Posts by JEDIDIAH 2525 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009
I found Apple style apps too limiting and it seemed silly to run mostly Free Software on a non-libre OS.
The subtle gratuitous differences in MacOS just annoyed the other users in my household. Lack o of that "pervasive 3rd party support" also didn't help.
Then there's that whole problem with doing something slightly "creative". Apple users don't seem to appreciate power users that push boundaries. Windows the OS may be crap but the user community is far less pedestrian.
This style of machine tends to be a problem regardless of who makes it. It's an inherently bad combination of design choices for a power hungry machine.
I had 3 similar boxes from 3 different vendors (including Apple) that all failed the same way for basically the same reason.
> Not to mention the fact that it's most likely better designed in terms of heat dissipation
That's funny. My last Mini cooked itself to death and you can easily burn yourself on an iMac if you're not careful.
The PC laptop is probably better equipped to deal with heat dissipation because it's not trying to achieve form over function.
> But your first sentence, that human illnesses, accidents, etc can be completely random is where I disagree.
Then you likely don't have enough experience.
The human body is a really complex system. We really don't understand it nearly as well as we think we do. We certainly don't understand it as well as certain LAYMEN think we do.
This quickly becomes obvious if you talk to enough patients with the same condition.
You make quickly lose your belief in "scientific certainty".
> Call me a cynic, but until AI takes over the cockpit, it can't take over the clinic.
If you've ever flown through Heathrow then you have already "been there, and done that".
They don't even let humans land at Heathrow anymore.
I used to know a commercial pilot that flew that route.
This feels like a bit of deja vu. A certain subset of Americans like to tell themselves that we spend all of our money on guns and that if we just gutted the defense budget they could get everything they always wanted and not pay any extra taxes.
Although ditching the boomers still might be a good idea.
I feel the same way about our own carriers. Not sure we need so many. We could lose a few and still have more than the rest of the world combined.
On the other hand, all of my bulk storage sits on the network to be accessed by the rest of the house. So my top speed is really the speed of my network. So SSD being faster really doesn't buy me anything for my bulk storage.
All of the "bells and whistles" you are fixating on are not likely relevant to most consumers.
I would say it's less about familiarity and more about cost. HDD is still cheap enough (relatively) that you can have multiple copies for the price of one piece of replacement SDD media.
Tech continues to improve on both fronts. I can almost put my entire hoard on a single piece of spinning rust now. I don't even want to contemplate the cost of duplicating all of my data with SSD.
Other entities have WAY more data than I do.
Why would an MS spreadsheet format matter? OpenOffice was pretty good at dealing with that kind of thing even when it was still called Star Office. I originally switched back in the day because it had the best MS format support of any of the any alternatives (most notably the commercial Win32 alternatives).
The only real issue here was the odd weird obscure feature some MS power user might come up with.
There has been a 3 way split since the Revolution.
If you are one of the established political parties, you can depend on your own partisans. You can write off the other partisans. What's left is the middle. You have to convince people that don't drink your brand of Kool-Aid to vote for you. You also have to excite your own partisans more than the other camp does.
The Dems annointed someone with the juice associated with being married to a past president. This someone was hated by the other partisan tribe. The whole mess with Bernie split the ticket, annoyed their base, and alienated the center.
Meanwhile, fundies were rightly focusing on future supreme court nominations rather than the libertine character of Trump.
Believing that we're fucked is one thing. Believing that we are powerful enough to done it to ourselves is another. This doesn't even get into the question of whether or not we can do anything to stop it.
Beyond all of that, there is the very obvious question of "Why do you littering gits need an armageddon narrative to start doing the right thing and 'leave no trace'? ". Not that the armageddon narrative helps, you still trash any place you have a large gathering.
I found the level of detail in all of this to be rather peculiar. We can nail down what was supposedly a foreign intelligence operation to the point where we can try and indict what are basically a bunch of CIA/KGB agents. This sounds like a more robust investigation/evidence than what might occur for some domestic organized crime bust.
If you are worried about the elected monarch then the pooch has already been thoroughly screwed. It's screwed because you've already subverted the system. The system is supposed to prevent th elected monarch from becoming a problem. THIS is the proper lesson to learn from the failure of the Wiemar Republic. If you think that you need to "fear men that say mean things", then you completely misunderstand history and governance.
...versus the pervasive narrative posing as "journalism" that the vast majority of the media pushes constantly? The vast chunk of the "professional" news media are shameless party rags shilling for one particular political party. Compared to that, a few more posts on social media is nothing to get your knickers in a twist over. It doesn't even shift the needle when compared to what nonsense people are already sharing amongst themselves.
Democrats demonstrated that they have a much larger wing nut contingent during the last election to a level that's much more embarasing if you previously identified as liberal or left or center left. You can't blame the Russians for that.
Even if the nonsense was authored by a Russian plant, our own wing nuts willingly propagated it. At a certain point, you have to take responsibility for your own stupid. Doesn't matter if you are the DNC or some random nit wit.
What kind of DOPE thinks that they can take ANY THING away from a secure facility? Even if you are dealing with a "normal" client, it seems like what he did would be just wrongful. I would expect that there would be an expectation to communicate with the client about everything you are doing including the replacement of faulty hardware and including taking the customer's property off site. I am not sure ANY ONE would be comfortable with the idea that their proprietary data might sprout legs and leave the building.This seems like a Sheldon-esque sort of gaffe.
IT isn't "sexist". It's a brutal meritocracy. This is especially true for places like Silicon Valley. A lot of guys can't cut it and do little more than occupy space. They would quickly get ejected from a high demand IT environment.
Women self select against IT for painfully obvious reasons that have nothing to do with this "sexism" narrative. HELL, this sexism narrative is one of the things keeping them away. It takes what little supply there might be and reduces it even further.
The smart ones gravitate towards jobs with better pay and more respect. They gravitate towards professions that are glamorized by our culture rather than shat upon by it. This should not be a shocking result.
Get over yourself.
This is about CLASS and not gender.
A female oncologist is as elite as anyone else. A nurse or cleaner is not. Each of those women made their own personal choices and is now living with them. The consequences here were never a mystery. NO ONE deserves a pity party over this stuff. They certainly don't deserve one just because of their genitalia. THAT is the opposite of equality.
A cleaner simply isn't that valuable. They shouldn't get shit. If you want to live large then you actually need to earn it. This includes putting in the prep work required to make more money. Nobody owes you a damn thing.
The fact that a nurse gets paid less than a physician is just and good. It places the individual incentives where they need to be so that someone is there to save your sorry ass.
If you start shitting on those of us that have spent out entire adult lives working to do better, then we will stop and you will shit out of luck when it matters most.
> I bought a 500MB SCSI drive, in 1995, for video and animation work, thinking that it would be enough last me for the full MTBF lifetime of the drive. Now I couldn't even fit my music collection on something that size.
Forget about now. Just a couple of years after that I had multiple classes of multimedia data that would not fit on a mere half gig. Music was just one example. That ship sailed a long time ago.
Unless your taxes can be sent in on a post card, they are too complicated for a machine. The rules are just a little too complex and subtle. It's a bit like law.
In the US you need a post-doc degree to be a tax lawyer.
It's not about keeping the accountants employed. It's about keeping billionaire campaign donors happy.
> Let's not forget that he has the Republican party behind him, Ted Cruz has been very vocal for such a change to NASA.
That's quite a bit of spin there.
Ted's position on the matter is that we shouldn't toss the thing after we've spent a ton of money on it. If it's still useful, we should still keep using it.
> The next generation should be taught to believe whatever their local pastor and Koch brothers tell them - not this fancy pants thinking business
The fun thing about high school level physics is that you can do it yourself. You can't do that with "climate science".
>> Today I teach Physics to our next generation.
>
> This is not needed for real estate speculation and swapping Slavic trophy wives every few decades. So there is no reason to fund it.
Physics is very handy for teaching genuine, practical, repeatable science. You can do real science, on your own, in the class room. It makes you far less prone to being vulnerable to every flim-flam man that comes along. This drives "science groupies" nuts though.
REAL civil engineering is very relevant to real estate.
Numeracy is also very important in business.
> eliminate the Department of Education entirely, leaving education up to the states and local gummints, which is how things used to be.
No. It's always been like that. Creating a new ministry in DC really didn't change that. What happens at the local level in your own town still is the most relevant thing. That includes local tax measures, the local school board, and even your own PTA.
Americans really need to be bludgeoned with a civics text book until it starts to sink in.
The rest of you have an excuse.
> How do you know? You take it on trust from the very same scientists
I've lived long enough to experience it personally. Kids get excited about a cold snap or some unusually nasty weather and I get nostalgiac rather than going into a media induced panic whining about "climate change" that had to be "re-branded".
> No, they are just being the best democracy money can buy.
Climate change is now taken as an article of faith. If you indicate any kind of disagreement, people start building bonfires to burn you with.
At this point, fixating on watching the fire burn doesn't really make any sense any more. We know the house is on fire (or rather, you're certain of it). We're way past the time to actually do something about it. That action may be nothing more that getting your ready bag and running out of the house.
Spending money to watch the house burn is a bit dubious at this point. Not wanting to spend that money any more is not what you think it means.
> I am surprised the Russians have not done it already. With all the vehement russophobia promoted by the USA lately this is very long overdue.
Democrats have selective amnesia. They forgot who shuttered our manned space program and who we now have to hitch hike with in order to get to the ISS.
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