446 karma · joined July 29, 2011
Possible that this attitude (along with many other factors) contributes to the far less developed startup cultures of many Western European countries.
While some of these can be purchased as one-offs, the cost of doing so would probably offset the "cheapest flight" approach, and the convenience of receiving them automatically has some value on its own.
The cost/benefit might still not be there, but it's not as straightforward as the ticket savings vs. free flight savings question you put forward. You have to also bear in mind that many miles hunters are logging some (or most) of their travel on an employer's dime.
"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes. Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable."
I'd say if you make a factory that takes raw materials and creates a series of one-off items, that you are engaging in production.
It seems like what you're really saying is, "this is not how production has been done in the past". With 3-D printing and related automation technologies, this will start to change very quickly. (It's already started, in fact).
The core support for the concept of presence in XMPP is also pretty compelling -- especially in remote collaboration settings, where transparency around another person's comings and goings can significantly reduce conversation friction.
That being said, the current XMPP protocol, even including the large set of approved protocol extensions, still falls very short of what would be needed for it to serve as a viable email replacement. As others in this thread have mentioned, the core protocol doesn't include any specification for how to handle messages directed to offline users, and while XEPs have been developed to address this, implementations still vary widely between implementations. Limited by the structure of JIDs, the protocol extension for multi-user chat ends up being a clumsy hack. It looks like there are also problems with large binary data transfer (see http://metajack.im/2008/06/10/binary-data-is-xmpps-achilles-...).
Obviously, a lot of these problems can be resolved with additional protocol extensions, but this risks creating a hodgepodge of conflicting standards and generating a menagerie of different implementations before drafts are settled on. The fact that the core XMPP RFC makes no allowance for offline messages, which is essentially the core of email, makes me think it might be unwise to try to hot-swap the two.
It's taking a product that could only exist through cultivating the higher functions of the human mind, and selling it by appealing to our basest lizard-brain instincts. It'd be like marketing a product by having two gladiators fighting to death in front of the booth. Impressive, but a step backwards for the species.
And yes, it's totally degrading to women as well. Even if the models involved were willing/wanted to participate.
As people have observed elsewhere in this thread, there's a natural human tendency for the privileged to underestimate their own privilege, and to overestimate the power of other groups. There are several comments in this thread that try to put the blame on women for not defending themselves more effectively, or even for contributing to the problem of sexism (see dizzystar's opening volley). This is flawed in the same way that it would be flawed to shout-down critiques of institutional racism by saying that minorities are as much to blame as white people. Of course there are sexist women and racist minorities. But they and their actions are not on an equal footing with those of the dominant holders of power in this country.
The fact is, in situations of social power imbalance, blaming the victim is an easy, shitty way to avoid addressing hard problems. The very defensiveness being displayed in this thread is further evidence that the members of this community need to calm down, look in the mirror, and consider their own privilege.
(And no, I'm not saying everyone in the HNN community is a straight, rich, white guy, but I think it's pretty clear we have a stilted demography).
An elegant solution for this kind of back-and-forth editing dialog on short-form copy would be huge. Surprised it doesn't exist already. And the concept of one-click "commits" is a powerful one for versioning -- makes it much easier to find things than google's atomic "save everything" version control.
Nice work. Look forward to giving this a try.
It never ceases to amaze me how much lip service people pay to the need for privacy on social networks that are fundamentally based on the premise of broadcasting your private life to a fairly large audience. If you REALLY don't want that photo of the sunset that you took to be seen by the wrong person, why post it online in the first place?
So great. You don't run into problem x or problem y.
But a LOT of people do. And when I sit down at somebody's computer, and they use Firefox, and they have more than a couple tabs open, it's slow. Inconceivably slow. Especially in light of how snappy Chrome manages to be with a big stack of tabs open.
And then on a modern computer, a nice shiny new computer, things are pausing erratically, and there's lag, and it's slow, and it feels like 2005.
I can hear you leaping to Firefox's defense now: "Sure, but that was only true until 5.323, when they fixed the 'FF is slow as shit' bug!" Or, "yes, but that has never happened to /me/, and I run Firefox on a Pentium I that I spilled a bunch of grape juice on and kick every day."
Congrats, you're either an anomaly, incredibly fortunate, or you limit your number of tabs, restart Firefox regularly, and clear out your history daily. All things that I can assure you, ordinary, non-technical people NEVER DO.
Chrome managed to make a browser that doesn't become unbearably slow under normal usage patterns. Firefox, for all its moral superiority (and I gladly concede that point), has never managed to do that.