back when BioSphere 2 was the rage it was easy to calculate what that model would look like spread over the whole planet. IIRC if 8 people lived in an area the size of biosphere 2 then 60 Billion could live on the planet Earth. Granted there were flaws in the biosphere 2 experiment such that the folks actually lost weight and couldn't build open fires due to slow rate of oxygen replenishment, couldn't use pesticides because the food cycles were too short, but still as an "upper limit" (somewhat beyond actually) it's a useful benchmark.
If you don't recall, Biosphere 2 had an "ocean" and a "desert" which for my calculations above I assumed were in roughly equal proportions to what's on Earth.
But that said, doesn't mean we're not about to encounter some extremely unusual times for our planet and species. What happens to the housing industry when population is stable? How much spare capacity is there in our food supplies if say a current major source is hit with a calamity (drought, fire, flood, etc)?
And because of that I'm surprised they didn't just swap out the recipe and leave the title the same. At least that would have been a bit harder to detect and may have been even funnier
The original summary mentioned that clicking on the clock itself put the user into a clock-settings page from which it was hard to return to the original alarm screen. IMHO people of all ages would be more comfortable playing with settings and screens if the "maze of twisty little passages" had an easy route to return to the previous screen.
Yea, when I'm older I might have clicked on the clock thinking I'm already IN the alarm setting and want to change the numbers of this alarm, and if I do that I might easily discover my mistake, but if I'm unable to return to the previous screen as easily as hitting a "back" button then... yea I'm going to be demotivated to play with new screens. I gotta choose right the first time or get lost trying to return to this screen.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
And for those who don't think gas prices will go that high, they already are in many parts of the world (and you can bet that cash-strapped state and federal governments are going to need to raise more taxes).
The threat of these gas prices here because legislators will seek to raise gas taxes is actually wrong/misleading in today's world. Here in WA State our legislators are considering MOVING AWAY FROM A GAS TAX to pay for road projects under the belief that hybrid/electric/high-efficiency owners aren't paying their fair share of road taxes if that is ONLY from gas taxes.
It's one thing to run away from gasoline because the core price of gas is high. It's quite another to run away from it because the taxes are high. In short that won't work here as legislators will merely find another way to tax you for the roads we all use.
Oh, I'm not EXCUSING it, I'm merely suggesting that the Oatmeal strategy may fail when there's other forces pushing people to misspelling. IDENTIFYING those additional reasons may ALSO help stop people from misspelling it.
To paraphrase Monty Python, this improvement of infrastructure is trickier than I thought.
I'm all for better, faster, cheaper, more efficient everything, BUT infrastructure spending is tricky to compare to STIMULUS spending. If we had more high speed rail transport, for example, wouldn't that be nearly a zero-sum game with airline travel today? I fail to see the stimulative effect of adding high speed rail to the US much as I'd personally like to see it (especially if it's one of those I can drive my car onto).
At this point I gotta say I'm more in favor of infrastructure spending that's also stimulative than on merely maintaining status-quo.
Are you kidding? The math part is elementary. I went to a North American high school, and could have easily passed the math part shortly after graduating. I think you just have an inferiority complex.
really? At one time I knew how to calculate square and cube roots by hand in a manner similar to long division, but no more. Are you claiming you remember how to do that?
Outside of that, yea the math part is more tedious than challenging. And even that's not challenging, more like a lost art.
If you believe this article the powers that be should force all porn providers to use IPv6 addresses too. If porn helps push technology forward then this should help IPv6 rollout.
I absolutely agree to start with the modern ones. The older ones are good (I got hooked with Tom Baker) but looking at them now the 70s/80s directing style shows through and they appear much slower paced to a modern audience.
I firmly believe you gotta love it before getting steeped in the older lore. I'd suggest just going straight to Tennant. I'm not convinced you should cherry pick among the fan-rated best (for example "Blink") mainly because some of the coolness of that will be lost on you first time through and besides if you start with the best... it's down hill from there.
After (if?) you're hooked, you may want to watch older ones involving the Master (for example) or any episodes set on Galifrey. (My fav is the episode right after Sarah Jane Smith left.) Or any of the villians who are repeat characters (cybermen, daleks, sontarans, etc)
One thing the new series is leaving out is how vast the interior of the tardis is/can be. One T.Baker episode showed it as huge, with rooms for each companion as well as a garden, pools, etc. Kinda wish they'd do that here.
While this is on point, generally, it's off topic from TFA.
Market forces are market forces, no arguing that and if you get left behind then so be it. What's insidious though, and what's discussed in TFA is how short-sighted many companies are. The big boss sees the cool new technology and opts to pay market rates that blow out the current internal rates to get it. What both he and his immediate underling (the PM here) failed to realize is that there's at least TWO key components to their new project (A) the hot new technology and (B) the deep-core knowledge of their current systems. (A) can be evaluated in the open market (B) can not be and if it wasn't for the senior programmer complaining, the company wouldn't have bothered to make an adjustment for him.
Now, programmers have choices... keep current with market skills and spend time doing this at the expense of not diving too deeply in the core guts of your current system OR maintain current skills and spend time learning the core system really well. Thing is, if you chose the latter your marketability is shot, you only know your original skills (but perhaps a bit better), but by the same token your value to the company (as long as that core system remains central to their success) also goes up. In a fair world you'd be paid based on your value to the company, cool-new-skills are generally valuable while deep knowledge of systems is only valuable to YOUR company, but still valuable. However, this rarely happens. Managers up the line tend to discount the latter and programmers specializing in the latter backed themselves into a poor position as the knowledge they learned doesn't translate into marketability in the wider market place and so WILL get a pay-hit if they leave (but the company would be hurt too).
And if you think the ideal programmer would do both, new skills and deep knowledge of current system, IMHO that's not feasible, if I had time to do both I'd still prefer to do more of the former as that is the more generally marketable skill and the one that's easier to convince management is the more valuable.
I think the company in question is a cut above average. They DID realize their mistake and took steps to correct it, but unfortunately they still made that mistake.
When I first read this I though some officer had the unfortunate last name of "Bubbles" and that the protestor was blowing bubbles as a mockery of his name. I was all set to have a smidgeon of sympathy for the officer. But then I saw the video. Nope... "Bubbles" was not his surname, he was just a dick.
Why not train the geeks to understand all the technical details?
This is actually an interesting perspective. The general question is... in content vs technology, who should be in charge of *any* form of cybersecurity... the content guys or the tech guys? Extending the metaphor, should bankers or geeks be in charge of financial cyber security?
The point, my eager-to-resort-to-mockery friend, is that appearing to appreciate Open Source is what Microsoft believes is in its interests today. It was not in Microsoft's interests yesterday (not literally 24 hours ago but figuratively speaking) and may not be in their interests tomorrow.
While I agree with you 100% you and the other poster are arguing different points. IMHO the other poster is complaining about MS's lack of vision. He would rather see a MS that was visionary enough to see a future where companies like MS and OpenSource could co-exist side by side and would actively move to make that vision a reality. Instead we see MS doing what most companies do, assess market need and move to fill that need.
Taking the visionary path is hard for a mature company. Blocking the visionary path (as MS perhaps did yesterday in your words) is short sighted, but also something most companies do while they wrestle with the visionary change that's before them. MS is large enough to do both... specifically put up the blocking strategy while they formulate a co-exist strategy and perhaps that is what they are doing as we speak.
Your story is awful and I completely understand, so don't take this the wrong way. But in between the ambulance bill and a jail cell there's you taking your child to the hospital/emergency room on your own.
Granted, this would be a very odd call... you dial 911... tell the operator you're driving your kid to the hospital yourself ("no don't send an ambulance"), spouse is on the phone asking about what you can do en-route to save the child (mouth to mouth, cpr, etc).
NOW the question is would THAT have resulted either in a monetary charge (911 advice) or a criminal charge (not waiting for an ambulance).
In my case, I live far enough out that I'd be 1/2 way to the local emergency room before an ambulance would arrive, so the self-driving option is something I'd probably do for the quicker response I'd get, not for the cost savings measure.
I tried teaching my kids programming many years ago and I started with C. Big mistake because the details of doing something as simple as PRINT are confusing and way off topic from the meat of programming.
Since then I've self-taught myself perl, php and python and those languages, with much simpler print statements, are easier to master for complete beginners. But I am not a complete beginner. I have years of C, C++ and unix shell experience in the telecommunications field. Consequently it's easier for me to learn a new language because I know what languages should do and am frequently just puzzled by the specifics of the local syntax. However, what I've found is that by far the easiest language to learn in this regard is PHP because when I run into one of these problems I google something like "php for loop" and I choose the answer on php.net and I get precisely the answer I'm looking for. A similar search in Perl or Python points me to a generic level page on control structures which requires me to scan the page looking for the for-loop part and in general takes 5 minutes of scanning to find the spot vs zero minutes of scanning for PHP. One interrupts my flow, the other does not.
I believe in the Singularity but as the internet and computers work to make us more intelligent and productive allowing more technology to make us even more intelligent and productive there has to come a point of some push back. The OP's article is one such example of push back. As more of my stuff gets out on the internet that I need to defend against or make excuses or apologies for then I need to take some time away from improving society and "waste time" defending myself.
The singularity will (probably) come, but examples like this show that the forecast unchecked growth does indeed have some checking mechanism.
a) how long before right wing pundits claim that this is proof Chu isn't doing the job he was hired for? b) is this viewing technique applicable in reverse for microchip optical etching/lithography?
Also, debates like this will end when we can stop relying on expert opinions and instead ask the experts to explain their reasoning to us in ways we can understand. Edward Tufte's analysis of the Challenger disaster is my favorite example of this. You can read the investigative commission's report is available, but for a variety of reasons the scientists and engineers tried to convince their managers to scrub the launch by giving them a crash course in the physics of the situation. Reading between the lines, the gist of the argument can be summarized as "cold temperatures cause booster rockets to fail". But the managers were successfully able to convince themselves things were Ok in part because there were a few damaged booster rockets at warm temperatures. (flawed logic I know, but there it is.)
Tufte came along (with a bit more prep time than the engineers had) and produced a graph plotting damage vs temperature for all the launches they had data on. The outliers of warm damage where there to see as outliers while a damage trend was clearly visible starting for launches as "warm" as 65 degrees F.
Experts can be rightfully questioned on many things, science, personal motivation, skill, knowledge, etc. Of those the only one the news media seems interested in pursing is the personal motivation side which is also perhaps the least relevant to the argument at hand. The news media isn't going to change, but perhaps the experts can. Datagraphics allow for many (but not all) arguments to be presented in a compelling and interesting way. Even if the underlying data is alleged to be flawed other experts should be happy to provide corrected data. This would keep the argument on the important parts instead of the sensationalistic but irrelevant parts. We should all run from experts who say "trust me, I'm an expert".
I thought this sinkhole looked more structured than normal. I had thought there was an underground parking facility which sunk along with the building on top. That could explain the smooth, sheer and cylindrical walls, but I guess there's a more ominous explanation.
Interestingly the article says there's hope if they manage their water/sewers properly.
Can someone British explain to me (an American) what an "A-level" is? Since the tests include Visual Basic and Pascal I'm assuming it's some sort of high school level exam and is used as an entrance into college? If so, I agree to remove C from this under the expectation that C will be taught at the college.
If instead A-Levels are exams required to graduate from college, then this seems to be a silly move.
Slashdot Mirror
back when BioSphere 2 was the rage it was easy to calculate what that model would look like spread over the whole planet. IIRC if 8 people lived in an area the size of biosphere 2 then 60 Billion could live on the planet Earth. Granted there were flaws in the biosphere 2 experiment such that the folks actually lost weight and couldn't build open fires due to slow rate of oxygen replenishment, couldn't use pesticides because the food cycles were too short, but still as an "upper limit" (somewhat beyond actually) it's a useful benchmark.
If you don't recall, Biosphere 2 had an "ocean" and a "desert" which for my calculations above I assumed were in roughly equal proportions to what's on Earth.
But that said, doesn't mean we're not about to encounter some extremely unusual times for our planet and species. What happens to the housing industry when population is stable? How much spare capacity is there in our food supplies if say a current major source is hit with a calamity (drought, fire, flood, etc)?
And because of that I'm surprised they didn't just swap out the recipe and leave the title the same. At least that would have been a bit harder to detect and may have been even funnier
"Our bombs smell like cupcakes".
The original summary mentioned that clicking on the clock itself put the user into a clock-settings page from which it was hard to return to the original alarm screen. IMHO people of all ages would be more comfortable playing with settings and screens if the "maze of twisty little passages" had an easy route to return to the previous screen.
Yea, when I'm older I might have clicked on the clock thinking I'm already IN the alarm setting and want to change the numbers of this alarm, and if I do that I might easily discover my mistake, but if I'm unable to return to the previous screen as easily as hitting a "back" button then... yea I'm going to be demotivated to play with new screens. I gotta choose right the first time or get lost trying to return to this screen.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
And for those who don't think gas prices will go that high, they already are in many parts of the world (and you can bet that cash-strapped state and federal governments are going to need to raise more taxes).
The threat of these gas prices here because legislators will seek to raise gas taxes is actually wrong/misleading in today's world. Here in WA State our legislators are considering MOVING AWAY FROM A GAS TAX to pay for road projects under the belief that hybrid/electric/high-efficiency owners aren't paying their fair share of road taxes if that is ONLY from gas taxes.
It's one thing to run away from gasoline because the core price of gas is high. It's quite another to run away from it because the taxes are high. In short that won't work here as legislators will merely find another way to tax you for the roads we all use.
Oh, I'm not EXCUSING it, I'm merely suggesting that the Oatmeal strategy may fail when there's other forces pushing people to misspelling. IDENTIFYING those additional reasons may ALSO help stop people from misspelling it.
loose choose moose
The loose lose misspelling, much as it irritates me, is understandable because of pronounciation. Consider
chose - choose
lose - loose.
Of the above, choose rhymes with lose, so I can certainly appreciate why people think choose rhymes with loose.
Perhaps if we had more moose around people would spell this correctly (moose rhymes with loose, but not choose)
That should motivate change.
To paraphrase Monty Python, this improvement of infrastructure is trickier than I thought.
I'm all for better, faster, cheaper, more efficient everything, BUT infrastructure spending is tricky to compare to STIMULUS spending. If we had more high speed rail transport, for example, wouldn't that be nearly a zero-sum game with airline travel today? I fail to see the stimulative effect of adding high speed rail to the US much as I'd personally like to see it (especially if it's one of those I can drive my car onto).
At this point I gotta say I'm more in favor of infrastructure spending that's also stimulative than on merely maintaining status-quo.
Are you kidding? The math part is elementary. I went to a North American high school, and could have easily passed the math part shortly after graduating. I think you just have an inferiority complex.
really? At one time I knew how to calculate square and cube roots by hand in a manner similar to long division, but no more. Are you claiming you remember how to do that?
Outside of that, yea the math part is more tedious than challenging. And even that's not challenging, more like a lost art.
If you believe this article the powers that be should force all porn providers to use IPv6 addresses too. If porn helps push technology forward then this should help IPv6 rollout.
I absolutely agree to start with the modern ones. The older ones are good (I got hooked with Tom Baker) but looking at them now the 70s/80s directing style shows through and they appear much slower paced to a modern audience.
I firmly believe you gotta love it before getting steeped in the older lore. I'd suggest just going straight to Tennant. I'm not convinced you should cherry pick among the fan-rated best (for example "Blink") mainly because some of the coolness of that will be lost on you first time through and besides if you start with the best... it's down hill from there.
After (if?) you're hooked, you may want to watch older ones involving the Master (for example) or any episodes set on Galifrey. (My fav is the episode right after Sarah Jane Smith left.) Or any of the villians who are repeat characters (cybermen, daleks, sontarans, etc)
One thing the new series is leaving out is how vast the interior of the tardis is/can be. One T.Baker episode showed it as huge, with rooms for each companion as well as a garden, pools, etc. Kinda wish they'd do that here.
While this is on point, generally, it's off topic from TFA.
Market forces are market forces, no arguing that and if you get left behind then so be it. What's insidious though, and what's discussed in TFA is how short-sighted many companies are. The big boss sees the cool new technology and opts to pay market rates that blow out the current internal rates to get it. What both he and his immediate underling (the PM here) failed to realize is that there's at least TWO key components to their new project (A) the hot new technology and (B) the deep-core knowledge of their current systems. (A) can be evaluated in the open market (B) can not be and if it wasn't for the senior programmer complaining, the company wouldn't have bothered to make an adjustment for him.
Now, programmers have choices... keep current with market skills and spend time doing this at the expense of not diving too deeply in the core guts of your current system OR maintain current skills and spend time learning the core system really well. Thing is, if you chose the latter your marketability is shot, you only know your original skills (but perhaps a bit better), but by the same token your value to the company (as long as that core system remains central to their success) also goes up. In a fair world you'd be paid based on your value to the company, cool-new-skills are generally valuable while deep knowledge of systems is only valuable to YOUR company, but still valuable. However, this rarely happens. Managers up the line tend to discount the latter and programmers specializing in the latter backed themselves into a poor position as the knowledge they learned doesn't translate into marketability in the wider market place and so WILL get a pay-hit if they leave (but the company would be hurt too).
And if you think the ideal programmer would do both, new skills and deep knowledge of current system, IMHO that's not feasible, if I had time to do both I'd still prefer to do more of the former as that is the more generally marketable skill and the one that's easier to convince management is the more valuable.
I think the company in question is a cut above average. They DID realize their mistake and took steps to correct it, but unfortunately they still made that mistake.
Instead of skimming, you are forced to actually read every word.
EXACTLY. I wonder if this is a counter example to the speed reading claims.
When I first read this I though some officer had the unfortunate last name of "Bubbles" and that the protestor was blowing bubbles as a mockery of his name. I was all set to have a smidgeon of sympathy for the officer. But then I saw the video. Nope... "Bubbles" was not his surname, he was just a dick.
Why not train the geeks to understand all the technical details?
This is actually an interesting perspective. The general question is ... in content vs technology, who should be in charge of *any* form of cybersecurity... the content guys or the tech guys? Extending the metaphor, should bankers or geeks be in charge of financial cyber security?
And using power tools makes us weaker.
So how many boffins died to bring 3.3Khz to our phones?
74 years ago when they made that policy? I'd say probably all of them.
The point, my eager-to-resort-to-mockery friend, is that appearing to appreciate Open Source is what Microsoft believes is in its interests today. It was not in Microsoft's interests yesterday (not literally 24 hours ago but figuratively speaking) and may not be in their interests tomorrow.
While I agree with you 100% you and the other poster are arguing different points. IMHO the other poster is complaining about MS's lack of vision. He would rather see a MS that was visionary enough to see a future where companies like MS and OpenSource could co-exist side by side and would actively move to make that vision a reality. Instead we see MS doing what most companies do, assess market need and move to fill that need.
Taking the visionary path is hard for a mature company. Blocking the visionary path (as MS perhaps did yesterday in your words) is short sighted, but also something most companies do while they wrestle with the visionary change that's before them. MS is large enough to do both... specifically put up the blocking strategy while they formulate a co-exist strategy and perhaps that is what they are doing as we speak.
Your story is awful and I completely understand, so don't take this the wrong way. But in between the ambulance bill and a jail cell there's you taking your child to the hospital/emergency room on your own.
Granted, this would be a very odd call... you dial 911... tell the operator you're driving your kid to the hospital yourself ("no don't send an ambulance"), spouse is on the phone asking about what you can do en-route to save the child (mouth to mouth, cpr, etc).
NOW the question is would THAT have resulted either in a monetary charge (911 advice) or a criminal charge (not waiting for an ambulance).
In my case, I live far enough out that I'd be 1/2 way to the local emergency room before an ambulance would arrive, so the self-driving option is something I'd probably do for the quicker response I'd get, not for the cost savings measure.
I tried teaching my kids programming many years ago and I started with C. Big mistake because the details of doing something as simple as PRINT are confusing and way off topic from the meat of programming.
Since then I've self-taught myself perl, php and python and those languages, with much simpler print statements, are easier to master for complete beginners. But I am not a complete beginner. I have years of C, C++ and unix shell experience in the telecommunications field. Consequently it's easier for me to learn a new language because I know what languages should do and am frequently just puzzled by the specifics of the local syntax. However, what I've found is that by far the easiest language to learn in this regard is PHP because when I run into one of these problems I google something like "php for loop" and I choose the answer on php.net and I get precisely the answer I'm looking for. A similar search in Perl or Python points me to a generic level page on control structures which requires me to scan the page looking for the for-loop part and in general takes 5 minutes of scanning to find the spot vs zero minutes of scanning for PHP. One interrupts my flow, the other does not.
I believe in the Singularity but as the internet and computers work to make us more intelligent and productive allowing more technology to make us even more intelligent and productive there has to come a point of some push back. The OP's article is one such example of push back. As more of my stuff gets out on the internet that I need to defend against or make excuses or apologies for then I need to take some time away from improving society and "waste time" defending myself.
The singularity will (probably) come, but examples like this show that the forecast unchecked growth does indeed have some checking mechanism.
Two comments...
a) how long before right wing pundits claim that this is proof Chu isn't doing the job he was hired for?
b) is this viewing technique applicable in reverse for microchip optical etching/lithography?
Also, debates like this will end when we can stop relying on expert opinions and instead ask the experts to explain their reasoning to us in ways we can understand. Edward Tufte's analysis of the Challenger disaster is my favorite example of this. You can read the investigative commission's report is available, but for a variety of reasons the scientists and engineers tried to convince their managers to scrub the launch by giving them a crash course in the physics of the situation. Reading between the lines, the gist of the argument can be summarized as "cold temperatures cause booster rockets to fail". But the managers were successfully able to convince themselves things were Ok in part because there were a few damaged booster rockets at warm temperatures. (flawed logic I know, but there it is.)
Tufte came along (with a bit more prep time than the engineers had) and produced a graph plotting damage vs temperature for all the launches they had data on. The outliers of warm damage where there to see as outliers while a damage trend was clearly visible starting for launches as "warm" as 65 degrees F.
Experts can be rightfully questioned on many things, science, personal motivation, skill, knowledge, etc. Of those the only one the news media seems interested in pursing is the personal motivation side which is also perhaps the least relevant to the argument at hand. The news media isn't going to change, but perhaps the experts can. Datagraphics allow for many (but not all) arguments to be presented in a compelling and interesting way. Even if the underlying data is alleged to be flawed other experts should be happy to provide corrected data. This would keep the argument on the important parts instead of the sensationalistic but irrelevant parts. We should all run from experts who say "trust me, I'm an expert".
yea.. finally a reference!
Also Fringe would work.
I thought this sinkhole looked more structured than normal. I had thought there was an underground parking facility which sunk along with the building on top. That could explain the smooth, sheer and cylindrical walls, but I guess there's a more ominous explanation.
Interestingly the article says there's hope if they manage their water/sewers properly.
Can someone British explain to me (an American) what an "A-level" is? Since the tests include Visual Basic and Pascal I'm assuming it's some sort of high school level exam and is used as an entrance into college? If so, I agree to remove C from this under the expectation that C will be taught at the college.
If instead A-Levels are exams required to graduate from college, then this seems to be a silly move.