All in all, that is really peanuts in terms of electicity bills. If you are spending roughly 2 hours a day gaming, a normal person with a full-time job and a family would have very little time to do much else that can sink money.
Considering that yearly electricty bills routinely reach about a $1000+ for a standard household, this added 10% due to gaming is pretty insignificant when compared to other hobbies...like racing cars for example.
Sure, there may be cheaper hobbies, but I honestly don't think anyone well-settled enough to be practising a daily hobby and deriving enjoyment from it finds it a problem to spend 8 bucks 50 cents a month for their recreation.
Try explaining to your boss or spouse, that the time spent playing a mindless game on the computer is actually an intense mind-wandering session that is going to boost your productivity. Or that you need this time to be your creative best.
Except, new designs of cars have a bunch of things that do make a difference- like aerodynamics and crumple zones. It's not _all_ about fashion. Much harder to say that about computer interface 'design'.
Curiously, the actual paper alludes to the fact that it was a case of "loss-of-function" for a gene product, ie., the inhibition of a certain genomic activity, rather than "gain-of-function" as is generally expected from a anthropocentric point of view that leads to "human-like features in mouse neurons" and perhaps human-like intelligence.
I happen to know one of the authors of the paper, and she was herself rather frustrated about exaggerations and misinterpretations she is seeing of her work in 'journalistic' literature.
Comments are comments. Comments are not journal articles. Comments can be said to be peer reviewed, to some extent, but then again, comments are not journal articles, comments need not follow any specific format for reporting of questions and results, comments are just comments.
I did not RTFA. I second your point. But even if we were to take a more generous view of commenting sections, the problem of noise filtering remains. Comment sections are a perfect example of what Asimov said best :
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
The amount of effort required to parse through comments to find gems of significant value is enormous. I know that this is that age of the crowd and so on, but there are certain issues on which the opinion of the crowd has on average very little value because of the complexity of the topic and the years of experience required to make informed conclusions. The trade-off between expert opinion and open crowdsourcing varies widely depending on what is the topic under discussion, and the userbase of the particular site. Vaccines and autism on a Californian site, for example.
On the contrary, there is much less money it now per researcher in relation to the problems expected to be solved. Competition for research positions remains high and results are still expected to be delivered. The way public funding is set up, failure is a disaster.
This creates the incentive for scientists to deliver the result, or the appearance of a successful project - by any means necessary.
This is why research laboratories in private enterprise have a higher incidence of pladiarism, but not fraud.
In academic science, there is little philosophical motivation to publish false results as the truth, unless the presence of those results and apparent success of the project is tied to the career and survival of the scientist.
This is a philosophical decision. Any setting that compromises security should be OPT-IN by design, not the default.
IT Professionals of minimal competency will read complete release notes before rolling out a new version of any software. So if you have a "Fuck it Broke" situation, blame it on your IT guys.
And you would deserve it. If you maintain an insecure system, you are a threat not just to yourself, but to the entire internet.
You foster malicious code that can be used to pit your system against others. Everyone is connected on the Internet, and if you chose to be a weak link, you are everyone's problem.
I am usually sympathetic to upgrade issues, but if you are going to be in the wild of the internet, fix your software. You are on an internal closed network, no one is forcing you to upgrade Firefox. Maintain your legacy setup.
I do taxes. I play 3D games. I do coding. I do a lot of scientific analysis and modeling for work. I do a lot of instrumentation control and driver manipulations during work for which I use specialized software like LabView and MATLAB and OriginPro.
Which is the operating system that allows me to do all of those things, without compromise ? You guessed it Windows 7.
How much does this cost me? Maybe a couple of thousand dollars including all the Windows and specialized software licenses, and zero time. How much will it cost me in time and money to replicate OriginPro on Linux or develop a peice of software that performs all those things on Linux?
The oh-so dangerous viruses that supposedly arrive through emails are taken care of by three things. 1. Get MS Security Essentials. Leave it on autoupdate. 2. Don't ever overrride its warning unless you confirm the file is non-executable/safe manually.
That's the thing with Linux...if I need it, I could get it an no cost. It makes infinitely more sense to run Linux on a Virtual Box on a Windows PC than the other way around , if you want to ensure that you never run into a situation that you are prevented from doing 'task x' in the intended way due to OS limitations.
The day a child runs out in a way the human behind a steering wheel is not able to react to due to their incompetence, blood alcohol levels, sleepiness, or distraction, there is always a tragedy.
This tragedy has nothing to do with whether a machine or a human is controlling the car. It's a tragedy of an unfortunate circumstance.
It is possible however that on an average the machine does better than or equal to a human. To determine if it is so, it requires testing. Which is being done. So what exactly is the problem? Why do you assume that the human level of intelligence is the end-all and be-all of doing everything? Time and again it has been demonstrated that human intelligence is biased towards certain kinds of tasks. And it is debatable if driving is one of those, considering it is something humans have started doing only in the last 150 years or so at most.
You can file a complaint against any an individual in the police force of any nation, and the police force of that nation has the right to make arrests if that individual is on their soil.
In the case of Megaupload, a US Federal Prosecutor filed that said complaint in New Zealand, providing evidence of international crimes. The FBI then filed for extradition of the accused in New Zealand. There was a court hearing in New Zealand, which approved the extradition.
Just because the newspapers report in colloquial language and say "upon the FBI's request" , it doesn't mean due procedure is not followed. Of course, the gist of it is still that he was arrested due to a request by the US authorities.
Incorrect. The Geneva conventionS (there is more than 1), consider these to be a breach of the conventions:
willful killing, torture or inhumane treatment, including biological experiments
willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health
compelling someone to serve in the forces of a hostile power
willfully depriving someone of the right to a fair trial if accused of a war crime.
Also considered grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention are the following:
taking of hostages
extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly
unlawful deportation, transfer, or confinement.
So no. Freezing of assets is a perfectly humane way of dealing with a flight risk.
But soon they will. In Germany, public transport, supermarkets, any shops and restaurants will accept a debit card under a uniform debt card system called EC (Electronic Cash).
The only thing one does need cash is for microtransactions - very small purchases from kiosks or coffee shops (Upto 5 Euro). Low adoption there seems to be primarily because the debt card-pin-receipt printing method is significantly slower than just dropping a euro coin for a beer. However, I believe as the speedier near-field technologies like Google Wallet catch up, cash will be a thing of the past.
Disclaimer : This is a comment on the practical usage of cashless payment systems. This is not a comment on private or government monitoring of transactions, your personal opinion on Google's monopoly and threat to the free market, or about how things are better in Europe, or about whether you personally feel that the time required to pay by debt card is not a big deal and how we are 'oh so entitled' because we want to save the 60 seconds.
Edward Teller was just projecting the attitude of his time - an attitude based on economic theories stating that human society functions in a way where it's 'every man for himself'.
The RAND Corporation militarized this idea, and the nuclear arms race began as a solution to what was seen as a 'game of chicken', when in fact , it was Prisoner's dilemma.
Fortunately, we live in a time when this doctrine has been shown to be false and altruism has received better appreciation.
Such as for example, spectral camouflage. Any method that depends on identifying spectra of compounds in a complex mixture depends on spectral deconvolution. Spectral deconvolution is easy to fool, but adding a compound that provides a "difference spectrum" , compensating for the differences in tobacco versus marijuana smoke.
"According to some analysts, India-U.S. relations have strained over Obama administration's approach in handling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[15][16] India's National Security Adviser, M.K. Narayanan, criticized the Obama administration for linking the Kashmir dispute to the instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and said that by doing so, President Obama was "barking up the wrong tree".[17] The Foreign Policy too criticized Obama's approach towards South Asia saying that "India can be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem" in South Asia and suggested India to take a more proactive role in rebuilding Afghanistan irrespective of the attitude of the Obama administration.[18] In a clear indication of growing rift between India and the U.S., the former decided not to accept a U.S. invitation to attend a conference on Afghanistan.[19] Bloomberg reported that since 2008 Mumbai attacks, the public mood in India has been to pressure Pakistan more aggressively to take actions against the culprits behind the terrorist attack and this might reflect on the upcoming general elections in May 2009. Consequently, the Obama administration may find itself at odds with India's rigid stance against terrorism.[20]
Robert Blake, assistant secretary of United States' Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, dismissed any concerns over a rift with India regarding United States' AfPak policy. Calling India and the United States "natural allies",[6] Blake said that the United States cannot afford to meet the strategic priorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan at "the expense of India".[21]"
So who exactly wants to be friends here? And yes, there is corruption. Yes, there are safety issues. But these exist mainly for lower income groups in India. I am not saying this is an acceptable, but the fact is that the upper-middle and upper classes in India is doing fantastically well, enjoying a standard of living in some ways higher than that in the Western world. And ex-pirate bay admins, in all likelihood , easily fit in the upper middle class (at least) in India.
You don't have to go that far. Countries like India, China, Russia cover a very large area of the world , and these three have a history of not putting up with U.S.- , well B.S.
It is unlikely, for example that Sweden , the EU, or the US would be able to make India extradite them even if they were caught - and India is a big country to get lost in.
Actually, although Kapil Sibal is democratically elected, this seems to be his own idea. I am Indian, and currently visiting Mumbai. The amount of backlash he is getting from the Indian public is astonishing. Nearly all media is heavily criticising him for this move.
This is not a popularly supported move. And it will go away. Nothing to see , move along.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't beat 'em, find a way to make money while you join 'em.
Well played, Microsoft, well played.
All in all, that is really peanuts in terms of electicity bills. If you are spending roughly 2 hours a day gaming, a normal person with a full-time job and a family would have very little time to do much else that can sink money.
Considering that yearly electricty bills routinely reach about a $1000+ for a standard household, this added 10% due to gaming is pretty insignificant when compared to other hobbies...like racing cars for example.
Sure, there may be cheaper hobbies, but I honestly don't think anyone well-settled enough to be practising a daily hobby and deriving enjoyment from it finds it a problem to spend 8 bucks 50 cents a month for their recreation.
Try explaining to your boss or spouse, that the time spent playing a mindless game on the computer is actually an intense mind-wandering session that is going to boost your productivity. Or that you need this time to be your creative best.
In my experience, few people 'get it'.
Except, new designs of cars have a bunch of things that do make a difference- like aerodynamics and crumple zones. It's not _all_ about fashion. Much harder to say that about computer interface 'design'.
torrents are the way to go for good quality, legal porn.
Torrents...huh. I am guessing you use the word 'legal' loosely.
Curiously, the actual paper alludes to the fact that it was a case of "loss-of-function" for a gene product, ie., the inhibition of a certain genomic activity, rather than "gain-of-function" as is generally expected from a anthropocentric point of view that leads to "human-like features in mouse neurons" and perhaps human-like intelligence.
I happen to know one of the authors of the paper, and she was herself rather frustrated about exaggerations and misinterpretations she is seeing of her work in 'journalistic' literature.
She pointed to what she feels is a much more relevant summary of the paper here : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/04/a-duplicated-gene-shaped-human-brain-evolution%E2%80%A6-and-why-the-genome-project-missed-it/
Comments are comments. Comments are not journal articles. Comments can be said to be peer reviewed, to some extent, but then again, comments are not journal articles, comments need not follow any specific format for reporting of questions and results, comments are just comments.
I did not RTFA. I second your point. But even if we were to take a more generous view of commenting sections, the problem of noise filtering remains. Comment sections are a perfect example of what Asimov said best :
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
The amount of effort required to parse through comments to find gems of significant value is enormous. I know that this is that age of the crowd and so on, but there are certain issues on which the opinion of the crowd has on average very little value because of the complexity of the topic and the years of experience required to make informed conclusions. The trade-off between expert opinion and open crowdsourcing varies widely depending on what is the topic under discussion, and the userbase of the particular site. Vaccines and autism on a Californian site, for example.
On the contrary, there is much less money it now per researcher in relation to the problems expected to be solved. Competition for research positions remains high and results are still expected to be delivered. The way public funding is set up, failure is a disaster.
This creates the incentive for scientists to deliver the result, or the appearance of a successful project - by any means necessary.
This is why research laboratories in private enterprise have a higher incidence of pladiarism, but not fraud.
In academic science, there is little philosophical motivation to publish false results as the truth, unless the presence of those results and apparent success of the project is tied to the career and survival of the scientist.
A lot of things look ridiculous in hindsight. It's all a work in progress, always will be.
This is a philosophical decision. Any setting that compromises security should be OPT-IN by design, not the default.
IT Professionals of minimal competency will read complete release notes before rolling out a new version of any software. So if you have a "Fuck it Broke" situation, blame it on your IT guys.
And you would deserve it. If you maintain an insecure system, you are a threat not just to yourself, but to the entire internet.
You foster malicious code that can be used to pit your system against others. Everyone is connected on the Internet, and if you chose to be a weak link, you are everyone's problem.
I am usually sympathetic to upgrade issues, but if you are going to be in the wild of the internet, fix your software. You are on an internal closed network, no one is forcing you to upgrade Firefox. Maintain your legacy setup.
Cool story.
Why I use Windows 7?
I do taxes. I play 3D games. I do coding. I do a lot of scientific analysis and modeling for work. I do a lot of instrumentation control and driver manipulations during work for which I use specialized software like LabView and MATLAB and OriginPro.
Which is the operating system that allows me to do all of those things, without compromise ? You guessed it Windows 7.
How much does this cost me? Maybe a couple of thousand dollars including all the Windows and specialized software licenses, and zero time. How much will it cost me in time and money to replicate OriginPro on Linux or develop a peice of software that performs all those things on Linux?
The oh-so dangerous viruses that supposedly arrive through emails are taken care of by three things.
1. Get MS Security Essentials. Leave it on autoupdate.
2. Don't ever overrride its warning unless you confirm the file is non-executable/safe manually.
That's the thing with Linux...if I need it, I could get it an no cost. It makes infinitely more sense to run Linux on a Virtual Box on a Windows PC than the other way around , if you want to ensure that you never run into a situation that you are prevented from doing 'task x' in the intended way due to OS limitations.
The day a child runs out in a way the human behind a steering wheel is not able to react to due to their incompetence, blood alcohol levels, sleepiness, or distraction, there is always a tragedy.
This tragedy has nothing to do with whether a machine or a human is controlling the car. It's a tragedy of an unfortunate circumstance.
It is possible however that on an average the machine does better than or equal to a human. To determine if it is so, it requires testing. Which is being done. So what exactly is the problem? Why do you assume that the human level of intelligence is the end-all and be-all of doing everything? Time and again it has been demonstrated that human intelligence is biased towards certain kinds of tasks. And it is debatable if driving is one of those, considering it is something humans have started doing only in the last 150 years or so at most.
"Anyone visiting websites for emo teens will be fined for self-inflicted depression that taxes the entire public health care system."
What bullshit thoughts does Sarkozy have in his brain now?
Why is it confusing ?
You can file a complaint against any an individual in the police force of any nation, and the police force of that nation has the right to make arrests if that individual is on their soil.
In the case of Megaupload, a US Federal Prosecutor filed that said complaint in New Zealand, providing evidence of international crimes. The FBI then filed for extradition of the accused in New Zealand. There was a court hearing in New Zealand, which approved the extradition.
Just because the newspapers report in colloquial language and say "upon the FBI's request" , it doesn't mean due procedure is not followed. Of course, the gist of it is still that he was arrested due to a request by the US authorities.
Incorrect. The Geneva conventionS (there is more than 1), consider these to be a breach of the conventions:
willful killing, torture or inhumane treatment, including biological experiments
willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health
compelling someone to serve in the forces of a hostile power
willfully depriving someone of the right to a fair trial if accused of a war crime.
Also considered grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention are the following:
taking of hostages
extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly
unlawful deportation, transfer, or confinement.
So no. Freezing of assets is a perfectly humane way of dealing with a flight risk.
But soon they will. In Germany, public transport, supermarkets, any shops and restaurants will accept a debit card under a uniform debt card system called EC (Electronic Cash).
The only thing one does need cash is for microtransactions - very small purchases from kiosks or coffee shops (Upto 5 Euro). Low adoption there seems to be primarily because the debt card-pin-receipt printing method is significantly slower than just dropping a euro coin for a beer. However, I believe as the speedier near-field technologies like Google Wallet catch up, cash will be a thing of the past.
Disclaimer : This is a comment on the practical usage of cashless payment systems. This is not a comment on private or government monitoring of transactions, your personal opinion on Google's monopoly and threat to the free market, or about how things are better in Europe, or about whether you personally feel that the time required to pay by debt card is not a big deal and how we are 'oh so entitled' because we want to save the 60 seconds.
Edward Teller was just projecting the attitude of his time - an attitude based on economic theories stating that human society functions in a way where it's 'every man for himself'.
The RAND Corporation militarized this idea, and the nuclear arms race began as a solution to what was seen as a 'game of chicken', when in fact , it was Prisoner's dilemma.
Fortunately, we live in a time when this doctrine has been shown to be false and altruism has received better appreciation.
Yes, and the author of TFA acknowledges that as much by showing the Photoshop splash screen as a badge of shame.
Such as for example, spectral camouflage. Any method that depends on identifying spectra of compounds in a complex mixture depends on spectral deconvolution. Spectral deconvolution is easy to fool, but adding a compound that provides a "difference spectrum" , compensating for the differences in tobacco versus marijuana smoke.
Your knowledge of India-US geopolitics, is tentative at best. As an example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_States_relations ,
"According to some analysts, India-U.S. relations have strained over Obama administration's approach in handling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[15][16] India's National Security Adviser, M.K. Narayanan, criticized the Obama administration for linking the Kashmir dispute to the instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and said that by doing so, President Obama was "barking up the wrong tree".[17] The Foreign Policy too criticized Obama's approach towards South Asia saying that "India can be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem" in South Asia and suggested India to take a more proactive role in rebuilding Afghanistan irrespective of the attitude of the Obama administration.[18] In a clear indication of growing rift between India and the U.S., the former decided not to accept a U.S. invitation to attend a conference on Afghanistan.[19] Bloomberg reported that since 2008 Mumbai attacks, the public mood in India has been to pressure Pakistan more aggressively to take actions against the culprits behind the terrorist attack and this might reflect on the upcoming general elections in May 2009. Consequently, the Obama administration may find itself at odds with India's rigid stance against terrorism.[20]
Robert Blake, assistant secretary of United States' Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, dismissed any concerns over a rift with India regarding United States' AfPak policy. Calling India and the United States "natural allies",[6] Blake said that the United States cannot afford to meet the strategic priorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan at "the expense of India".[21]"
So who exactly wants to be friends here? And yes, there is corruption. Yes, there are safety issues. But these exist mainly for lower income groups in India. I am not saying this is an acceptable, but the fact is that the upper-middle and upper classes in India is doing fantastically well, enjoying a standard of living in some ways higher than that in the Western world. And ex-pirate bay admins, in all likelihood , easily fit in the upper middle class (at least) in India.
You don't have to go that far. Countries like India, China, Russia cover a very large area of the world , and these three have a history of not putting up with U.S.- , well B.S.
It is unlikely, for example that Sweden , the EU, or the US would be able to make India extradite them even if they were caught - and India is a big country to get lost in.
*facepalm*
Thank you GP, I see you your point now.
Actually, although Kapil Sibal is democratically elected, this seems to be his own idea. I am Indian, and currently visiting Mumbai. The amount of backlash he is getting from the Indian public is astonishing. Nearly all media is heavily criticising him for this move.
This is not a popularly supported move. And it will go away. Nothing to see , move along.