I'm concerned about the implications of storing personal data on Gmail, Facebook, and other social media sites.
Stop using them.
Ah, so they do some things that you like? Well now you've got to the nub of the problem : are the services that they provide to you sufficiently worthwhile to counterbalance the intrusiveness of their data mining.
Incidentally, doing things like trashing your Facebook account, then setting up a new one and re-friending lots of the same people won't do much, if anything, to break their chain of continuity. They'll re-connect your new and old accounts pretty damned quick.
At a minimum, you'd need to delete all of your data from Facebook while keeping the account open (but inactive) for some time, so that their various servers will replicate the emptied account around their global network (may only take seconds) and into their backups (hours, days, months? No idea. I emptied my account over a month ago, and I doubt that that data has gone.) Even then that rests on the somewhat forlorn hope that they'll actually obey your instructions to delete the data, not just tell you that they've deleted it.
Actually, I'd have to dig into my (encrypted) password store to find out what my log-in credentials for Facebook are. It's that long since I logged in.
Though squid eyes and mammal eyes are both functional eyes with a degree of surface similarity, in detail they're very different. In fact, the figure on the page you cite shows the precise difference I was going to raise : in mammalian eyes, the photoreceptor cells are covered by layers of nerves while in the mollusc eye the nerves are at the outside layer of the retina and the photoreceptors are on the inside. In consequence, mammalian eyes have a blind spot, unavoidably, while squid eyes don't.
How about a politician traveling to a less than friendly country?
The politician's actions may well be legitimate in his own country, but illegitimate in the country that they're visiting. Which make the politician a criminal. for a non-hysterical example, consider an American politician who goes to Germany to give a talk advocating the unreality of the Holocaust ; the politician may believe that the US's constitutional protection of free speech covers him, and he could carry on thinking that as the doors of the jail slam shut on his arse.
"Legitimacy" is a slippery concept, particularly once you get more than one jurisdiction involved. Try crossing the (unguarded) border between Scotland and England one day for further examples.
Granted, in much of Africa, the population density is NOWHERE near that high.
However simple economics indicates that the first places to get supplied with any novel sort of service will be the areas of highest population density, simply because you can then reach the highest number of people for the smallest investment in fixed assets.
Went on safari in Kenya and Tanzania last year. I had cell signal everywhere and 3G almost everywhere.
Try the signal away from the tourist hotspots. I was working in Tanzania last year, near the Mozambique border, and while I could generally get a voice connection, data was much more spotty. Which was awkward when the site's satellite dish broke down.
I use a number of Yahoo groups quite extensively, and simply haven't noticed any change in the format. The emails come in , the emails go out ; no change.
If the nuclear missiles had been unstoppable and non detectable, enabling the US to disintegrate the entire USSR without possible retaliation. There would be no Russia.
While not doubting that America would have killed every Russian in the late 1940s (what with them being allies in the war against Hitler... that's what you'd expect), I doubt whether there was actually enough material available until the late 1950s.
Since the existence of nuclear weapons was "out" by the end of the Second World War, then the production streams which operated in the Manhatten Project and which produced three bombs worth of material in 1945 would have needed to continue and be ramped up to produce a stockpile of several thousand warheads before the Russians developed their own bomb. That took over 10 years. Given that the Russians aren't idiots themselves, and acquired a lot of German expertise at the end of the war, and that the possibility of a nuclear bomb was known... I don't think that America could have built enough nuclear weapons to murder all of the Russians before the Russians developed their own bomb. and after that, it's a MAD world.
Spying efforts to get atomic technology from America to Russia may have moved the dates of events by a couple of years, but in the larger scale of things, probably didn't matter much.
Anyway, I'm completely unsurprised to see that the idea of murdering your allies is still not anathema. It's what I'd expect in America.
When do you think Li depletion will limit battery production?
I honestly don't know. I think that production is fairly well concentrated into a small number of mines, which doesn't auger well for being able to expand production rapidly, but I really don't know about the ultimate levels of reserves, or their distribution.
Reading the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Production), it's not clear whether there is likely to be a problem or not. It's not encouraging that half of the reserves are in one country, but the article reports several other recent major discoveries. Given that estimating reserves isn't exactly a precise science, it's probably good that a number of other resources are being developed.
"Ostensibly" they want to get their hands on him in order to torture him, get the details of all the material that he's taken, then execute him in a messy and very public manner, "pour encourager les autres."
No disagreement from me about that.
The intention to kill him should, of course, make it impossible to get him extradited from any European country to the USA. It probably won't protect him, or Assange if the spooks ever get their hands on him too, but it should do.
I was wondering about that too. The layout of ports seems very dense too, increasing the likelihood of clashes between connectors (yes, I know that connectors should be a standard size ; the operative word is, of course, "should").
Even at 3W/block, If you assembled a rack of these ("imagine a Beowulf cluster of them", to quote the Slah-meme), the ports would be nicely accessible at the back, but it's going to be generating quite a lot of heat in a compact space. Manageable, I'm sure. But it's an issue I'd be cautious of.
I suspect that it's a null problem. I don't know how my mother taught me to read at 3-4 years old - I was too young to notice, or care - but I do know that my reading didn't take off until my asymmetric short-sightedness was diagnosed when I was about 10. Almost 7 years of knowing how to read, but only doing it when necessary, as opposed to the voracious devourer of books I became when I got my glasses. What a waste!
To put it in context, if I'd had my vision diagnosed correctly when I was young, then I'd have had around 14 years of book-wormery when I went to university instead of the 7 years I did have. I don't know how things would have been different, but I'm sure they would have been.
Yes, there are certainly differences in many details in the Gospels. Do you read newspapers? Two different articles typically describe events from different points of view, adding different information.
I am not currently aware of a newspaper which claims to be the divinely inspired word of god(*), infallible and worthy of killing people to defend. Possibly you read the Pyongyang Pravda? I hold the writers of newspaper articles to slightly lower standards than I hold the (alleged) omnipotent inspirers of holy books ; strangely I find myself less disappointed by the newspapers.
(*) Not worth the dignity of capitalisation, since there seem to be so many of them.
Lithium is one of the rarer metals, in commercially extractable concentrations. A crustal abundance of about 20ppm is comparable to the abundance of fine diamond in a good quality ore. Clearly, ore bodies presently being worked are more concentrated than that.
Outside of a Larry Niven novel I don't believe in a "lucky" gene, but different people win the lottery every week.
FTFY
It is an important point in the novels. But also... look at what ultimately happened to her.
But if you're worried about the growing unfitness of the human race, I'm expecting a massive cull happening during the environmental collapse that's coming in the later part of this century will sort things out.
Doesn't worry me ; I've not put any cards in that deck. Deliberately.
Sure there were some societies like the Spartans who used eugenics of some kind to strengthen the master race,
... and they suffered the population problems that went with it. The Spartans proper were outnumbered around 100 to 1 by their slave workforce, the helots. Towards the end of the Hellenistic period the ratio may have been worse.
(and ultimately it didn't help them when the Romans came rolling into town).
It was Phillip of Macedon (father of Alexander, called "the Great") who came rolling in and effectively wiped the Spartans off the map. I don't think that he exterminated them, but I don't recall them being a significant force after that, and their lauded military prowess didn't do anything of note against the Macedonian phalanges.
Several hundred years later, the Romans came to town.
Neither can I, and I have only sat through a few episodes when that's what other people have been watching in the smoking room.
but the whole point of that episode is that LaForge, despite his birth defect, [yadda, yadda] but LaForge was a highly intelligent man. His blindness didn't make him less intelligent.
I thought that the point of that episode, of which I only saw a few minutes of before going into my book then finishing my fag and going back to work, was that LaForge (is that the character, or the actor? Meh.) was fitted with the visor [unique prototype?] as an infant, long before his potentials were realised.
So that's another lose for state-provided universal healthcare. It must be such an un-appealing idea for Hollywood to refer to it so often as if it were a good thing. Isn't it good that the land of Hollywood has 40% of it's population without healthcare provision, to protect them from being communists.
I Acknowledge that from 100,000 years ago to roughly 100 years from now being born [DELETE: blind or with any such handicap] has been a death sentence.
FTFY
Life can be accurately described as a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality. It may not be a confidence-inspiring description, but it is accurate. The existence of IVF techniques is the first significant modification to matters, and that still depends on most of the apparatus of sex (reduction division of genomes to form gametes ; combination of gametes to form a zygote ; development of the zygote). There is progress on treating the disease of "aging", but we've been working on it for less than 1000th of the duration of our species, so it's less than astonishing that we've made little progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop using them.
Ah, so they do some things that you like? Well now you've got to the nub of the problem : are the services that they provide to you sufficiently worthwhile to counterbalance the intrusiveness of their data mining.
Incidentally, doing things like trashing your Facebook account, then setting up a new one and re-friending lots of the same people won't do much, if anything, to break their chain of continuity. They'll re-connect your new and old accounts pretty damned quick.
At a minimum, you'd need to delete all of your data from Facebook while keeping the account open (but inactive) for some time, so that their various servers will replicate the emptied account around their global network (may only take seconds) and into their backups (hours, days, months? No idea. I emptied my account over a month ago, and I doubt that that data has gone.) Even then that rests on the somewhat forlorn hope that they'll actually obey your instructions to delete the data, not just tell you that they've deleted it.
Actually, I'd have to dig into my (encrypted) password store to find out what my log-in credentials for Facebook are. It's that long since I logged in.
Though squid eyes and mammal eyes are both functional eyes with a degree of surface similarity, in detail they're very different. In fact, the figure on the page you cite shows the precise difference I was going to raise : in mammalian eyes, the photoreceptor cells are covered by layers of nerves while in the mollusc eye the nerves are at the outside layer of the retina and the photoreceptors are on the inside. In consequence, mammalian eyes have a blind spot, unavoidably, while squid eyes don't.
The politician's actions may well be legitimate in his own country, but illegitimate in the country that they're visiting. Which make the politician a criminal. for a non-hysterical example, consider an American politician who goes to Germany to give a talk advocating the unreality of the Holocaust ; the politician may believe that the US's constitutional protection of free speech covers him, and he could carry on thinking that as the doors of the jail slam shut on his arse.
"Legitimacy" is a slippery concept, particularly once you get more than one jurisdiction involved. Try crossing the (unguarded) border between Scotland and England one day for further examples.
However simple economics indicates that the first places to get supplied with any novel sort of service will be the areas of highest population density, simply because you can then reach the highest number of people for the smallest investment in fixed assets.
Try the signal away from the tourist hotspots. I was working in Tanzania last year, near the Mozambique border, and while I could generally get a voice connection, data was much more spotty. Which was awkward when the site's satellite dish broke down.
I use a number of Yahoo groups quite extensively, and simply haven't noticed any change in the format. The emails come in , the emails go out ; no change.
While not doubting that America would have killed every Russian in the late 1940s (what with them being allies in the war against Hitler ... that's what you'd expect), I doubt whether there was actually enough material available until the late 1950s.
Since the existence of nuclear weapons was "out" by the end of the Second World War, then the production streams which operated in the Manhatten Project and which produced three bombs worth of material in 1945 would have needed to continue and be ramped up to produce a stockpile of several thousand warheads before the Russians developed their own bomb. That took over 10 years. Given that the Russians aren't idiots themselves, and acquired a lot of German expertise at the end of the war, and that the possibility of a nuclear bomb was known ... I don't think that America could have built enough nuclear weapons to murder all of the Russians before the Russians developed their own bomb. and after that, it's a MAD world.
Spying efforts to get atomic technology from America to Russia may have moved the dates of events by a couple of years, but in the larger scale of things, probably didn't matter much.
Anyway, I'm completely unsurprised to see that the idea of murdering your allies is still not anathema. It's what I'd expect in America.
I honestly don't know. I think that production is fairly well concentrated into a small number of mines, which doesn't auger well for being able to expand production rapidly, but I really don't know about the ultimate levels of reserves, or their distribution.
Reading the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Production), it's not clear whether there is likely to be a problem or not. It's not encouraging that half of the reserves are in one country, but the article reports several other recent major discoveries. Given that estimating reserves isn't exactly a precise science, it's probably good that a number of other resources are being developed.
I'd lose sleep over something else.
No disagreement from me about that.
The intention to kill him should, of course, make it impossible to get him extradited from any European country to the USA. It probably won't protect him, or Assange if the spooks ever get their hands on him too, but it should do.
Even at 3W/block, If you assembled a rack of these ("imagine a Beowulf cluster of them", to quote the Slah-meme), the ports would be nicely accessible at the back, but it's going to be generating quite a lot of heat in a compact space. Manageable, I'm sure. But it's an issue I'd be cautious of.
I suspect that it's a null problem. I don't know how my mother taught me to read at 3-4 years old - I was too young to notice, or care - but I do know that my reading didn't take off until my asymmetric short-sightedness was diagnosed when I was about 10. Almost 7 years of knowing how to read, but only doing it when necessary, as opposed to the voracious devourer of books I became when I got my glasses. What a waste!
To put it in context, if I'd had my vision diagnosed correctly when I was young, then I'd have had around 14 years of book-wormery when I went to university instead of the 7 years I did have. I don't know how things would have been different, but I'm sure they would have been.
I am not currently aware of a newspaper which claims to be the divinely inspired word of god(*), infallible and worthy of killing people to defend. Possibly you read the Pyongyang Pravda? I hold the writers of newspaper articles to slightly lower standards than I hold the (alleged) omnipotent inspirers of holy books ; strangely I find myself less disappointed by the newspapers.
(*) Not worth the dignity of capitalisation, since there seem to be so many of them.
ITYM "wasted", not "devoted". (Spent long enough in the trenches myself. Fuck the "god squad".)
To see what they can wrench out of him. http://xkcd.com/538/
Yet.
Lithium is one of the rarer metals, in commercially extractable concentrations. A crustal abundance of about 20ppm is comparable to the abundance of fine diamond in a good quality ore. Clearly, ore bodies presently being worked are more concentrated than that.
And don't forget to find the fucker who left it there and shove the bottle, broken end first, up their arse where it belongs.
If you send me a text like that, you'll get a "govorit Angleskii, perzhalste" in return.
(It means "speak English, please", mangled to suit Slashdot's incomprehensions of non=Latin characters.)
Now, get off my lawn.
For the people that it's responsible to, the shareholders.
It's not as if they lie about this.
The first part has happened. Twice for one guy, IIRC.
HPV? (Human PapillomaVirus)
(And there are probably others, if less clearly associated with cancers.)
FTFY
It is an important point in the novels. But also ... look at what ultimately happened to her.
Doesn't worry me ; I've not put any cards in that deck. Deliberately.
... and they suffered the population problems that went with it. The Spartans proper were outnumbered around 100 to 1 by their slave workforce, the helots. Towards the end of the Hellenistic period the ratio may have been worse.
It was Phillip of Macedon (father of Alexander, called "the Great") who came rolling in and effectively wiped the Spartans off the map. I don't think that he exterminated them, but I don't recall them being a significant force after that, and their lauded military prowess didn't do anything of note against the Macedonian phalanges.
Several hundred years later, the Romans came to town.
Neither can I, and I have only sat through a few episodes when that's what other people have been watching in the smoking room.
I thought that the point of that episode, of which I only saw a few minutes of before going into my book then finishing my fag and going back to work, was that LaForge (is that the character, or the actor? Meh.) was fitted with the visor [unique prototype?] as an infant, long before his potentials were realised.
So that's another lose for state-provided universal healthcare. It must be such an un-appealing idea for Hollywood to refer to it so often as if it were a good thing. Isn't it good that the land of Hollywood has 40% of it's population without healthcare provision, to protect them from being communists.
FTFY
Life can be accurately described as a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality. It may not be a confidence-inspiring description, but it is accurate.
The existence of IVF techniques is the first significant modification to matters, and that still depends on most of the apparatus of sex (reduction division of genomes to form gametes ; combination of gametes to form a zygote ; development of the zygote). There is progress on treating the disease of "aging", but we've been working on it for less than 1000th of the duration of our species, so it's less than astonishing that we've made little progress.
Sounds like he was having a joke to me.