I think that high political circles and social forces will make Charlie Hebdo continue no matter what, otherwise it looks like successful censorship and loss of face (loss of sovereignty) even in the unlikely case that the remaining staff would refrain from continuing.
The real damage is through all the other media outlets who will consciously or subconsciously self-censor themselves.
If an entity or social force (e.g. the Muslim fundamentalism) has the power to introduce censorship in areas that matter to them, then in effect Muslim fundamentalism gained some (additional) level of sovereignty over French (and W. European and Western and World) territory, at the expense of preexisting (French etc.) sovereignties.
So in some form it is a significant battle in the fight between Islam (as culture and social phenomenon) and Western civilisation.
It won't stop Charlie Hebdo but it claimed a huge swath of territory. Combine it with the effective censorship of that stupid movie in the US and you (presuming Western values) will WANT a pervasive surveillance state to counteract the encroachment of foreign powers into your own life, as the lesser evil.
> But let's be realistic. Terrorism of pretty much anykind is only a minor nuisance in the western world
I don't consider it a minor nuisance if it results in - widespread self-censorship by media outlets and thus loss of freedom of speech - hatred, suspicion and distrust toward immigrant communities - examples and role models for malleable young minds - consequently increased surveiillance and monitoring of all citizens
There are a couple of common, but false rebuttals to these:
1. Terrorism is 'a minor nuisance' and we can thank to ourselves that we make a bigger deal out of it than what it is, drawing to ourselves the big negatives above. a) it's natural that newspaper editors etc. will self-censor esp. if they have family b) it's (unfortunately) natural that people (usually uneducated, misguided but plentyful) will react less favorably or more indifferently toward Muslims as a response c) who knows what the level of terrorism would be, had there not been some measures against it (surveiilance, etc.)?
2. Why are we applying mass surveillance, when ordinary law abiding citizens shouldn't be monitored, only court approved suspects and their social network - or in other words, Western civilisation purposefully chose the evil of monitoring law-abiding citizens so why should we blame terrorists for that? A: You either cover networks comprehensively, or you will miss signals, because a lot of things aren't suspicious in and of themselves, however give rise to suspicion if a pattern among them is detected. To detect a pattern that emerges from individually innocent looking events, you have to, well, capture the individually innocent events. You must also retain them otherwise you can't use them to contribute to detection of future events. If you aren't comprehensive in monitoring, your adversary will exploit the gaps.
> I am all about being correct. And in this case, Islam is no more or less violent than Christianity is, if you judge it according to the respective holy book.
Irrelevant even if it were true which I don't think it is. A religion is more than some set of books. It is a social phenomenon with some correlated distribution of values. Things like women's rights and education (or lack thereof), acceptance of corporal punishment and stoning to death, or tolerance towards other religions (or its lack thereof), or the distribution of moderate vs extremist fundamentalists who are ready to kill and die for their cause (fat tail distribution). It is in this neutral, objective, practical light that you can safely say that from the viewpoint of Western civilization, Islam is a more violent religion than Christianty, without risking your holy PC-ness status.
> it was the US that initiated a coup > US friendly dictator > Ayatollah Khomeini > armament through the US > has been destabilized by US > cement US influence
Blah blah irrelevant points from a moral high ground wannabe who doesn't mind to consequently live in a permanent conflict zone that Western Europe may become. For it is a terrorist act in France, committed against a French newspaper's stuff, by muslims living in France, killing French Caucasians and Muslims in the process, in the name of Allah. Or are you a violence apologist for whom having suffered collective injustice is a good reason to give a license for killing anyone and everyone they feel like, because it's against their values? What if hiding women behind veils is against my values, can we relativize away my violent revenge then, or would you (in this hypothetical case) call me a terrorist or racist? Only Caucasians can be racist?
Never mind, a PC apologist will bring up whatever centuries outdated or otherwise irrelevant point just to be righteous, pretentious and deserving of his Moral High Ground and transcendent liberalism.
> And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam. And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam, and really do want, as most of us do, peace.
Does it mean that we can't draw some correlation between such acts, and a specific religion, maybe in an attempt to understand and avoid the causes? Statistics could do a good job, going through potential explanatory variables and assessing the predictive power of each.
In other words, who the hell cares if these terrorists weren't "proper" muslims, and what's your measure anyway for how good an adherent is? All aspects around this specific massacre relate to religious (muslim) issues.
And please don't make the rookie mistake of equating murders. There will always be social outcasts and nuts who load their weapons and go for the neighboring school, subway etc. But let's not sweep together religious fundamentalist terrorism with gangster & maffia crime with nutcase shootings......
Reading through a number of comments from many of us, it seems like a commonality among the overly PC, relativizing crowd is to bend the truth by highlighting irrelevant details and glossing over relevant ones. It's pretty transparent. There is a systemic link between a specific religion and the erosion of Western values. Even if the terrorist events are just the fuel or the casus belli for the process. This opinion does not make me a hater of Islam or Muslim people, or prejudiced. From a reasoning perspective: I'm OK with an Arabic person next to me on the subway because him being Arabic does not make him significantly more likely to commit a terrorist act there and then (or ever). There is a roughly equal, incredibly tiny chance that the guy (whether Arabic or Caucasian) next to me is crazy or fundamentalist or on a revenge. BUT this does not mean that we can't detect pattern in the data, and lawmaking everywhere might be able to reduce incidence rates by, for example, not allowing all kinds of sometimes militant teachings in the odd mosques in European cities. Btw. I appreciate a lot about Middle Eastern culture and most people I got to know from that region.
Or did you think the GP was in any significant way (other than nitpicking) ambiguous and maybe some fraction of the readers didn't connect the word Allah with Islam?
You are trying to relativize things. Just because you find a data point here and a data point there this does not make the two sample sets similar. Muslims killing Christians, or killing Muslims who integrated (e.g. the policeman) isn't lessened by muslims being violent to other muslims more often. Because if you feel comfortable in your Western values (which seems to motivates your naive, overly PC attitude) and want your children and grandchildren to enjoy those values and allowed to live by them, then you'll realize that a handful of terrorist in the name of ideology can do an awful lot of reduction to those civil liberties you exercise, for example, through inducing self-censorship of media, and through increased police state presence and surveillance. It is from this vantage point that your Yemen example is much less relevant, other than of course, helping understand (and trying to address) the root causes. I'm not lessening the importance of the Yemen massacre, but not all horrible inhuman acts are equally relevant offsetting points in all debates involving Islam.
Yours is the argument that "if we play nice with them, they will play nice with us". But then you attribute values to them which are unsupported and are only reflective of your own values (with hundreds of years of historical evolution behind them that's very different to the hundreds of years of history to others), i.e. not only it is wishful thinking, but it is clueless, and insulting to everyone's intelligence, no matter which value system they follow.
> If Muslims are integrated into modern Western society,
this is a BIG if - because many simply don't care to, don't want to or can't integrate, and such processes can take a hundred years or more anyway, even there is a stable trend towards integration. Also, check the demography, like differences of childbirth rates and immigration rates. Do some critical thinking on this.
> then religious fanatics will have no power over them.
Citation needed. Unless, of course, you define "being integrated into modern Western society" to mean "religious fanatics will have no power over them" in which case, of course, it just becomes a tautology.
Well intentioned, PC persons on the West, who try to reason from the perspective of their own value system, are like doctors who continue to believe that tapping blood or whatever ineffective method they are accustomed to is the best approach, despite evidence that it isn't effective. They may well risk the well-being of their own children.
Intended consequences ("purposes" of the terrorist act) aren't even very relevant (other than to understand root causes), and desirability of outcome shouldn't be evaluated with reference to a terrorist's purpose (if what a terrorist purports to achieve is automatically opposed by their 'enemy', then they could control their 'enemy' by declaring the contrarian purpose - would be stupid, wouldn't it?). Outcomes should be evaluated from the vantage point of what's desirable for the society as a whole, or for Western civilization, or your family. And one of the most easily inferrable outcomes is lessened *freedom of speech* through the immediate and very effective self-censoring mechanisms that are immediately observable even despite the uproar of Western media.
So on all these points, try to think through the situation and don't automatically assume that your first impulses represent some kind of generally accepted truth or consensus among members of liberal democracies or good people or whatever. Stick to things that can be reasonably well defined, are realistic on a reasonable timescale, or best, that can be observed directly.
"a strategic policy issue for the United States with regards to the UOG boom will be the possibility of using our domestic energy resources for geopolitical influence, in effect turning the tables on the current major oil producers"
I'm looking forward to a World where, for example, Eastern Europe and even Germany are not held hostage by Russia just because there is more oil under their soil and they tend to raise militant leaders into power. Some European countries aren't cozy with Russia because of being fans, but because of being left behind by the EU when it comes to energy independence and alternative sourcing.
The material is also one of the first examples of mainstream recognition of unpredictable, accelerating technological progress, and shows the fig to those who claim that the singularity is no more than the rapture of the nerds or new age-ism. Even discounting for the not too veiled bias of the material to argue for more resources in order to retain technological leadership.
I went from Lisp to JavaScript and have the same sentiment about it. JavaScript is an acceptable Lisp, especially with the awesome V8 engine and the performance war it triggered, sans the infix notation. One can even program with expressions only and (almost) no statements. Ternary is like Lisp if; comma operator is like progn. Not that I'm proposing this style in general.
And how about now? Are the conditions still present for quantum fluctuations to happen? If so, could another universe come into existence side by side?
Double counting of benefits is common in PR and gets automatically filtered by the spam detector of the brain, but seeing it in a technical discussion is novel.
You seem to understand the upside but let me lay out the downsides:
1) It adds bulk to the phone for a feature that most customers do not care about and will not use
...
4) Adding the microSD card comes at the expense of other features that could occupy that space such as additional battery capacity.
As a reference, a strenuous ride on a bicycle generates about 500W of kinetic energy. Probably a light arm curl of one arm could easily generate 5% of that. 25W does not sound like much, because the Glass probably uses a few Watts, and 5 minutes of arm curl for every hour of use would be socially unacceptable, it would look funny.to say the least. Not to mention the contraption that one would need to wear on his arm to harvest the energy.
I'm sure a special shoe could easily generate many watts just by the wearer walking, and it is socially acceptable (at least outside the US).
Or there could be a special hat, which would have three functions: - solar cells on the top - casting a shadow so that less power is needed for the display projector - being able to switch between augmented reality and virtual reality
Dear poster, don't you remember an article a short while ago, explaining how a pretty old chipset is used in the device? With a chipset that's many years fresher, it will be possible to both go down in power consumption and increase performance. I'm sure most other components, including the battery, were thought to improve in energy efficiency.
> That's probably close to the high end of what's possible, and I doubt their first attempt will be that good, but it is more than I expected. If you have good night vision, and if you sat right up against a bush, it may be just enough to (uncomfortably) read by. If all you have is typical size potted plant you'll only get a tiny fraction of that much light though.... maybe 5% of that.
One can still read the leaves. It's an Organic Light Emitting Device. Seriously, while at it, program the light emission to be triggered by some external stimulus, such as UV light. Also, maybe different leaf areas can be selected for different UV light frequency sensitivities. It would be fun to watch pulsating shrubbery.
If much of the population is wiped out and a few centuries of nomadity steps in, then most of those surface-brought metals etc. will have vanished, corroded away, or became impossible to process. I think that any oil and gas reserves on the surface or near it will be exhausted, depleted, contaminated etc. first. Then in those few hundred years, those mutants will have forgotten what any remaining artifacts are; and maybe another few thousand years will elapse when steel is the new gold.
So let's get real, if a catastrophe occurs that stops civilization for more than a few decades, we might be in it for a long ride again.
There is a tightrope as well: if all fossils become quickly inaccessible but otherwise we remain intact (water/nuclear power plants etc.) then it may bring about an accelerated route to solar based economy, the end of the asphalt roads and beginning of glass / ceramics roads etc.
Can you explain how amphibians are very simple organisms? Even a single cell is not simple. Are you assuming that the next levels of abstraction, tissues, organs and amphibian bodies, are somehow very simple? Or are they just different and somewhat simpler / more rudimentary relative to reptiles? Can we say that in the tree of life, we are mammals, all mammals are reptiles and all reptiles are amphibians, evolutionarily speaking?
It looks really weird. Why didn't they use a thinner cable? They might as well nailed down the little creature. There is no need to conduct tens of Ampers. Monster cable, why?
Indeed I should not have made assumptions about your readings even if your familiarity was not apparent in your post. What I mean by strawman arguments is present in your response as well. You should not assume that people equate plastic to inferiority; more likely they equate bendy, twisting, creaking cases, dust-collecting seams and an unappealing tactile sensation with low quality, and in most cases this is a good gauge even if the product has fast components, great battery life and impact resistance. On a statistical basis, excellent designs have good to great components and few of the listed problems. The reason is the difference in the design process. Apple designers or the IBM Thinkpad designers understood this and for them, putting together a product was different from hardware architecture + assembly. There are some interesting readings of what went into Thinkpad desings and how they formulated their design language.
In your response referring to ZAMM, there is a strawman again, as the serviceability (and impact resistance, type of material etc.) of a product is mostly orthogonal to the question of subjectively experienced quality. For example, my R.A.T. mouse is attractive to look, hold and use; its exterior is mostly matte plastic that's not brittle and not flimsy, being ergonomic just the right way. It is also a most serviceable mouse, with accessible screws and a wide range of adjustment options. Impact resistance is good. A lot of thought went into it and the use is flawless, the feel is premium.
So let's not assume that someone who is knocking a product as plasticky or having a cheap feel can be reduced to the obvious observation that a product that contains plastic actually contains plastic. It would be childish. If it feels cheap or plasticky, then it's something some of us will possibly avoid. Bringing in aspects of design does not imply that your discussion partner misunderstood ZAMM, it might have been your way of returning some hostility.
The solution cries out for global search, the uncorrelated exploration of the search space, the determination of the minimal number of iterations and number of Markov chains, stopping criteria and estimates of bias. The problem is given, the population size is known and the benefits of an optimal heuristic are obvious. May the trappings of greedy search and gradient descent be avoided! The low friction of search steps makes it more likely, rather than less likely to find a reasonably good answer to a key question of our life, if we first sample the search space widely, but eventually converge to the One.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that high political circles and social forces will make Charlie Hebdo continue no matter what, otherwise it looks like successful censorship and loss of face (loss of sovereignty) even in the unlikely case that the remaining staff would refrain from continuing.
The real damage is through all the other media outlets who will consciously or subconsciously self-censor themselves.
If an entity or social force (e.g. the Muslim fundamentalism) has the power to introduce censorship in areas that matter to them, then in effect Muslim fundamentalism gained some (additional) level of sovereignty over French (and W. European and Western and World) territory, at the expense of preexisting (French etc.) sovereignties.
So in some form it is a significant battle in the fight between Islam (as culture and social phenomenon) and Western civilisation.
It won't stop Charlie Hebdo but it claimed a huge swath of territory. Combine it with the effective censorship of that stupid movie in the US and you (presuming Western values) will WANT a pervasive surveillance state to counteract the encroachment of foreign powers into your own life, as the lesser evil.
> But let's be realistic. Terrorism of pretty much anykind is only a minor nuisance in the western world
I don't consider it a minor nuisance if it results in
- widespread self-censorship by media outlets and thus loss of freedom of speech
- hatred, suspicion and distrust toward immigrant communities
- examples and role models for malleable young minds
- consequently increased surveiillance and monitoring of all citizens
There are a couple of common, but false rebuttals to these:
1. Terrorism is 'a minor nuisance' and we can thank to ourselves that we make a bigger deal out of it than what it is, drawing to ourselves the big negatives above.
a) it's natural that newspaper editors etc. will self-censor esp. if they have family
b) it's (unfortunately) natural that people (usually uneducated, misguided but plentyful) will react less favorably or more indifferently toward Muslims as a response
c) who knows what the level of terrorism would be, had there not been some measures against it (surveiilance, etc.)?
2. Why are we applying mass surveillance, when ordinary law abiding citizens shouldn't be monitored, only court approved suspects and their social network - or in other words, Western civilisation purposefully chose the evil of monitoring law-abiding citizens so why should we blame terrorists for that?
A: You either cover networks comprehensively, or you will miss signals, because a lot of things aren't suspicious in and of themselves, however give rise to suspicion if a pattern among them is detected. To detect a pattern that emerges from individually innocent looking events, you have to, well, capture the individually innocent events. You must also retain them otherwise you can't use them to contribute to detection of future events. If you aren't comprehensive in monitoring, your adversary will exploit the gaps.
> I am all about being correct. And in this case, Islam is no more or less violent than Christianity is, if you judge it according to the respective holy book.
Irrelevant even if it were true which I don't think it is. A religion is more than some set of books. It is a social phenomenon with some correlated distribution of values. Things like women's rights and education (or lack thereof), acceptance of corporal punishment and stoning to death, or tolerance towards other religions (or its lack thereof), or the distribution of moderate vs extremist fundamentalists who are ready to kill and die for their cause (fat tail distribution). It is in this neutral, objective, practical light that you can safely say that from the viewpoint of Western civilization, Islam is a more violent religion than Christianty, without risking your holy PC-ness status.
> it was the US that initiated a coup
> US friendly dictator
> Ayatollah Khomeini
> armament through the US
> has been destabilized by US
> cement US influence
Blah blah irrelevant points from a moral high ground wannabe who doesn't mind to consequently live in a permanent conflict zone that Western Europe may become.
For it is a terrorist act in France, committed against a French newspaper's stuff, by muslims living in France, killing French Caucasians and Muslims in the process, in the name of Allah. Or are you a violence apologist for whom having suffered collective injustice is a good reason to give a license for killing anyone and everyone they feel like, because it's against their values? What if hiding women behind veils is against my values, can we relativize away my violent revenge then, or would you (in this hypothetical case) call me a terrorist or racist? Only Caucasians can be racist?
Never mind, a PC apologist will bring up whatever centuries outdated or otherwise irrelevant point just to be righteous, pretentious and deserving of his Moral High Ground and transcendent liberalism.
> And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam. And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam, and really do want, as most of us do, peace.
Does it mean that we can't draw some correlation between such acts, and a specific religion, maybe in an attempt to understand and avoid the causes? Statistics could do a good job, going through potential explanatory variables and assessing the predictive power of each.
In other words, who the hell cares if these terrorists weren't "proper" muslims, and what's your measure anyway for how good an adherent is? All aspects around this specific massacre relate to religious (muslim) issues.
And please don't make the rookie mistake of equating murders. There will always be social outcasts and nuts who load their weapons and go for the neighboring school, subway etc. But let's not sweep together religious fundamentalist terrorism with gangster & maffia crime with nutcase shootings. .....
Reading through a number of comments from many of us, it seems like a commonality among the overly PC, relativizing crowd is to bend the truth by highlighting irrelevant details and glossing over relevant ones. It's pretty transparent. There is a systemic link between a specific religion and the erosion of Western values. Even if the terrorist events are just the fuel or the casus belli for the process. This opinion does not make me a hater of Islam or Muslim people, or prejudiced. From a reasoning perspective: I'm OK with an Arabic person next to me on the subway because him being Arabic does not make him significantly more likely to commit a terrorist act there and then (or ever). There is a roughly equal, incredibly tiny chance that the guy (whether Arabic or Caucasian) next to me is crazy or fundamentalist or on a revenge. BUT this does not mean that we can't detect pattern in the data, and lawmaking everywhere might be able to reduce incidence rates by, for example, not allowing all kinds of sometimes militant teachings in the odd mosques in European cities. Btw. I appreciate a lot about Middle Eastern culture and most people I got to know from that region.
> > They bombed the London Tube for Allah...
> "Allah" is just Arabic for "God".
It's alright then?
Or did you think the GP was in any significant way (other than nitpicking) ambiguous and maybe some fraction of the readers didn't connect the word Allah with Islam?
Btw. interesting titbit.
You are trying to relativize things.
Just because you find a data point here and a data point there this does not make the two sample sets similar.
Muslims killing Christians, or killing Muslims who integrated (e.g. the policeman) isn't lessened by muslims being violent to other muslims more often. Because if you feel comfortable in your Western values (which seems to motivates your naive, overly PC attitude) and want your children and grandchildren to enjoy those values and allowed to live by them, then you'll realize that a handful of terrorist in the name of ideology can do an awful lot of reduction to those civil liberties you exercise, for example, through inducing self-censorship of media, and through increased police state presence and surveillance. It is from this vantage point that your Yemen example is much less relevant, other than of course, helping understand (and trying to address) the root causes. I'm not lessening the importance of the Yemen massacre, but not all horrible inhuman acts are equally relevant offsetting points in all debates involving Islam.
Yours is the argument that "if we play nice with them, they will play nice with us". But then you attribute values to them which are unsupported and are only reflective of your own values (with hundreds of years of historical evolution behind them that's very different to the hundreds of years of history to others), i.e. not only it is wishful thinking, but it is clueless, and insulting to everyone's intelligence, no matter which value system they follow.
> If Muslims are integrated into modern Western society,
this is a BIG if - because many simply don't care to, don't want to or can't integrate, and such processes can take a hundred years or more anyway, even there is a stable trend towards integration. Also, check the demography, like differences of childbirth rates and immigration rates. Do some critical thinking on this.
> then religious fanatics will have no power over them.
Citation needed. Unless, of course, you define "being integrated into modern Western society" to mean "religious fanatics will have no power over them" in which case, of course, it just becomes a tautology.
Well intentioned, PC persons on the West, who try to reason from the perspective of their own value system, are like doctors who continue to believe that tapping blood or whatever ineffective method they are accustomed to is the best approach, despite evidence that it isn't effective. They may well risk the well-being of their own children.
Intended consequences ("purposes" of the terrorist act) aren't even very relevant (other than to understand root causes), and desirability of outcome shouldn't be evaluated with reference to a terrorist's purpose (if what a terrorist purports to achieve is automatically opposed by their 'enemy', then they could control their 'enemy' by declaring the contrarian purpose - would be stupid, wouldn't it?). Outcomes should be evaluated from the vantage point of what's desirable for the society as a whole, or for Western civilization, or your family. And one of the most easily inferrable outcomes is lessened *freedom of speech* through the immediate and very effective self-censoring mechanisms that are immediately observable even despite the uproar of Western media.
So on all these points, try to think through the situation and don't automatically assume that your first impulses represent some kind of generally accepted truth or consensus among members of liberal democracies or good people or whatever. Stick to things that can be reasonably well defined, are realistic on a reasonable timescale, or best, that can be observed directly.
I've been laughing, reading your tongue-in-cheek humor until your last sentence... then realized that maybe you actually meant what you wrote...
I really like the DoD document. It is fairly approachable, e.g.
http://ctnsp.dodlive.mil/files...
"a strategic policy issue for the United States with
regards to the UOG boom will be the possibility of using our domestic energy resources for
geopolitical influence, in effect turning the tables on the current major oil producers"
I'm looking forward to a World where, for example, Eastern Europe and even Germany are not held hostage by Russia just because there is more oil under their soil and they tend to raise militant leaders into power. Some European countries aren't cozy with Russia because of being fans, but because of being left behind by the EU when it comes to energy independence and alternative sourcing.
The material is also one of the first examples of mainstream recognition of unpredictable, accelerating technological progress, and shows the fig to those who claim that the singularity is no more than the rapture of the nerds or new age-ism. Even discounting for the not too veiled bias of the material to argue for more resources in order to retain technological leadership.
Not all flying cars looked new. Some of them looked like 5 year old cars.
I went from Lisp to JavaScript and have the same sentiment about it. JavaScript is an acceptable Lisp, especially with the awesome V8 engine and the performance war it triggered, sans the infix notation. One can even program with expressions only and (almost) no statements. Ternary is like Lisp if; comma operator is like progn. Not that I'm proposing this style in general.
And how about now? Are the conditions still present for quantum fluctuations to happen? If so, could another universe come into existence side by side?
Double counting of benefits is common in PR and gets automatically filtered by the spam detector of the brain, but seeing it in a technical discussion is novel.
You seem to understand the upside but let me lay out the downsides:
1) It adds bulk to the phone for a feature that most customers do not care about and will not use
...
4) Adding the microSD card comes at the expense of other features that could occupy that space such as additional battery capacity.
Further drop tests revealed that the sapphire glass screen was not likely to break when embedded in a liquid metal casing.
As a reference, a strenuous ride on a bicycle generates about 500W of kinetic energy. Probably a light arm curl of one arm could easily generate 5% of that. 25W does not sound like much, because the Glass probably uses a few Watts, and 5 minutes of arm curl for every hour of use would be socially unacceptable, it would look funny.to say the least. Not to mention the contraption that one would need to wear on his arm to harvest the energy.
I'm sure a special shoe could easily generate many watts just by the wearer walking, and it is socially acceptable (at least outside the US).
Or there could be a special hat, which would have three functions:
- solar cells on the top
- casting a shadow so that less power is needed for the display projector
- being able to switch between augmented reality and virtual reality
It could look like this proven design: http://bit.ly/160kqxD
Dear poster, don't you remember an article a short while ago, explaining how a pretty old chipset is used in the device? With a chipset that's many years fresher, it will be possible to both go down in power consumption and increase performance. I'm sure most other components, including the battery, were thought to improve in energy efficiency.
> That's probably close to the high end of what's possible, and I doubt their first attempt will be that good, but it is more than I expected. If you have good night vision, and if you sat right up against a bush, it may be just enough to (uncomfortably) read by. If all you have is typical size potted plant you'll only get a tiny fraction of that much light though.... maybe 5% of that.
One can still read the leaves. It's an Organic Light Emitting Device.
Seriously, while at it, program the light emission to be triggered by some external stimulus, such as UV light. Also, maybe different leaf areas can be selected for different UV light frequency sensitivities. It would be fun to watch pulsating shrubbery.
CMake Error: The source directory "/home" does not appear to contain CMakeLists.txt.
If much of the population is wiped out and a few centuries of nomadity steps in, then most of those surface-brought metals etc. will have vanished, corroded away, or became impossible to process. I think that any oil and gas reserves on the surface or near it will be exhausted, depleted, contaminated etc. first. Then in those few hundred years, those mutants will have forgotten what any remaining artifacts are; and maybe another few thousand years will elapse when steel is the new gold.
So let's get real, if a catastrophe occurs that stops civilization for more than a few decades, we might be in it for a long ride again.
There is a tightrope as well: if all fossils become quickly inaccessible but otherwise we remain intact (water/nuclear power plants etc.) then it may bring about an accelerated route to solar based economy, the end of the asphalt roads and beginning of glass / ceramics roads etc.
Can you explain how amphibians are very simple organisms? Even a single cell is not simple. Are you assuming that the next levels of abstraction, tissues, organs and amphibian bodies, are somehow very simple? Or are they just different and somewhat simpler / more rudimentary relative to reptiles? Can we say that in the tree of life, we are mammals, all mammals are reptiles and all reptiles are amphibians, evolutionarily speaking?
It looks really weird. Why didn't they use a thinner cable? They might as well nailed down the little creature. There is no need to conduct tens of Ampers. Monster cable, why?
Indeed I should not have made assumptions about your readings even if your familiarity was not apparent in your post. What I mean by strawman arguments is present in your response as well. You should not assume that people equate plastic to inferiority; more likely they equate bendy, twisting, creaking cases, dust-collecting seams and an unappealing tactile sensation with low quality, and in most cases this is a good gauge even if the product has fast components, great battery life and impact resistance. On a statistical basis, excellent designs have good to great components and few of the listed problems. The reason is the difference in the design process. Apple designers or the IBM Thinkpad designers understood this and for them, putting together a product was different from hardware architecture + assembly. There are some interesting readings of what went into Thinkpad desings and how they formulated their design language.
In your response referring to ZAMM, there is a strawman again, as the serviceability (and impact resistance, type of material etc.) of a product is mostly orthogonal to the question of subjectively experienced quality. For example, my R.A.T. mouse is attractive to look, hold and use; its exterior is mostly matte plastic that's not brittle and not flimsy, being ergonomic just the right way. It is also a most serviceable mouse, with accessible screws and a wide range of adjustment options. Impact resistance is good. A lot of thought went into it and the use is flawless, the feel is premium.
So let's not assume that someone who is knocking a product as plasticky or having a cheap feel can be reduced to the obvious observation that a product that contains plastic actually contains plastic. It would be childish. If it feels cheap or plasticky, then it's something some of us will possibly avoid. Bringing in aspects of design does not imply that your discussion partner misunderstood ZAMM, it might have been your way of returning some hostility.
The solution cries out for global search, the uncorrelated exploration of the search space, the determination of the minimal number of iterations and number of Markov chains, stopping criteria and estimates of bias. The problem is given, the population size is known and the benefits of an optimal heuristic are obvious. May the trappings of greedy search and gradient descent be avoided! The low friction of search steps makes it more likely, rather than less likely to find a reasonably good answer to a key question of our life, if we first sample the search space widely, but eventually converge to the One.