Am I saying the Drake Equation is almost certainly full of shit? Why yes I am.
Oh, the Drake equation is just fine. It's anyone who thinks they know any of the values to plug into it that's probably full of it.
Many folks have proposed the "government doesn't use the term marriage" thing. It has a few problems.
First of all, it's a bit like Lucy and the football that's she's holding for Charlie Brown to kick. You're effectively saying "sorry gay people - we really don't want you to have marriage, so we're going to take it away from everyone".
But the biggie: it's a tremendous amount of work to solve a non-problem. There are literally thousands thousands of laws, in literally thousands of jurisdictions, that reference marriage. We'd have to change all of these, and somehow convince people to start using a different terminology, to eliminate a confusion that doesn't exist. We already distinguish between the legal status filed at the county courthouse, and the ceremony that may or not be performed at a church.
I protested that this could create a conflict wherein a church could be sued for refusing to allow a gay couple to use the church for a wedding.
Not going to happen. In the US, the Westboro Baptist Church still has tax-exempt status. We still have freedom for religious groups as vile as that one, so churches that only refuse gay weddings won't be an issue.
I didn't rub it in the faces of my gay friends
Is that really the phrasing you wanted to use?
and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me.
Labels. It's not a work-around, it's a deliberate design decision, and a good one. You can emulate folders with labels - simply don't attach more than one label to a given email.
As others have noted: citation needed. I can only find other comments making the same claim, no articles.
Also, the ship that shot down 655 was a guided missile cruiser, not a carrier. While there's no requirement that a movie be historically accurate, a cruiser mock-up would be much, much cheaper.
They shouldn't be in traffic in the first place, for starters.
True, but then again, automobiles shouldn't be driving into crosswalks when I've got the light, but that happened to me today - in fact, during the time since I wrote that last comment.
Today's incident wasn't a big deal, because I was watching the driver, and I could see she was looking only at oncoming traffic from her left, while I was on her right, trying to cross in front of her turn. So I waited, and resisted the temptation to slap the side of her car.
But that's also a scenario where the Elio would have been a bit more of a danger. If I'm watching the driver, that protruding wheel is only in my peripheral vision. That's different from a regular car, where the edge of the car is between us and easier to identify.
So it's a risk - the hard part is quantifying how big of a risk it presents.
Well, it's narrower - that'll help in many urban areas, and will make finding parking a bit easier. A two-wheel car is also a little less likely to take out pedestrians with one of those protruding front wheels.
But those advantages might be outweighed by other disadvantages - as you've noted, cost and complexity are concerns, and the actual performance of the balancing algorithms and such is still an unknown.
256-bit block ciphers are merely difficult to attack.
That is incorrect. It is impossible to brute-force a cipher like that, and it is extremely unlikely that someone has found a cryptanalytic break for modern ciphers like AES.
Unlike a block cipher, you can prove that a one-time pad is unbreakable, but that proof depends on the assumption that the random bits of the pad are completely unpredictable. Turns out that's a non-trivial problem to solve, and an especially difficult one to test.
Automobile insurance issuers are chartered and regulated at the state level. There have been a number of discussions of a federal-level charter, but I'm not aware of any changes on that front in years.
Copyright was a very minor factor in Microsoft's exclusion of effective competition and suppression of any real innovation in software design.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.
The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.
Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.
In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.
The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.
... in the vast majority of cases
Bullshit. State laws on the subject vary massively; there's no way to make a blanket statement like that unless you're in confirmation-bias mode.
Nice to see my mum's allotment garden on
Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.
Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?
Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:
1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories.
2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech
3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people
etc.
Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.
"My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%."
I concur. W3Schools is completely unrepresentative of a normal web demographic and I never know why people take their reports seriously. I worked for 5 years at a multi-national online travel agent operating in 48 countries. I posted some stats on our browser usage about 18 months ago as part of a similar rant about some loons called StatCounter claiming that Chrome was now the majority browser in the UK. There is no way in hell that IE has declined over 40% since then:
(BTW the differences between China and India on weekends is quite striking though)
"You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface."
No, you're confusing good UI design with bad UI design. That's a different thing to what I'm talking about because in your example features can be rendered easy or hard to use by the way they are designed into the interface. Put it another way, you can have great features poorly executed, or poor features well executed - and in both cases the outcome is fail. Features are neutral until executed (AKA designed).
Instead, what I'm talking about is the knee-jerk reaction of product managers (as opposed to designers) who immediately start listing "better features" in order to compete with a rival. They don't realise that what they need to do instead is list customer needs, then come up with features from there. That's much harder to do of course. Who cares if I have 1080p video if I don't need to record any video?
This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian
