This is based on science, as the diet of the chicken significantly affects the nutrient content in the eggs.
Organic chickens also produce an order of magnitude more waste than chickens farmed using modern techniques, waste that invariably ends up in the water supply. There is a trade off to everything.
I agree with you on the cattle though, corn fed cattle cause an amazing number of problems up and down the chain, from extra waste (and extra... odorous waste) to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Unfortunately, America as a nation is addicted to beef, and switching to 100% grass fed beef is probably economically impossible with demands at current levels, even if every single consumer demanded it.
Yeah, I think I'll take a Lithium ion battery in my trunk before I take a 3 ton hunk of steel spinning at 900km/h. That's a lot of energy, and unlike a battery, that energy has to go somewhere if it breaks.
I was thinking the same thing; give a person a 1000 x 1000 grid of randomly generated cells, the rules to Conway's game of life, and ask them if there is a static end state to the system. Humans can't solve the halting problem, we can't do any of the NP complete problems. Sometimes it feels like we can, but that is because the problems we demonstrate the ability on are trivially small, easily small enough that a modern computer can solve them at least as quickly.
This kind of system offers significantly better security than CCs.
If the system is designed well the stores you visit will never see your financial information (and never have an opportunity to lose it). Encrypt the account information on the phone with a psuedo-random number that is generated every 60s (along the lines of SecureID), send the encrypted data to the store, the store forwards that encrypted string, along with the amount of purchase to the payment server, the server responds back with a simple 'approve/deny' response. This also applies to card skimmers, if someone skims your account details, they're valid for 60s or less.
The system can also be password protected, or even biometricly protected if you really wanted to make things easy; which is better than I've heard of CCs being able to do.
Marvin I can agree with you, his attitude is close enough that it still feels genuine and the 'futuristic' body plan and color had the dual payoff of being more modern and throwing his depression into contrast.
The period between GUIs becoming dominant and HD televisions being common saw a complete lack of TV out options for good reason, operating a GUI on a fuzzy pixeled, CRT, 480p television is a painful experience. Even 720p LCD isn't really up to snuff for many applications.
The district loses its "squareness" and follows the local streets/neighborhoods.
No, they follow neighborhoods, generally neighborhoods carefully chosen by the party in power to ensure that said party will be reelected for the foreseeable future. Imagine a city with 50/50 republicans and democrats, where 50% of the democrats live in one neighborhood but the republicans are evenly spread. The democrats take one district handidly, but lose every other district by a considerable margin. A city that is politically an even split suddenly has a city council that is made up of 19 republicans and 1 democrat.
It isn't the ratings that is terrifying, it is the attitude being displayed. And yes, this attitude does terrify me; it is used to justify everything from petty theft and copyright infringement all the way up to money laundering and financial ponzi schemes. People are willing to do harm (however small) to someone who is giving them free things because the free things aren't available when demanded, that is a serious failing of society.
Re:Thanks for inappropriate ratings
on
Amazon Gags On Gaga
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But... they're not getting me my (nearly) free stuff fast enough! I'm deserve to get this album now because they told me that I could have it and I want it now and if I can't have it now I'm going to do whatever I can to hurt them. [/sarcasm]
Honestly, people complain about food stamps and medical care being the problem with the entitlement generation, but I really don't have a problem with feeling entitled to basic human needs. The idea that you are entitled to the latest Lady Gaga album, and being so angry about a day or two delay in getting it that you sabotage the rating system, is quite frankly terrifying to me.
Einstein added the cosmological constant because he felt at the time that the universe should be steady state, it shouldn't have an identifiable end. The cosmological constant was meant to exactly cancel out the force of gravity at cosmological scales so that the universe could effectively last forever. We know now that this is most likely not the case, eventually the expansion will accelerate so rapidly that individual subatomic particles will be torn to pieces by it. So really, Einstein was right in that there is a cosmological constant (and do note that he changed his mind later and removed it from the equations), but he was very much so wrong about what the value of the constant would be and the effects that it would have on the universe.
There are several disaster preparedness groups that go under the guise of preparing for the zombie outbreak "because if you're ready for the zombie Apocalypse, you're ready for anything". Besides, this looks less like an analysis and more like a press release explaining how the CDC would respond to a major outbreak.
Uhhhh, you can exchange bitcoins for USD, the current rate is around $6.75. The problem is that the value tomorrow might be $20... or $.20, they are extremely volatile and due to their deflationary nature probably always will be.
Or read "A Pail of Air" which is about survivors of a freak accident that causes the earth to become one of these (I suspect that the physics of this story are off by orders of magnitude, but it's still a fun read for some reason).
The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs. If an outbreak occurred people would be dying in the streets before you would even have enough samples incubated to start vaccine development and who knows how far it would spread before your vaccine is in full production. As is, with samples in secure locations you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the minute you are aware of the outbreak. This isn't like MAD where we keep nukes to blow up the other guy if he uses his, keeping live samples of the virus actually allows us to defend against it's use. (Not to mention the small but real possibility of a natural outbreak).
You're right, it's time to cut out the problem all together and jump straight to 256 bit addressing. With 10^77 addresses, we'll be able to assign a unique address to nearly every atom in the universe and never have to have these arguments again.
$200? An ATI Radeon HD 5870 6 monitor setup runs about $500 for the card, $150 for a mount, and $1200 for the monitors. That's still a fraction of what an experienced developer makes in a year; even if all it does is give your employees serious geek cred it's worth the $2k and I highly doubt an experienced developer won't be able to find ways to use 6 monitors while doing complex work. Yeah, it's probably overkill, but if it keeps your employees happy and costs a pittance (relatively speaking) why not? Of course, reality for most of us is a 6 year old desktop with at most 2 monitors, even if developers making 6 figures are often enough stuck with that.
'spectacular' doesn't mean awesome, it means 'creating a spectacle', 'an event with striking effects', 'dramatic and eyecatching'. Cheese is 'spectacular' because it completely changes the the early game from a slow build up to large armies, into an edge of the seat, do or die confrontation with minimal forces.
Really though, the odds of success in pro games is pretty low for those kinds of plays, opponents are too good at scouting them and deflecting them; I suspect that pro level players continue to mix them in primarily so that their opponents have to waste time in every game scouting them and preparing for them. It's like opening a football game with an onside kick, even if it doesn't work the opposing team (and opposing teams in future games as well) is going to be extra watchful for it at the expense of something else, even if it is only a fraction of a second reaction time. Even as a platinum player I can tell you that 20 seconds lost checking your base for cannons can be more than enough to spell the difference between winning and losing.
The problem is, and always has been, studio time and advertising. Those are the only real services that a record label produces in a world with modern technology, but without them it's almost impossible for a band to go mainstream; they'll be forever stuck in a small genre or geographical niche. I think a solution to this would be to enourage all bands of any popularity level to identify a half dozen or so bands that are less well known than they are and offer their support to them. That support would obviously vary based on how big the supporting band is.
A band that is widely established and popular might donate the studio time to a band that is regionally popular but not yet on in the national spotlight. A somewhat well known regional band might invite a local band to open a few shows for them and bundle a song on their next album. An established local band might help a brand new garage band line up gigs that the garage band wouldn't have a chance of getting without help. Imagine you're a band and you have a choice between siding with an RIAA label or the band that inspired you to play in the first place, which would you chose?
Without a way to replace advertising and capital there will always be new bands willing to sign any contract with a label to get their names bumped up to the national level. And with enough advertising their music will sell to the masses even if it's derivative crap, it's just a fact of human nature. Any plan to eliminate the major labels has to take into account that the record labels do serve a purpose, it's just that the purpose has nothing to do with making music and everything to do with advertising and providing capital. Those roles need to be filled, otherwise new bands will without a doubt be lured in by the promise of instant wealth and fame.
Sneakernets are actually pretty cool, never under estimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard drives. I mean sure, the latency is horrible, but 1000 2 Tbyte hard drives at 60 mph will achieve ludicrous transfer rates even driving halfway across the continent.
Exactly, that's the same way that I know that this rock that I have bought keeps away tigers!
More seriously, lets say that your screening procedures are 99% effective with a 0.0001% false positive rate, both of which are horribly, massively unrealistic. And then let's pretend that there are 10 terrorists that try to get on an airplane each year in the US, which is almost definitely an unrealistically high number. There are an estimated 737.4 million passenger flights each year in the US. That means that for each terrorist detected you're going to hit 8200 false positives. Screening everyone in the country just doesn't work at a mathematical level.
I'd be interested in someone taking it a step farther, Electric car with distributed generation is given 80% efficiency, but that can't include the energy involved in making the solar cells or windmills. Of course, if you're going to include that in the electric items, you need to do the same analysis for the others as well: how much does energy does it cost to make the equipment to mine and drill for fossil fuels. And then of course you have to think about maintenance, future upgrades, economies of scale... I'm not really convinced that it's possible to do an accurate analysis of this kind of problem, you can probably get some general ideas though.
What they're getting at is basically a feedback loop, introduce a few 'words' to the Dolphins so that we have something to start with, then try to learn a few 'words' that the Dolphins already use amongst themselves and then use those words to 'speak' back to the dolphins, maybe adding a few more of our own invention to help with structure.
Honestly though, research has shown that Dolphins can keep track of at least 100 different words... compare that to a great ape which is capable of up to a couple thousand... then compare that to a human which is capable of tens of thousands. Someone up above made the joke that they got the system working and all the dolphins wanted to talk about was mackerel, I suspect that the joke isn't too far from the truth. If dolphins communicate with each other in a significant way, they're going to be communicating things that dolphins care about; where the food is, the dolphin that just joined the group, where the predators are, and, quite frankly, who is having sex with whom. It's fascinating from a linguistics and animal intelligence perspective, but the dialog isn't going to be anything earth shattering or amazing.
The people who design GPS satellites for a start. And I imagine other satellites requiring precise timing information out beyond the Earth's gravitational field.
As far as hiring decisions go it makes perfect sense. One of the most dangerous things a project can fall into is groupthink, believing this as a group that no individual would have believed on their own. Ask a group of developers how long a project will take and they'll talk about it and come up with a number, but if you ask each developer individually it's entirely possible that no single person will come up with the same number; that's normal. Groupthink is when no individual developer comes up with a number that is within an order of magnitude what the group arrived at and every individual, if they were impartial, would say that the group estimate was unrealistic.
Groupthink tends to correlate with how alike members of the group are, it's believed to be driven by a desire to conform. Geeks are generally not like other people, not even like other geeks. Even geeks that are close friends tend to have different hobbies and beliefs, especially in the formative years, simply because the treatment they received from non-geeks has driven them together. They've also shown a willingness to break conformity, many of them have put up with, or found ways to avoid, being bullied, teased, and ostracized throughout their adolescence. Both of these, the fact that they are different and the fact that they are willing to be nonconforming can help avoid a group falling into illogical thinking.
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This is based on science, as the diet of the chicken significantly affects the nutrient content in the eggs.
Organic chickens also produce an order of magnitude more waste than chickens farmed using modern techniques, waste that invariably ends up in the water supply. There is a trade off to everything.
I agree with you on the cattle though, corn fed cattle cause an amazing number of problems up and down the chain, from extra waste (and extra... odorous waste) to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Unfortunately, America as a nation is addicted to beef, and switching to 100% grass fed beef is probably economically impossible with demands at current levels, even if every single consumer demanded it.
Yeah, I think I'll take a Lithium ion battery in my trunk before I take a 3 ton hunk of steel spinning at 900km/h. That's a lot of energy, and unlike a battery, that energy has to go somewhere if it breaks.
I was thinking the same thing; give a person a 1000 x 1000 grid of randomly generated cells, the rules to Conway's game of life, and ask them if there is a static end state to the system. Humans can't solve the halting problem, we can't do any of the NP complete problems. Sometimes it feels like we can, but that is because the problems we demonstrate the ability on are trivially small, easily small enough that a modern computer can solve them at least as quickly.
This kind of system offers significantly better security than CCs.
If the system is designed well the stores you visit will never see your financial information (and never have an opportunity to lose it). Encrypt the account information on the phone with a psuedo-random number that is generated every 60s (along the lines of SecureID), send the encrypted data to the store, the store forwards that encrypted string, along with the amount of purchase to the payment server, the server responds back with a simple 'approve/deny' response. This also applies to card skimmers, if someone skims your account details, they're valid for 60s or less.
The system can also be password protected, or even biometricly protected if you really wanted to make things easy; which is better than I've heard of CCs being able to do.
Marvin I can agree with you, his attitude is close enough that it still feels genuine and the 'futuristic' body plan and color had the dual payoff of being more modern and throwing his depression into contrast.
Zaphod... no. Just... no.
The period between GUIs becoming dominant and HD televisions being common saw a complete lack of TV out options for good reason, operating a GUI on a fuzzy pixeled, CRT, 480p television is a painful experience. Even 720p LCD isn't really up to snuff for many applications.
The district loses its "squareness" and follows the local streets/neighborhoods.
No, they follow neighborhoods, generally neighborhoods carefully chosen by the party in power to ensure that said party will be reelected for the foreseeable future. Imagine a city with 50/50 republicans and democrats, where 50% of the democrats live in one neighborhood but the republicans are evenly spread. The democrats take one district handidly, but lose every other district by a considerable margin. A city that is politically an even split suddenly has a city council that is made up of 19 republicans and 1 democrat.
It isn't the ratings that is terrifying, it is the attitude being displayed. And yes, this attitude does terrify me; it is used to justify everything from petty theft and copyright infringement all the way up to money laundering and financial ponzi schemes. People are willing to do harm (however small) to someone who is giving them free things because the free things aren't available when demanded, that is a serious failing of society.
But... they're not getting me my (nearly) free stuff fast enough! I'm deserve to get this album now because they told me that I could have it and I want it now and if I can't have it now I'm going to do whatever I can to hurt them.
[/sarcasm]
Honestly, people complain about food stamps and medical care being the problem with the entitlement generation, but I really don't have a problem with feeling entitled to basic human needs. The idea that you are entitled to the latest Lady Gaga album, and being so angry about a day or two delay in getting it that you sabotage the rating system, is quite frankly terrifying to me.
Einstein added the cosmological constant because he felt at the time that the universe should be steady state, it shouldn't have an identifiable end. The cosmological constant was meant to exactly cancel out the force of gravity at cosmological scales so that the universe could effectively last forever. We know now that this is most likely not the case, eventually the expansion will accelerate so rapidly that individual subatomic particles will be torn to pieces by it. So really, Einstein was right in that there is a cosmological constant (and do note that he changed his mind later and removed it from the equations), but he was very much so wrong about what the value of the constant would be and the effects that it would have on the universe.
There are several disaster preparedness groups that go under the guise of preparing for the zombie outbreak "because if you're ready for the zombie Apocalypse, you're ready for anything". Besides, this looks less like an analysis and more like a press release explaining how the CDC would respond to a major outbreak.
Uhhhh, you can exchange bitcoins for USD, the current rate is around $6.75. The problem is that the value tomorrow might be $20... or $.20, they are extremely volatile and due to their deflationary nature probably always will be.
Or Niven's Fleet of Worlds, or watch Space 1999.
Or read "A Pail of Air" which is about survivors of a freak accident that causes the earth to become one of these (I suspect that the physics of this story are off by orders of magnitude, but it's still a fun read for some reason).
The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs. If an outbreak occurred people would be dying in the streets before you would even have enough samples incubated to start vaccine development and who knows how far it would spread before your vaccine is in full production. As is, with samples in secure locations you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the minute you are aware of the outbreak. This isn't like MAD where we keep nukes to blow up the other guy if he uses his, keeping live samples of the virus actually allows us to defend against it's use. (Not to mention the small but real possibility of a natural outbreak).
You're right, it's time to cut out the problem all together and jump straight to 256 bit addressing. With 10^77 addresses, we'll be able to assign a unique address to nearly every atom in the universe and never have to have these arguments again.
$200? An ATI Radeon HD 5870 6 monitor setup runs about $500 for the card, $150 for a mount, and $1200 for the monitors. That's still a fraction of what an experienced developer makes in a year; even if all it does is give your employees serious geek cred it's worth the $2k and I highly doubt an experienced developer won't be able to find ways to use 6 monitors while doing complex work. Yeah, it's probably overkill, but if it keeps your employees happy and costs a pittance (relatively speaking) why not? Of course, reality for most of us is a 6 year old desktop with at most 2 monitors, even if developers making 6 figures are often enough stuck with that.
'spectacular' doesn't mean awesome, it means 'creating a spectacle', 'an event with striking effects', 'dramatic and eyecatching'. Cheese is 'spectacular' because it completely changes the the early game from a slow build up to large armies, into an edge of the seat, do or die confrontation with minimal forces.
Really though, the odds of success in pro games is pretty low for those kinds of plays, opponents are too good at scouting them and deflecting them; I suspect that pro level players continue to mix them in primarily so that their opponents have to waste time in every game scouting them and preparing for them. It's like opening a football game with an onside kick, even if it doesn't work the opposing team (and opposing teams in future games as well) is going to be extra watchful for it at the expense of something else, even if it is only a fraction of a second reaction time. Even as a platinum player I can tell you that 20 seconds lost checking your base for cannons can be more than enough to spell the difference between winning and losing.
The problem is, and always has been, studio time and advertising. Those are the only real services that a record label produces in a world with modern technology, but without them it's almost impossible for a band to go mainstream; they'll be forever stuck in a small genre or geographical niche. I think a solution to this would be to enourage all bands of any popularity level to identify a half dozen or so bands that are less well known than they are and offer their support to them. That support would obviously vary based on how big the supporting band is.
A band that is widely established and popular might donate the studio time to a band that is regionally popular but not yet on in the national spotlight. A somewhat well known regional band might invite a local band to open a few shows for them and bundle a song on their next album. An established local band might help a brand new garage band line up gigs that the garage band wouldn't have a chance of getting without help. Imagine you're a band and you have a choice between siding with an RIAA label or the band that inspired you to play in the first place, which would you chose?
Without a way to replace advertising and capital there will always be new bands willing to sign any contract with a label to get their names bumped up to the national level. And with enough advertising their music will sell to the masses even if it's derivative crap, it's just a fact of human nature. Any plan to eliminate the major labels has to take into account that the record labels do serve a purpose, it's just that the purpose has nothing to do with making music and everything to do with advertising and providing capital. Those roles need to be filled, otherwise new bands will without a doubt be lured in by the promise of instant wealth and fame.
Sneakernets are actually pretty cool, never under estimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard drives. I mean sure, the latency is horrible, but 1000 2 Tbyte hard drives at 60 mph will achieve ludicrous transfer rates even driving halfway across the continent.
Exactly, that's the same way that I know that this rock that I have bought keeps away tigers!
More seriously, lets say that your screening procedures are 99% effective with a 0.0001% false positive rate, both of which are horribly, massively unrealistic. And then let's pretend that there are 10 terrorists that try to get on an airplane each year in the US, which is almost definitely an unrealistically high number. There are an estimated 737.4 million passenger flights each year in the US. That means that for each terrorist detected you're going to hit 8200 false positives. Screening everyone in the country just doesn't work at a mathematical level.
I'd be interested in someone taking it a step farther, Electric car with distributed generation is given 80% efficiency, but that can't include the energy involved in making the solar cells or windmills. Of course, if you're going to include that in the electric items, you need to do the same analysis for the others as well: how much does energy does it cost to make the equipment to mine and drill for fossil fuels. And then of course you have to think about maintenance, future upgrades, economies of scale... I'm not really convinced that it's possible to do an accurate analysis of this kind of problem, you can probably get some general ideas though.
What they're getting at is basically a feedback loop, introduce a few 'words' to the Dolphins so that we have something to start with, then try to learn a few 'words' that the Dolphins already use amongst themselves and then use those words to 'speak' back to the dolphins, maybe adding a few more of our own invention to help with structure.
Honestly though, research has shown that Dolphins can keep track of at least 100 different words... compare that to a great ape which is capable of up to a couple thousand... then compare that to a human which is capable of tens of thousands. Someone up above made the joke that they got the system working and all the dolphins wanted to talk about was mackerel, I suspect that the joke isn't too far from the truth. If dolphins communicate with each other in a significant way, they're going to be communicating things that dolphins care about; where the food is, the dolphin that just joined the group, where the predators are, and, quite frankly, who is having sex with whom. It's fascinating from a linguistics and animal intelligence perspective, but the dialog isn't going to be anything earth shattering or amazing.
The people who design GPS satellites for a start. And I imagine other satellites requiring precise timing information out beyond the Earth's gravitational field.
As far as hiring decisions go it makes perfect sense. One of the most dangerous things a project can fall into is groupthink, believing this as a group that no individual would have believed on their own. Ask a group of developers how long a project will take and they'll talk about it and come up with a number, but if you ask each developer individually it's entirely possible that no single person will come up with the same number; that's normal. Groupthink is when no individual developer comes up with a number that is within an order of magnitude what the group arrived at and every individual, if they were impartial, would say that the group estimate was unrealistic.
Groupthink tends to correlate with how alike members of the group are, it's believed to be driven by a desire to conform. Geeks are generally not like other people, not even like other geeks. Even geeks that are close friends tend to have different hobbies and beliefs, especially in the formative years, simply because the treatment they received from non-geeks has driven them together. They've also shown a willingness to break conformity, many of them have put up with, or found ways to avoid, being bullied, teased, and ostracized throughout their adolescence. Both of these, the fact that they are different and the fact that they are willing to be nonconforming can help avoid a group falling into illogical thinking.
It's giving corporations a nuclear weapon to use on squatters and trolls, except there's no telling who the corporations will actually use it on.