Reducing crime levels should not be the goal. The goal should be to make communities feel safer.
Right, lets make them feel safer and tackling the actual problems should never be a goal. Much like boosting our childrens self-esteem rather than dealing with the actual issues facing young people and helping them... which seems to be the theme in reccent years.
No. It's a Trike. Equivelent road-legal vehicle would be classed a motorcycle in the majority of jurasdictions on the planet. The reverse trike configuration is used by other notable high-mpg vehicles such as the Aptera.
I could sure use one in my daily commute. I get 23mpg in my Nissan Maxima. My inherited 40-year-old Mini Cooper got 50mpg with 1960s technology and 100,000 miles on the clock. How far we've (not) come!
I'd sworn off Apple products after dramas with iTunes, no linux support, and other problems (like Android being better these days).
But I'd consider buying an Apple TV because it would be a very good TV. Personally I consider iOS devices to be multimedia appliances anyway, as they are crippled as general purpose computers.
Reconfigurability is something fundamental to definition of a computer, which is after all a tool. "No user serviceable parts inside" is something fundamental to a non-repairable consumer appliance focused for a particular task and eventual obsolesence. That's just fine for a TV.
But with one requirement - it must not be white and it must not be overly glossy 99% of flatscreen TVs are black - at least the bezel, and it's for a reason. It also must not cost 50% more than an equivelent spec'd product for no apparent reason other than brand name, a bit of polished metal and window dressing.
So despite everything I probably won't end up buying one.
I have a custom ROM on my phone, lots of Apps mysteriously break on download from market, and sometimes don't even install when sideloading. I supsect many users harass developers about their Apps when they shouldn't. If its not their own fault for riding the bleeding edge of OSS software then they should harass their carrier for it's dodgy customized Android. In my case aftermarket ROMs run better than the stock carrier flakeware ever did.
I also blame the evergreen problem of OS and applications lacking a meaningful and useful error messages about what is going wrong. Thus leading users down the wrong path trying to find help.
"Installation failed" - no shit, but why? I know how to find the logs through the terminal (but command like work is torture on a touchscreen with my fat fingers), but most users wont.
I'm exceptionally good at picking North/South myself and have been able to do this since I was a kid, when I first noticed that other people often are unable to do this, and never been able to explain it. Later in life I'd guessed it was just good spatial awareness.
I think it's rather easy to train yourself to have a sense of direction based on the sun and a sense of time of day, and this can become quite a subconscious thing. However I find I can still orient myself on heavily overcast days and without a view of the sky. I seem to have a good sense of direction while others feel completely lost but I quickly run into limitations.
I live at latitiude 41' in the southern hemisphere and when I went on vacation to a pacific island I was utterly lost and couldn't find north and felt oddly disoriented until I had an idea of where I was on the island by looking at maps.
I just atributed this to the position of the sun and unfamiliar territory. Until one day back home I got a little lost driving in a foreign city, once I stopped, got out of the car and walked about a bit I quickly reoriented. After reading this I think I know why, just as a compass might read wrong if you try use it inside a metal car, perhaps that was at work? The sun explaination is no longer entirely satisfactory.
Last time this hit the news a few years back I read that birds are ultra senstive to introduced electromagnetic fields, something like one third of one percent earths field strength could crash the brids geomagnetic sense. This might explan why I can only do this on foot and have no hope in a car, and the only time it worked really well when I got "lost" in the back country with a couple young cousins. I wasn't really feeling very lost, I directed the group on a short cut through some bush in the right direction to the walking track we had missed. Can't explain why it felt like the right direction.
Some people seem exceptionally good at navigating outdoors, indeed indigenous peoples performed quite amazing feats of crossing distances. It should be little suprise that people claim to be able to do this, and indigenous people demostrably can. Yet your average urbanite lost in the woods or desert walks around in circles. I wonder if there really is more than just experience at work? Our animal cousins all seem to have geomagnetic sense built-in, it's probably unlikely that we've somehow completely lost it. There's certainly plenty of annecdotal evidence for justifying some serious scientific study.
Kurzweil is probably the least wrong of many futurists, which is an achievement. He gets a lot right.
He predicted we'd be interacting with our computers by voice commands now. We don't. But the technology is there and works pretty well (Kinect, iPhone). Because we find it a little creepy and feel like douches talking to a gadget. I have had voice dialing in my cellphone for a long time but never used it once. What makes it to market and what consumers adopt is impossible to predict it seems.
In New Zealand we got rid of the 5c coin in 2006. A lot of prices still end in.95 and.99 of course. If you pay by cash these are rounded down to.90c or in some cases up by swedish rounding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding varying between retailers of course.
This means you inevitably pay slightly more or slightly less for a electronic transaction than paying by cash.
Just click the maximize button! It's another pointless illusion such as the appification of everything. Google chrome web store "apps" are are just a links to a web page. Lets hope this doesn't happen to Firefox too.
Indeed, cars didn't make the horse extinct, recorded music didn't make live music extinct, and ebooks won't make printed paper books extinct. Another absurd prediction.
Here's a clue: Your grandkids won't be inherting your Kindle and your ebook collection. Books tend to stick around for decades. They will still have value and interest, even to our descendants as long as the written word has.
The thing is, at the moment, why would anyone want an Android experience except for diehard Android geeks?
You missed the news. Android phones have been outselling iPhones since last year some time. Perhaps 3:1 now. It seems a lot people want an Android. It was perhaps true in 2008 when the two or three Android models around were designed more as developer phones.
How many features on the iPad were listed on the box and in the marketing material but didn't come out until a later software update?
Apple is very secretive about future features, will even give many justifications for not including the equivelent that Android already has.....then quietly introduce it later anyway. It's a masterful marketing trick compared of the industry standard "It has this feature! but... er.. in the next update"..
With iOS 5 Apple is quietly adding a lot of features that have been in Android for a long time, including a copy of Android's swipe down notification bar. I recall it was news when iOS 4 release had the ability to change the home screen wallpaper and multitasking added, this was great news for iPhone and iPad users, for Android users it was a funny joke.
Once again... it's still massively better than the desktop software ecosystem. Significant malware problems are largely absent considering the millions of devices kicking about now. Android and indeed other platforms can still be called "Virus free" as a rule, although there have been some exceptions.
Android also has a pretty good security model in the OS. There's certainly no cause for alarm.
Massive respect to the ROM community for releasing a security update fast.
This is apparently an story that has resurface around the web. Only this time it's gotten more attention. Googling with various date range and looking for "Environmental Assessment Center, Okayama, Japan" - "Mitsuyuki Ikeda" gets the same story popping up all the way back to a L.A. Times article dated 1993, and shows an enormous absence fact checking since.
" 2007 Sep 27, 2007 - The Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama Japan announced in October that it had manufactured an experimental sausage by adding soybean protein and steak flavoring tosewage solids from TokyoSewage isnt really such a dangerous and dirty thing said a spokesman However he did not...
From News of the Weird | News of the Weird | Chicago Reader - Related web pages
www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/news-of-the... "
http://www.greenkampong.com/food/scientists-makes-meat-from-poo/
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=119734.0 (2009)
http://absolutelyfobulous.com/2009/09/03/ooey-gooey-poop-burger/ (1993!!!!)
"Dec 30, 1993 - In October the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama Japan announced that it had managed to make a sausage out of recycled Tokyo sewage by adding soybean protein and beef flavoring The company does not plan to market the product commercially however citing the main..."
So it is a genuine news story? Not sure, but smells very fake. Although both the alleged researcher and the organisation do have other mentions on the internet, only the organisation seems to be genuine.
The existing meat industry has a huge problem fecal contamination of meat already without adding the more direct risk of actually making meat from it. We're eating traces of cow/chicken/pig shit all the time and don't realise it. The more processed the meat (ie sausage) the more fecal contamination.
(Faeces already being the primary source of E. Coli as food borne pathogen for example).
Now a good fraction of gastric poisoning cases are fecal-oral route of human to human transmission (Which is why you must always wash your freaking hands). If you've ever been part of a norovirus outbreak you'll know how easily it spreads, thats from traces of shit getting eaten.
If you or anyone you know has had food poisoning, norovirus, or the incredibly common rotavirus etc. they've most certainly ingested a trace of someone elses fecal matter, which we all must do indirectly quite often.
FAIL. I was looking at the numpad on a keyboard. Different when looking at actual phone and considering alphanumeric. There's the cognitive bias I was talking about.
I'm suprised 1998 is a common passcode, is this a birthdate? It's in amongst obvious 1234, 2222, 0000. But it correspondes to a age of approximately 13. Many 13 year olds with a iPhone? Or this age group least security aware?
Top ten PIN codes:
1234
0000
2580
1111
5555
5683
0852
2222
1212
1998
This interesting. 5683, 2580, 0852 don't seem to have any special significance, they aren't even a particular pattern on the keypad, nor especially natural to punch in, ie right handed, using your thumb.
Is this some odd human cognitive bias revealing itself?
Why? Because it would be effective enough to get stuff done with. Also some x86 Android builds I've tried are something like a 90mb ISO and boot in about 5 seconds. Admittedly a proper desktop Android distro would be 100-150mb + because of drivers and additional apps. But it makes you wonder how we put up with bloated multi gigabyte OSes packed with decades of legacy cruft.
Back when I was getting my CS degree, I've always noticed that the cleanest coders are also the guys who didn't shower for days at a time and always wore the same clothes.
I'll come right out and say it, the cleanest coders were the walking bacterial colonies, the fact that human fingers were pressing the keys was a mere detail.
If humans are no longer a part of the economy, earning money making stuff to in turn buy stuff that is made, leading to a world where we need no money in it's traditional sense and our machines make everything on demand and with little limit. Who's to say all our magical 3d printer cornucopia machines will continue to obey us just because they ask?
Slashdot Mirror
Reducing crime levels should not be the goal. The goal should be to make communities feel safer.
Right, lets make them feel safer and tackling the actual problems should never be a goal. Much like boosting our childrens self-esteem rather than dealing with the actual issues facing young people and helping them... which seems to be the theme in reccent years.
Give her more pipe!
Aye cap'n I'm givin er all I got, but ya canna change the laws of physics.
No. It's a Trike. Equivelent road-legal vehicle would be classed a motorcycle in the majority of jurasdictions on the planet. The reverse trike configuration is used by other notable high-mpg vehicles such as the Aptera.
I could sure use one in my daily commute. I get 23mpg in my Nissan Maxima. My inherited 40-year-old Mini Cooper got 50mpg with 1960s technology and 100,000 miles on the clock. How far we've (not) come!
I'd sworn off Apple products after dramas with iTunes, no linux support, and other problems (like Android being better these days).
But I'd consider buying an Apple TV because it would be a very good TV. Personally I consider iOS devices to be multimedia appliances anyway, as they are crippled as general purpose computers.
Reconfigurability is something fundamental to definition of a computer, which is after all a tool. "No user serviceable parts inside" is something fundamental to a non-repairable consumer appliance focused for a particular task and eventual obsolesence. That's just fine for a TV.
But with one requirement - it must not be white and it must not be overly glossy 99% of flatscreen TVs are black - at least the bezel, and it's for a reason. It also must not cost 50% more than an equivelent spec'd product for no apparent reason other than brand name, a bit of polished metal and window dressing.
So despite everything I probably won't end up buying one.
I have a custom ROM on my phone, lots of Apps mysteriously break on download from market, and sometimes don't even install when sideloading. I supsect many users harass developers about their Apps when they shouldn't. If its not their own fault for riding the bleeding edge of OSS software then they should harass their carrier for it's dodgy customized Android. In my case aftermarket ROMs run better than the stock carrier flakeware ever did.
I also blame the evergreen problem of OS and applications lacking a meaningful and useful error messages about what is going wrong. Thus leading users down the wrong path trying to find help.
"Installation failed" - no shit, but why? I know how to find the logs through the terminal (but command like work is torture on a touchscreen with my fat fingers), but most users wont.
... you've made it. Now get off my lawn!
I'm exceptionally good at picking North/South myself and have been able to do this since I was a kid, when I first noticed that other people often are unable to do this, and never been able to explain it. Later in life I'd guessed it was just good spatial awareness.
I think it's rather easy to train yourself to have a sense of direction based on the sun and a sense of time of day, and this can become quite a subconscious thing. However I find I can still orient myself on heavily overcast days and without a view of the sky. I seem to have a good sense of direction while others feel completely lost but I quickly run into limitations.
I live at latitiude 41' in the southern hemisphere and when I went on vacation to a pacific island I was utterly lost and couldn't find north and felt oddly disoriented until I had an idea of where I was on the island by looking at maps.
I just atributed this to the position of the sun and unfamiliar territory. Until one day back home I got a little lost driving in a foreign city, once I stopped, got out of the car and walked about a bit I quickly reoriented. After reading this I think I know why, just as a compass might read wrong if you try use it inside a metal car, perhaps that was at work? The sun explaination is no longer entirely satisfactory.
Last time this hit the news a few years back I read that birds are ultra senstive to introduced electromagnetic fields, something like one third of one percent earths field strength could crash the brids geomagnetic sense. This might explan why I can only do this on foot and have no hope in a car, and the only time it worked really well when I got "lost" in the back country with a couple young cousins. I wasn't really feeling very lost, I directed the group on a short cut through some bush in the right direction to the walking track we had missed. Can't explain why it felt like the right direction.
Some people seem exceptionally good at navigating outdoors, indeed indigenous peoples performed quite amazing feats of crossing distances. It should be little suprise that people claim to be able to do this, and indigenous people demostrably can. Yet your average urbanite lost in the woods or desert walks around in circles. I wonder if there really is more than just experience at work? Our animal cousins all seem to have geomagnetic sense built-in, it's probably unlikely that we've somehow completely lost it. There's certainly plenty of annecdotal evidence for justifying some serious scientific study.
Kurzweil is probably the least wrong of many futurists, which is an achievement. He gets a lot right.
He predicted we'd be interacting with our computers by voice commands now. We don't. But the technology is there and works pretty well (Kinect, iPhone). Because we find it a little creepy and feel like douches talking to a gadget. I have had voice dialing in my cellphone for a long time but never used it once. What makes it to market and what consumers adopt is impossible to predict it seems.
In New Zealand we got rid of the 5c coin in 2006. A lot of prices still end in .95 and .99 of course. If you pay by cash these are rounded down to .90c or in some cases up by swedish rounding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding varying between retailers of course.
This means you inevitably pay slightly more or slightly less for a electronic transaction than paying by cash.
Just click the maximize button! It's another pointless illusion such as the appification of everything. Google chrome web store "apps" are are just a links to a web page. Lets hope this doesn't happen to Firefox too.
Indeed, cars didn't make the horse extinct, recorded music didn't make live music extinct, and ebooks won't make printed paper books extinct. Another absurd prediction.
Here's a clue: Your grandkids won't be inherting your Kindle and your ebook collection. Books tend to stick around for decades. They will still have value and interest, even to our descendants as long as the written word has.
The thing is, at the moment, why would anyone want an Android experience except for diehard Android geeks?
You missed the news. Android phones have been outselling iPhones since last year some time. Perhaps 3:1 now. It seems a lot people want an Android. It was perhaps true in 2008 when the two or three Android models around were designed more as developer phones.
How many features on the iPad were listed on the box and in the marketing material but didn't come out until a later software update?
Apple is very secretive about future features, will even give many justifications for not including the equivelent that Android already has.....then quietly introduce it later anyway. It's a masterful marketing trick compared of the industry standard "It has this feature! but ... er.. in the next update"..
With iOS 5 Apple is quietly adding a lot of features that have been in Android for a long time, including a copy of Android's swipe down notification bar. I recall it was news when iOS 4 release had the ability to change the home screen wallpaper and multitasking added, this was great news for iPhone and iPad users, for Android users it was a funny joke.
Once again... it's still massively better than the desktop software ecosystem. Significant malware problems are largely absent considering the millions of devices kicking about now. Android and indeed other platforms can still be called "Virus free" as a rule, although there have been some exceptions.
Android also has a pretty good security model in the OS. There's certainly no cause for alarm.
Massive respect to the ROM community for releasing a security update fast.
This is apparently an story that has resurface around the web. Only this time it's gotten more attention. Googling with various date range and looking for "Environmental Assessment Center, Okayama, Japan" - "Mitsuyuki Ikeda" gets the same story popping up all the way back to a L.A. Times article dated 1993, and shows an enormous absence fact checking since.
...
From News of the Weird | News of the Weird | Chicago Reader - Related web pages
www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/news-of-the ... "
..."
" 2007 Sep 27, 2007 - The Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama Japan announced in October that it had manufactured an experimental sausage by adding soybean protein and steak flavoring tosewage solids from TokyoSewage isnt really such a dangerous and dirty thing said a spokesman However he did not
Check this http://www.google.com/search?q=Environmental+Assessment+Center,+Okayama,+Japan&hl=en&biw=1062&bih=543&prmd=ivns&sa=X&ei=OoD5TbWtNcTTiALGx9DnBA&ved=0CDgQpQI&tbm=&tbs=tl:1,tlul:1990,tluh:2010
http://www.greenkampong.com/food/scientists-makes-meat-from-poo/
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=119734.0 (2009)
http://absolutelyfobulous.com/2009/09/03/ooey-gooey-poop-burger/ (1993!!!!)
"Dec 30, 1993 - In October the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama Japan announced that it had managed to make a sausage out of recycled Tokyo sewage by adding soybean protein and beef flavoring The company does not plan to market the product commercially however citing the main
So it is a genuine news story? Not sure, but smells very fake. Although both the alleged researcher and the organisation do have other mentions on the internet, only the organisation seems to be genuine.
The existing meat industry has a huge problem fecal contamination of meat already without adding the more direct risk of actually making meat from it. We're eating traces of cow/chicken/pig shit all the time and don't realise it. The more processed the meat (ie sausage) the more fecal contamination.
(Faeces already being the primary source of E. Coli as food borne pathogen for example).
Now a good fraction of gastric poisoning cases are fecal-oral route of human to human transmission (Which is why you must always wash your freaking hands). If you've ever been part of a norovirus outbreak you'll know how easily it spreads, thats from traces of shit getting eaten.
If you or anyone you know has had food poisoning, norovirus, or the incredibly common rotavirus etc. they've most certainly ingested a trace of someone elses fecal matter, which we all must do indirectly quite often.
We're routinely literally eating shit anyway.
FAIL. I was looking at the numpad on a keyboard. Different when looking at actual phone and considering alphanumeric. There's the cognitive bias I was talking about.
I'm suprised 1998 is a common passcode, is this a birthdate? It's in amongst obvious 1234, 2222, 0000. But it correspondes to a age of approximately 13. Many 13 year olds with a iPhone? Or this age group least security aware?
Top ten PIN codes:
1234
0000
2580
1111
5555
5683
0852
2222
1212
1998
This interesting. 5683, 2580, 0852 don't seem to have any special significance, they aren't even a particular pattern on the keypad, nor especially natural to punch in, ie right handed, using your thumb.
Is this some odd human cognitive bias revealing itself?
We've already increased greenhouse gas 40% over preindustrial levels.
What's a little more?
Lets assume global warming is real
Lets assume you are not joking and that you don't buy into the FUDstering....
Why? Because it would be effective enough to get stuff done with. Also some x86 Android builds I've tried are something like a 90mb ISO and boot in about 5 seconds. Admittedly a proper desktop Android distro would be 100-150mb + because of drivers and additional apps. But it makes you wonder how we put up with bloated multi gigabyte OSes packed with decades of legacy cruft.
Back when I was getting my CS degree, I've always noticed that the cleanest coders are also the guys who didn't shower for days at a time and always wore the same clothes.
I'll come right out and say it, the cleanest coders were the walking bacterial colonies, the fact that human fingers were pressing the keys was a mere detail.
Someday you will join us...
If humans are no longer a part of the economy, earning money making stuff to in turn buy stuff that is made, leading to a world where we need no money in it's traditional sense and our machines make everything on demand and with little limit. Who's to say all our magical 3d printer cornucopia machines will continue to obey us just because they ask?
For now humans are still part of the equation.