system that isn't prone to a large portion of the continent's electricity supply being taken down by an ice storm, (or, God forbid, a terrorist attack), is to start de-centralizing power production and distribution. Yes, there are technical hurdles, but we can get over them. I am less sure that we can get past the entrenched business interests fighting that kind of disruption with all of the resources at their disposal, including the money we pay them.
I wonder if it would be a better world if every word we ever speak was filmed and available for all to see permanently. We often get to know people as we first see them at their best moments but how low are they in their very worst moments? How stable are they in real life? Shouldn't others know when a person is in a defective state of being? For example the pilot that locked the cabin door and flew his plane into the side of a mountain could have been stopped before he acted out.
You wonder? Really? Do you honestly think there's even a shred of a possibility that we would all be better off if we habitually paused to think about and weigh every utterance and action beforehand? Would you consider the loss of all spontaneity for everyone in society a fair price to pay for your incredibly narrow personal vision of safety and security? Also, who the hell are you to judge whether someone is in a "defective state of being"?
I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for.
This, exactly. Google's ideas regarding 'synonyms' for my search terms would be laughable if they didn't waste so much of my time. Also, these days when I do an 'allintext' search it almost always turns up far more results than did the same query without the 'allintext' operator. Now just how in the fuck does that happen?
I would pay two or three hundred dollars a year for access to a search engine with Google's reach and power, but without all the ad-oriented bloat, the lowest-common-denominator attempts at hand-holding, and the Microsoft Clippy-isms. You know - something that's more suitable for real research and for getting a job done than for figuring out where to have dinner or what meaningless bullshit the Kardashians and other such social parasites are up to. And while they're at it, they need to include a way of searching for exactly what I type, including case, punctuation and special characters. And if my search turns up zero results, that's fine. I'd far rather have that than be insulted by Google's insistence that it must have something I'm interested in.
I'm not so naive as to believe that anyone else can replicate Google's massive search capabilities. So I really wish Google would provide a search interface for those of us who have both a good idea of what we're looking for and a clue about how to do research. It would cost them next to nothing, they could charge for it, and they'd be doing the world a favour.
Hell, right now I'd settle for Google circa ten years ago - it was way better than it is now.
...but wake me up when they can graft a Trackpoint onto my hand. That's something I'd be excited about!
...and a student sneaks over to it and pencils in a lewd picture on the cover.
I agree with almost everything you said. But in what way is a picture of two men kissing "lewd"?
...for web sites that are https-capable to start refusing all non-https connections. That might go along way to ensuring the ubiquity of https...
Sounds like outsourcing labour to from the US so that a third party catches flack for it should it go south. Canada, who basically has few natural enemies, could end up with a kick me sign on its back because of this.
We Canadians already have a 'kick me' sign on our backs, courtesy of our Prime Minister's insistence on following the US example of poking its nose into places where it doesn't belong. And he keeps making the sign bigger and more taunting. I have yet to figure out whether it's because he has a 'Me too!' inferiority complex, is inherently stupid and/or evil, or is a tool of the corporations that benefit from war and from a compliant populace. Possibly a combination of the above, with perhaps a dash of some other psychological and/or intellectual defects yet to be determined.
...don't know why anyone would buy this rather than Dell's XPS 13... (Too bad it doesn't have a trackpoint.)
You answered your own question - no Trackpoint. On several occasions I've used my Lenovo to do CAD work without a mouse. Not the best for a long session of schematic capture or PCB layout, but actually quite viable. Wouldn't even attempt it on a Touchpad. And even in day-to-day browsing and e-mailing, Trackpoints rule and Touchpads drool.
...for the rest of the world that counts dates logically
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. So I'll just add that if we're going to use the American system of dating, (and not add in the hours, minutes, and seconds), then Pi Day is NEXT year. Pi rounded to four decimal places is 3.1416.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
