If you consider the extremes we're going to get coal, oil and gas at the moment I suspect we could easily come up with new and exciting sources of uranium and thorium. But the very act of cleaning up our energy industry would probably do wonders for most renewables and fusion research, since the zeitgeist would be in their favor - it would be popular to be investing in these things alongside conventional nuclear power.
Funny you mention garbage men. They are my example to counter the "Teachers are the most important job." tripe. I can tell you if I had to choose between getting rid of all professional teachers and getting rid of all professional garbage men, the garbage men would still be working. Professional teachers wouldn't even make the top 20 most important jobs.
You do realize that the education system is literally the most important thing to the continuance of modern human civilization? Technology doesn't just happen - it's built and maintained on the backs of knowledge transfer down to the next generation.
But sure, get rid of public education. I'm sure there could be absolutely no negative consequences to reducing the US to third world literacy rates, limited mathematical ability, and ensuring that the only people who trickle into important industries are those who could afford private education. Meanwhile the middle class can be hollowed out entirely and then the 1% can safely move to Europe, Australia, Canada, China - you know - basically anywhere in the world which is going to continue having a functional civilization after this.
And of course...a military force that's utterly dependent on high-tech precision weaponry couldn't possibly suffer if most of the recruitment age population can't read, write or basic numeracy...
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? You can't survey the kids - they'll assess a teacher's ability based on how much they like the teacher, not on how good a teacher they are. I think most people are well aware of the folly of rating a teacher by test scores - things just get worse when you teach to the test.
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Don't leave out the parents.
Education is an involved process, which is not solely the duty of the school or teachers - it requires participation, thoughtfulness and input from parents as well.
No amount of good teaching is going to help a student who comes from an abusive or poverty stricken home life. Not to mention the tendency of the entitled middle class parent to assume that they're child couldn't possibly be doing badly on their own merits either.
The whole process is complicated, involved, and yet apparently the problem is clearly the "overpaid" teachers - I guess that's why people are just rushing to hop on that gravy train.
Because on a geological timescale, what we're doing is releasing all the CO2 that has ever been sequestered on earth ALL AT ONCE.
Well, we aren't actually doing that. Most CO2 is bound with limestone not loose as extractable fossil fuels.
Missing the key word "sequestered". Most CO2 bound with limestone has been that way for millions if not billions of years. Most CO2 which has been sequestered from the atmosphere since then however, is not bound to limestone, it's oil.
No way to know, but being able to observe "drug in large doses causes immediate cessation of pumping" would be a pretty important thing to find out - animal models have had some fairly notable failures when transferred to humans.
Being able to stick drugs in a model organism based on human tissue would be a huge development.
I'm sure the family's of the victims of the most recent Colarado shooting, who are currently having to solicit donations to pay for the healthcare of wounded family members are just so glad America has left it all to the private sector.
Oh yeah - despite spending more government money per capita on healthcare then country's which do have socialized healthcare, and yet achieving worse outcomes.
The problem is we're not taking appropriate security precautions yet again. Bothering the user about every little thing isn't the way - you either click 'no' all the time, or 'yes' all the time and the whole thing is moot.
We're getting to the point where what we need is for our browsers to lie convincingly about what personal data they have.
More importantly the desktop is very likely to fork through whatever that final interface would be first.
If we're going to head towards Augmented Reality VR-gesture recognition systems, well, unlike current mobile technology they're all things with very significant gains and least-resistance implementation on the desktop.
I've love to ditch my monitors, clear my desk and seamlessly work with physical and virtual documents in an intuitive way.
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with frequent updates provided your update mechanism is transparent, and you make sure you're not breaking things with them.
A word of warning, Linux Mint really needs to fix up how their installer drops X onto the system. The LiveCD will run great, but then you get all sorts of corruption till you get the right drivers installed.
It's a great distro - running it right now in fact - but oh god does that ever need to be fixed.
I suspect ironically enough that the individual user use case for a filesystem is much more demanding then any conceivable datacenter use case.
Datacenters have a budget, online redundancy, backups, and many levels of power and hardware support.
Individual users have whatever they're willing to part with, and are trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible. We all know we should have backups, but it's not always practical or justifiable - we may have just the extra machine we use to backup our main machine, or just the extra disk.
Making sure those limited resources stay reliable with a limited budget to maintain them in time and money, is a much bigger ask.
ZFS seems like it could end up being a rather sad story - a very full featured, ahead of its time filesystem killed off by restrictive licensing.
Had ZFS been licensed under GPL, I suspect it would've been rolled part and parcel into Linux, and instead of losing Sun developers to btrfs, we'd have seen a completion of block pointer rewrite which would give ZFS the last basic features it really needs for end users (that is, ability to shrink filesystems online, reshape RAIDZ vdevs etc.)
It really is excellent - for a while I was running XFS+mdadm RAID6, and still managed to end up losing data because mdadm doesn't checksum and so would happily kick devices due to a bad sector here or there, and before you know it you're running with no redundancy and anything more it finds is a dead loss.
As it stands I suspect I'll roll on with ZFSonLinux until btrfs picks up something akin to RAIDZ3 and then migrate on over, but it really will be just a reinvention of the same featureset.
Re:checkpointing and restoring TCP connections
on
Linux 3.5 Released
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Faking out Samba would be another.
While many apps might detect a failure, most will wait a few seconds before giving up - which if everything's working, should be more then enough time to migrate.
Though a big part of it is, the rest of the world where I generally want to use scripting is some variant of Unix - whereas Powershell is Windows only. So for things like manipulating text/data files, I'd much rather use bash and the associated toolstack.
Well that's what driver's ed is for. Just because over the sum total of millions of people we can find a few assholes, doesn't invalidate the value of educational programs - or technological aides - which improve drivability and crash survivability.
It might do you well to note that companies like Mercedes have been investing in technologies like external airbags specifically to improve the survivability of pedestrians in accidents involving their cars. There is a very real, non-zero value, to the motorist, in driving a vehicle which is less likely to kill a pedestrian. And at the very least, value to companies in making sure their brandname isn't involved when people die.
In hindsight it's easy to say "this was clearly the number" - because by then we've done something. Or we've averaged all the scenarios after we did something.
There are a lot of intersections and a finite supply of tax dollars with which to deal with them, up against any number of equally or more worthy needs.
Yeah gaming is pretty much the only thing keeping me tied to Windows in any serious way. I already use Cygwin in Windows a hell of alot just so I can have convenient access to Unix-like scripting for dealing with a lot of normal repetitive tasks.
Also I'd rather not care about them, and instead focus on making civilization not collapse.
I mean, a few accidental deaths from overzealous exploration is nothing compared to the billions of deaths said civilizational collapse will have required come beforehand to get to that point.
It's very much why I think no one is having a sensible discussion about nuclear power when timespans like 10,000 years come up. Those people 10,000 years away do not matter to the discussion if the scenario is contrived "well all records have been destroyed and they only have bronze age technology". Well gee, maybe that happened because the planet got completely ruined by runaway climate change and desertification which could've been avoided if they'd switched to nuclear power?
Well, convincing everyone NFC is a horrible idea before it launches would be one of the better economic efficiency services of white hatting.
The reality is that there's a very important distinction between contact and contact-less communication, since if you have a suitable antenna you can pick out almost any signal, no matter how "short range". I mean America was snooping Soviet microwave transmission towers with satellites in tangential orbits during the cold war (hell, it's probably still being done).
Exactly. Basically we know that as long as people are familiar with the key locations, they can type fast - i.e. the limitation is almost certainly the human ability to coordinate our fingers.
So it's really questionable how much benefit you get from changing the keyboard layout to try and optimize it, since is it really the limiting factor in productivity?
The main use case I can think of for wanting a different keyboard layout would be in programming, where we depend more on the outer-keyboard shapes and symbols like braces, $ @ etc.
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If you consider the extremes we're going to get coal, oil and gas at the moment I suspect we could easily come up with new and exciting sources of uranium and thorium. But the very act of cleaning up our energy industry would probably do wonders for most renewables and fusion research, since the zeitgeist would be in their favor - it would be popular to be investing in these things alongside conventional nuclear power.
Can you link a study for this assertion?
Funny you mention garbage men. They are my example to counter the "Teachers are the most important job." tripe. I can tell you if I had to choose between getting rid of all professional teachers and getting rid of all professional garbage men, the garbage men would still be working. Professional teachers wouldn't even make the top 20 most important jobs.
You do realize that the education system is literally the most important thing to the continuance of modern human civilization? Technology doesn't just happen - it's built and maintained on the backs of knowledge transfer down to the next generation.
But sure, get rid of public education. I'm sure there could be absolutely no negative consequences to reducing the US to third world literacy rates, limited mathematical ability, and ensuring that the only people who trickle into important industries are those who could afford private education. Meanwhile the middle class can be hollowed out entirely and then the 1% can safely move to Europe, Australia, Canada, China - you know - basically anywhere in the world which is going to continue having a functional civilization after this.
And of course...a military force that's utterly dependent on high-tech precision weaponry couldn't possibly suffer if most of the recruitment age population can't read, write or basic numeracy...
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
That's bumper sticker logic. How do you propose we figure out which is which? You can't survey the kids - they'll assess a teacher's ability based on how much they like the teacher, not on how good a teacher they are. I think most people are well aware of the folly of rating a teacher by test scores - things just get worse when you teach to the test.
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Don't leave out the parents.
Education is an involved process, which is not solely the duty of the school or teachers - it requires participation, thoughtfulness and input from parents as well.
No amount of good teaching is going to help a student who comes from an abusive or poverty stricken home life. Not to mention the tendency of the entitled middle class parent to assume that they're child couldn't possibly be doing badly on their own merits either.
The whole process is complicated, involved, and yet apparently the problem is clearly the "overpaid" teachers - I guess that's why people are just rushing to hop on that gravy train.
Well, evidently with 20 million people uninsured and your overall health outcomes, you can't heal your wounded.
You do realize my post was talking about healthcare right?
And that gun rights was not mentioned...anywhere.
75% of it is coming from the photons landing my roof.
Because on a geological timescale, what we're doing is releasing all the CO2 that has ever been sequestered on earth ALL AT ONCE.
Well, we aren't actually doing that. Most CO2 is bound with limestone not loose as extractable fossil fuels.
Missing the key word "sequestered". Most CO2 bound with limestone has been that way for millions if not billions of years. Most CO2 which has been sequestered from the atmosphere since then however, is not bound to limestone, it's oil.
No way to know, but being able to observe "drug in large doses causes immediate cessation of pumping" would be a pretty important thing to find out - animal models have had some fairly notable failures when transferred to humans.
Being able to stick drugs in a model organism based on human tissue would be a huge development.
I'm sure the family's of the victims of the most recent Colarado shooting, who are currently having to solicit donations to pay for the healthcare of wounded family members are just so glad America has left it all to the private sector.
Oh yeah - despite spending more government money per capita on healthcare then country's which do have socialized healthcare, and yet achieving worse outcomes.
The problem is we're not taking appropriate security precautions yet again. Bothering the user about every little thing isn't the way - you either click 'no' all the time, or 'yes' all the time and the whole thing is moot.
We're getting to the point where what we need is for our browsers to lie convincingly about what personal data they have.
More importantly the desktop is very likely to fork through whatever that final interface would be first.
If we're going to head towards Augmented Reality VR-gesture recognition systems, well, unlike current mobile technology they're all things with very significant gains and least-resistance implementation on the desktop.
I've love to ditch my monitors, clear my desk and seamlessly work with physical and virtual documents in an intuitive way.
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with frequent updates provided your update mechanism is transparent, and you make sure you're not breaking things with them.
Chrome does them perfectly.
A word of warning, Linux Mint really needs to fix up how their installer drops X onto the system. The LiveCD will run great, but then you get all sorts of corruption till you get the right drivers installed.
It's a great distro - running it right now in fact - but oh god does that ever need to be fixed.
I suspect ironically enough that the individual user use case for a filesystem is much more demanding then any conceivable datacenter use case.
Datacenters have a budget, online redundancy, backups, and many levels of power and hardware support.
Individual users have whatever they're willing to part with, and are trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible. We all know we should have backups, but it's not always practical or justifiable - we may have just the extra machine we use to backup our main machine, or just the extra disk.
Making sure those limited resources stay reliable with a limited budget to maintain them in time and money, is a much bigger ask.
ZFS seems like it could end up being a rather sad story - a very full featured, ahead of its time filesystem killed off by restrictive licensing.
Had ZFS been licensed under GPL, I suspect it would've been rolled part and parcel into Linux, and instead of losing Sun developers to btrfs, we'd have seen a completion of block pointer rewrite which would give ZFS the last basic features it really needs for end users (that is, ability to shrink filesystems online, reshape RAIDZ vdevs etc.)
It really is excellent - for a while I was running XFS+mdadm RAID6, and still managed to end up losing data because mdadm doesn't checksum and so would happily kick devices due to a bad sector here or there, and before you know it you're running with no redundancy and anything more it finds is a dead loss.
As it stands I suspect I'll roll on with ZFSonLinux until btrfs picks up something akin to RAIDZ3 and then migrate on over, but it really will be just a reinvention of the same featureset.
Faking out Samba would be another.
While many apps might detect a failure, most will wait a few seconds before giving up - which if everything's working, should be more then enough time to migrate.
Snapshots.
Being able to snapshot your whole FS before you do system changes, and easily rollback should be a big draw card.
Powershell doesn't really gel for me.
Though a big part of it is, the rest of the world where I generally want to use scripting is some variant of Unix - whereas Powershell is Windows only. So for things like manipulating text/data files, I'd much rather use bash and the associated toolstack.
Well that's what driver's ed is for. Just because over the sum total of millions of people we can find a few assholes, doesn't invalidate the value of educational programs - or technological aides - which improve drivability and crash survivability.
It might do you well to note that companies like Mercedes have been investing in technologies like external airbags specifically to improve the survivability of pedestrians in accidents involving their cars. There is a very real, non-zero value, to the motorist, in driving a vehicle which is less likely to kill a pedestrian. And at the very least, value to companies in making sure their brandname isn't involved when people die.
"A lot" is a very imprecise unit.
How many? 100 over the average? 1000?
In hindsight it's easy to say "this was clearly the number" - because by then we've done something. Or we've averaged all the scenarios after we did something.
There are a lot of intersections and a finite supply of tax dollars with which to deal with them, up against any number of equally or more worthy needs.
Yeah gaming is pretty much the only thing keeping me tied to Windows in any serious way. I already use Cygwin in Windows a hell of alot just so I can have convenient access to Unix-like scripting for dealing with a lot of normal repetitive tasks.
Also I'd rather not care about them, and instead focus on making civilization not collapse.
I mean, a few accidental deaths from overzealous exploration is nothing compared to the billions of deaths said civilizational collapse will have required come beforehand to get to that point.
It's very much why I think no one is having a sensible discussion about nuclear power when timespans like 10,000 years come up. Those people 10,000 years away do not matter to the discussion if the scenario is contrived "well all records have been destroyed and they only have bronze age technology". Well gee, maybe that happened because the planet got completely ruined by runaway climate change and desertification which could've been avoided if they'd switched to nuclear power?
Well, convincing everyone NFC is a horrible idea before it launches would be one of the better economic efficiency services of white hatting.
The reality is that there's a very important distinction between contact and contact-less communication, since if you have a suitable antenna you can pick out almost any signal, no matter how "short range". I mean America was snooping Soviet microwave transmission towers with satellites in tangential orbits during the cold war (hell, it's probably still being done).
Exactly. Basically we know that as long as people are familiar with the key locations, they can type fast - i.e. the limitation is almost certainly the human ability to coordinate our fingers.
So it's really questionable how much benefit you get from changing the keyboard layout to try and optimize it, since is it really the limiting factor in productivity?
The main use case I can think of for wanting a different keyboard layout would be in programming, where we depend more on the outer-keyboard shapes and symbols like braces, $ @ etc.
But that's not what's being proposed here.