The.amazon and similar tlds are silly and look to me like money grabs by ICANN.
p.s. I proposed to the ICANN and the IETF to reserve ".here" for free local use by everyone similar to how the RFC1918 IP ranges are reserved. That would be the sort of thing I consider useful for a new TLD. We don't need "yet another dot com".
Probably Hasbro is surprised as well and didn't think the system had become so ridiculous that they could have done that. After all there was some fuss over Windows in the past, the initial trademark application was rejected in 1993, but somehow they succeeded in 1995: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12...
I personally believe that trademarks should not be allowed on common single words[1]. If they want to trademark single words they should make up their own words. Trademarking rare/unique word combinations or phrases should be allowed.
[1] I'm not sure if Amazon qualifies as common, I think it's not such a common word in daily usage (other than specifically referring to Amazon corp's stuff). Whereas Candy is certainly not uncommon for games and clothes.
But how's that an improvement over Windows XP? Windows XP- left click on Start, select "Log Off..." or "Turn Off Computer..."? Or for the impatient to shutdown: winkey, u, u. To restart = winkey, u, r.
It's left click like the other stuff "normal folk" click on. No need for right click which "normal folk" have problems with.
So why the change to right click?
Is shutting down or logging off easier for newbies? Is there a built-in method for faster shutting down or restarting for the pros?
Many of the other Windows 8 UI changes are similarly stupid. They don't make things easier for newbies. They don't help the pros.
Microsoft should know it is screwing up when many nontech people actually start using 3rd party start menus/shells, HP does this Windows 7 thing and Lenovo bundles an alternative start menu for their Windows 8 machines that one of my bosses actually thought was part of Windows 8!
In the old days it was only us tech nerds who would use such stuff - everyone else would just make do with what Microsoft gave them and curse what the PC vendors added on.
I dunno about you, but for every day _practical_ purposes I'd put killer whales in a different category. Just like I'd put lions and house cats in different categories.
Dolphins and killer whales may be in the same family Delphinidae, but house cats and lions are in the same family too - Felidae. Just because some stupid scientists think Delphinidae = dolphin doesn't hold much weight to me.
When people say dolphin they don't normally include killer whales, similarly when they say cat they don't normally include lions, even though technically they could. It makes more sense in practice - since there's a difference between:
"Hey that cat is heading towards you" "Hey that dolphin is heading towards you" vs "Hey that lion is heading towards you" "Hey that killer whale is heading towards you"
Normal person with google glass, when asked not to record, would take it off, fold it up and put it in pocket possibly adding an apology.
Uh, and watch a really blurry movie? He needed it to watch the movie clearly. What are they going to do in the future - rip out someone's prosthetic eyes and/or ears? Rip out someone's prosthetic memory?
What's the big problem anyway? How many Google Glass wearers can cam a 2 hour movie with Google Glass and keep it steady enough? Just thinking about it makes me wince. And watching the resulting cam would probably make normal people ill.
And how much business does the **AA really lose to cams of their movies? How big a market is that?
At the rate things go in a possible future it may not even be a penny for your thoughts. It would be a $0.99 and you don't own those thoughts, you license them from some Corp.
They don't care because a desktop with a 24 core AMD CPU is likely to be slower than a 4 core Intel CPU for most popular _desktop_ tasks which are mostly single threaded. They're already having problems competing with 8 core CPUs, adding more cores would either make their chips too expensive (too big) or too slow (dumber small cores).
Sad truth is for those who don't need the speed a cheap AMD is enough - they don't need the expensive ones. Those who want the speed pay more for Intel's faster stuff. The 8350 is about AMD's fastest desktop CPU for people who'd rather not use 220W TDP CPUs, and it already struggles to be ahead of Intel's mid range for desktop tasks: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=702
A few of us might regularly compress/encode video or use 7zip to compress lots of stuff. But video compression can often be accelerated by GPUs (and Intel has QuickSync but quality might be an issue depending on implementation). The rest of the desktop stuff that people care about spending $$$ to make faster would be faster on an Intel CPU.
A server with 24 cores will be a better investment than a desktop with 24 cores.
Purpose is painless execution that's as humane as execution can get. Wasn't that the goal of that lethal drug method?
If you want to torture people there are so many ways but those would come under cruel and unusual punishment. It's probably best not to give anyone too many ideas on such things.
Many criminals don't think they will get caught, many don't even think of the consequences.
How about my proposed execution method that's more likely to be painless than all other "popular" methods:
Put suitable explosives around the subject's head. Put the subject into an explosion proof coffin/container in the ground. Set off the explosives. Confirm subject is dead. Bury/recycle coffin/container.
There could be psychological trauma of course but that also happens with the other execution methods. But at least with my way you can honestly tell them there won't be any pain when the button is pushed. Could even use a sedative first at the normal dosages (with lower chance of bad reactions).
Whereas those cocktails of drugs sure don't seem convincingly painless. Whether the old drugs or the new.
If I was to be executed and had a choice I'd pick my way.
But why do so many people in the USA think they need more women engineers?
I can understand a push in India, China, Vietnam and other "cheaper countries" for more women engineers - it helps the women in those countries (take jobs from more expensive US workers). But a push in the USA (an expensive country) doesn't make sense to me. If women aren't that interested why encourage them to go into such areas? Many of the jobs women are more interested in aren't outsourced as much. How many preschool teachers in the USA lose their jobs to cheaper people in India?
Not all are high pay jobs but they usually pay better than no job.
I think we will develop artificial intelligence well before we will ever create an artificial cell. Borrowing the natural systems that have already perfected this process is quite a bit easier.
The popular assumption appears to be that cells (including neurons) are stupid and just react to their environment without much processing. And intelligence is mainly emergent from networks of neurons, and so many AI researchers work from those assumptions.
But as you said a cell is quite complicated. So it seems presumptuous to assume they're stupid without even knowing most of the details on how they make decisions. How does a white blood cell decide where to head to chase down a bacterium? Which part makes the decision to extend pseudopods and where?
So maybe cells aren't that much dumber than the usual range of dumb animals. They just lack the sensors and appendages animals have. How smart could you appear if you were a blob that was blind, deaf, dumb? Of course most cells won't need to be very smart - how smart would you evolve to be with those limitations? But other cells like neurons or even white blood cells might be smarter than assumed. Maybe about as smart as a worm or insect?
A person with "locked-in" syndrome might not appear very smart, but hook him up to a suit that allows him to move and talk and he might appear smarter.
Only fools believe that if there weren't any patents people would keep their discoveries secret and technology might be lost. Have you ever read one of those broad and vague patents? They write them not so you can implement something but so that they can prevent as much implementation of anything as possible.
So when a patent application is reviewed by a patent office worker it's not easy to figure out in advance whether it should be approved- he's not likely to be an expert in all fields. The Patent Office is not punished for approving patents that should not be approved but is rewarded for approving patents.
I don't see an easy way of fixing things. If there isn't a way then patents should be abolished.
If you want to reward inventors and implementers of inventions I'd say you should set up a registry of inventions - you register your invention for a fee. The fee goes to a pool. Governments and others could contribute to the pool too. Every year or so, awards are given out for Inventions. There should be two categories of awards - one where winners are chosen by experts in that field, and another where winners are chosen by the public (random members of the public or similar).
It's easier in hindsight to see whether something is worthy or not. An inventor might be rewarded 20 years later for something really innovative that blazed a new path but most people didn't quite "get" at first- and took years of development. Whereas normal patents wouldn't reward such an inventor - the patents would have long expired, normal patents are more likely to reward bullshit patents like "one click".
1) Aircraft carriers near your target country halfway across the world are much better for offense than airbases in your own country. 2) As long as Russia has nukes you do NOT want to use nukes. You do not want to even look like you are launching ICBMs. So what are your options if you want to attack another country?
So for a country that wishes to "project power" aka attack other countries, aircraft carriers are a requirement.
They are stupid for defense. Plenty of other things are better bang for buck for defense e.g. nuclear powered submarines with nukes.
There are cheaper ways of protecting shipping lanes from pirates. So you can't use that as an excuse either.
I don't mind big/radical changes as long as they clearly are better - e.g. they help me do easy, common and difficult stuff easier and faster.
Windows 95 was a big change from Windows 3.1. The UI was better (taskbar, start menu, recent documents, SendTo, etc) and it was very popular.
Windows 8 and 8.1 are NOT better in terms of UI - the changes are mostly change for the sake of change - some things take more steps, others take the same number of steps but are now different steps. Discoverability seems worse now. Some things may be a bit better under the hood but those improvements aren't enough to counterbalance the crappy UI.
Maybe Microsoft or Apple should start thinking about what sort of UIs would really help augment humans for the next generation Oculus Rift stuff. Imagine being able to have screens as large as you want, and as many of them as you want. You're not limited to 2D but I bet 2D will still be useful - if you're a coder I'm sure 2D will mostly be fine and 3d may not help that much except stuff like exploring different source code versions. Or maybe viewing/adjusting a HTML page in 3D layers for faster debugging. Similar for augmented reality.
Stuff like thought macros would be nice too. Just associate a distinct thought or thought sequence with an object (picture, video, file, message, person etc) or action - then rethink it again and you can recall that object or perform the action.
Didn't say you made it up. I'm well aware of the theory - it shows up on Slashdot and elsewhere every now and then. But I don't think it's a better theory than some other random one.
Just because a few tribes do persistent hunting doesn't make it so plausible that persistence hunting is why we evolved to run. A few tribes do some other random stuff too. There could be other reasons. My theory makes about as much sense if not more so.
Warfare seems a lot more prevalent in hominids, especially humans than persistence hunting. And I'd claim the selection/evolutionary pressures are a lot higher.
Maybe running started with a few persistence hunters, but once a bunch of hominids started going to war running around with spears the survivors were mostly those who could run whether with spears or not. That's a far stronger evolutionary pressure than failing to chase down some meat - could survive for a fair bit by eating some grass bulbs, insects or worms which don't run that fast.
I can come up with random theories too. Here's one of my theories why humans evolved to run long distances: War.
Evolving to run faster than your prey stops after a while when your prey is the same species. Being able to run long distances gives you the chance to run till it gets dark or you find a hiding place.
It's easier to carry a trusty stick if you run on two legs.
Helmets will help prevent cuts and mild concussions, but not serious head injuries with permanent damage, which they might even exacerbate.
The level of protection depends on the helmet.
Full face motorcycle helmets really work. Bicycle helmets range from subpar to a joke. Equestrian helmets are a ridiculous farce (worse or similar protection to bicycle helmets but you're higher up on an easily spooked animal).
Nobody wants to cycle/ride with full face helmets, but I believe there's still room somewhere in between for better helmets.
Apple not releasing updates doesn't matter to me coz I use Windows 7 on the corporate MacBook Pro.
So I'd still be getting updates way after Apple has stopped.
I know and do enough to avoid most viruses and other bad stuff. I might get pwned by the NSA or some top hacker, but other than that, antivirus software is more likely to give me problems than viruses (and neither AV software nor OS X will protect me against NSA/hacker zero day exploits).
If you really like large workspaces, you may like future generations of the Oculus Rift displays.
Once they get the latencies really low, fix the image quality issues (and maybe reduce the weight - no one's complained yet but maybe for hours of work they might), you'd have as big a "screen" as you can manage.
Check this out: http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598 Then imagine you are looking at huge virtual workspaces as large and as many as you can handle. Even better if there's tech to fade in and out of virtual/actual reality without removing the goggles - so you can do augmented reality, switch to full virtual or full "real world".
So I'm not really that excited by these large high res physical screens. To me we should already have had high res screens a decade ago, but we were stuck on or even regressed to crappy resolutions for too long.
Yes I'm impatient- I'm not getting any younger and it's disappointing to know that so many things should already be possible but aren't implemented yet.
And I've long seen that as a stupid design- mixing addresses and data in the same stack. You don't have to do that.
It's funny how Intel/AMD make CPUs with billions of transistors and yet we are still mixing data and program addresses on the same stack.
If you have separate stacks for parameters/data and return addresses, the attacker could clobber other data with data, but the program would still be running its intended code instead of arbitrary code of the attacker's choice - so it's more likely to throw errors or crash rather than get trivially pwned.
Keeping separate stacks might even help with CPU performance - when you know that one stack always contains return addresses it could be easier to do optimization tricks - prefetching, cache prioritizing etc.
Of course you will still be able to exploit certain programs by overflowing and overwriting other parameters - for example a program ends up seeing "OK" in a parameter instead of "NO" and so it does something differently. But hackers won't be able the other common stuff they do nowadays.
Uh plants aren't a good argument. Since plant stuff is a lot more independent and decentralized. One branch in one part of the tree doesn't really need a leaf/branch in another part. You could chop off a branch, stick it into the ground, add water and there's a chance it could survive. You could often stick the branch onto a different (but related) tree and have it grow.
As for not wearing at all, I don't think anyone in their right mind would think we'd ever stop stuff from wearing out. Everything wears out, including the universe. So you'd eventually want to die anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
They could refuse to allow Amazon's trademark in their country.
Keep in mind most of them probably call the river Amazonas and not Amazon: http://global.britannica.com/E...
The .amazon and similar tlds are silly and look to me like money grabs by ICANN.
p.s. I proposed to the ICANN and the IETF to reserve ".here" for free local use by everyone similar to how the RFC1918 IP ranges are reserved. That would be the sort of thing I consider useful for a new TLD. We don't need "yet another dot com".
Probably Hasbro is surprised as well and didn't think the system had become so ridiculous that they could have done that. After all there was some fuss over Windows in the past, the initial trademark application was rejected in 1993, but somehow they succeeded in 1995: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12...
I personally believe that trademarks should not be allowed on common single words[1]. If they want to trademark single words they should make up their own words. Trademarking rare/unique word combinations or phrases should be allowed.
[1] I'm not sure if Amazon qualifies as common, I think it's not such a common word in daily usage (other than specifically referring to Amazon corp's stuff). Whereas Candy is certainly not uncommon for games and clothes.
But how's that an improvement over Windows XP? Windows XP- left click on Start, select "Log Off..." or "Turn Off Computer..."? Or for the impatient to shutdown: winkey, u, u. To restart = winkey, u, r.
It's left click like the other stuff "normal folk" click on. No need for right click which "normal folk" have problems with.
So why the change to right click?
Is shutting down or logging off easier for newbies? Is there a built-in method for faster shutting down or restarting for the pros?
Many of the other Windows 8 UI changes are similarly stupid. They don't make things easier for newbies. They don't help the pros.
Microsoft should know it is screwing up when many nontech people actually start using 3rd party start menus/shells, HP does this Windows 7 thing and Lenovo bundles an alternative start menu for their Windows 8 machines that one of my bosses actually thought was part of Windows 8!
In the old days it was only us tech nerds who would use such stuff - everyone else would just make do with what Microsoft gave them and curse what the PC vendors added on.
I dunno about you, but for every day _practical_ purposes I'd put killer whales in a different category. Just like I'd put lions and house cats in different categories.
Dolphins and killer whales may be in the same family Delphinidae, but house cats and lions are in the same family too - Felidae. Just because some stupid scientists think Delphinidae = dolphin doesn't hold much weight to me.
When people say dolphin they don't normally include killer whales, similarly when they say cat they don't normally include lions, even though technically they could. It makes more sense in practice - since there's a difference between:
"Hey that cat is heading towards you"
"Hey that dolphin is heading towards you"
vs
"Hey that lion is heading towards you"
"Hey that killer whale is heading towards you"
If you still don't get it, never mind.
Normal person with google glass, when asked not to record, would take it off, fold it up and put it in pocket possibly adding an apology.
Uh, and watch a really blurry movie? He needed it to watch the movie clearly. What are they going to do in the future - rip out someone's prosthetic eyes and/or ears? Rip out someone's prosthetic memory?
What's the big problem anyway? How many Google Glass wearers can cam a 2 hour movie with Google Glass and keep it steady enough? Just thinking about it makes me wince. And watching the resulting cam would probably make normal people ill.
And how much business does the **AA really lose to cams of their movies? How big a market is that?
At the rate things go in a possible future it may not even be a penny for your thoughts. It would be a $0.99 and you don't own those thoughts, you license them from some Corp.
They don't care because a desktop with a 24 core AMD CPU is likely to be slower than a 4 core Intel CPU for most popular _desktop_ tasks which are mostly single threaded. They're already having problems competing with 8 core CPUs, adding more cores would either make their chips too expensive (too big) or too slow (dumber small cores).
Sad truth is for those who don't need the speed a cheap AMD is enough - they don't need the expensive ones. Those who want the speed pay more for Intel's faster stuff. The 8350 is about AMD's fastest desktop CPU for people who'd rather not use 220W TDP CPUs, and it already struggles to be ahead of Intel's mid range for desktop tasks: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/697?vs=702
A few of us might regularly compress/encode video or use 7zip to compress lots of stuff. But video compression can often be accelerated by GPUs (and Intel has QuickSync but quality might be an issue depending on implementation). The rest of the desktop stuff that people care about spending $$$ to make faster would be faster on an Intel CPU.
A server with 24 cores will be a better investment than a desktop with 24 cores.
Sure: weakness to fire, earth, lightning, cold, poison and to 90% cocoa dark chocolate.
*Note: partial list.
Purpose is painless execution that's as humane as execution can get. Wasn't that the goal of that lethal drug method?
If you want to torture people there are so many ways but those would come under cruel and unusual punishment. It's probably best not to give anyone too many ideas on such things.
Many criminals don't think they will get caught, many don't even think of the consequences.
How about my proposed execution method that's more likely to be painless than all other "popular" methods:
Put suitable explosives around the subject's head. Put the subject into an explosion proof coffin/container in the ground. Set off the explosives. Confirm subject is dead. Bury/recycle coffin/container.
The subject won't feel pain from the explosion since it destroys the head and brain faster than nerve signals travel. Compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_velocity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
There could be psychological trauma of course but that also happens with the other execution methods. But at least with my way you can honestly tell them there won't be any pain when the button is pushed. Could even use a sedative first at the normal dosages (with lower chance of bad reactions).
Whereas those cocktails of drugs sure don't seem convincingly painless. Whether the old drugs or the new.
If I was to be executed and had a choice I'd pick my way.
But why do so many people in the USA think they need more women engineers?
I can understand a push in India, China, Vietnam and other "cheaper countries" for more women engineers - it helps the women in those countries (take jobs from more expensive US workers). But a push in the USA (an expensive country) doesn't make sense to me. If women aren't that interested why encourage them to go into such areas? Many of the jobs women are more interested in aren't outsourced as much. How many preschool teachers in the USA lose their jobs to cheaper people in India?
Not all are high pay jobs but they usually pay better than no job.
I think we will develop artificial intelligence well before we will ever create an artificial cell. Borrowing the natural systems that have already perfected this process is quite a bit easier.
The popular assumption appears to be that cells (including neurons) are stupid and just react to their environment without much processing. And intelligence is mainly emergent from networks of neurons, and so many AI researchers work from those assumptions.
But as you said a cell is quite complicated. So it seems presumptuous to assume they're stupid without even knowing most of the details on how they make decisions. How does a white blood cell decide where to head to chase down a bacterium? Which part makes the decision to extend pseudopods and where?
So maybe cells aren't that much dumber than the usual range of dumb animals. They just lack the sensors and appendages animals have. How smart could you appear if you were a blob that was blind, deaf, dumb? Of course most cells won't need to be very smart - how smart would you evolve to be with those limitations? But other cells like neurons or even white blood cells might be smarter than assumed. Maybe about as smart as a worm or insect?
A person with "locked-in" syndrome might not appear very smart, but hook him up to a suit that allows him to move and talk and he might appear smarter.
I'd say abolish patents completely. They don't benefit society in general.
99% of ideas are easy/trivial, and very often when the time comes for an idea to be popular, there are many people with the same idea, so why award a monopoly to one person?
See: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?printable=true¤tPage=all
Only fools believe that if there weren't any patents people would keep their discoveries secret and technology might be lost. Have you ever read one of those broad and vague patents? They write them not so you can implement something but so that they can prevent as much implementation of anything as possible.
So when a patent application is reviewed by a patent office worker it's not easy to figure out in advance whether it should be approved- he's not likely to be an expert in all fields. The Patent Office is not punished for approving patents that should not be approved but is rewarded for approving patents.
I don't see an easy way of fixing things. If there isn't a way then patents should be abolished.
If you want to reward inventors and implementers of inventions I'd say you should set up a registry of inventions - you register your invention for a fee. The fee goes to a pool. Governments and others could contribute to the pool too. Every year or so, awards are given out for Inventions. There should be two categories of awards - one where winners are chosen by experts in that field, and another where winners are chosen by the public (random members of the public or similar).
It's easier in hindsight to see whether something is worthy or not. An inventor might be rewarded 20 years later for something really innovative that blazed a new path but most people didn't quite "get" at first- and took years of development. Whereas normal patents wouldn't reward such an inventor - the patents would have long expired, normal patents are more likely to reward bullshit patents like "one click".
1) Aircraft carriers near your target country halfway across the world are much better for offense than airbases in your own country.
2) As long as Russia has nukes you do NOT want to use nukes. You do not want to even look like you are launching ICBMs. So what are your options if you want to attack another country?
So for a country that wishes to "project power" aka attack other countries, aircraft carriers are a requirement.
They are stupid for defense. Plenty of other things are better bang for buck for defense e.g. nuclear powered submarines with nukes.
There are cheaper ways of protecting shipping lanes from pirates. So you can't use that as an excuse either.
Same could be said for Google Maps as well.
I've seen many buildings/places in the wrong location on Google Maps.
I don't mind big/radical changes as long as they clearly are better - e.g. they help me do easy, common and difficult stuff easier and faster.
Windows 95 was a big change from Windows 3.1. The UI was better (taskbar, start menu, recent documents, SendTo, etc) and it was very popular.
Windows 8 and 8.1 are NOT better in terms of UI - the changes are mostly change for the sake of change - some things take more steps, others take the same number of steps but are now different steps. Discoverability seems worse now. Some things may be a bit better under the hood but those improvements aren't enough to counterbalance the crappy UI.
Maybe Microsoft or Apple should start thinking about what sort of UIs would really help augment humans for the next generation Oculus Rift stuff. Imagine being able to have screens as large as you want, and as many of them as you want. You're not limited to 2D but I bet 2D will still be useful - if you're a coder I'm sure 2D will mostly be fine and 3d may not help that much except stuff like exploring different source code versions. Or maybe viewing/adjusting a HTML page in 3D layers for faster debugging. Similar for augmented reality.
Stuff like thought macros would be nice too. Just associate a distinct thought or thought sequence with an object (picture, video, file, message, person etc) or action - then rethink it again and you can recall that object or perform the action.
Didn't say you made it up. I'm well aware of the theory - it shows up on Slashdot and elsewhere every now and then. But I don't think it's a better theory than some other random one.
Just because a few tribes do persistent hunting doesn't make it so plausible that persistence hunting is why we evolved to run. A few tribes do some other random stuff too. There could be other reasons. My theory makes about as much sense if not more so.
Warfare seems a lot more prevalent in hominids, especially humans than persistence hunting. And I'd claim the selection/evolutionary pressures are a lot higher.
Chimpanzees conduct warfare and genocide quite regularly: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22chimp.html?_r=0
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2011/05/17/ugandan-chimpanzees-may-be-hunting-red-colobus-monkeys-into-extinction/
Babboons go to war: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8400000/8400019.stm
Even monkeys: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/videos/monkey-gang-turf-war/
Maybe running started with a few persistence hunters, but once a bunch of hominids started going to war running around with spears the survivors were mostly those who could run whether with spears or not. That's a far stronger evolutionary pressure than failing to chase down some meat - could survive for a fair bit by eating some grass bulbs, insects or worms which don't run that fast.
I can come up with random theories too. Here's one of my theories why humans evolved to run long distances: War.
Evolving to run faster than your prey stops after a while when your prey is the same species. Being able to run long distances gives you the chance to run till it gets dark or you find a hiding place.
It's easier to carry a trusty stick if you run on two legs.
Selection pressure is very high with war.
Helmets will help prevent cuts and mild concussions, but not serious head injuries with permanent damage, which they might even exacerbate.
The level of protection depends on the helmet.
Full face motorcycle helmets really work. Bicycle helmets range from subpar to a joke. Equestrian helmets are a ridiculous farce (worse or similar protection to bicycle helmets but you're higher up on an easily spooked animal).
Nobody wants to cycle/ride with full face helmets, but I believe there's still room somewhere in between for better helmets.
Apple not releasing updates doesn't matter to me coz I use Windows 7 on the corporate MacBook Pro.
So I'd still be getting updates way after Apple has stopped.
I know and do enough to avoid most viruses and other bad stuff. I might get pwned by the NSA or some top hacker, but other than that, antivirus software is more likely to give me problems than viruses (and neither AV software nor OS X will protect me against NSA/hacker zero day exploits).
If you really like large workspaces, you may like future generations of the Oculus Rift displays.
Once they get the latencies really low, fix the image quality issues (and maybe reduce the weight - no one's complained yet but maybe for hours of work they might), you'd have as big a "screen" as you can manage.
Check this out: http://gizmodo.com/i-wore-the-new-oculus-rift-and-i-never-want-to-look-at-1496569598
Then imagine you are looking at huge virtual workspaces as large and as many as you can handle. Even better if there's tech to fade in and out of virtual/actual reality without removing the goggles - so you can do augmented reality, switch to full virtual or full "real world".
So I'm not really that excited by these large high res physical screens. To me we should already have had high res screens a decade ago, but we were stuck on or even regressed to crappy resolutions for too long.
Yes I'm impatient- I'm not getting any younger and it's disappointing to know that so many things should already be possible but aren't implemented yet.
And I've long seen that as a stupid design- mixing addresses and data in the same stack. You don't have to do that.
It's funny how Intel/AMD make CPUs with billions of transistors and yet we are still mixing data and program addresses on the same stack.
If you have separate stacks for parameters/data and return addresses, the attacker could clobber other data with data, but the program would still be running its intended code instead of arbitrary code of the attacker's choice - so it's more likely to throw errors or crash rather than get trivially pwned.
Keeping separate stacks might even help with CPU performance - when you know that one stack always contains return addresses it could be easier to do optimization tricks - prefetching, cache prioritizing etc.
Of course you will still be able to exploit certain programs by overflowing and overwriting other parameters - for example a program ends up seeing "OK" in a parameter instead of "NO" and so it does something differently. But hackers won't be able the other common stuff they do nowadays.
That's a bit wasteful if the leaders are good. Good leaders are rare.
I prefer my proposal: http://slashdot.org/~TheLink/journal/208853
With my proposal the leaders do put their lives at risk, but their lives are not automatically forfeit.
That should be enough to make even sociopaths not start wars lightly.
Uh plants aren't a good argument. Since plant stuff is a lot more independent and decentralized. One branch in one part of the tree doesn't really need a leaf/branch in another part. You could chop off a branch, stick it into the ground, add water and there's a chance it could survive. You could often stick the branch onto a different (but related) tree and have it grow.
An argument would be blue whales: http://www.nature.com/news/massive-animals-may-hold-secrets-of-cancer-suppression-1.12258
Cells do eventually wear down and cause cancer. But given the huge sizes of whales and their lifespans, they have so many more cells than we do and thus they can't be getting cancer at the same rates (per cell divide) we do.
As for not wearing at all, I don't think anyone in their right mind would think we'd ever stop stuff from wearing out. Everything wears out, including the universe. So you'd eventually want to die anyway.
You might like this too then: https://www.google.com/maps/views/streetview/antarctica
Plenty of other places to explore too on streetview.
Could also check out http://www.airpano.com/ - not as extensive but aerial.