I'm in the UK, my job is 40 hours per week and my paid holiday is 4 weeks for new starters, increasing to 5 weeks at the rate of 1 day per year of service. If I work overtime (as long as it's agreed in advance, rather than "ad hoc") I either get overtime pay (at I believe 1.5x salary) or Time Off In Lieu. I've worked some monster weeks in my time there, but I always get recognised for it in my bottom line.
I like my job, and I like my work-life balance. I also have some affection and loyalty for my company. I honestly don't know how anyone can live with the crushing mistreatment that some people seem to enjoy bragging about in this and similar threads. Do people not have any self respect?
If I were going to regularly work 60 hour weeks, I'd need to be paid a lit more than I am today, and I'd need to like my work an awful lot more than I do now. Anyone doing a job they dislike, so many hours that they're exhausted, for mediocre money- they really shouldn't be bragging about it.
For the record, my wife is a teacher (UK, primary school age) so I have many years of first hand observational evidence.
Her normal working pattern is this: be in the classroom to start work by 8:00 absolute latest, and never leave the school before 6:00. Doesn't get a lunch break per se (as there are always children to deal with over their lunch breaks), so that's already a 50 hour working week. Consistently works 2 hours each evening after dinner (marking, prepping etc.), so that's 60 hours. Regularly works 3 hours each on Saturday and Sunday (mostly planning and general assessment)- so that's 66 hours.
That's the standard. You can up that to 3 hours in the evening and 5 hours each on the weekend (so 75 hours a week) on special occasions, such as assessment time each term. Her school was recently inspected by OFSTED (look it up if you care), and that week she put 15 hours (at least) for 5 days, plus some time on the weekend. Must have broken the 80 barrier that week.
Technically she gets quite a bit of "holiday", but she has to do work during that too. She consistently works for 3 days in each 1 week "half term", and generally at least 1 full working week in both the 6 week Summer holidays and 2 week Easter holidays. Once you do the maths, she gets an amount of paid holiday each year comparable with the generous end of standard corporate holiday policy, with the slight drawback that you don't get to choose when to take it.
That would be true if our economic system made a lick of sense. But it doesn't.
Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire (net worth something like $27 billion) for creating Facebook. By all accounts, Facebook is a Nice Thing, that the world is generally better off having it than not. But did he really contribute billions of dollars of value to the world? Someone who grows food on a farm might earn....$25,000 perhaps in a year, working 12 hour days, physical and skillfull labour, and with a high degree of risk of failure (crops can fail in the slightest of bad weather). So, did Mark Zuckerberg really add more than 1 million times the value to the world as someone who produces food for several hundred people?
Let's say the answer is "no". How much value did Mr Zuckerberg add to the world through his personal labours? 1000 times that of a farmer? 10,000? If the answer was "10,000", he would have made a "mere" $250 million from his creation. Still ample reward for his work, most would agree. But that $26.75 billion dollars we're talking about being in the balance- if he hadn't harvested it from other people (customers, investors, whoever), they would still have that money. It would be distributed differently, not "destroyed" because he doesn't have it. Admittedly in this example we're probably talking about mostly the money being held either by the very rich Zuckerberg or his very rich investors- but the same logic applies to each of the investors too. If each of them were rewarded fairly for their work (rather than over rewarded, in comparison to the rest of society), then you'd pretty quickly find yourself talking about people that actually need the money.
Let's say one of the rich investors of Facebook from the example above made his money in manufacturing. His factories buy resources, pay workers to work the resources into products, and then sells them to customers. He pays each of his workers an average of $25,000 a year for their labour. His profit comes from the sum "Sale Price of Goods" minus "Cost of Resources" minus "Cost of Labour". So, if he paid his workers more, he would be less rich and they would be more rich- a strict one for one exchange. If he paid his workers more and was himself slightly less rich (but still plenty wealthy enough for the job to be worth his time), he will not have added less value to the world than if he had paid his workers less- the world benefits in exactly the same way either way, it is only who gets to enjoy the fruits of the labour that changes.
If you could contrive a system where money (and by extension all of the stuff money can buy) was distributed more evenly (i.e., the gap between richest and poorest was smaller), do you deny that the poorer people would have a better quality of life than they do today (at the expense of a slightly lower quality of life for the richest)?
There is the obvious question of HOW you contrive a system where wealth is evenly distributed. That is as yet unsolved. Classical Communism and early Socialism has obviously fared rather badly at it, and Capitalism is god awful at it. If anyone can come up with an answer to that one, immortality beckons for them.
Linking it back to the topic thread in hand- Star Trek "post-scarcity" society. Star Trek never bothered to go into detail as to how we go from modern Capitalism and Socialism to their magical society where everyone is happy. That's because that's the hard bit.
So, in your world wealth is finite and if I have more then by definition it is because I, directly or indirectly, took it from someone that has less? What a dreary and depressing little world you live in.
Quite so, yes. If you're a billionaire, and you have yachts and diamonds and silks, you have those things and somebody else does not. It is binary. Those things didn't magically appear when you became rich; they are the product of (a very large number) of other people's labour. That labour was directed solely at making you happy, and not at making someone else happy- that too is binary.
Let's take the case of the yacht. One of those big billionaire's super-yachts probably took 10's of thousands of man hours to create. It also took factories, and education for the workers, and materials from the ground, and so forth. Perhaps you paid $100 million for it. Those factories could also have been used to manufacture other things- fishing boats, farm machinery, affordable family vehicles, whatever. Let's say that I took your $100 million and magically distributed it to some poor people- they could have spent the same money, used the same resources, and the same labour to create things that would be useful for them. You can't both have it; if the factories, labour and resources are making yachts, they are verifiably unable to make other things at the same time.
Let's take food. You're a billionaire, so you decide to host a great big feast for all of your swanky friends. You order 100 dishes, each made with a dazzling array of ingredients, enough food to feed 10 times as many guests as you have coming (but you just must do it that way to ensure you don't run out of the best bits!). At the end of the night, after you've all eaten far more than you could possibly need to eat, you throw out 80% of it. Farm land, farm labour, fertilizers, feeds, pesticides and so forth were all used to make that food- and not make food for others.If your wealth were more evenly distributed amongst hungrier people, the same amount of food from the same amount of farmland (et al) could have been more usefully distributed. As it is, you had the food and someone else didn't- food wasted is gone for good. It is binary- your excess is directly linked to other people's suffering.
And let's not even get on to the misery involved in the production of luxuries such as diamonds.
To pretend that wealth is not finite might be less "dreary and depressing", but it has consequences that you can't deny simply because you don't like the sound of them. If wealth were truly not finite, then presumably it would be possible for every single person alive to be a billionaire, living a billionaire's lifestyle. Everyone can have a super yacht! Diamonds for all! Obviously it's a nonsense. The things worth having in the world are not infinite, they are limited- if someone has a lot of "stuff", other people will, as a consequence, have less.
One day we might have increased the pool of "stuff" in the world (through those magical replicators and almost limitless sources of energy we keep hearing so much about) to such a point as everyone's wildest material desires can be fulfilled easily, with "stuff" to spare. But until that point, rich people are and will remain rich at the expense of the poor.
One obvious thing would be "food". We already struggle to grown enough food (and food of the right sorts and in the right places) to feed everyone alive today (citation: pick any famine-struck country). Arguably we are already farming most of the "easy to farm" land (populations have been living in most places for between centuries and millennia- we've had plenty of times to nab the easy stuff). That means farming using modern methods to feed more people than are alive today will mean converting even more land into viable farmland; see "destruction of the rainforests" for how that one works.
It's possible that we'll keep coming up with new technological breakthroughs to keep raising farm productivity, and it's possible that this will be enough to stay ahead of the curve until Earth hit's peak population (at which point, that problem solved). But there's no guarantee of that. Nor are they all going to be problem free- using ever increasing amounts of fertiliser and pesticide in order to increase yields is not guaranteed to be without harmful side effects.
The problem is not necessarily that population growth is or is not exponential- it is that the peak population might be greater than our civilization can adequately support. The medium UN prediction is that world population will peak at somewhere around 11 billion in approximately 100 years. That's something like a 50% increase on today's population. Can we adequately provide for a global population 50% larger than it is now (without buggering the planet in the process)?
It does sound "very little"- but that's just a cool realisation to make. It's easy to think of everything in the universe being very permanent and enduring- and a little shocking to realise that even mega-scale structures of the universe are only fleeting or are quite young.
Considering how long the universe's processes are expected to go on for (star formation might be expected to end roughly 100 trillion years from now), we are currently existing in the extremely early days of the universe. The universe has existed for barely the tiniest fraction of a percentage of it's "life", and we're here living it, enjoying its extreme youth. That's very cool.
I'm sorry, but what you've said there isn't correct in this case. As far as I can tell from TFA, we are not talking about a 13.7 billion year old image of something very far away (as is usually the case with this sort of story)- we're talking about a star that is still going, and is literally, right now, 6000 ly away. That is to say, the image we are seeing now is of the star as it was 6000 years ago. The image we are seeing now is NOT as the star was shortly after the Big Bang, it's of a star that was around shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years later.
To put it simply, small stars have very long lives. Red dwarves can last trillions of years. A star of this sort will burn for many billions of years more yet. This one formed 13.7 billion years ago, and has just kept on going.
Everyone: We want to be able to run the programmes that we use on our desktops on our phones too!
MS: OK, with Windows 8 we'll turn your desktop into a MASSIVE PHONE. All your favourite desktop programmes will have to be extensively rewritten so that they can run halfway gracefully on your new MASSIVE PHONE desktop, and will be able to run on your actual phone or tablet too (as long as you buy the software twice, seeing as we're not implementing an ARM/x86 emulation layer at all). Neat, huh?
If government agents lobbed military-grade ordinance at innocent civilians in the UK, we'd call that unlawful killing and lock the bastards up. And by the same token, if GCHQ had DoS'd targets belonging to legitimate wartime enemies, we wouldn't be criticizing them.
As a rough rule of thumb, the government isn't allowed to do things to citizens above and beyond what any civilian could do without a court mandate or a valid piece of legislation. Unless GCHQ have such a thing, they did wrong.
(Presuming that's a genuine question, and I'm not somehow wooshing myself).
MATE is a fork for the Gnome 2 shell, which maintains a simple desktop style of the classic variety. It is usually associated with the distro Mint. Competes on similar territory to XFCE, although I don't think they have an explicit "for lighter hardware" mandate in the same way as XFCE does.
Not to be confused with Cinnamon, which is a fork of the Gnome 3 shell which attempts to recreate a classic Gnome 2 style desktop, and is also usually associated with Mint.
Cooking up your own drugs probably can't be outlawed, any more than drinking household cleaners can be outlawed- it's impossible to legislate for every little thing a person could do to themselves.
On the other hand, it would be eminently possible to outlaw "supplying a substance to a person with the intention or knowledge that they would consume it without having been through the proper licensing and testing authorities", which essentially deals with Breaking Bad style home-cook drug dealers.
That's probably what the law you quoted is trying to achieve in your jurisdiction, and could be easily legislated for in others. Basically- if it looks like drug dealing, it probably is.
Incidentally, (while I'm a complete non-drug user- too square for any of that, I think) I'm generally for the legalisation of most milder recreational drugs, but still all for the kind of law specified above. Why? While I think that recreational drugs should be legalised, one of the main reasons for that is I think that they really need to be brought under a centrally managed quality control and safety testing regime, in the same way as tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and all food stuffs in general. There are few things more dangerous than narcotics which have been cooked up incorrectly or cut with something dodgy- it is possibly the singularly worst thing about current drug-taking culture. Amateur chemists cooking up narcotics and selling them to unsuspecting folks without having a good handle on what the effects and dangers will be is incredibly dangerous territory.
$1600 isn't bad for essentially nothing- i.e., assuming (like Linus) you don't have to change your behaviour at all to get it. That's still a couple of weeks salary for most people.
As you say, assuming that this isn't just launch hype. Which I expect it is.
I'm UK, and I haven't seen or heard anyone use Farenheit in as long as I can remember. And that includes in the (dead tree) papers I read (which would, indeed, talk about the temperature breaking 30, 35, 40, etc.)- maybe I'm just reading a better class of paper?
Last time anyone I knew was talking about temperatures in Farenheit was back when my parent's home (my childhood home) had a Farenheit-labeled themostat dating from when the house was built in the early 70s. That thermostat was replaced a decade and a half ago. Since then, not even my grandparents use it anymore...
I can't help but feel that this thread misses the interesting point of all this.
EVE Online has just managed (just about) to have a multiplayer game with 2200 players all playing against each other in the same in-game instance. That is, 2200 players in the same arena, being run by a single interoperating server. That is an absolutely absurd technical feat. Has any other multiplayer game ever come ever remotely close to this?
CCP have always been a fascinating one to watch in terms of their technical abilities. Arguably they've built one of the most advanced (in novel complexity terms) supercomputers in the world, certainly the most advanced in the entertainment industry. Both the hardware and the software of it, the load balancing and instance management, the ability to maintain uptime under unexpected loads, and the ability to maintain a playable state rather than submit to downtime in some of the worst conditions, is all extremely impressive.
I haven't looked into the technical details of CCP's set up in many years- does anyone have any details they'd care to share?
I used to play EVE years ago. There's an absurd amount going on, tactically and strategically, in these battles which isn't really visible just from a video play back.
As another poster pointed out, formations don't really play any part in things, so everything will just appear to be a big mishmash. But within the two opposing fleets, you'll have dozens of different groups with different tasks. You'll have your capital ships and largest sub-caps duking it out- if the whole fleet's big hitters coordinate and focus on a single target at a time, that target will not last more than a dozen or so (realtime) seconds. Each ship that is targeted will probably try and warp away and escape before it can be destroyed, where it can repair and rejoin the fight. There will be ships tasked with repairing and shield-boosting other ships- mostly in the battle (to "tank" a targeted ship), or stationed at a retreat point (to repair escapees). Other ships will be "warp jammers", to try to stop targets escaping. Others will have "electronic warfare" equipment, and will be coordinating to try to break targeting locks of either the big-hitters or any other class of ships (jammers, repairers, other ECM ships). Then there will be specialist hunter-killer ships designed specifically to take out these smaller support ships. And THOSE hunter-killer ships will themselves be targets of other hunter-killers. And that's just the tactical bit.
Strategically, you'll have fleets jumping from system to system, trying to ambush each other, blockade "warp gates", cut off reinforcement lines or escape routes, fleets pulling off feints and double bluffs.
It's all hideously complicated.
As others have pointed out, it's often more fun to talk about EVE than it is to actually play it. It is a game which is hugely about the meta-game, more than it's about actually flying your internet spaceship. It's possible to get quite a large portion of the fun of EVE Online without ever actually logging in and playing. All the planning of these battles will have taken place in internet forums outside of the game, and the actual battles will probably be being commanded via Skype and IRC as much as via in-game channels.
Fujitsu brand is still common in the UK. Possibly related to their relationship to old UK giant ICL- which (I think) used to sell rebadged Fujitsu PCs, and was later taken over by Fujitsu.
In any case, they're still a common enough brand. I have a Vista-era Fujitsu laptop on my desk right now, albeit not in working order.
Assuming you don't count the whole messy business with NeXt- i.e., Jobs leaving, founding a competing company, Apple heading to the point of bankruptcy, buying NeXt in a sort of reverse takeover in which the NeXt board (i.e. Jobs) takes control of the company, replacing their entire product line (Mac OS) with NeXt products. And then, of course, switching their primary business model to selling audio players and phones, with their major revenue source being a content distribution platform.
So yeah, definitely exactly the same company as existed in 1986.
I still take your point, but it's disingenuous to pretend that Apple hasn't been through the corporate meat grinder just as much as any other long-lived company.
First of all, in-store credit vouchers are not "their own currency" at all. They're just U.S. dollars with restrictions on where they can be spent. They'll always be worth the same amount in dollars because they're not a separate currency at all. other currencies values are tracked separately from each other. Yes, a particular currency can be tied to another currency, but at any point, that tie can be severed. A voucher's tie to the U.S. dollar can NEVER be severed because it IS U.S. dollars.
That would make it a currency with an exchange rate pegged to the US dollar- it does not negate the fact that it is a separate currency. It is no different to any other currency which is pegged to the dollar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
The fact that it seems weird to call it a "separate currency" doesn't make it not so. The only potential difference between an Amazon gift voucher and an "Amazon Coin" would be the rules around it's issuance and exchange- the fundamentals would be the same.
For the record, landlines in the UK (both BT and Virgin lines, probably others) can receive SMS- they come through as robo-voice audio messages. Particularly in the era of Txt Sp8k, it was basically completely unusable. Still, certainly exists.
There is nothing immortal about Google Search either. While it's true that it looks pretty unassailable now, there's no reason why that should always be the case. It has strictly zero tying people in to using it. Just as Yahoo and Ask and AltaVista have come and gone before it, so might Google one day go. Or it might not; there's no reason they can't keep their market forever if they play their cards right.
For comparison, AltaVista was one of the top search engines for 10 years, and is now no more. Google Search has only been popular for perhaps 5 years longer than that. What makes Google inherently unbeatable, when AltaVista wasn't? Android and Chrome are certainly points in their favour, but neither of those are immortal either.
What you're doing is making the classic mistake of assuming that, while things have always changed in the past, NOW must be the final state and everything is definitely going to stay the same from now on. You're in good company; many great scientific and engineering brains in history have done the same thing. I can guarantee you that you're wrong, though.
Not that peculiar when you consider Firefox's default behaviour if you type an invalid URL in the address bar is to run a Google search for the term. So if someone types "Google" in the address bar (but without the ".com"), it would count as a Google search for "Google".
Still not exactly bright user behaviour, but not quite as stupid (and considerably more believable) than people visiting the Google website and then searching for the keyword "Google"...
It's be nice to see what would happen if one of those Loan Officers brought in all that "new business", but there was no-one around to do the work for them. A salesman might seem like he's the one making the money, but he'd be worthless without the factory workers giving him things to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the UK, my job is 40 hours per week and my paid holiday is 4 weeks for new starters, increasing to 5 weeks at the rate of 1 day per year of service. If I work overtime (as long as it's agreed in advance, rather than "ad hoc") I either get overtime pay (at I believe 1.5x salary) or Time Off In Lieu. I've worked some monster weeks in my time there, but I always get recognised for it in my bottom line.
I like my job, and I like my work-life balance. I also have some affection and loyalty for my company. I honestly don't know how anyone can live with the crushing mistreatment that some people seem to enjoy bragging about in this and similar threads. Do people not have any self respect?
If I were going to regularly work 60 hour weeks, I'd need to be paid a lit more than I am today, and I'd need to like my work an awful lot more than I do now. Anyone doing a job they dislike, so many hours that they're exhausted, for mediocre money- they really shouldn't be bragging about it.
For the record, my wife is a teacher (UK, primary school age) so I have many years of first hand observational evidence.
Her normal working pattern is this: be in the classroom to start work by 8:00 absolute latest, and never leave the school before 6:00. Doesn't get a lunch break per se (as there are always children to deal with over their lunch breaks), so that's already a 50 hour working week. Consistently works 2 hours each evening after dinner (marking, prepping etc.), so that's 60 hours. Regularly works 3 hours each on Saturday and Sunday (mostly planning and general assessment)- so that's 66 hours.
That's the standard. You can up that to 3 hours in the evening and 5 hours each on the weekend (so 75 hours a week) on special occasions, such as assessment time each term. Her school was recently inspected by OFSTED (look it up if you care), and that week she put 15 hours (at least) for 5 days, plus some time on the weekend. Must have broken the 80 barrier that week.
Technically she gets quite a bit of "holiday", but she has to do work during that too. She consistently works for 3 days in each 1 week "half term", and generally at least 1 full working week in both the 6 week Summer holidays and 2 week Easter holidays. Once you do the maths, she gets an amount of paid holiday each year comparable with the generous end of standard corporate holiday policy, with the slight drawback that you don't get to choose when to take it.
Pretty brutal, considering the pay.
That would be true if our economic system made a lick of sense. But it doesn't.
Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire (net worth something like $27 billion) for creating Facebook. By all accounts, Facebook is a Nice Thing, that the world is generally better off having it than not. But did he really contribute billions of dollars of value to the world? Someone who grows food on a farm might earn....$25,000 perhaps in a year, working 12 hour days, physical and skillfull labour, and with a high degree of risk of failure (crops can fail in the slightest of bad weather). So, did Mark Zuckerberg really add more than 1 million times the value to the world as someone who produces food for several hundred people?
Let's say the answer is "no". How much value did Mr Zuckerberg add to the world through his personal labours? 1000 times that of a farmer? 10,000? If the answer was "10,000", he would have made a "mere" $250 million from his creation. Still ample reward for his work, most would agree. But that $26.75 billion dollars we're talking about being in the balance- if he hadn't harvested it from other people (customers, investors, whoever), they would still have that money. It would be distributed differently, not "destroyed" because he doesn't have it. Admittedly in this example we're probably talking about mostly the money being held either by the very rich Zuckerberg or his very rich investors- but the same logic applies to each of the investors too. If each of them were rewarded fairly for their work (rather than over rewarded, in comparison to the rest of society), then you'd pretty quickly find yourself talking about people that actually need the money.
Let's say one of the rich investors of Facebook from the example above made his money in manufacturing. His factories buy resources, pay workers to work the resources into products, and then sells them to customers. He pays each of his workers an average of $25,000 a year for their labour. His profit comes from the sum "Sale Price of Goods" minus "Cost of Resources" minus "Cost of Labour". So, if he paid his workers more, he would be less rich and they would be more rich- a strict one for one exchange. If he paid his workers more and was himself slightly less rich (but still plenty wealthy enough for the job to be worth his time), he will not have added less value to the world than if he had paid his workers less- the world benefits in exactly the same way either way, it is only who gets to enjoy the fruits of the labour that changes.
If you could contrive a system where money (and by extension all of the stuff money can buy) was distributed more evenly (i.e., the gap between richest and poorest was smaller), do you deny that the poorer people would have a better quality of life than they do today (at the expense of a slightly lower quality of life for the richest)?
There is the obvious question of HOW you contrive a system where wealth is evenly distributed. That is as yet unsolved. Classical Communism and early Socialism has obviously fared rather badly at it, and Capitalism is god awful at it. If anyone can come up with an answer to that one, immortality beckons for them.
Linking it back to the topic thread in hand- Star Trek "post-scarcity" society. Star Trek never bothered to go into detail as to how we go from modern Capitalism and Socialism to their magical society where everyone is happy. That's because that's the hard bit.
So, in your world wealth is finite and if I have more then by definition it is because I, directly or indirectly, took it from someone that has less? What a dreary and depressing little world you live in.
Quite so, yes. If you're a billionaire, and you have yachts and diamonds and silks, you have those things and somebody else does not. It is binary. Those things didn't magically appear when you became rich; they are the product of (a very large number) of other people's labour. That labour was directed solely at making you happy, and not at making someone else happy- that too is binary.
Let's take the case of the yacht. One of those big billionaire's super-yachts probably took 10's of thousands of man hours to create. It also took factories, and education for the workers, and materials from the ground, and so forth. Perhaps you paid $100 million for it. Those factories could also have been used to manufacture other things- fishing boats, farm machinery, affordable family vehicles, whatever. Let's say that I took your $100 million and magically distributed it to some poor people- they could have spent the same money, used the same resources, and the same labour to create things that would be useful for them. You can't both have it; if the factories, labour and resources are making yachts, they are verifiably unable to make other things at the same time.
Let's take food. You're a billionaire, so you decide to host a great big feast for all of your swanky friends. You order 100 dishes, each made with a dazzling array of ingredients, enough food to feed 10 times as many guests as you have coming (but you just must do it that way to ensure you don't run out of the best bits!). At the end of the night, after you've all eaten far more than you could possibly need to eat, you throw out 80% of it. Farm land, farm labour, fertilizers, feeds, pesticides and so forth were all used to make that food- and not make food for others.If your wealth were more evenly distributed amongst hungrier people, the same amount of food from the same amount of farmland (et al) could have been more usefully distributed. As it is, you had the food and someone else didn't- food wasted is gone for good. It is binary- your excess is directly linked to other people's suffering.
And let's not even get on to the misery involved in the production of luxuries such as diamonds.
To pretend that wealth is not finite might be less "dreary and depressing", but it has consequences that you can't deny simply because you don't like the sound of them. If wealth were truly not finite, then presumably it would be possible for every single person alive to be a billionaire, living a billionaire's lifestyle. Everyone can have a super yacht! Diamonds for all! Obviously it's a nonsense. The things worth having in the world are not infinite, they are limited- if someone has a lot of "stuff", other people will, as a consequence, have less.
One day we might have increased the pool of "stuff" in the world (through those magical replicators and almost limitless sources of energy we keep hearing so much about) to such a point as everyone's wildest material desires can be fulfilled easily, with "stuff" to spare. But until that point, rich people are and will remain rich at the expense of the poor.
One obvious thing would be "food". We already struggle to grown enough food (and food of the right sorts and in the right places) to feed everyone alive today (citation: pick any famine-struck country). Arguably we are already farming most of the "easy to farm" land (populations have been living in most places for between centuries and millennia- we've had plenty of times to nab the easy stuff). That means farming using modern methods to feed more people than are alive today will mean converting even more land into viable farmland; see "destruction of the rainforests" for how that one works.
It's possible that we'll keep coming up with new technological breakthroughs to keep raising farm productivity, and it's possible that this will be enough to stay ahead of the curve until Earth hit's peak population (at which point, that problem solved). But there's no guarantee of that. Nor are they all going to be problem free- using ever increasing amounts of fertiliser and pesticide in order to increase yields is not guaranteed to be without harmful side effects.
The problem is not necessarily that population growth is or is not exponential- it is that the peak population might be greater than our civilization can adequately support. The medium UN prediction is that world population will peak at somewhere around 11 billion in approximately 100 years. That's something like a 50% increase on today's population. Can we adequately provide for a global population 50% larger than it is now (without buggering the planet in the process)?
Answers on a postcard, on that one.
It does sound "very little"- but that's just a cool realisation to make. It's easy to think of everything in the universe being very permanent and enduring- and a little shocking to realise that even mega-scale structures of the universe are only fleeting or are quite young.
Considering how long the universe's processes are expected to go on for (star formation might be expected to end roughly 100 trillion years from now), we are currently existing in the extremely early days of the universe. The universe has existed for barely the tiniest fraction of a percentage of it's "life", and we're here living it, enjoying its extreme youth. That's very cool.
I'm sorry, but what you've said there isn't correct in this case. As far as I can tell from TFA, we are not talking about a 13.7 billion year old image of something very far away (as is usually the case with this sort of story)- we're talking about a star that is still going, and is literally, right now, 6000 ly away. That is to say, the image we are seeing now is of the star as it was 6000 years ago. The image we are seeing now is NOT as the star was shortly after the Big Bang, it's of a star that was around shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years later.
To put it simply, small stars have very long lives. Red dwarves can last trillions of years. A star of this sort will burn for many billions of years more yet. This one formed 13.7 billion years ago, and has just kept on going.
Everyone: We want to be able to run the programmes that we use on our desktops on our phones too!
MS: OK, with Windows 8 we'll turn your desktop into a MASSIVE PHONE. All your favourite desktop programmes will have to be extensively rewritten so that they can run halfway gracefully on your new MASSIVE PHONE desktop, and will be able to run on your actual phone or tablet too (as long as you buy the software twice, seeing as we're not implementing an ARM/x86 emulation layer at all). Neat, huh?
Everyone: [despair]
Make sense?
If government agents lobbed military-grade ordinance at innocent civilians in the UK, we'd call that unlawful killing and lock the bastards up. And by the same token, if GCHQ had DoS'd targets belonging to legitimate wartime enemies, we wouldn't be criticizing them.
As a rough rule of thumb, the government isn't allowed to do things to citizens above and beyond what any civilian could do without a court mandate or a valid piece of legislation. Unless GCHQ have such a thing, they did wrong.
(Presuming that's a genuine question, and I'm not somehow wooshing myself).
MATE is a fork for the Gnome 2 shell, which maintains a simple desktop style of the classic variety. It is usually associated with the distro Mint. Competes on similar territory to XFCE, although I don't think they have an explicit "for lighter hardware" mandate in the same way as XFCE does.
Not to be confused with Cinnamon, which is a fork of the Gnome 3 shell which attempts to recreate a classic Gnome 2 style desktop, and is also usually associated with Mint.
Cooking up your own drugs probably can't be outlawed, any more than drinking household cleaners can be outlawed- it's impossible to legislate for every little thing a person could do to themselves.
On the other hand, it would be eminently possible to outlaw "supplying a substance to a person with the intention or knowledge that they would consume it without having been through the proper licensing and testing authorities", which essentially deals with Breaking Bad style home-cook drug dealers.
That's probably what the law you quoted is trying to achieve in your jurisdiction, and could be easily legislated for in others. Basically- if it looks like drug dealing, it probably is.
Incidentally, (while I'm a complete non-drug user- too square for any of that, I think) I'm generally for the legalisation of most milder recreational drugs, but still all for the kind of law specified above. Why? While I think that recreational drugs should be legalised, one of the main reasons for that is I think that they really need to be brought under a centrally managed quality control and safety testing regime, in the same way as tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and all food stuffs in general. There are few things more dangerous than narcotics which have been cooked up incorrectly or cut with something dodgy- it is possibly the singularly worst thing about current drug-taking culture. Amateur chemists cooking up narcotics and selling them to unsuspecting folks without having a good handle on what the effects and dangers will be is incredibly dangerous territory.
$1600 isn't bad for essentially nothing- i.e., assuming (like Linus) you don't have to change your behaviour at all to get it. That's still a couple of weeks salary for most people.
As you say, assuming that this isn't just launch hype. Which I expect it is.
I'm UK, and I haven't seen or heard anyone use Farenheit in as long as I can remember. And that includes in the (dead tree) papers I read (which would, indeed, talk about the temperature breaking 30, 35, 40, etc.)- maybe I'm just reading a better class of paper?
Last time anyone I knew was talking about temperatures in Farenheit was back when my parent's home (my childhood home) had a Farenheit-labeled themostat dating from when the house was built in the early 70s. That thermostat was replaced a decade and a half ago. Since then, not even my grandparents use it anymore...
I can't help but feel that this thread misses the interesting point of all this.
EVE Online has just managed (just about) to have a multiplayer game with 2200 players all playing against each other in the same in-game instance. That is, 2200 players in the same arena, being run by a single interoperating server. That is an absolutely absurd technical feat. Has any other multiplayer game ever come ever remotely close to this?
CCP have always been a fascinating one to watch in terms of their technical abilities. Arguably they've built one of the most advanced (in novel complexity terms) supercomputers in the world, certainly the most advanced in the entertainment industry. Both the hardware and the software of it, the load balancing and instance management, the ability to maintain uptime under unexpected loads, and the ability to maintain a playable state rather than submit to downtime in some of the worst conditions, is all extremely impressive.
I haven't looked into the technical details of CCP's set up in many years- does anyone have any details they'd care to share?
I used to play EVE years ago. There's an absurd amount going on, tactically and strategically, in these battles which isn't really visible just from a video play back.
As another poster pointed out, formations don't really play any part in things, so everything will just appear to be a big mishmash. But within the two opposing fleets, you'll have dozens of different groups with different tasks. You'll have your capital ships and largest sub-caps duking it out- if the whole fleet's big hitters coordinate and focus on a single target at a time, that target will not last more than a dozen or so (realtime) seconds. Each ship that is targeted will probably try and warp away and escape before it can be destroyed, where it can repair and rejoin the fight. There will be ships tasked with repairing and shield-boosting other ships- mostly in the battle (to "tank" a targeted ship), or stationed at a retreat point (to repair escapees). Other ships will be "warp jammers", to try to stop targets escaping. Others will have "electronic warfare" equipment, and will be coordinating to try to break targeting locks of either the big-hitters or any other class of ships (jammers, repairers, other ECM ships). Then there will be specialist hunter-killer ships designed specifically to take out these smaller support ships. And THOSE hunter-killer ships will themselves be targets of other hunter-killers. And that's just the tactical bit.
Strategically, you'll have fleets jumping from system to system, trying to ambush each other, blockade "warp gates", cut off reinforcement lines or escape routes, fleets pulling off feints and double bluffs.
It's all hideously complicated.
As others have pointed out, it's often more fun to talk about EVE than it is to actually play it. It is a game which is hugely about the meta-game, more than it's about actually flying your internet spaceship. It's possible to get quite a large portion of the fun of EVE Online without ever actually logging in and playing. All the planning of these battles will have taken place in internet forums outside of the game, and the actual battles will probably be being commanded via Skype and IRC as much as via in-game channels.
Fujitsu brand is still common in the UK. Possibly related to their relationship to old UK giant ICL- which (I think) used to sell rebadged Fujitsu PCs, and was later taken over by Fujitsu.
In any case, they're still a common enough brand. I have a Vista-era Fujitsu laptop on my desk right now, albeit not in working order.
Assuming you don't count the whole messy business with NeXt- i.e., Jobs leaving, founding a competing company, Apple heading to the point of bankruptcy, buying NeXt in a sort of reverse takeover in which the NeXt board (i.e. Jobs) takes control of the company, replacing their entire product line (Mac OS) with NeXt products. And then, of course, switching their primary business model to selling audio players and phones, with their major revenue source being a content distribution platform.
So yeah, definitely exactly the same company as existed in 1986.
I still take your point, but it's disingenuous to pretend that Apple hasn't been through the corporate meat grinder just as much as any other long-lived company.
First of all, in-store credit vouchers are not "their own currency" at all. They're just U.S. dollars with restrictions on where they can be spent. They'll always be worth the same amount in dollars because they're not a separate currency at all. other currencies values are tracked separately from each other. Yes, a particular currency can be tied to another currency, but at any point, that tie can be severed. A voucher's tie to the U.S. dollar can NEVER be severed because it IS U.S. dollars.
That would make it a currency with an exchange rate pegged to the US dollar- it does not negate the fact that it is a separate currency. It is no different to any other currency which is pegged to the dollar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
The fact that it seems weird to call it a "separate currency" doesn't make it not so. The only potential difference between an Amazon gift voucher and an "Amazon Coin" would be the rules around it's issuance and exchange- the fundamentals would be the same.
As has been said so many times in this thread- same could be said of AOL, Geocities, MySpace...
Facebook is not the first useful social website. It will not be the last.
I use Android, and I can barely get away from G+-tied official apps. You are a lucky person.
2. land lines can't receive SMS.
For the record, landlines in the UK (both BT and Virgin lines, probably others) can receive SMS- they come through as robo-voice audio messages. Particularly in the era of Txt Sp8k, it was basically completely unusable. Still, certainly exists.
There is nothing immortal about Google Search either. While it's true that it looks pretty unassailable now, there's no reason why that should always be the case. It has strictly zero tying people in to using it. Just as Yahoo and Ask and AltaVista have come and gone before it, so might Google one day go. Or it might not; there's no reason they can't keep their market forever if they play their cards right.
For comparison, AltaVista was one of the top search engines for 10 years, and is now no more. Google Search has only been popular for perhaps 5 years longer than that. What makes Google inherently unbeatable, when AltaVista wasn't? Android and Chrome are certainly points in their favour, but neither of those are immortal either.
What you're doing is making the classic mistake of assuming that, while things have always changed in the past, NOW must be the final state and everything is definitely going to stay the same from now on. You're in good company; many great scientific and engineering brains in history have done the same thing. I can guarantee you that you're wrong, though.
Not that peculiar when you consider Firefox's default behaviour if you type an invalid URL in the address bar is to run a Google search for the term. So if someone types "Google" in the address bar (but without the ".com"), it would count as a Google search for "Google".
Still not exactly bright user behaviour, but not quite as stupid (and considerably more believable) than people visiting the Google website and then searching for the keyword "Google"...
[Marxism]
It's be nice to see what would happen if one of those Loan Officers brought in all that "new business", but there was no-one around to do the work for them. A salesman might seem like he's the one making the money, but he'd be worthless without the factory workers giving him things to sell.
[/Marxism]