Important distinction - "A party that wanted for him to lose" vs "A party that wanted nothing more than for him to lose".
When "make sure the other guy loses" is the over-riding objective, above any other goal, you stop doing things that would make sense if you wanted to get anything done, because getting things done might make the other guy look good. You stop doing things that would make sense to advance your own (original) agenda, where it overlaps with the other guy, because agreeing with the other guy makes him look good and might allow him to achieve something.
It turns everything into a game of tribal warfare - no compromise, no co-operation, just blind hate and contrarian obstruction. Being anything so long as it puts the other guy down or makes his life difficult. That's pretty much the impression I get of a good chunk of the republican party for the last 4 years, and thankfully it hasn't proved to be a winning strategy. If all you had to do to win an election was to block everything the incumbent tries to do (then lambast him for never doing anything), then the USA would be stuck fruitlessly spinning its gears forever.
Maybe now that's been shown to be a dud they'll start working for the common good of the people being governed, rather than treating ideas (and laws) as soldiers in an imaginary war. Maybe. That is perhaps optimistic though; equally likely they double down on the obstructionist crap, especially given how much the far right has supplanted the centre right.
Hmm, actually first they would need to release second installments in all their other series as The Orange Box 2, then they can put part 3 of every-damn-thing in The Orange Box 3.
And it'll be released on 3/3/33
The weird part is that Valve actually do turn out a lot of games - about 1 a year pretty consistently for the last decade. They don't seem to have a problem with making and shipping things in general, just that one game in particular. Maybe they're caught in the trap of trying to beat expectations against a background of continually rising expectations.
At this point, there's a part of me that's expecting to see the third installment of everything from Valve all come out on the same day. Would explain why HalfLife 2 Ep 3 took so long if they had to wait to also have Team Fortress 3, Portal 3, Left4Dead 3 and DOTA 3 in the pipe and ready to go.
That said, it's not a big piece of me that's actually expecting that though. About 1/3.
When you can shift off that whole layer of complexity to a large-scale specialist, you've reduced the total complexity your company has to manage directly. Focus on the areas that matter, not the common ground. Did your company design, engineer, and build its own kitchen appliances for the company breakroom? Didn't think so...
Surely in handing over responsibility for managing that complexity, you also hand over control of what could be intensely critical components of your business. They may do a perfectly good job at a lower cost, but in the (hopefully infrequent) event that the shit hits the fan, the job of fixing it is out of your hands and out of your control and that ought to be scary.
I don't know. Maybe it makes enough sense in the bulk of cases to be a good plan, but the risk of having your entire infrastructure yanked out from under you because of a black swan event or just a regular-grade fuck-up at an unrelated company sounds like something best avoided.
To be honest, the same effect would result if one of her friends posted "Hey, what's it like being a lesbian?" on her wall. I don't see anyone advocating a way to prevent that from happening.
You can decide not to allow your friends to post on your wall. It likely wouldn't occur to you that you need to do so in the name of keeping some specific secret, but you can, in theory, control who is allowed to post there. There's not even a theoretical option to prevent people adding you to groups.
I skimmed through the whole paper, and didn't see one overview diagram to show the shape of this thing's orbit. Haven't really gotten a grip even on how 4 stars orbit around each other - is it two binary systems circling a common centre? Then where do you put a planet in... orbiting in a wide circle around the outside of the stars, figure-8ing between two pairs of stars, some elaborate knot weaving in and out around all 4?
If anyone has a better handle on this than I do, a clear description would serve just as well as a diagram.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the loophole here is that you can be added to a group without your involvement or active consent, then surely that gives you an out when your ignorant homophobe of a father sees that you're associated with a queer choir group - say it was a case of mistaken identity or a prank or a troll or anything else you like.
That said, I don't think it's a non-issue when group membership can leak actual or apparent private information; ought to be a simple fix to make it ask before you're added to any group and then the whole problem goes away without anyone getting interrogated about groups they're attached to. The existence of potential deniability doesn't remove the issue, just provides at least some way of coping with problems casued until it's actually fixed.
Software has a $0 replication and distribution cost, thus driving the price to $0 dollars. Hardware will never have this issue.
Following that line of economic thought, all prices are driven towards marginal cost. You don't make any more money selling $100 hardware units at $100 each than you do selling $0 copies of software at $0 each.
Hate to ruin a good factoid, but "negative calorie" foods are more complex than just eating a particular thing - it depends a lot on your metabolism and weight, and apparently the thermic effect of food (how much extra energy you burn as a side-effect of digesting it) decreases with weight and insulin resistance.
Doesn't mean a food can't be negative-calorie, but it sounds like it's most likely in someone who's already a low weight, and even then it won't subtract very many calories from your day.
The fees at UK universities, for domestic students at least, are all capped to the same level.
That cap just recently tripled, but until then it was a very reasonable £3000ish per year. Anyway, point is, Cambridge is no more expensive than anywhere else in the UK.
I went there, studied Computer Science, and apparently graduated just in time to not get a Raspberry Pi. That said, having seen the setup with the practical labs, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the CS department were in fact buying in RPi's for students to use for a term or two and then give back for the following year to use, rather than for students as a free gift. We had the same deal with some FPGAs.
If every day everyone on Earth were unavoidably hit on the head with a hammer, there would be a long tradition of philosophising to find benefits of being hit on the head with a hammer. Maybe it makes you better appreciate the time you spend not being hit on the head with a hammer, maybe it's shallow and greedy to want not to be hit on the head with a hammer, maybe everyone being hit on the head with a hammer together is a great leveller and a reminder that we should all be humble.
But in a world where people don't get hit on the head with a hammer, you wouldn't be able to sell it as beneficial. I see senescence/death the same way - healthy human life is a universal good, that which destroys it is unequivocally bad. I want as much healthy lifespan as I can possibly get hold of, and it would be for the same reason 100 or 1000 years hence as it is now: I'm not done yet.
On one matter, natural human perception may be limited to a small band of frequencies in light and sound, but we do seem to have something of a knack for making tools that improve on that. If something has measurable effect on our reality we'll eventually find a way to measure it, and if not then... well I'm not too bothered about things with no measurable effect on reality.
On another, even if the world we experience was some variety of illusion, it's such a persistent illusion that it seems like worthwhile effort to operate within it. Even if my subjective experience were built on top of an entirely different kind of universe than I expect, I'd still want to keep on experiencing for as long as possible, and for those experiences to be as pleasant/fulfilling as possible.
In brief: who cares if the world isn't "real" in the way we think, it's still a fun place to be.
Asking people directly why they made the choices they did isn't always as illuminating as it seems - the human brain is more than capable of coming up with after-the-fact rationalisations to explain why a choice was the logical thing to do, when in fact the real decision-making was done on an instinctive/emotional level.
I'm not opposed to cybernetic implants powered by the beer and pizza I already consume, but I sure want to know that the researchers and engineers did their homework first.
Nah, sounds more likely that the people who have spent however much of their lives on enough study/research to build this thing, all just failed to consider the simple potential problem you came up with in under 15 minutes. That sounds plausible, have a cookie.
Given a non-zero probability of parents in that situation getting belligerent about the idea of a stranger coming into their home and feeding their children, that sounds like it's fraught with the potential for either abuse/assault of the social workers involved, or at very least for it to be a really stressful situation for them.
You also seem to be assuming that they'd universally have adequate cooking equipment in the home.
I guess you could send someone to drop off pre-made meals, but enforcing a rule of the food being exclusively for children is always going to be difficult if the parents aren't co-operative.
I think they should have some kind of Google programming question as a prerequisite for registration.
It needs to be something that would eliminate the PHB's.
"Hey Jim, ya mind filling out my registration for the Google shindig? They're asking about some weird techy stuff."
Granted, that may not be viable in a 20 minute window.
This being slashdot, I think you know what I'm driving at...
I believe I do. Car analogy time! That's what you were driving at, right?
So the group of nuclear scientists should instead be adjusting the AC on the car of civilisation, to represent whether nuclear tensions have cooled off or heated up.
Because of course if you turn the heater up too high, chances are you'll get all irritable, fly off the handle at some idiot who doesn't know how to drive, and launch an ICBM strike against that asshole who keeps tailgating you.
Just my pessimism showing through there. I know it goes both ways but I assume it's going to get closer to armageddon more often that it gets further away.
Sooner or later they're going to box themselves into a corner - they only have so many discrete 1-minute steps they can take before they find that the world is more fucked up than they thought possible, but somehow still carrying on.
Then what? Leave it at 1-minute to midnight, or edge ever closer in smaller and smaller increments?
Classist? I'm struggling to see it, but if you'd like to enlighten me on the nature of prejudices I didn't realise I had then please go ahead. However, I think you're assuming more about what I think than what I said provides evidence for.
As to putting artificial premiums on things... yes, of course I place a premium on things I want, that is what a preference is. I suspect there are enough people of similar preference, or come to that similar actual needs, that the original idea that the PC is imminently obsolete becomes unlikely.
You may be right; treating computing as an appliance could well produce devices suited to the "not good with computers" crowd. But I don't want one as my main device, and don't want to see that kind of thing crowd out the market for things that aren't hermetically sealed, underpowered, and locked into someone else's "ecosystem".
Look up the stated requirements for the simple things you see all over the place - Office, Windows itself, that kind of software. Versions from a decade ago (I'm looking at Windows/Office 2000) only ask for a CPU of 133MHz, 64MB of RAM, a few GB of disk space. Those requirements have ballooned upwards as more powerful machines became available
10 year old hardware would run current software at a painful crawl, if at all... anyone whose parents are still using a machine from a decade ago can probably attest to that.
I suppose it's not really very demanding as software goes, but the difference of capability (how fast it runs undemanding software, or how many such programs it can comfortably run at once) between a mobile device and a big box is still apparent.
If I have the maths right, I'm paying more than double what you are at the pump, and it only keeps going up. Damnable extortionate UK prices.
I suspect if your gas prices were the same as ours, efficiency would be a much more desirable thing... especially given the near-certainty that your average USAian is doing more miles across that giant-ass country of yours than those of us on small islands.
Seems to me that the trend isn't "the death of the PC" so much as "the rise of shiny toys for simpletons who don't know how to computer"
Use of traditional PCs might decline among those who want to use a computer the same way they use a microwave –to do a handful of simple pre-defined tasks, without any control or knowledge of the details– and maybe that's a big market segment these days, but I can't see myself replacing my big box any time soon.
I prefer the form factor, the desk setup, the ability to open the thing up and tinker with it, the extra power and storage... everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Important distinction - "A party that wanted for him to lose" vs "A party that wanted nothing more than for him to lose".
When "make sure the other guy loses" is the over-riding objective, above any other goal, you stop doing things that would make sense if you wanted to get anything done, because getting things done might make the other guy look good. You stop doing things that would make sense to advance your own (original) agenda, where it overlaps with the other guy, because agreeing with the other guy makes him look good and might allow him to achieve something.
It turns everything into a game of tribal warfare - no compromise, no co-operation, just blind hate and contrarian obstruction. Being anything so long as it puts the other guy down or makes his life difficult. That's pretty much the impression I get of a good chunk of the republican party for the last 4 years, and thankfully it hasn't proved to be a winning strategy. If all you had to do to win an election was to block everything the incumbent tries to do (then lambast him for never doing anything), then the USA would be stuck fruitlessly spinning its gears forever.
Maybe now that's been shown to be a dud they'll start working for the common good of the people being governed, rather than treating ideas (and laws) as soldiers in an imaginary war. Maybe. That is perhaps optimistic though; equally likely they double down on the obstructionist crap, especially given how much the far right has supplanted the centre right.
Hmm, actually first they would need to release second installments in all their other series as The Orange Box 2, then they can put part 3 of every-damn-thing in The Orange Box 3.
And it'll be released on 3/3/33
The weird part is that Valve actually do turn out a lot of games - about 1 a year pretty consistently for the last decade. They don't seem to have a problem with making and shipping things in general, just that one game in particular. Maybe they're caught in the trap of trying to beat expectations against a background of continually rising expectations.
At this point, there's a part of me that's expecting to see the third installment of everything from Valve all come out on the same day. Would explain why HalfLife 2 Ep 3 took so long if they had to wait to also have Team Fortress 3, Portal 3, Left4Dead 3 and DOTA 3 in the pipe and ready to go.
That said, it's not a big piece of me that's actually expecting that though. About 1/3.
When you can shift off that whole layer of complexity to a large-scale specialist, you've reduced the total complexity your company has to manage directly. Focus on the areas that matter, not the common ground. Did your company design, engineer, and build its own kitchen appliances for the company breakroom? Didn't think so...
Surely in handing over responsibility for managing that complexity, you also hand over control of what could be intensely critical components of your business. They may do a perfectly good job at a lower cost, but in the (hopefully infrequent) event that the shit hits the fan, the job of fixing it is out of your hands and out of your control and that ought to be scary.
I don't know. Maybe it makes enough sense in the bulk of cases to be a good plan, but the risk of having your entire infrastructure yanked out from under you because of a black swan event or just a regular-grade fuck-up at an unrelated company sounds like something best avoided.
To be honest, the same effect would result if one of her friends posted "Hey, what's it like being a lesbian?" on her wall. I don't see anyone advocating a way to prevent that from happening.
You can decide not to allow your friends to post on your wall. It likely wouldn't occur to you that you need to do so in the name of keeping some specific secret, but you can, in theory, control who is allowed to post there. There's not even a theoretical option to prevent people adding you to groups.
I skimmed through the whole paper, and didn't see one overview diagram to show the shape of this thing's orbit. Haven't really gotten a grip even on how 4 stars orbit around each other - is it two binary systems circling a common centre? Then where do you put a planet in... orbiting in a wide circle around the outside of the stars, figure-8ing between two pairs of stars, some elaborate knot weaving in and out around all 4?
If anyone has a better handle on this than I do, a clear description would serve just as well as a diagram.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the loophole here is that you can be added to a group without your involvement or active consent, then surely that gives you an out when your ignorant homophobe of a father sees that you're associated with a queer choir group - say it was a case of mistaken identity or a prank or a troll or anything else you like.
That said, I don't think it's a non-issue when group membership can leak actual or apparent private information; ought to be a simple fix to make it ask before you're added to any group and then the whole problem goes away without anyone getting interrogated about groups they're attached to. The existence of potential deniability doesn't remove the issue, just provides at least some way of coping with problems casued until it's actually fixed.
Software has a $0 replication and distribution cost, thus driving the price to $0 dollars. Hardware will never have this issue.
Following that line of economic thought, all prices are driven towards marginal cost. You don't make any more money selling $100 hardware units at $100 each than you do selling $0 copies of software at $0 each.
Hate to ruin a good factoid, but "negative calorie" foods are more complex than just eating a particular thing - it depends a lot on your metabolism and weight, and apparently the thermic effect of food (how much extra energy you burn as a side-effect of digesting it) decreases with weight and insulin resistance.
Doesn't mean a food can't be negative-calorie, but it sounds like it's most likely in someone who's already a low weight, and even then it won't subtract very many calories from your day.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4322
The fees at UK universities, for domestic students at least, are all capped to the same level.
That cap just recently tripled, but until then it was a very reasonable £3000ish per year. Anyway, point is, Cambridge is no more expensive than anywhere else in the UK.
I went there, studied Computer Science, and apparently graduated just in time to not get a Raspberry Pi. That said, having seen the setup with the practical labs, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the CS department were in fact buying in RPi's for students to use for a term or two and then give back for the following year to use, rather than for students as a free gift. We had the same deal with some FPGAs.
Dying is what makes us real.
I'm sure we'd be fine without it.
If every day everyone on Earth were unavoidably hit on the head with a hammer, there would be a long tradition of philosophising to find benefits of being hit on the head with a hammer. Maybe it makes you better appreciate the time you spend not being hit on the head with a hammer, maybe it's shallow and greedy to want not to be hit on the head with a hammer, maybe everyone being hit on the head with a hammer together is a great leveller and a reminder that we should all be humble.
But in a world where people don't get hit on the head with a hammer, you wouldn't be able to sell it as beneficial. I see senescence/death the same way - healthy human life is a universal good, that which destroys it is unequivocally bad. I want as much healthy lifespan as I can possibly get hold of, and it would be for the same reason 100 or 1000 years hence as it is now: I'm not done yet.
On one matter, natural human perception may be limited to a small band of frequencies in light and sound, but we do seem to have something of a knack for making tools that improve on that. If something has measurable effect on our reality we'll eventually find a way to measure it, and if not then... well I'm not too bothered about things with no measurable effect on reality.
On another, even if the world we experience was some variety of illusion, it's such a persistent illusion that it seems like worthwhile effort to operate within it. Even if my subjective experience were built on top of an entirely different kind of universe than I expect, I'd still want to keep on experiencing for as long as possible, and for those experiences to be as pleasant/fulfilling as possible.
In brief: who cares if the world isn't "real" in the way we think, it's still a fun place to be.
Coming soon to Minecraft?
Asking people directly why they made the choices they did isn't always as illuminating as it seems - the human brain is more than capable of coming up with after-the-fact rationalisations to explain why a choice was the logical thing to do, when in fact the real decision-making was done on an instinctive/emotional level.
I'm not opposed to cybernetic implants powered by the beer and pizza I already consume, but I sure want to know that the researchers and engineers did their homework first.
Nah, sounds more likely that the people who have spent however much of their lives on enough study/research to build this thing, all just failed to consider the simple potential problem you came up with in under 15 minutes. That sounds plausible, have a cookie.
Given a non-zero probability of parents in that situation getting belligerent about the idea of a stranger coming into their home and feeding their children, that sounds like it's fraught with the potential for either abuse/assault of the social workers involved, or at very least for it to be a really stressful situation for them.
You also seem to be assuming that they'd universally have adequate cooking equipment in the home.
I guess you could send someone to drop off pre-made meals, but enforcing a rule of the food being exclusively for children is always going to be difficult if the parents aren't co-operative.
I think they should have some kind of Google programming question as a prerequisite for registration.
It needs to be something that would eliminate the PHB's.
"Hey Jim, ya mind filling out my registration for the Google shindig? They're asking about some weird techy stuff."
Granted, that may not be viable in a 20 minute window.
Wish it was more common in writing to define an acronym before using it, especially one that doesn't appear in the article.
This being slashdot, I think you know what I'm driving at...
I believe I do. Car analogy time! That's what you were driving at, right?
So the group of nuclear scientists should instead be adjusting the AC on the car of civilisation, to represent whether nuclear tensions have cooled off or heated up.
Because of course if you turn the heater up too high, chances are you'll get all irritable, fly off the handle at some idiot who doesn't know how to drive, and launch an ICBM strike against that asshole who keeps tailgating you.
Just my pessimism showing through there. I know it goes both ways but I assume it's going to get closer to armageddon more often that it gets further away.
Sooner or later they're going to box themselves into a corner - they only have so many discrete 1-minute steps they can take before they find that the world is more fucked up than they thought possible, but somehow still carrying on.
Then what? Leave it at 1-minute to midnight, or edge ever closer in smaller and smaller increments?
Classist? I'm struggling to see it, but if you'd like to enlighten me on the nature of prejudices I didn't realise I had then please go ahead. However, I think you're assuming more about what I think than what I said provides evidence for.
As to putting artificial premiums on things... yes, of course I place a premium on things I want, that is what a preference is. I suspect there are enough people of similar preference, or come to that similar actual needs, that the original idea that the PC is imminently obsolete becomes unlikely.
You may be right; treating computing as an appliance could well produce devices suited to the "not good with computers" crowd. But I don't want one as my main device, and don't want to see that kind of thing crowd out the market for things that aren't hermetically sealed, underpowered, and locked into someone else's "ecosystem".
Look up the stated requirements for the simple things you see all over the place - Office, Windows itself, that kind of software. Versions from a decade ago (I'm looking at Windows/Office 2000) only ask for a CPU of 133MHz, 64MB of RAM, a few GB of disk space. Those requirements have ballooned upwards as more powerful machines became available
10 year old hardware would run current software at a painful crawl, if at all... anyone whose parents are still using a machine from a decade ago can probably attest to that.
I suppose it's not really very demanding as software goes, but the difference of capability (how fast it runs undemanding software, or how many such programs it can comfortably run at once) between a mobile device and a big box is still apparent.
If I have the maths right, I'm paying more than double what you are at the pump, and it only keeps going up. Damnable extortionate UK prices.
I suspect if your gas prices were the same as ours, efficiency would be a much more desirable thing... especially given the near-certainty that your average USAian is doing more miles across that giant-ass country of yours than those of us on small islands.
Seems to me that the trend isn't "the death of the PC" so much as "the rise of shiny toys for simpletons who don't know how to computer"
Use of traditional PCs might decline among those who want to use a computer the same way they use a microwave –to do a handful of simple pre-defined tasks, without any control or knowledge of the details– and maybe that's a big market segment these days, but I can't see myself replacing my big box any time soon.
I prefer the form factor, the desk setup, the ability to open the thing up and tinker with it, the extra power and storage... everything.