Are you *sure* it's an improvement when using a touch screen? I've tended to assume that that must be the idea, but when I actually talk to people who use, say, Android phones, they're often bemoaning the fact that the "native apps" never work right, and they'd really like to switch to the web interface, but many sites make that hard to do...
My complaint is a little simpler: the UI keeps changing, and never works with my preferred browser settings. I continually need to move to a virgin browser profile just to figure out what it's supposed to be doing, and whatever improvements they're going after, it's never apparent to me at all.
Yeah, for simple stuff I almost always just use openstreetmap.org. The search feature is fussier, but I can deal with that.
For public transit directions transit311.org seems to work a little better (though that's Bay Area only, I think).
Okay, so software libraries were invented to have a standard
place to put shared, common code, which allows bug fixes and so
on to be applied in one place.
And so stuff like "snap" packages are much less annoying, because
every app gets it's own different versions of the libraries.
But this means that if, for example, you try to fix a bug by
updating a library, the snap package that uses that library won't
get the fix, because it's go it's own variant of the library.
And to actually fix a bug in a library, you need to update the
version embedded in each snap package...
"So you have 'big oil' and 'big wind' both fighting to keep
nuclear power from becoming a viable option in the minds of the
public and the policy makers."
That's not Al-foil hat territory, it's pretty well documented
that the fossil fuel industry was using solar power freaks as
"useful idiots" back in the 70s when the Shoreham nuclear plant
fight was going on. See "Pandora's Promise".
"Yes.. sugar does in fact have calories and amazingly those drinks have their calories and sugar content listed on them.. "
Yes, it's just thermodynamics! Except that it isn't because there's
a human being in the loop acting as a control system, and so
there are complicated psychological and physiological effects
going on that no one seems to understand terribly well.
Are high carbohydrate diets bad? Then how do you explain the Japanese?
Are high fat diets bad? Then how do you explain the French?
Could it be that sugar is a particularly bad form of
carbohydrates? Well sure it could be... but if all you've got is
an argument from correlation (sugar intake up => obesity rate up)
then you don't actually know much, because it could easily be something
more complicated (economy up => sugar intake up plus economy up
=> gasoline intake up).
In conclusion: (1) Shit is complicated. Don't believe anything
but a full lifestyle, cross-cultural comparison, (2) What you
shove in your mouth matters less than if you get off of your butt,
(3) "We need more willpower" isn't a solution or there wouldn't be
a problem. Kill your automobile.
I stand corrected. We don't think alike:
"Coal and nuclear are done. They are no longer economically competitive..."
(1) We have yet to see an even half-way sane energy market where
fossil fuels are charged for anything like the damage they do to
the environment. Methane obtained via fracking despite it's
reputation as a better form of fossile fuels, is particularly
nasty on both ends, between methane leakage when mined and CO2
emissions when burned, it's one of the more damaging power
sources.
(2) Nuclear power is presently rather expensive to build in the
United States, but there are other countries.
(3) Some of the reasons nuclear power is expensive are great
reasons: it's held to (and delivers) a higher safety standard
than any other power source, and the cost of waste disposal is
built-in at the outset.
I was looking for some reason to assume that sugar is the great
devil, but they just take that as a given, something that
everyone is supposed to know.
One thing that I know is that you should worry about exercise
first-- but that's apparently too horrible a thought for most
people to contemplate, they prefer to obsess about what they're
shoving in their mouths.
Worried about your health? Let your sugar
intake ride, but cut down on gasoline.
By any meaningful measure (e.g. lives lost per megawatt) nuclear
power has been far cleaner and safer than the competing major
power sources, with the possible exception of hydropower. If we
had not had nuclear power, the global warming problem would be
even worse now, if we had used more of it, we would be in much
better shape.
If you want a good example of human fallibility, you should
consider the widespread perception that nuclear power is horribly
dangerous as a prime example. Is democracy viable in a world
where a misconception like that can spread and flourish and prove
resistant to correction?
As it happens, we think alike evilviper. People sometimes ask me
if I really believe there's going to be a rennaissance of nuclear
power, and really what I think is we're going to keep dithering
around until Miami is underwater, then we're going to go into
panic mode and use the quickest and dirtiest technical fixes
available to us, like blowing sulfides into the upper atmosphere
with nuclear explosions. After which, we're stuck trying to
learn fast how to control the effect...
And so, I go back to trying to talk to people about the need for
a rennaissance of nuclear power to get us through the next 100
years.
Yeah, like I was saying, that was a hack to try to squeeze all of
the useful characters into the BMP, back when they were trying to
limit the number of codepoints to 64k. Over 40% of the BMP is
dedicated to Han-derived characters, there's no way 16bit unicode
could've gotten close to working if they hadn't used this trick [1].
So for CJK it's critically important to know the right font (or
rather, to pick a font for
the right culture), so for me the real question is why aren't
there special characters built-into the spec that give you a hint
about this? And there used to be a way to embed the locale, but
now it's deprecated. WTF?
[1] The OP here exaggerates how bad this problem is, I think:
most differences between, say, Chinese and Japanese usage are
more stylistic (to my uneducated eye, the Chinese fonts look like
bold face, the Japanese a bit like italic). However, there
are characters that have differences in strokes also, and
we are talking about edge-cases here. It's pretty bad that
hypothetically you could print someone's name in a way that
doesn't just annoy them, but that they might not even recognize.
Are you sure that there are still names that can't be rendered in
Unicode? My understanding was that they were continuing to assign
codepoints in part to fix issues like that (there are still fun
issues where some more primitive software have weak support for
anything out of the Basic Multilingual Plane... good thing no one
uses Javascript for anything much, eh? And the distinction
between mysql's utf8 and utf8mb4 types can't possibly confuse anyone,
could it?).
You have a point about the difficulty of rendering CJK
characters correctly: a hack built-in to the early 16bit version
of unicode has han-derived characters sharing codepoints. There
used to be a way to stick locale hints in, but that was
deprecated with Unicode 5.0, damned if I know why.
Fortunately, people manufacturing photovaltaic cells undergo
ethical screening by Ariasian lensmen, and there will never be
any difficulties from them with leaks of cadmium, arsenic or
hydroflouric acid...
France in the 1970s, in a very short period of time, completely
switched it's power generation over to nuclear power. If
everyone had done that, we might not have a global warming
problem now.
If you look at the magnitude of what needs to be done to fix
climate change, the sheer scale of it looks nearly impossible.
This is not a "Manhatten Project", we're looking at something
more like mobilizing for WWII.
We don't actually know what the deadlines are, and what the
time table is, but we need to do everything we can think of, and
we need to start now.
The solar and wind enthusiasts are the real problem here: they
spin every little bit of encouraging news for their side so hard
everyone is convinced we've got the solution already and they are
it.
On balance, sunlight is good for you (and parental
over-proctiveness is very bad).
Agreed about human risk assessment, but I'm afraid this
particular line of argument (like most of them) is doomed.
Like: "more people die falling off the roof messing with solar
collectors than are killed by nuclear power". You can't even
finish the sentence before people zone-out and write you off,
good luck getting them to focus long enough for you to prove the
case.
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard
English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules?
Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not
part of the quote? Who ever came up with that?
And anyway, English title casing rules are easy to deal with...
https://metacpan.org/pod/Text:...
Of course the real question is why all the other words do, when No-one Ever Writes Anything Else Like This.
Um, linear dose is what the law tells us. Claiming you have
Science On Your Side when the actual evidence is sketchy is not
actually scientific.
There's some reason to think radiation hormesis might exist, but
it's not established, so we stick with a simple linear projection
for now as a conservative assumption.
It could be that both are wrong, you know: there might not be any
hormesis effect to speak of, but there may be a threshold.
> What do you think about the significance of what this kind of
> small-population study would show?
What it's going to show is that the VC firms have been fooling
themselves about their own accumen in picking winning ideas, and
if they had just handed out money at random their hit rate
would've been roughly the same.
We can only hope a universal basic income comes along in time to
take care of them all when they're all out of a job.
Nothing will ever change in the world of journalism, at any rate: predict the status quo to keep the advertisers happy, when anything changes report it in bold face as an amazing surprise ("no one could ever have forseen...").
The advertising apocalypse arrives, the value of internet ads drops to zero, and google's main revenue stream evaporates. Google goes on life support living off it's cash reserve for years while it goes casting around for a great new idea that never quite comes off. (See, Yahoo, SGI, etc.)
No: what's not impressive is you.
The trouble is you guys talk a good enough line to impress the ignorant, and this time you may get the planet fried.
Have a nice life.
In other words, you can't remember where you got it and are trying to run a bluff.
This is actually a really serious business at hand-- fate of the planet and all that, you know? There is a lot more at stake than you saving face with this nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to indulge in trendy fear-mongering based on irrational grounds. Why won't they give me the tools I need?
Are you *sure* it's an improvement when using a touch screen? I've tended to assume that that must be the idea, but when I actually talk to people who use, say, Android phones, they're often bemoaning the fact that the "native apps" never work right, and they'd really like to switch to the web interface, but many sites make that hard to do...
My complaint is a little simpler: the UI keeps changing, and never works with my preferred browser settings. I continually need to move to a virgin browser profile just to figure out what it's supposed to be doing, and whatever improvements they're going after, it's never apparent to me at all. Yeah, for simple stuff I almost always just use openstreetmap.org. The search feature is fussier, but I can deal with that. For public transit directions transit311.org seems to work a little better (though that's Bay Area only, I think).
Okay, so software libraries were invented to have a standard place to put shared, common code, which allows bug fixes and so on to be applied in one place.
And so stuff like "snap" packages are much less annoying, because every app gets it's own different versions of the libraries.
But this means that if, for example, you try to fix a bug by updating a library, the snap package that uses that library won't get the fix, because it's go it's own variant of the library.
And to actually fix a bug in a library, you need to update the version embedded in each snap package...
(Someone please tell me this is wrong.)
"So you have 'big oil' and 'big wind' both fighting to keep nuclear power from becoming a viable option in the minds of the public and the policy makers." That's not Al-foil hat territory, it's pretty well documented that the fossil fuel industry was using solar power freaks as "useful idiots" back in the 70s when the Shoreham nuclear plant fight was going on. See "Pandora's Promise".
"Lots of money for fission too even though uranium won't last."
Yup, mdsolar has spoken: we're at *peak uranium*.
Dude: it's nice having a hobby, but try not to get the planet fried with your bullshit.
"Yes.. sugar does in fact have calories and amazingly those drinks have their calories and sugar content listed on them.. "
Yes, it's just thermodynamics! Except that it isn't because there's a human being in the loop acting as a control system, and so there are complicated psychological and physiological effects going on that no one seems to understand terribly well.
Are high carbohydrate diets bad? Then how do you explain the Japanese?
Are high fat diets bad? Then how do you explain the French?
Could it be that sugar is a particularly bad form of carbohydrates? Well sure it could be... but if all you've got is an argument from correlation (sugar intake up => obesity rate up) then you don't actually know much, because it could easily be something more complicated (economy up => sugar intake up plus economy up => gasoline intake up).
In conclusion: (1) Shit is complicated. Don't believe anything but a full lifestyle, cross-cultural comparison, (2) What you shove in your mouth matters less than if you get off of your butt, (3) "We need more willpower" isn't a solution or there wouldn't be a problem. Kill your automobile.
I stand corrected. We don't think alike: "Coal and nuclear are done. They are no longer economically competitive ..."
(1) We have yet to see an even half-way sane energy market where fossil fuels are charged for anything like the damage they do to the environment. Methane obtained via fracking despite it's reputation as a better form of fossile fuels, is particularly nasty on both ends, between methane leakage when mined and CO2 emissions when burned, it's one of the more damaging power sources.
(2) Nuclear power is presently rather expensive to build in the United States, but there are other countries.
(3) Some of the reasons nuclear power is expensive are great reasons: it's held to (and delivers) a higher safety standard than any other power source, and the cost of waste disposal is built-in at the outset.
I was looking for some reason to assume that sugar is the great devil, but they just take that as a given, something that everyone is supposed to know.
One thing that I know is that you should worry about exercise first-- but that's apparently too horrible a thought for most people to contemplate, they prefer to obsess about what they're shoving in their mouths.
Worried about your health? Let your sugar intake ride, but cut down on gasoline.
By any meaningful measure (e.g. lives lost per megawatt) nuclear power has been far cleaner and safer than the competing major power sources, with the possible exception of hydropower. If we had not had nuclear power, the global warming problem would be even worse now, if we had used more of it, we would be in much better shape.
If you want a good example of human fallibility, you should consider the widespread perception that nuclear power is horribly dangerous as a prime example. Is democracy viable in a world where a misconception like that can spread and flourish and prove resistant to correction?
As it happens, we think alike evilviper. People sometimes ask me if I really believe there's going to be a rennaissance of nuclear power, and really what I think is we're going to keep dithering around until Miami is underwater, then we're going to go into panic mode and use the quickest and dirtiest technical fixes available to us, like blowing sulfides into the upper atmosphere with nuclear explosions. After which, we're stuck trying to learn fast how to control the effect... And so, I go back to trying to talk to people about the need for a rennaissance of nuclear power to get us through the next 100 years.
Yeah, like I was saying, that was a hack to try to squeeze all of the useful characters into the BMP, back when they were trying to limit the number of codepoints to 64k. Over 40% of the BMP is dedicated to Han-derived characters, there's no way 16bit unicode could've gotten close to working if they hadn't used this trick [1].
So for CJK it's critically important to know the right font (or rather, to pick a font for the right culture), so for me the real question is why aren't there special characters built-into the spec that give you a hint about this? And there used to be a way to embed the locale, but now it's deprecated. WTF?
[1] The OP here exaggerates how bad this problem is, I think: most differences between, say, Chinese and Japanese usage are more stylistic (to my uneducated eye, the Chinese fonts look like bold face, the Japanese a bit like italic). However, there are characters that have differences in strokes also, and we are talking about edge-cases here. It's pretty bad that hypothetically you could print someone's name in a way that doesn't just annoy them, but that they might not even recognize.
Are you sure that there are still names that can't be rendered in Unicode? My understanding was that they were continuing to assign codepoints in part to fix issues like that (there are still fun issues where some more primitive software have weak support for anything out of the Basic Multilingual Plane... good thing no one uses Javascript for anything much, eh? And the distinction between mysql's utf8 and utf8mb4 types can't possibly confuse anyone, could it?).
You have a point about the difficulty of rendering CJK characters correctly: a hack built-in to the early 16bit version of unicode has han-derived characters sharing codepoints. There used to be a way to stick locale hints in, but that was deprecated with Unicode 5.0, damned if I know why.
One more try:
Fortunately, people manufacturing photovaltaic cells undergo ethical screening by Ariasian lensmen, and there will never be any difficulties from them with leaks of cadmium, arsenic or hydroflouric acid...
Fortunately, the people operating
France in the 1970s, in a very short period of time, completely switched it's power generation over to nuclear power. If everyone had done that, we might not have a global warming problem now.
If you look at the magnitude of what needs to be done to fix climate change, the sheer scale of it looks nearly impossible. This is not a "Manhatten Project", we're looking at something more like mobilizing for WWII.
We don't actually know what the deadlines are, and what the time table is, but we need to do everything we can think of, and we need to start now.
The solar and wind enthusiasts are the real problem here: they spin every little bit of encouraging news for their side so hard everyone is convinced we've got the solution already and they are it.
On balance, sunlight is good for you (and parental over-proctiveness is very bad).
Agreed about human risk assessment, but I'm afraid this particular line of argument (like most of them) is doomed.
Like: "more people die falling off the roof messing with solar collectors than are killed by nuclear power". You can't even finish the sentence before people zone-out and write you off, good luck getting them to focus long enough for you to prove the case.
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not part of the quote? Who ever came up with that? And anyway, English title casing rules are easy to deal with... https://metacpan.org/pod/Text:...
Right. On the internet WE ALL TALK LIKE THIS.
Um, linear dose is what the law tells us. Claiming you have Science On Your Side when the actual evidence is sketchy is not actually scientific. There's some reason to think radiation hormesis might exist, but it's not established, so we stick with a simple linear projection for now as a conservative assumption. It could be that both are wrong, you know: there might not be any hormesis effect to speak of, but there may be a threshold.
> What do you think about the significance of what this kind of > small-population study would show? What it's going to show is that the VC firms have been fooling themselves about their own accumen in picking winning ideas, and if they had just handed out money at random their hit rate would've been roughly the same. We can only hope a universal basic income comes along in time to take care of them all when they're all out of a job.
Nothing will ever change in the world of journalism, at any rate: predict the status quo to keep the advertisers happy, when anything changes report it in bold face as an amazing surprise ("no one could ever have forseen...").
The advertising apocalypse arrives, the value of internet ads drops to zero, and google's main revenue stream evaporates. Google goes on life support living off it's cash reserve for years while it goes casting around for a great new idea that never quite comes off. (See, Yahoo, SGI, etc.)
No: what's not impressive is you. The trouble is you guys talk a good enough line to impress the ignorant, and this time you may get the planet fried. Have a nice life.
In other words, you can't remember where you got it and are trying to run a bluff.
This is actually a really serious business at hand-- fate of the planet and all that, you know? There is a lot more at stake than you saving face with this nonsense.
Allow me to try again. You just cited some numbers: "Gas plants are 60% efficient, coal, 40, and nukes 30."
Where did these numbers come from? Got links?
If you're going to talk about "efficiency", you should really be able to explain what you mean.