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Mom and Pop data centers?

#908

Sounds like I'm you're friend. ;-)

Would buy the DVDs and play copies. Then got a bid hard drive and ripped directly to that and learned over the course of a few years about XBMC/KODI, bought a few nettop computers (one for each TV) and universal remote controls and set everything up for the family.

Life is so much better now that they can watch any movie or TV show I've ripper (or downloaded) at the touch of a button.

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/

The particular words you use don't matter so long as you use enough of them to distinguish

No! The words you use matter immensely - that is, if you have any intention of productive communication. Yes, Adam Smith didn't use the word 'capitalism' or the term 'lassiez-faire' etc but rather the term 'system of natural liberty.' But for a century and a half this is what has been understood by 'capitalism' and no other name for such a system has been anywhere near so widely recognized. Socialism has always meant social ownership rather than private ownership. Coming up with your own redefinitions and playing Humpty Dumpty is just poor communication.

To talk about proposals for trying to decentralize economic power and distribute ownership, again, the term that will communicate that to people is 'distributivism' and not 'socialism.' Claiming that centralization and markets are simply orthogonal is to ignore the obvious issues: there is no way to allow free exchange and simultaneously prevent uneven accumulation of wealth.

BTW Bernard Shaw, who was with the (socialist) Fabian society, had debates with Chesterton about socialism and distributivism. In the 1920s he explained the standard meaning of 'capitalism' and 'socialism' for the Encyclopedia Britannica:

In Socialism private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

Shaw

Odds are excellent the job is doing something toxic to society anyway

Yep, and ICBM are toxic, no mistake there, but if the software had never been written because everyone had your attitude you would be speaking Russian right now (or Chinese).

If you don't like the conditions, don't work there, go write another webpage about cats or something.
You know, something less toxic. And finish your Tofu.

Yeah, that guy's an even BIGGER problem. :-)

https://www.xkcd.com/154/

https://xkcd.com/1504/

Who to believe?

Learn critical thinking. What critical word appears in the very first sentence of the summary?

Answer: "Questionnaire"

This was a SURVEY, of people that selected their own diets, not a controlled study. People that give up meat and eat "plant based proteins" are the same people that will exercise, avoid smoking, drink a glass of red wine instead of a keg of beer, etc. Correlation is not causation, and the results of this survey really don't mean anything.

You don't keep any of what you produce, except in unusual circumstances. You trade the product of your labor in exchange for money. Why? Why would you do that? Because you would rather have money than the product of your labor. Why does your boss pay you? Because he wanted the product more than he wanted money. The end result is both sides have been enriched by the exchange.

I don't know what econ courses you've taken but you need to step outside of your frictionless vacuum.

CEO compensation went up 17.6%, this is probably almost entirely due to the tax bill. Do you really think the tax cut somehow made CEOs 17.6% more productive or valuable without affecting labour at all, or do you think there's other factors at work affecting compensation?

You probably won't understand that though, you seem to have a low IQ.

Are you deliberately trying to throw around juvenile Trumpy insults? Just what are you trying to signal?

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Yes, it has been changing. But if you can look at that and aren't the least bit alarmed, I'm not sure anything is going to ever get through.

So basically, no one is confused by it except for the ones that are?

In other news, the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

There's a distinction between being forced to provide money for military (to draw a hasty analogy) and being forced to quarter troops at your home. The former might be distasteful and objectionable, but ultimately not protected against in our system of laws. The latter is distasteful, objectionable, and prohibited by our supreme law of the land.

If they try to prohibit secure end-to-end encryption here (because that's what this amounts to), you can bet somebody will make a (successful) First-Amendment-based argument.

It is misleading since nothing of real value can be done to those websites.

It is the old xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/932/

I don't hide tricks using links.

Google search doesn't even return relevant results anymore but more results that may look like what you ask. Soon just expect that an AI will generate the results on the fly SCIgen style.

Now they even remove keywords from your query to get more irrelevant matches from higher scored sites.

Also the +"" or intext: tags are basically ignored and worse if you insist they start throwing captchas at you.

Unfortunately you will be one of those few people who notice, may be poining it out a couple more will also realize, like when you point out about bad kerning.

Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/932/

https://xkcd.com/2030/

This.

Obligatory XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Except this is a HPC programming language, not a one-size-fits-all HTML5-style standard.

https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/2030/

that is a strange - and notably 100% unsupportable - conclusion you came to there. just because i pointed out your own severe bias and your own lack of knowledge on political topics does not in any way demonstrate a lack of "civic interest in the matter". quite the opposite, in fact - i was merely showing that someone as close-minded and uneducated as yourself has more to gain by leaving the problem alone than by attempting to solve it.

that said, if you're smart enough to understand xkcd, they just took on one of the biggest problems with software for electronic voting. let me know if you need it translated.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

https://xkcd.com/2030/

But like they say in obligatory xkcd, most people aren't murderers.

Most people aren’t swatters, either - but unfortunately a few think it’s funny. And those sorts of people seemed to be wired not to blame themselves when their “prank” goes very wrong.

Sure, you can hack a pacemaker and kill its wearer. You can also shoot him with a gun, poison him, bomb him, whatever. It is made even easier by the fact that people who wear pacemakers aren't usually at the peak of their shape.

But like they say in obligatory xkcd, most people aren't murderers.

blockchain ?!?

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Thanks, I needed a chuckle after reading this story/submission!

https://xkcd.com/2030/

I'd like to see better statistics. On average, a first heart attack strikes men at age 65; women, 72. A 72 year old is simply more likely to die of a heart attack than a 65 year old one; age matters. There's no surprise that women are more likely to die, and although women are more likely to die of their heart attack, men still, on the average, die earlier of heart attacks.

Except that, given female doctors for both male and female patients, women are not more likely to die. FTA:

I stand by my statement. I want to see better statistics.

...

The difference between male and female doctors is interesting, but note that the difference is actually small: according to the article, a heart attack patient dies in the ER about 11.9 percent of the time, versus 12.4 percent with female patients with male doctors [corrected from error in my original; sorry]-- the difference is one part in two hundred.

Yes, but with a study population of over half a million, that's a statistically significant difference.

No, it's not.

Work it out. They say one doctor in four are women. Half of the patients are women. So the actual study population of women patients treated by women doctors is one eighth of the total-- that's 62,000, not half a million. The deaths in the ER are 12%: 7.5 thousand. Square root of that is 86, for statistical variance (Poisson statistics) of 1.1 percent.

So difference of one in two hundred is NOT statistically significant.

It's actually worse statistics than that, since they have split the data into many tranches. There are four groups (male doctor, male patient; male doctor, female patient; female doctor, male patient; female doctor, female patient). Thus there are four ways to compare one subgroup against the average, plus three ways to compare subsets of data (effect male doctors, effect of female doctors, effect of same-sex doctor)-- seven possible comparisons to check against the null hypothesis. Statistically, that's only four degrees of freedom (because the comparisons have overlap)-- but still, you have four times higher possibility of false positive, and thus need four times higher statistical significance to pull signal out of the noise.

(This xkcd is a primer on why multiple comparisons in a group increase the possibility of false positive: https://xkcd.com/882/ ).

The big confounding effect here is age in doctors, not just patients: on the average, female doctors are younger than male doctors, and thus more recently educated and presumably up to date on the most modern techniques. I'd like to see that effect accounted for.

That would be a really great point, except it runs into the same flaw as your first argument: there was no difference in death rates between male doctors-male patient and female doctor-male patient. If female doctors were more recently educated and up to date on the most modern techniques and that made a difference, you'd expect to see the female doctor-male patient death rate be lower. But it's not. Both of your arguments have a fundamental flaw that suggest you didn't really read the article summary, much less the article: your first argument requires a premise that women are more likely to die than men regardless of the gender of their doctor; and your second argument requires a premise that female doctors are less likely to have patients die regardless of the gender of their patient. But neither of those are true - this study found an increased death rate only when two variables coincide: female doctor and female patient.

Your point would be interesting if the statistics were convincing, but they're not.

The statistics would have to be much more convincing for your analysis to hold, since if the older patient eff

Obligatory:
https://xkcd.com/2030/

... obviously involves a $5 wrench.

https://xkcd.com/882/

I need to say this: despite the fact that misoginy is a real problem in our society, this is just a spurious correlation.

It's all about context. Pretty certain the author was dripping with disdain for having to go out to a "backwater" for the article. Especially given some of the other comments the author made about sleep walking train stations or some other nonsense.

Anyways, lets consider a line from this article regarding Lee Kuan Yew former PM of Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew Built Modern Singapore

But the Singaporean strongman will go down in history not only as the founding father of his nation, which he transformed from a third world backwater into a stable and prosperous first world financial hub.

So tell me, is backwater being used in a pejorative sense? I'd say yes.

Words can have multiple meanings and it is upon you the writer(or speaker) to understand how your listener might take said words. Or a non-obligatory xkcd link: Misinterpretation that might get the point across better.

To make a really long point short, the author of the article is terrible at hiding personal biases.

https://xkcd.com/1807/

https://xkcd.com/1807/

They may not have enough time with their current burn rate.

The problem with burn rate is it's an extrapolation. It ignores the plan to reduce the burn rate.

I'm wondering if part of taking this private is so that their quarterly balances won't be so public.

No doubt this is part of it.

Wall Street wants information that Tesla simply can't disclose because it would lose it's competitive edge. What are the cost targets per vehicle? How will the company reach those targets? If Tesla gives up that information, it would be valuable information for competitors.

At the end of the day, an investment in Tesla is an investment in Musk. Do you trust his planning? Do you trust his ability to overcome obstacles along the way? Some people think he is a liar and a cheat. However, I look at the success of SpaceX and conclude that Musk is entirely capable of leading Tesla to the same success.

Yeah, people don't seem to understand how big the difference between getting into space and getting into orbit is.

But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.

The delta-v required to get something up to the Karman Line (100km) is 1,400 m/s, assuming an instance impulse and no atmosphere. In reality you need about 2,000 m/s because of atmospheric and "gravity" drag. That's a mere 20% of the delta-v required to get into LEO where you not only have to get into space (2 km/s), but also travel fast enough to stay up (8 km/s).

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Yeah, I know it's a cartoon and not precise scale but it's pretty blatant at the end of it, bad things are coming.

Combine this, with the recent discussion of methane finally escaping in siberia.
https://www.google.com.au/sear...

It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return. I can't really fathom a good analogy, perhaps the titanic? Except 10,000 times larger and moving much, much slower but we're only 6 feet from the ice burg. We're gonna take a little bit to hit it, but rest assured we absoloutely will be hitting that ice burg.

Don't breed, having kids in the future that's coming is only more depressing.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

https://xkcd.com/927/

It also authenticates you with blood on your face, strapped to a chair with broken kneecaps

If your face is very damaged it would not. Also if you refuse to look at the device it will not...

But all of that is a pretty stupid argument considering a passcode will also still unlock the device and they could just use the XKCD method if we are talking about people willing to use extreme physical force to open a device.

With FaceID at least you'd still have as much a fighting chance to not unlock the device as you would with a passcode, vs. TouchID where they can just cut off your thumb and go in the other room with it, if you want to talk about the efficacy of different schemes.

...and also has your fingerprints? I think there are simpler options.

You fail it.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Yep, I hear you.

I consider git to be a perfect example of a tool that's absolutely brilliant in what it does, but is needlessly over-complex in many ways. The software forces users to care about many things which I'd posit shouldn't be necessary except for advanced scenarios. I'm a long-time C++ programmer (considered one of the more difficult languages to use), and am also well-regarded in my field. I actually find git tricky to use, and often have to search on the web for whatever arcane syntax is required to perform the tasks I wish to accomplish. The man pages contain a lot of self-referential techo-jargon which really only makes sense to those who are already experts. Ease-of-use really didn't seem to be much of a concern all all during development - nor even consistency of commands. Sure, I could spend the effort to memorize it all if I wished... but I'm plenty busy straining my brain with my actual work.

I don't mean to bag on git. Obviously, it's an awesome tool, but I think it's also typical of many developer-focused tools, languages, and libraries. It makes an assumption about the intelligence and expertise of the users, and as such, often tends to require MORE intelligence or expertise than is strictly necessary to use it at a basic or introductory level. It's especially frustrating when you can point out simple changes, sometimes very minor or even cosmetic in nature, that would drastically have improved the user experience, but it's often far too late once a product has gained critical mass to make changes like that.

Generally speaking, I don't really buy the ridiculousness of the "everyone can code" mantra - not at a professional level at least, but my concern is the trend of making things more difficult on professional programmers who are clearly competent enough to use the tools if enough brainpower is expended... but why make things more difficult than they need to be? All that does is distract the programmer from more productive work. No matter how smart you are, your brainpower reserve is ultimately limited.

Complaining about whitespace is a pretty certain sign that the poster doesn't know squat about Python. Python has plenty of issues. Here's one -- https://xkcd.com/1987/ In point of fact Python use of whitespace is (unlike say bash's) just a straightforward formalization of a pretty reasonable style rule for readable code in any language that allows some (by no means all) nested parentheses to be omitted.

The only genuine problem I'm aware of with Python indentation comes when trying to embed python in a shell script using python -c .... I'm not sure anything non-trivial can be done that way. I suspect that anyone wishing to embed Python code in a shell script will probably try -c, quickly become annoyed/frustrated/outraged and learn about heredoc.

Because this. ;)

As long as it take more space and more weight than an IC performing an equivalent task

But it doesn't use power and should have a high radiation/EMP robustness. And is literally as fast as lightning. Any of these factory may mitigate space or weight

I already wrote in a different post that it's really cool because it mixes hi-tech with absolute low-tech.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

I'm no moon landing conspiracy theorist but the combination of losing the Saturn blue prints and not having a viable ship to get to the moon and not having space suits that can allow a person to survive on the moon a pretty strong factors to consider.

I don't usually respond to ACs, especially when they're spouting easily and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories. But, in the interests of correcting the internet:

YouTuber Curious Droid, who creates videos about lots of rocket and aeronautic history, just recently put out a video about recreating the F-1 engine. Short answer: the blueprints aren't lost, but they do not contain all the necessary information about how to make the engine. A lot of that information about assembly technique was not well documented. Each engine, although more or less the same, was practically hand-made by skilled technicians.

NASA does have suits that went to the Moon. For instance, the Smithsonian has been carefully restoring and documenting Armstrong's lunar EVA suit for permanent display. I am a backer of that successful kickstarter effort, and have been getting regular updates as they prepare for its debut next year (50th anniversary).