It's worse than that - education itself is devalued. Elementary school is basically kindergarten extended for a few years, high school is where you learn to not do homework and get away with it and then you get dropped in university with most people coming just looking for the nearest exit. Even for those who want to do it, school tends to bog down to chasing grades whatever the cost. Instead of learning, people stuff the important things in their heads and vomit it on paper the next day. What you end up with is wasted time and money for teachers, students and society.
Elementary school should be reconstructed to provide an actual foundation for knowledge. There should be more than just learning how to read, write and calculate, plus a few miscellaneous things like geography or history which most people forget within minutes after the exam. There should be critical thinking, philosophy, science, literature, etc. I'm not saying I want them to do integrals at age 7 but kids can take a lot more than we give them credit for as long as it's presented properly. Give casual explanations with general concepts, keep to basic ideas with easy examples, but fill their heads with ideas!
Then, when they get to high school, they might have a better understanding of where they want to go. Consolidate and expand on their elementary knowledge, keep adding things, stimulate them. Midway through they should also get mandatory orientation courses which can further help them know what they really like (mind you, not necessarily profession orientation, just academic). If they tend towards trade school disciplines, then encourage them to go there. Don't tell them university is better, it's just different.
At that point you branch out between trade schools and university.
The former teaches most common jobs from programmer to plumber, and do it well. No frills, actual field experience, sessions with actual professionals, etc. Give them the means to reach their goal. They aren't there to learn theory otherwise they'd be at university, so give them practical overviews and lots and lots of things to get their hands on.
The latter goes on to make academics: delve deep in very particular subjects with small to mid-sized classrooms with a lot of interaction and projects. Don't just push them to study, give them the thirst for knowledge, make it flow naturally. Stop them from chasing for grades, heck maybe strip out grades altogether. Use the smaller classes to adapt the courses to each individual instead of the other way around. University should be a place where it is assumed that you want to learn when you enter. If you don't want to, then you shouldn't be there. As it is, a lot of university courses are wasted weeding out those who weren't interested after all.
Everybody has something they're good at. It's just a matter of finding it and capitalizing on it, which the current system has a very hard time to do.
Many Android owners don't even know they're running Android. They just picked up a free phone with their plan which happened to run Android. I'm not saying it's the case for, say, Galaxy S buyers or Sensation buyers, let alone Nexus buyers, but there's a lot of barebone, cheap Android phones out there. I'm sure many are quite successful even if you don't hear much about them on tech sites.
How can you know it won't sell? It hasn't even been released!
Or do you mean it's derivative, generic and uninteresting? In which case it's not a matter of PC gamers not buying that kind of game, it's a matter of making a good game to get sales.
From what I've seen, I Am Alive certainly looks unique in many ways and I don't exactly see how you can conclude it won't be popular with no analysis, no experience, nothing.
Notwithstanding how hypothetical it is to ask when Steam will go offline (this is after all the biggest digital distribution service on the PC by a very, very large margin), I would be extremely surprised that Valve hasn't already planned something for this kind of thing. They take it rather seriously (surely more than Sony anyways).
I'll add one thing: I much prefer to have Steam DRM than any other form of DRM. I don't trust EA to keep their activation servers online for more than a year or two, but Steam will be there for many years to come, guaranteed. Of course, I'd rather have no DRM at all (or at least DRM getting stripped, like say Egosoft did with X3), which is why I support GOG a lot, but in the face of having mandatory DRM, Steam would be my first choice.
No, nuclear power is not renewable and is not a perfect solution. But it is amongst the best ones we currently have available.
The problem is when people, faced with the choice of a new, imperfect solution and the status quo, almost invariably choose the status quo. There is a point where we must take what we have; the alternative is far too dire.
That's entirely dependent on current nuclear reactors (BWR, PWR, which all share the "water reactor" part in common). Molten salt reactors would need a lot less water.
Unless you plan on living a few hundred years, it's their children's children who will be doomed. However, this is only assuming exponential growth. Looking at first-world countries, there is a clear peak that is attained, after which population actually decreases. We don't know for sure, but there's good reason to believe that other countries will reach a similar peak and then Earth's population will stabilize.
If it does not stabilize for good reasons (ie. general enrichment of the population and diminishing desire for large amounts of offspring), it will through calamities. It's inevitable.
My only concern with that point of view is that there will be no "aftermath". An aftermath is defined as the state after the calamity, but unless we take action to STOP AGW, it won't stall by itself.
Yes, it may be impossible to avoid some measure of global warming. It then becomes a matter of how much we can avoid. Only after we have stopped it can we seriously consider living with what we've gotten ourselves into.
Is there any evidence that we can fundamentally shift the global economy away from fossil fuels on a radical program without incurring large and unknowable risks to geopolitical stability in doing so?
No, but there is evidence that not doing so will cause even worse geopolitical stability.
Sorry, but no.... Just no. He asked for a form that does a specific task. If the form does not do this task, then this isn't about guessing, it's that they're incompetent.
I'm fairly sure this problem is NP-complete, which makes it anything BUT trivial to compute. It might be easy to represent computationally, but to actually calculate the result is extremely hard. In fact, finding an efficient algorithm for it would make you incredibly rich and possibly dead.
Android is open source. That non-essential applications using the platform are not is unrelated to the subject at hand. If you can run Android in a functional manner without the closed-source applications installed, then Android is by definition open source.
That's like saying Linux isn't open source because it can have proprietary drivers.
Call of Duty, Mas Effect or Skyrim aren't the big PC pushers. Most of those AAA games have been targeted at consoles first and foremost for a while now, with the PC getting mediocre to acceptable ports (with a few notable exceptions) of them.
There are very few developers who consider the PC their primary platform, and the real reason PC gaming is still popular isn't what it was 10 years ago.
On one hand, you have the "big gaming" with the last entrenched PC devs/publishers: Valve, Blizzard, Paradox, CD Projekt, etc. More and more of these games are distributed through the likes of Steam, GOG.com, Gamersgate, Impulse, Greenmangaming, etc. THIS is where a lot of the strength of PC is found; DD on PC is much better, much more varied, and often insanely cheaper. Pricing on PC games is lower at launch and goes down faster than on consoles, to the extent that unless the PC port is absolutely terrible or the game is unsuitable to the PC, it's often better to wait a few months and get it on PC for 50% off while it's still full price on console for the next three years.
On the other hand, you have "social" gaming. This means both MMOs and Facebook. These two things make up an extremely large amount of gamers who plain and simply cannot play on consoles. The Xbox 360's online architecture prevents most MMOs from operating and Sony's lackluster infrastructure means they tend to avoid the PS3. This leaves the PC for all MMOs, of which there are now hundreds. The elephant in the room, WoW, is still grossing millions every month, despite a decrease in subscribers. Then you have Facebook, whose gaming platform has created tens of millions of "casual gamers". They likely never will move from Farmville, but they're still gaming on PC and often spending money on the platform.
Facebook is currently the sole thing easily transfered to another OS since it does not rely on DirectX. Anything else will be hard work. I also dearly hope that cloud gaming like OnLive and Gaikai fail miserably. If people complain about Ubisoft's DRM now, I don't know what they'll do about how restrictive cloud gaming is...
4K is only four times the pixels as standard 1080p video. There is still no way for realtime rendering of Pixar-like stuff in the near future, be it on mobiles or desktops.
Some? Make that most. You can count on two hands 1080p, 60 fps games on both 360 and PS3, with most being 2D games that don't need any sort of graphical power to run.
Nobody's said humans are solely responsible. They are, however, partially. The Earth's always had a certain amount of climate variability and this won't change just because we're there, but just about every single report shows that all known cycles are insufficient to explain the sudden rise in CO2 levels.
It would be fairly peculiar that an unknown phenomenon suddenly and precisely causes a rise in CO2 levels just as humanity enters its post-industrial revolution phase, at which point Occam's razor says hello.
Note that CO2 levels have risen way beyond current levels in the Earth's past, but this kind of change happened on a geological scale, not on our human scale. Earth and life will survive, I have no doubt. The concern should be whether humanity survives.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is amoral. Discoveries have no inherent consequences.
What man makes of science is the problem.
It's worse than that - education itself is devalued. Elementary school is basically kindergarten extended for a few years, high school is where you learn to not do homework and get away with it and then you get dropped in university with most people coming just looking for the nearest exit. Even for those who want to do it, school tends to bog down to chasing grades whatever the cost. Instead of learning, people stuff the important things in their heads and vomit it on paper the next day. What you end up with is wasted time and money for teachers, students and society.
Elementary school should be reconstructed to provide an actual foundation for knowledge. There should be more than just learning how to read, write and calculate, plus a few miscellaneous things like geography or history which most people forget within minutes after the exam. There should be critical thinking, philosophy, science, literature, etc. I'm not saying I want them to do integrals at age 7 but kids can take a lot more than we give them credit for as long as it's presented properly. Give casual explanations with general concepts, keep to basic ideas with easy examples, but fill their heads with ideas!
Then, when they get to high school, they might have a better understanding of where they want to go. Consolidate and expand on their elementary knowledge, keep adding things, stimulate them. Midway through they should also get mandatory orientation courses which can further help them know what they really like (mind you, not necessarily profession orientation, just academic). If they tend towards trade school disciplines, then encourage them to go there. Don't tell them university is better, it's just different.
At that point you branch out between trade schools and university.
The former teaches most common jobs from programmer to plumber, and do it well. No frills, actual field experience, sessions with actual professionals, etc. Give them the means to reach their goal. They aren't there to learn theory otherwise they'd be at university, so give them practical overviews and lots and lots of things to get their hands on.
The latter goes on to make academics: delve deep in very particular subjects with small to mid-sized classrooms with a lot of interaction and projects. Don't just push them to study, give them the thirst for knowledge, make it flow naturally. Stop them from chasing for grades, heck maybe strip out grades altogether. Use the smaller classes to adapt the courses to each individual instead of the other way around. University should be a place where it is assumed that you want to learn when you enter. If you don't want to, then you shouldn't be there. As it is, a lot of university courses are wasted weeding out those who weren't interested after all.
Everybody has something they're good at. It's just a matter of finding it and capitalizing on it, which the current system has a very hard time to do.
Many Android owners don't even know they're running Android. They just picked up a free phone with their plan which happened to run Android. I'm not saying it's the case for, say, Galaxy S buyers or Sensation buyers, let alone Nexus buyers, but there's a lot of barebone, cheap Android phones out there. I'm sure many are quite successful even if you don't hear much about them on tech sites.
TW2 is a special case since it's developed by CD Projekt, the guys behind GOG.
Valve is not a publicly traded company. This changes a LOT of things, namely that quarterly revenue doesn't interest them quite as much.
This isn't to say they're shining white knights, but they're certainly better off than most.
How can you know it won't sell? It hasn't even been released!
Or do you mean it's derivative, generic and uninteresting? In which case it's not a matter of PC gamers not buying that kind of game, it's a matter of making a good game to get sales.
From what I've seen, I Am Alive certainly looks unique in many ways and I don't exactly see how you can conclude it won't be popular with no analysis, no experience, nothing.
Notwithstanding how hypothetical it is to ask when Steam will go offline (this is after all the biggest digital distribution service on the PC by a very, very large margin), I would be extremely surprised that Valve hasn't already planned something for this kind of thing. They take it rather seriously (surely more than Sony anyways).
I'll add one thing: I much prefer to have Steam DRM than any other form of DRM. I don't trust EA to keep their activation servers online for more than a year or two, but Steam will be there for many years to come, guaranteed. Of course, I'd rather have no DRM at all (or at least DRM getting stripped, like say Egosoft did with X3), which is why I support GOG a lot, but in the face of having mandatory DRM, Steam would be my first choice.
No, nuclear power is not renewable and is not a perfect solution. But it is amongst the best ones we currently have available.
The problem is when people, faced with the choice of a new, imperfect solution and the status quo, almost invariably choose the status quo. There is a point where we must take what we have; the alternative is far too dire.
That's entirely dependent on current nuclear reactors (BWR, PWR, which all share the "water reactor" part in common). Molten salt reactors would need a lot less water.
Yes, we know how that works out.
Unless you plan on living a few hundred years, it's their children's children who will be doomed. However, this is only assuming exponential growth. Looking at first-world countries, there is a clear peak that is attained, after which population actually decreases. We don't know for sure, but there's good reason to believe that other countries will reach a similar peak and then Earth's population will stabilize.
If it does not stabilize for good reasons (ie. general enrichment of the population and diminishing desire for large amounts of offspring), it will through calamities. It's inevitable.
Some parts of the world already have highly fluctuating weather. That's just how it is.
What would happen is that more parts of the world would get fluctuating weather, and those that already do would have it worse.
My only concern with that point of view is that there will be no "aftermath". An aftermath is defined as the state after the calamity, but unless we take action to STOP AGW, it won't stall by itself.
Yes, it may be impossible to avoid some measure of global warming. It then becomes a matter of how much we can avoid. Only after we have stopped it can we seriously consider living with what we've gotten ourselves into.
Is there any evidence that we can fundamentally shift the global economy away from fossil fuels on a radical program without incurring large and unknowable risks to geopolitical stability in doing so?
No, but there is evidence that not doing so will cause even worse geopolitical stability.
Sorry, but no.... Just no. He asked for a form that does a specific task. If the form does not do this task, then this isn't about guessing, it's that they're incompetent.
Slippery slope fallacy does not an argument make.
I'm fairly sure this problem is NP-complete, which makes it anything BUT trivial to compute. It might be easy to represent computationally, but to actually calculate the result is extremely hard. In fact, finding an efficient algorithm for it would make you incredibly rich and possibly dead.
Android is open source. That non-essential applications using the platform are not is unrelated to the subject at hand. If you can run Android in a functional manner without the closed-source applications installed, then Android is by definition open source.
That's like saying Linux isn't open source because it can have proprietary drivers.
Even at $2B+, it's still probably cheaper to buy EMI outright than to pay copyright charges for all of their songs.
And then you run in your bank's online services which restrict you to 8 characters.
Consoles do not do the same games as PC. If you want to cut yourself off from some of the best games on the market, it's your choice.
Call of Duty, Mas Effect or Skyrim aren't the big PC pushers. Most of those AAA games have been targeted at consoles first and foremost for a while now, with the PC getting mediocre to acceptable ports (with a few notable exceptions) of them.
There are very few developers who consider the PC their primary platform, and the real reason PC gaming is still popular isn't what it was 10 years ago.
On one hand, you have the "big gaming" with the last entrenched PC devs/publishers: Valve, Blizzard, Paradox, CD Projekt, etc. More and more of these games are distributed through the likes of Steam, GOG.com, Gamersgate, Impulse, Greenmangaming, etc. THIS is where a lot of the strength of PC is found; DD on PC is much better, much more varied, and often insanely cheaper. Pricing on PC games is lower at launch and goes down faster than on consoles, to the extent that unless the PC port is absolutely terrible or the game is unsuitable to the PC, it's often better to wait a few months and get it on PC for 50% off while it's still full price on console for the next three years.
On the other hand, you have "social" gaming. This means both MMOs and Facebook. These two things make up an extremely large amount of gamers who plain and simply cannot play on consoles. The Xbox 360's online architecture prevents most MMOs from operating and Sony's lackluster infrastructure means they tend to avoid the PS3. This leaves the PC for all MMOs, of which there are now hundreds. The elephant in the room, WoW, is still grossing millions every month, despite a decrease in subscribers. Then you have Facebook, whose gaming platform has created tens of millions of "casual gamers". They likely never will move from Farmville, but they're still gaming on PC and often spending money on the platform.
Facebook is currently the sole thing easily transfered to another OS since it does not rely on DirectX. Anything else will be hard work. I also dearly hope that cloud gaming like OnLive and Gaikai fail miserably. If people complain about Ubisoft's DRM now, I don't know what they'll do about how restrictive cloud gaming is...
4K is only four times the pixels as standard 1080p video. There is still no way for realtime rendering of Pixar-like stuff in the near future, be it on mobiles or desktops.
Some? Make that most. You can count on two hands 1080p, 60 fps games on both 360 and PS3, with most being 2D games that don't need any sort of graphical power to run.
Nobody's said humans are solely responsible. They are, however, partially. The Earth's always had a certain amount of climate variability and this won't change just because we're there, but just about every single report shows that all known cycles are insufficient to explain the sudden rise in CO2 levels.
It would be fairly peculiar that an unknown phenomenon suddenly and precisely causes a rise in CO2 levels just as humanity enters its post-industrial revolution phase, at which point Occam's razor says hello.
Note that CO2 levels have risen way beyond current levels in the Earth's past, but this kind of change happened on a geological scale, not on our human scale. Earth and life will survive, I have no doubt. The concern should be whether humanity survives.