Sorry I don't have a reference, but I think I saw an article about the problem of trust in different European economies, for example Italy versus Britain, where Italy suffers because of a general lack of trust which slows down business.
Yes I was glad my little solution in the department was to have backup machines do rsync over ssh to pull data off the clients. And for storage put it in ZFS.
Yes, and it's a simple principle: "don't make me think". The person should not be having to sit and ponder what things are, they should be able to just get on with using the functions. Just imagine if road signage went the way of subtle and "discoverable".
I thought the episode where Capaldi was with the confession thing (no spolers) was awesome. It was a fresh idea, the idea was used to develop his character, and it had a pace which moved me to tears by the climax. And Capaldi held the interest from start to finish. So age of the show is not an issue really.
Oh and another point, the music. Gold seems very influenced, in Dr Who, by Morricone, and had a lot of (albeit too sentimental) emotion and drama. The new series is insipid.
It's not the woman thing, as we had scary mad The Master and even the Tardis has been a woman. The new Doctor is actually being played as gender neutral.
Yes, my impression too. Good actors in other roles (arguably) but somehow ruined by the directing, dialogue, camera angles, etc. Compared to a highly polished and effective US series, Dr Who feels like a student film project. Yet apparently it's a big export for the BBC, but you know what, maybe that's just the British accents.
Yes, plus our decisions are driven by the 90% or so of our minds which are non-verbal and to all intents and purposes, automatic -- and all of that is dark and hidden, so quite often we need to deliberate not because we need all the details, but to give us time to find conscious reasons to justify what the dark or unconscious mind has already decided.
Although the prior release, iOS 11, had already made it very slow, it turned out the flash was gummed up, and doing a full reset and reinstall seems to have cleared the flash storage and it has returned to as-new performance under iOS 12.
In the soft sciences there are also things like: small sample sizes, ill-defined terms, and using overly complex statistical methodology to extract meaningless conclusions. And there is no remediation via stupidity: large swaths of the social sciences are just breeding grounds for career-hungry paper pushers whose motivation has nothing to do with the furthering of human knowledge.
The good news is that there is still good research going on. We could weed out the bad if we changed the promotional model of researchers, but that won't happen easily because those at the top are there because of the current methodology.
Science has an aura of responsibility and objectivity and truth, but as a social institution it is prone to corruption as is any other social institution, like the police, government, the churches, and big corporations, and even charities. To what degree is an open question.
But the statement "it's science!" is a persuasion device in rhetoric, whereas the science method is to be able to check and test and verify and repeat and sure, you have to have the intellectual integrity to know if you are too uninformed to judge, but essentially, take nobody's word for it.
Naturally there are many technologies which do work and therefore the science behind them works. There are also many fields where people can have careers without being tested for real, and they train the next generation of "peers" to do the same, and follow the same exemplars.
So when someone makes rhetoric about "it's science!" one has to ask, which field, what methods, what experiments, what testing... etc. Too often a field is trying to study something for which there is no practical method for real testing, so all the researchers collecively drop their standards for testing and then get very defensive and close ranks when this is questioned.
The thing is that Caroline Lucas is right. Wind and solar are in fact falling in price so rapidly that you have to be extremely biased towards a particular tech to not notice it.
There's a lot of hype going on in nuclear land. The tech itself is appealing to some. But it's just not very practical.
Ok, so at what point will my electricity bill stop going up?
When subsidies are no longer needed?
Or is it a case of, ban coal and oil and gas and then let wind and solar stabilise at whatever their natural price is?
I think a lot of people are under the illusion that energy should be cheap, whereas there's a broader issue of how much of industrialised life is pure waste. And whether there are simply too many people (one billion rather than seven or ten).
George Monbiot, in a column in The Guardian, some years ago, wrote about his debate with Caroline Lucas (I think, then leader of the Greens), about her rejection of nuclear.
He'd realised himself that nuclear was the only solution to the sheer scale of the problem, and yet all along, Lucas would insist that the alternatives would continue to develop and advance and improve etc., yet she rejected the notion that nuclear could develop and advance and improve. I don't think he managed to get to the bottom of why she was so biased against the most likely technology to be capable of stopping climate change.
I think there's actually two currents here, ethical and technological. The ethical side gets into the view that humans are greedy and exploitative, therefore MORE energy is merely license to exploit more. So wind and solar are sustainable in the sense of forcing us to live a more, ahem, quiet life.
Meanwhile the technology current, which just looks at climate as a simple matter of science and solutions, makes kinda clear what the numbers are and what the options are.
The trouble is, these two currents get smooshed together, and then people end up feeling like, why is this technology problem turning into a religious argument? It doesn't have to, as there is nothing wrong with asking, how shall we humans live? Is there really a fulfilling life in the rat race? Can we be happy with a simple life?
Another reason why confusing the technical and the ethical is so bad is that the ethical side is extremely complex. We in the West have inherited a set of religions which emphasise austerity, but in the East this whole category is simply called "sutra style" and it is only one of three major approaches to life.
So the Western ethical arguments can go down this austerity approach, and meanwhile in the East they are going along a creativity and play approach, which is far less life-denying, and if anything, is a wide field of creative play and chaos and development.
So the ethics have to be discussed and made explicit, rather than hidden and implicit within a science narrative. And the technology needs to be given its own fair and unbiased space to research and solve problems.
Well if Native Americans/Original Peoples were doing that, that's just as bad. In context I'm talking about the invention of agriculture, 12,000 years ago. So I guess that applies to everyone.
Look, there are very few things these days which seem to me to be actual global threats. Most stuff that is sold as "catastrophe" is just something to solve with technology and more brainpower. Which is why I was shocked, shocked I say, to hear about soil depletion. And the fault is agriculture itself.
This is the one which, to me, is really scary. And hence my rant. But I guess that like me, most people haven't heard about it. And many environmentally conscious people think that, focussing on climate change and CO2 reduction, will somehow fix all the big environmental problems.
But this one ain't one of them. This one cuts to the very core of our food production. At a time when we are all being told to eat more vegetables because that is what is "sustainable". So, ranty ranty post. And one can just start to search a bit. For example, in the first few random hits:
Steadily and alarmingly, humans have been depleting Earth’s soil resources faster than the nutrients can be replenished. If this trajectory does not change, soil erosion, combined with the effects of climate change, will present a huge risk to global food security over the next century, warns a review paper authored by some of the top soil scientists in the country.
Scientists warn that humans have been depleting soil nutrients at rates that are orders of magnitude greater than our current ability to replenish the soil. Fixing this imbalance is critical to global food security over the next century.
The paper singles out farming, which accelerates erosion and nutrient removal, as the primary game changer in soil health.
“Ever since humans developed agriculture, we’ve been transforming the planet and throwing the soil’s nutrient cycle out of balance,” said the paper’s lead author, Ronald Amundson, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management. “Because the changes happen slowly, often taking two to three generations to be noticed, people are not cognizant of the geological transformation taking place.”
Apart from continuously trying to add the stuff back into the soil in an artificial way, and I do say "trying" as in Yoda, "there is no try", there is no answer. It happens slowly over generations and all the while it looks like there is food on the table. Then one day there isn't.
This Luddite screed brought to you by a poster using the most advanced technology on earth.
Oh I love our technology, but human technology is nothing compared to the technology of biological life. We take our rudimentary primitive tech and try to use to manipulate nature, and find we screw up nature's systems. WE are the luddites, who act as if our human-invented tech is better than nature. We are the ones who deny nature's natural systems, and impose our own. How many stupid consequences have we created with our "advanced" human technology? Humans are the arrogant luddites. And agriculture is a prime example. We come to rely on simple crops for most of the world's food, and the wheat and rice and so on, it depletes the soil. Yeah, real smart technology you got there. The luddites pretend that their own primitive ways are better than the sophisticated systems of life itself. Forty percent of the world's arable soil is depleted. But yeah, keep believing your technology is so sophisticated.
Has anyone seen the UK TV mini series Utopia? The episode where the guy is chatting to a mom with a kid at a bus station, and she says she is taking the bus because of the environment. and then he launches into a stone cold monologue regards, so then why did you have the kid?
And does anyone remember how this all used to be about population growth? Films like ZPG, made in 1972?
We ran out of time when the Earth's carrying capacity was exceeded by cheating humans, around 12,000 years ago when we invented agriculture. Agriculture rapes ecosystems and forces them into unnatural monocultures, which inevitably deplete the soil.
There's even an argument that civilisations fell whenever, after a few centuries or about a thousand years, they depleted their soils and crashed their food production, because agriculture takes away from the soil and doesn't put anything back. Of course, we cheat by using fossil based fertilisers.
These sorts of arguments just add up to a picture that, the Earth's carrying capacity for humans is exactly how many humans were living as hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago, when our numbers were kept in check by natural availability of animals and berries.
That's it. Everything after that was a cheat. Defining stable climate as pre-industrial levels is also a cheat. Try instead, using pre-agricultural levels. That would actually be realistic.
Our current "crop" (pun intended) of experts are corporate driven people who still think big agribusiness is the way to feed the world. It isn't. Rice, bread, and carrots are not sustainable anymore than SUVs are sustainable. It is all a cheat.
Ask the Egyptians of old. Ask the people of the "fertile crescent" which ain't so fertile anymore. Ask anyone who relied on agriculture in the face of changing environmental conditions like soil depletion.
There is a reason we were, for almost our entire history, living as nomadic hunters and gatherers.
The ecology view just doesn't run deep enough. We are royally screwed but for whatever reason, we cheated our way to a population of ten billion, as projected, once Africa gets going, and we did it using technology.
Why do we think they keep extending this so-called "must act now" deadline? Because it isn't real. The real deadline was 12,000 years ago when we invented agriculture as a way to cheat environmental restraints.
It is when the European turned up in that land and shot all the natives who were living on bison and berries in harmony and balance with the environment.
Now this same technological culture thinks it can get some experts to figure out the right way to CONTINUE this cheat exercise. Well maybe we just cut back a bit on this here stuff and do some more of that other stuff. More grains and less meat, more solar and wind and less oil. That's ludicrous. We never existed in nature that way. For two million years humans lived and died as hunter gatherers and the children lived and learned in that environment.
Now we think about "saving the environment" by plonking solar panels on the roof and trying to recycle plastics which inevitably end up in the environment anyway, if not on the first recycle then on the tenth or twentieth, all the while generating more industrial processing side-effects.
It ain't natural. Don't have kids. That's about the only thing you can do, and then maybe you can say with a straight face, "yes I am saving the environment."
I get the impression (as random guy in the street) that Jobs was a designer, in the sense of trying to make something awesome and gasp-worthy. And I was taught that design is a discipline, whether that's making clothes or bridges. But that dedication to a product is what, from the stories, made him succeed and fail so spectacularly, be it the Mac cube or the iPhone.
But I also suspect that the world is now too complicated for even a Jobs to handle, relying on their own singular design vision. Which is why Apple is now more a team thing. The notch may suck but it would have blocked too many projects if a Jobs had vetoed it. And Apple has managed some big ecosystem projects, like Apple Pay, and their custom A series chips. And it surprises me how many people have an Apple Watch.
Anyway, I'm typing this on an updated 4 year old iPhone so I don't feel like Apple are ignoring their customers.
Ok, the definition is simple in words. In practice though, to decide what a human needs, one has to bring to mind an image of what a human is and what the potential of a human is. Does a human have potential to live a healthy life to 140? If that's the vision then all health preserving methods are a rational need. Is a human's value in life simply to make a contribution to society in knowledge and standards of living? Then a human has ZERO needs as soon as they stop being able to work productively. Does a human life have a right to happiness, and to freedom? Then their needs are again, going to be defined accordingly. So, as soon as we ask, what is a human being, we start making value choices and defining what is and isn't a real need. Were we living in a caste system two hundred years ago, our lives would be defined by the system and our opportunities "rationally" determined. My point isn't that all value judgements are arbitrary, rather, that they are complex and context dependent, and we still have to make them, and pretending they are simple actually undermines their significance, if you see what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here, two years, open past 70 degrees or so, and display goes off. It was under a third party three year warranty, which they honoured.
Oops, looks like I misspelt xg3/qqKsB-2zl
Sorry I don't have a reference, but I think I saw an article about the problem of trust in different European economies, for example Italy versus Britain, where Italy suffers because of a general lack of trust which slows down business.
Yes I was glad my little solution in the department was to have backup machines do rsync over ssh to pull data off the clients. And for storage put it in ZFS.
Retina is normally submerged, but not when you've just had a vitrectomy and are walking around empty.
Allan Savory has some good talks online about the need to regenerate soil.
Yes, and it's a simple principle: "don't make me think". The person should not be having to sit and ponder what things are, they should be able to just get on with using the functions. Just imagine if road signage went the way of subtle and "discoverable".
{ AC { Representing { People { Who { Hate { Whitespace-Sensitive } } } } Programming } Languages }
I thought the episode where Capaldi was with the confession thing (no spolers) was awesome. It was a fresh idea, the idea was used to develop his character, and it had a pace which moved me to tears by the climax. And Capaldi held the interest from start to finish. So age of the show is not an issue really.
Oh and another point, the music. Gold seems very influenced, in Dr Who, by Morricone, and had a lot of (albeit too sentimental) emotion and drama. The new series is insipid.
It's not the woman thing, as we had scary mad The Master and even the Tardis has been a woman. The new Doctor is actually being played as gender neutral.
Yes, my impression too. Good actors in other roles (arguably) but somehow ruined by the directing, dialogue, camera angles, etc. Compared to a highly polished and effective US series, Dr Who feels like a student film project. Yet apparently it's a big export for the BBC, but you know what, maybe that's just the British accents.
Yes, plus our decisions are driven by the 90% or so of our minds which are non-verbal and to all intents and purposes, automatic -- and all of that is dark and hidden, so quite often we need to deliberate not because we need all the details, but to give us time to find conscious reasons to justify what the dark or unconscious mind has already decided.
Having a good reason to collect data is one thing.
It's just that it should not be a surprise to anyone, ie. you're supposed to do it in a transparent, obvious, and common sense manner.
Same here on an iPhone 6.
Although the prior release, iOS 11, had already made it very slow, it turned out the flash was gummed up, and doing a full reset and reinstall seems to have cleared the flash storage and it has returned to as-new performance under iOS 12.
In the soft sciences there are also things like: small sample sizes, ill-defined terms, and using overly complex statistical methodology to extract meaningless conclusions. And there is no remediation via stupidity: large swaths of the social sciences are just breeding grounds for career-hungry paper pushers whose motivation has nothing to do with the furthering of human knowledge.
The good news is that there is still good research going on. We could weed out the bad if we changed the promotional model of researchers, but that won't happen easily because those at the top are there because of the current methodology.
Science has an aura of responsibility and objectivity and truth, but as a social institution it is prone to corruption as is any other social institution, like the police, government, the churches, and big corporations, and even charities. To what degree is an open question.
But the statement "it's science!" is a persuasion device in rhetoric, whereas the science method is to be able to check and test and verify and repeat and sure, you have to have the intellectual integrity to know if you are too uninformed to judge, but essentially, take nobody's word for it.
Naturally there are many technologies which do work and therefore the science behind them works. There are also many fields where people can have careers without being tested for real, and they train the next generation of "peers" to do the same, and follow the same exemplars.
So when someone makes rhetoric about "it's science!" one has to ask, which field, what methods, what experiments, what testing... etc. Too often a field is trying to study something for which there is no practical method for real testing, so all the researchers collecively drop their standards for testing and then get very defensive and close ranks when this is questioned.
The thing is that Caroline Lucas is right. Wind and solar are in fact falling in price so rapidly that you have to be extremely biased towards a particular tech to not notice it.
There's a lot of hype going on in nuclear land. The tech itself is appealing to some. But it's just not very practical.
Ok, so at what point will my electricity bill stop going up?
When subsidies are no longer needed?
Or is it a case of, ban coal and oil and gas and then let wind and solar stabilise at whatever their natural price is?
I think a lot of people are under the illusion that energy should be cheap, whereas there's a broader issue of how much of industrialised life is pure waste. And whether there are simply too many people (one billion rather than seven or ten).
George Monbiot, in a column in The Guardian, some years ago, wrote about his debate with Caroline Lucas (I think, then leader of the Greens), about her rejection of nuclear.
He'd realised himself that nuclear was the only solution to the sheer scale of the problem, and yet all along, Lucas would insist that the alternatives would continue to develop and advance and improve etc., yet she rejected the notion that nuclear could develop and advance and improve. I don't think he managed to get to the bottom of why she was so biased against the most likely technology to be capable of stopping climate change.
I think there's actually two currents here, ethical and technological. The ethical side gets into the view that humans are greedy and exploitative, therefore MORE energy is merely license to exploit more. So wind and solar are sustainable in the sense of forcing us to live a more, ahem, quiet life.
Meanwhile the technology current, which just looks at climate as a simple matter of science and solutions, makes kinda clear what the numbers are and what the options are.
The trouble is, these two currents get smooshed together, and then people end up feeling like, why is this technology problem turning into a religious argument? It doesn't have to, as there is nothing wrong with asking, how shall we humans live? Is there really a fulfilling life in the rat race? Can we be happy with a simple life?
Another reason why confusing the technical and the ethical is so bad is that the ethical side is extremely complex. We in the West have inherited a set of religions which emphasise austerity, but in the East this whole category is simply called "sutra style" and it is only one of three major approaches to life.
So the Western ethical arguments can go down this austerity approach, and meanwhile in the East they are going along a creativity and play approach, which is far less life-denying, and if anything, is a wide field of creative play and chaos and development.
So the ethics have to be discussed and made explicit, rather than hidden and implicit within a science narrative. And the technology needs to be given its own fair and unbiased space to research and solve problems.
This is the whole point of why we should be eating ruminants: they eat GRASS.
We feed them crops rather than their natural food, and it's incredibly stupid.
I gather the statistic is that only 4 percent of land can be used for agriculture, but 40 percent can be used for grass and ruminants.
The experts who write these reports claiming we should be cutting meat, are clueless, probably just specialists in the wrong fields.
Well if Native Americans/Original Peoples were doing that, that's just as bad. In context I'm talking about the invention of agriculture, 12,000 years ago. So I guess that applies to everyone.
Look, there are very few things these days which seem to me to be actual global threats. Most stuff that is sold as "catastrophe" is just something to solve with technology and more brainpower. Which is why I was shocked, shocked I say, to hear about soil depletion. And the fault is agriculture itself.
This is the one which, to me, is really scary. And hence my rant. But I guess that like me, most people haven't heard about it. And many environmentally conscious people think that, focussing on climate change and CO2 reduction, will somehow fix all the big environmental problems.
But this one ain't one of them. This one cuts to the very core of our food production. At a time when we are all being told to eat more vegetables because that is what is "sustainable". So, ranty ranty post. And one can just start to search a bit. For example, in the first few random hits:
Human security at risk as depletion of soil accelerates, scientists warn
Apart from continuously trying to add the stuff back into the soil in an artificial way, and I do say "trying" as in Yoda, "there is no try", there is no answer. It happens slowly over generations and all the while it looks like there is food on the table. Then one day there isn't.
If that worked then why despite many efforts has the planet continued to desertify? Crop rotation just delays things a little.
This Luddite screed brought to you by a poster using the most advanced technology on earth.
Oh I love our technology, but human technology is nothing compared to the technology of biological life. We take our rudimentary primitive tech and try to use to manipulate nature, and find we screw up nature's systems. WE are the luddites, who act as if our human-invented tech is better than nature. We are the ones who deny nature's natural systems, and impose our own. How many stupid consequences have we created with our "advanced" human technology? Humans are the arrogant luddites. And agriculture is a prime example. We come to rely on simple crops for most of the world's food, and the wheat and rice and so on, it depletes the soil. Yeah, real smart technology you got there. The luddites pretend that their own primitive ways are better than the sophisticated systems of life itself. Forty percent of the world's arable soil is depleted. But yeah, keep believing your technology is so sophisticated.
Has anyone seen the UK TV mini series Utopia?
The episode where the guy is chatting to a mom with a kid at a bus station, and she says she is taking the bus because of the environment. and then he launches into a stone cold monologue regards, so then why did you have the kid?
And does anyone remember how this all used to be about population growth? Films like ZPG, made in 1972?
We ran out of time when the Earth's carrying capacity was exceeded by cheating humans, around 12,000 years ago when we invented agriculture.
Agriculture rapes ecosystems and forces them into unnatural monocultures, which inevitably deplete the soil.
There's even an argument that civilisations fell whenever, after a few centuries or about a thousand years, they depleted their soils and crashed their food production, because agriculture takes away from the soil and doesn't put anything back.
Of course, we cheat by using fossil based fertilisers.
These sorts of arguments just add up to a picture that, the Earth's carrying capacity for humans is exactly how many humans were living as hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago, when our numbers were kept in check by natural availability of animals and berries.
That's it. Everything after that was a cheat. Defining stable climate as pre-industrial levels is also a cheat. Try instead, using pre-agricultural levels.
That would actually be realistic.
Our current "crop" (pun intended) of experts are corporate driven people who still think big agribusiness is the way to feed the world. It isn't.
Rice, bread, and carrots are not sustainable anymore than SUVs are sustainable. It is all a cheat.
Ask the Egyptians of old. Ask the people of the "fertile crescent" which ain't so fertile anymore. Ask anyone who relied on agriculture in the face of changing environmental conditions like soil depletion.
There is a reason we were, for almost our entire history, living as nomadic hunters and gatherers.
The ecology view just doesn't run deep enough. We are royally screwed but for whatever reason, we cheated our way to a population of ten billion, as projected, once Africa gets going, and we did it using technology.
Why do we think they keep extending this so-called "must act now" deadline? Because it isn't real. The real deadline was 12,000 years ago when we invented agriculture as a way to cheat environmental restraints.
It is when the European turned up in that land and shot all the natives who were living on bison and berries in harmony and balance with the environment.
Now this same technological culture thinks it can get some experts to figure out the right way to CONTINUE this cheat exercise. Well maybe we just cut back a bit on this here stuff and do some more of that other stuff. More grains and less meat, more solar and wind and less oil. That's ludicrous. We never existed in nature that way. For two million years humans lived and died as hunter gatherers and the children lived and learned in that environment.
Now we think about "saving the environment" by plonking solar panels on the roof and trying to recycle plastics which inevitably end up in the environment anyway, if not on the first recycle then on the tenth or twentieth, all the while generating more industrial processing side-effects.
It ain't natural. Don't have kids. That's about the only thing you can do, and then maybe you can say with a straight face, "yes I am saving the environment."
END_POLEMIC
And who makes the firewall?
Storing it in the wangpan. [1]
[1] Any Chinese speakers care to confirm that means "cloud filestore" ?
I wonder if Jobs would have accepted the notch.
I get the impression (as random guy in the street) that Jobs was a designer, in the sense of trying to make something awesome and gasp-worthy. And I was taught that design is a discipline, whether that's making clothes or bridges. But that dedication to a product is what, from the stories, made him succeed and fail so spectacularly, be it the Mac cube or the iPhone.
But I also suspect that the world is now too complicated for even a Jobs to handle, relying on their own singular design vision. Which is why Apple is now more a team thing. The notch may suck but it would have blocked too many projects if a Jobs had vetoed it. And Apple has managed some big ecosystem projects, like Apple Pay, and their custom A series chips. And it surprises me how many people have an Apple Watch.
Anyway, I'm typing this on an updated 4 year old iPhone so I don't feel like Apple are ignoring their customers.
Ok, the definition is simple in words. In practice though, to decide what a human needs, one has to bring to mind an image of what a human is and what the potential of a human is. Does a human have potential to live a healthy life to 140? If that's the vision then all health preserving methods are a rational need. Is a human's value in life simply to make a contribution to society in knowledge and standards of living? Then a human has ZERO needs as soon as they stop being able to work productively. Does a human life have a right to happiness, and to freedom? Then their needs are again, going to be defined accordingly. So, as soon as we ask, what is a human being, we start making value choices and defining what is and isn't a real need. Were we living in a caste system two hundred years ago, our lives would be defined by the system and our opportunities "rationally" determined. My point isn't that all value judgements are arbitrary, rather, that they are complex and context dependent, and we still have to make them, and pretending they are simple actually undermines their significance, if you see what I mean.