Can we assume that one day North Korea will attack something? I've always thought that they're just posturing, but this most recent "test" makes me hesitate...
North Korea is the buffer between China and the US forces, a North Korean attack would lead to the regime's fall and probably a reunification into a strong pro-western country which I'm sure China doesn't want. Despite all the saber rattling I'm fairly sure Kim wouldn't try pulling it off alone. In fact, I think China would tell him that in case of a unilateral attack they'd roll in and occupy North Korea themselves before US-led forces could do it. Even if 99,99% of the population is ignorant some must know the real state of the country and its technology, this is not Nazi Germany. This is a backwater podunk with a not-so-unwarranted paranoia after being named in the "axis of evil" and the invasion of Iraq. Fuck what everyone else thinks, it's better to have the arms to defend yourself and act like you could use them. He'd be right at home in the US, in another life.
They fear them because of the very real and demonstrably accurate statistical fact of black violence. Blacks kill other Blacks at astronomically high levels. Cops would be suicidal to pretend otherwise.
Roughly speaking, black murderers constitute around 0.03% of the black population. Meanwhile, white murderers constitute around 0.005% of the white population. (...) >99% of Muslims are NOT terrorists.
So say I'm a cop approaching a suspect's car, is a 0.03%/0.005% = 600% difference in risk of getting shot trivial or not? Or if I'm the security service, the ratio of Muslim to non-Muslim terrorists? Most rentals go well, but one horror story can easily wipe out the profit of a hundred ordinary rentals. It could happen with white people, it could happen with black people, it's unlikely to happen with white people and it's unlikely to happen with black people. But if the unlikely is still a lot more likely to happen with black people rather than white people, is that bigotry or risk management?
If I've been out partying and is walking home late at night and see a woman walking the same way I bet she's a lot more worried I'll jump her and rape her in the bushes than I am that she'll do the same to me. Because I'm male and she's female and most rapists are male and rape victims female. I'd say it's pretty daft to call that sexist, even though it's entirely based on our sex with no regards to the actual person and wouldn't happen if it were two men or two women. That 99%+ don't drag women into bushes to rape them doesn't mean that fear is false or misguided.
Of course a selective bias may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if everyone looks to the more likely suspect they might also be disproportionally often investigated and caught compared to non-likely suspects leading to excessive confirmation of the bias. That is to say if the real numbers are 60/40 and the chance of getting caught is also 60/40 the actual figures will look like 0.6*0.6 = 36% vs 0.4*0.4 = 16% leading to the false conclusion that one group is more than twice as likely to be the perp rather than 50%. But in a world of limited knowledge and resources we tend to apply what we have, even though it's unfair to those who belong to a group but go against the statistics of that group.
So... if I have a business unit that's losing money and I tell it to either turn a profit or they'll be laid off, am I responsible when the employees cheat and break the law to save their jobs because there's no other way? If you hand in your resignation, can I make you a counteroffer or is "ok" the only acceptable response? A lot of this pressure is natural, everybody's looking for ways to increase volume and price, cut costs and reduce losses. And then somebody takes it too far, but how far is too far? Who started it, who's doing it, who's in on it might not be so crystal clear.
I mean it's a little easy to just blame it on your manager who'll blame it on their manager and so on all the way to the top until only Hitler is guilty and the rest were just following orders and trying to fulfill impossible goals. Sorry to Godwin the thread but this is a criminal conspiracy and while there's certainly leaders who should be doing hard time it should be pretty obvious to everyone that when you're faking customer accounts you're doing something blatantly illegal. I say aggressively prosecute everyone you can prove was in on it, top to bottom.
I'm not sure I like the implications of that line of reasoning, because if you create a derivative work in violation of copyright law through instructions to include referenced content then it stands to reason the same would apply to omissions, making ad blockers illegal. Or at the very least only legal through fair use, which it may or may not be as it ruins the copyright holder's business model. And if that's where you draw the line, you're basically relying on the client's decision to show <a href....> tags as links and <img> tags as inline images, should you then be liable if someone creates a client that does the opposite? A HTTP file is a glorified recipe, there's a difference between sending someone the Anarchist's Cookbook with instructions to make explosives and the resulting explosives.
Imagine how this works if you have for example banner ads on your site, they're incorporated in the page so now you're potentially liable if someone serves up an ad that contains a copyright violation because it's your responsibility to preemptively verify that any image you serve up on your website is legal. Not that there's any centralized record of all copyrighted items and you can't simply shift the responsibility and say if the ad server sends it then it must be legal. If that were the case, they wouldn't have been convicted in this case. Or you run a forum with the img tag enabled, you're the one making profit so are you now liable for what users reference in? Sorry, it's not that I want to support stealing bandwidth by linking other people's images but I think the cure is worse than the problem.
Isn't this move sacrificing one of the major advantages of owning - and developing for - a console, which is its standardized hardware?
Yes. But that you're stuck on a hardware platform many years old is also the greatest drawback. I'm surprised there is no middle ground between the infinite combinations of the PC markets and the "one console to rule them all". Like say you declare - in advance - that you'll issue bi-annually updated consoles. All released games are required to minimum support the N-1 and N-2 versions. So instead of the PS3 (2006) and PS4 (2013) you'd have PS 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and any game released today must support 2012-2016. You'd have a six year rolling window before your console is too old to play the latest games, a game only has to deal with three configurations (low, medium, high) and there's never a "bad time" to buy a new console. Though I guess the pre-x86 generations were different, but now when they're just PCs in drag I don't see why a 7 year cycle is useful.
Smart watches will become as popular as Smart phones only when they become functional enough to completely replace Smart phones. Until then, most people aren't going to bother carrying around (and recharge) two devices when carrying around one will do.
I already put my smartphone on the charger and take off my "dumbwatch" every night, plugging in my watch would only take a few seconds. It's the intersection between things that are more complicated than checking the time and things that'd take less time than whipping out my smartphone I'm struggling to find. Then again I have a small iPhone SE, maybe if have one of those plus size phones you feel the need for a smaller device but then I think you got the wrong phone not the right watch.
You can fake it in software. I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh. But it's not real bokeh, it's a digital manipulation.
Not sure I care. Reality is as my eyes see it, either way you're trying to manipulate reality except one limits you to physical effects and the other uses both physical and digital effects. Particularly if you are measuring focused light and simulate the out of focus effect you could have had with a different lens, I think it's more in the direction towards adjusting color/contrast/white balance and not photoshopping in Gollum. I suppose if you're in some kind of nature photography competition or news reporting where accuracy to reality is paramount this might be off limits, but for average people who'll just as easily use snapchat and instagram filters this is about a 1/10 on the photo manipulation scale.
This is why I am waiting for the iPhone 7s. It's going to remove the Lightning plug and all you have to do is say a 4 hour prayer to save Steve Job's soul every day to charge the device.
Well, I suppose that could be useful after the App-ocalypse. We might actually get temples dedicated to Jobs, where they recite the book of Jobs aka the Apple EULA. We could have the orthodox church all in white and a reformed church where they worship the rose gold, gray, silver and black which of course hate each other. His followers will declare that there is no god but Jobs, and Siri is his prophet. And they'll all be awaiting the rAPPture, where all the faithful will be uploaded to the iCloud to live forever. Okay, I'll go take my meds now...
About 90% of the women who learn their child will have Down's syndrome choose to have an abortion. Very few will say much if anything at all about it out of respect for the other 10% and those who didn't have the test at all. Maybe we won't do designer babies but at least remove genes strongly corrolated with bad medical conditions, because ultimately nobody wants their kid to have potential heart/lung/liver/kidney diseases, be predisposed for cancer and whatnot. But the implied critique against other parents who didn't have their kids screened means it's going to be an extremely touchy subject. Particular if you insult mom, accusations of being deadbeat dads don't seem to carry the same weight but tell a mom she's a bad parent then all hell will come raining down on you.
On the other hand: - The ARM "microserver" thing seem to have flopped, Xeons rule unchallenged - Fewer discrete GPUs, Intel now has 72% market share in graphics - Win10 is spyware on any CPU, not that most people care anyway - Premium convertibles seem to do well against iPad Pro and such - Post-Sandy Bridge: Smaller CPUs (mm^2) at same price & performance = more profit
Intel has mostly backtracked on their smartphone/tablet ambitions, but ARM hasn't exactly found a foothold in Intel's domain either. And AMD are so on the ropes that even if they pull out a killer product they need time to recover before they can significantly hurt Intel and they're struggling against nVidia too and as it seems Zen will be a 2017 launch that's 5 long years they've been out of the high-end business. I wouldn't invest in their stock but I'd say Intel could make bigger blunders than the Pentium 4 and still easily stay on top.
Are you willing to pay for it? Can you convince another million users to do so? if not, why should they add new features to an 8 year old OS? What were you doing 8 years ago and are you willing to stop what you are doing now and spend the next year supporting it for no gain?
To be honest, what I really want isn't really Win7, I'd like a "Win10 Nano" home edition that ships with everything off, defaults to security patches only like the Enterprise LTSB and only serves as an application execution environment. I doubt it would cost Microsoft much to offer such an alternative, because the bits and pieces already exist they just choose not to offer that kind of combination. Yes, that means more than one edition to support but they already do that and I don't think enterprise applications will play by the home edition any time soon, so it's really just to let power/paranoid users tap into that.
We still use Skype for DM, but all voice chat now goes over Discord as Skype had a habit of throwing us out of full screen when people joined/left the conversation. We are fairly casual gamers and form groups based on whoever is online, so it's not unusual for someone to join late or leave early. Also you can easily adjust volume per participant, which lets you decide your own mix if someone is being loud or quiet or talking too close/far from the mic. Otherwise the sound quality has been pretty equal and we pretty much never close connection, so it's not like Skype is bad... but it's not the best.
It is surprisingly easy using tools like Handbrake (it really does hammer your PC though) to convert from one codec to another as well as converting 8bit to 10bit or even 12bit. The main reason to convert H264 to H265 is the fact that you can get a reduction in file size from 55% to 65%
transcoding from one loss codec to another -> *facepalm 1* 8 bit source -> 10/12 bit destination *facepalm 2* 55-65% and in some cases much better than that -> *facepalm 3*
It only makes sense to self insure if you have a large number of things that you can average the risk over. It's also often a good idea to take a middle path. For example, the university that I work for gets a good deal on travel insurance, because the underwriters only have to cover very rare (and expensive) payouts.
In that particular case it might also be to have a professional organization that can help travelers in need, do fraud detection and so on, not the monetary risk as such. It also depends on how deep pockets you can pull on, like NASA is not really just NASA they're a branch of the US government. If you have an understanding that this business unit will ordinarily deliver a good profit and occasionally a huge loss the parent unit/company/owners might decide they'll be your de facto insurance, eating the loss when it happens.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you can count this one towards failed launches, if you count a failed ground test then you'd also have to count all the successful ones. They did blow up the payload though, maybe next time they'll use a dummy until it's for real. I mean with this super-chilled fuel they use now they have to drain it after the test and do it again when the launch window opens, it's not like the rocket stands there ready to go. Though I suppose you'll need an awfully big crane....
I'd probably pick the Panasonic HC-X1, a 1" UHD/60 fps camcorder for $3199. After having had 1080p60 cameras I couldn't imagine going back to 30 fps, haters gonna hate on HFR but the "movie feel" is a fuzzy wish for things the way they were like gramophone records as opposed to the cold and sterile CDs. Hopefully it shows up in a consumer camcorder next CES.
Isn't there some penalty.. for trying to take down what shouldn't be taken down?
Nope. There isn't. (...) Let's say I do hold the copyright on Hogan's Heroes and I send a DMCA notice about your Cowboy Bebop fanpage (and your Ride the Lightning lyrics page) (and your game walk-through) (and your Scientology OT III tuition invoice) (and a poem you wrote when you were 12 years old), claiming you are infringing my Hogan's Heroes copyright. Consequences: none.
Actually if you ran some kind of targeted attack trying to harass someone there are penalties if you "knowingly materially misrepresents" infringing activity, even if you own the copyright. It doesn't cover accidental or reckless notices by a bot though, so ignorance is bliss.
I'm always impressed that software devs and project managers and database architects understand business strategy so well that they only need about 10% of the contextual information about what's going on in the business, and no access to financial statements... and yet can tell that the C-suite has it all wrong. Have you ever thought about being CEO? We would love to have you.
At the CEO level I think nerds might be way off the mark at times like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." because average people don't think the way we do. When it comes to funny new systems / technology / organization / methods though we're often the ones stuck trying to make things work after the executives have read buzzwords in trade magazines and the salesmen has collected their commissions. I think we very early get an idea who knows what they're doing and not but as a "support" organization we don't get a choice so we waste tons of time on projects that'll flop miserably. I know that I've written a lot of good code that was ultimately utterly futile and that's grounds for resentment.
My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
Except you know.... the house? If that's downpaid or at least eligible for a bigger loan I'd consider that a rather healthy savings. I mean it's one thing to run a tight ship on liquidity if you really have the assets and you're just aggressively paying off a loan or investing and use the remainder of the paycheck as a form of self-procrastination, as opposed to running on fumes. I'm usually not cutting it that close as $400... but if I did I'd have a $6000 credit limit that I'm not using and much more once I've increased the mortgage so it's not like I'm really cutting it close. It's the 14% that said "no can do" that have a real problem, the other 33%... maybe, maybe not.
More generally, it is necessary that the universal basic income is sufficient not to force those on it into defacto poverty.
The way national poverty is typically defined as those earning less than a percentage of the average (50 or 60%, usually) there will always be poverty. If you could have almost the same by not working as you could by working, what would you choose? It's supposed to be enough to cover the essentials so you won't freeze or starve but it's not going to be great. Since everyone else also gets UBI if you don't have any other income you'll be at the absolute bottom of the pool. That guy who works minimum wage at McD will live considerably better than you. It's a life of Ramen noodles and the cheapest accommodation money can buy.
The one and only thing that can hope to work is to provide an income that not only covers all the basics but also leaves money left over to spend on things that are not basic needs. If we do not do this we will surely face a total economic collapse and a loss of our nation.
Nothing is gained if you tax people who would have spent it anyways, then you're just redistributing and not helping the economy. To improve the economy you need to coerce those who accumulate money or take it abroad (rich people and corporations mostly) to use it in the local economy. Both of those are pretty skilled at avoiding taxes though, so for the most part you hit the middle class resulting in their purchasing power going down by the same amount the poor's goes up. UBI's main claim is to reduce overhead and administration, increasing consumer spending without a basis in the underlying economy only leads to disaster.
It's important to not let short-sighted goals get in the way of your vision. It's also important to not let your vision get in the way of making progress. I have this colleague at work who said something like "I've been trying to get them to do this for more than ten years now" and to be honest I didn't have the heart to tell him he could try another ten and it would make no difference at all. Basically because he's arguing for a big bang change where we switch from way A to way B overnight. The arguments are in fact strong but the leap is just too great. Meanwhile I've been making progress because I got them from A to A' to A'' to A''' nibbling away at the worst flaws and drawbacks. There is still resistance to change but it's manageable.
SpaceX probably have limited resources like everybody else, everyone working on FH and MCT and reuse and whatnot is not working the basics of launching new F9s. It is important that they don't declare themselves done too soon but keep pushing for higher and higher reliability. I think it was said the Shuttle had ~250k parts, I don't know about an F9 but certainly far too many to wait for a part to go bad and cause mission failure. You have to keep testing and inspecting and simulating to push every part into the 99.99999%+ reliability rate for the overall rocket to hit 99%. Otherwise you'll have rockets blowing up and always for a new reason, you can't just whack at it until no more bugs show up because it'd take a thousand years.
No mass media would ever work if the first person to read/hear/watch it had to carry all the costs. Nor would donations work because most people would wait and see if they could get it for free anyway without donating or they'd complain about what they did or didn't get like on Kickstarter. We need to split the costs somehow. But it's not good that online news sites track every article you read tied to a subscription, it's another wet dream for totalitarian governments. If reading radical ideas and critical voices about the government filters back to the government you might end up on some kind of subversives list and that'd be the end of an informed public as they'd self-censor away from knowing what's going on.
Um, no. It couldn't be. "A few thousand lightyears apart" is um, too far. How would someone travel a few thousand light years?
Probably slowly, by human standards. Project Orion in the 1950s studied a hypothetical fission propulsion systems that could reach ~0.01c. So a few thousand kly = a few hundred thousand years. That's certainly a long time, but consider that it's 65 million years since the dinosaurs and billions of years since life began. If our civilization gets to be several million years old and we can't figure out anything better we might say it's better than not spreading at all. And we still have some ideas for fusion and anti-matter drives we might figure out eventually. We're pretty close to fantasy here but not wormhole/warp drive/hyperspace degrees of fantasy.
You know, your argument would come across better if you could divide it into paragraphs. I think where most of it starts and ends is that despite totally dominating other sectors like cell phones and supercomputers, Linux has not been able to conquer the basic corporate desktop. Even if what you do today is just mail and office, chances are better that you're running Windows/Outlook/MS Office than anything else. I've heard for almost 20 years that MS Office was pretty much "done" around Office 97 but none the less it's utterly dominating.
I'm not hoping for an utopia where all software will be written by magic fairies, but I still have a lingering hope that some day you won't expect to pay for software that covers the basics. Some 99% of what I see could have been created in Libre Office or Google Docs, it's not that they really need MS Office. People use it because that's what other people use. I think my workplace could have done just as well on open source, if the situation was reversed. It's being the odd one out trying to lead a change that costs dearly.
Is that the relevant point? You don't think that agreements should be ratified when they don't have penalties? You're saying it's okay for the president to speak for the country and make agreements without oversight? Could there be any bad consequences down the road if we let it pass this one time?
Presidents often have chosen to exclude the Senate in making some controversial and historic international pacts through the channel of executive agreements, among them, the destroyer-base deal with Great Britain in 1940, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements of 1945, the Vietnam peace agreement of 1973, and the Sinai agreements of 1975.
If you can end WWII with a few executive agreements, a fluffy climate promise seems like small potatoes. It's constitutionally controversial, but there's also tons of small practical agreements made here and there with other nations. It was probably never the intent that the president had to run back to Congress to get their permission to give an embassy an extra parking spot. It's actually an odd coupling, Congress can declare war but the President can apparently end one, seems like a mismatch even though he's commander-in-chief. Unfortunately I don't think you'll get a do-over to make it clearer any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we assume that one day North Korea will attack something? I've always thought that they're just posturing, but this most recent "test" makes me hesitate...
North Korea is the buffer between China and the US forces, a North Korean attack would lead to the regime's fall and probably a reunification into a strong pro-western country which I'm sure China doesn't want. Despite all the saber rattling I'm fairly sure Kim wouldn't try pulling it off alone. In fact, I think China would tell him that in case of a unilateral attack they'd roll in and occupy North Korea themselves before US-led forces could do it. Even if 99,99% of the population is ignorant some must know the real state of the country and its technology, this is not Nazi Germany. This is a backwater podunk with a not-so-unwarranted paranoia after being named in the "axis of evil" and the invasion of Iraq. Fuck what everyone else thinks, it's better to have the arms to defend yourself and act like you could use them. He'd be right at home in the US, in another life.
They fear them because of the very real and demonstrably accurate statistical fact of black violence. Blacks kill other Blacks at astronomically high levels. Cops would be suicidal to pretend otherwise.
Roughly speaking, black murderers constitute around 0.03% of the black population. Meanwhile, white murderers constitute around 0.005% of the white population. (...) >99% of Muslims are NOT terrorists.
So say I'm a cop approaching a suspect's car, is a 0.03%/0.005% = 600% difference in risk of getting shot trivial or not? Or if I'm the security service, the ratio of Muslim to non-Muslim terrorists? Most rentals go well, but one horror story can easily wipe out the profit of a hundred ordinary rentals. It could happen with white people, it could happen with black people, it's unlikely to happen with white people and it's unlikely to happen with black people. But if the unlikely is still a lot more likely to happen with black people rather than white people, is that bigotry or risk management?
If I've been out partying and is walking home late at night and see a woman walking the same way I bet she's a lot more worried I'll jump her and rape her in the bushes than I am that she'll do the same to me. Because I'm male and she's female and most rapists are male and rape victims female. I'd say it's pretty daft to call that sexist, even though it's entirely based on our sex with no regards to the actual person and wouldn't happen if it were two men or two women. That 99%+ don't drag women into bushes to rape them doesn't mean that fear is false or misguided.
Of course a selective bias may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if everyone looks to the more likely suspect they might also be disproportionally often investigated and caught compared to non-likely suspects leading to excessive confirmation of the bias. That is to say if the real numbers are 60/40 and the chance of getting caught is also 60/40 the actual figures will look like 0.6*0.6 = 36% vs 0.4*0.4 = 16% leading to the false conclusion that one group is more than twice as likely to be the perp rather than 50%. But in a world of limited knowledge and resources we tend to apply what we have, even though it's unfair to those who belong to a group but go against the statistics of that group.
So... if I have a business unit that's losing money and I tell it to either turn a profit or they'll be laid off, am I responsible when the employees cheat and break the law to save their jobs because there's no other way? If you hand in your resignation, can I make you a counteroffer or is "ok" the only acceptable response? A lot of this pressure is natural, everybody's looking for ways to increase volume and price, cut costs and reduce losses. And then somebody takes it too far, but how far is too far? Who started it, who's doing it, who's in on it might not be so crystal clear.
I mean it's a little easy to just blame it on your manager who'll blame it on their manager and so on all the way to the top until only Hitler is guilty and the rest were just following orders and trying to fulfill impossible goals. Sorry to Godwin the thread but this is a criminal conspiracy and while there's certainly leaders who should be doing hard time it should be pretty obvious to everyone that when you're faking customer accounts you're doing something blatantly illegal. I say aggressively prosecute everyone you can prove was in on it, top to bottom.
I'm not sure I like the implications of that line of reasoning, because if you create a derivative work in violation of copyright law through instructions to include referenced content then it stands to reason the same would apply to omissions, making ad blockers illegal. Or at the very least only legal through fair use, which it may or may not be as it ruins the copyright holder's business model. And if that's where you draw the line, you're basically relying on the client's decision to show <a href....> tags as links and <img> tags as inline images, should you then be liable if someone creates a client that does the opposite? A HTTP file is a glorified recipe, there's a difference between sending someone the Anarchist's Cookbook with instructions to make explosives and the resulting explosives.
Imagine how this works if you have for example banner ads on your site, they're incorporated in the page so now you're potentially liable if someone serves up an ad that contains a copyright violation because it's your responsibility to preemptively verify that any image you serve up on your website is legal. Not that there's any centralized record of all copyrighted items and you can't simply shift the responsibility and say if the ad server sends it then it must be legal. If that were the case, they wouldn't have been convicted in this case. Or you run a forum with the img tag enabled, you're the one making profit so are you now liable for what users reference in? Sorry, it's not that I want to support stealing bandwidth by linking other people's images but I think the cure is worse than the problem.
Isn't this move sacrificing one of the major advantages of owning - and developing for - a console, which is its standardized hardware?
Yes. But that you're stuck on a hardware platform many years old is also the greatest drawback. I'm surprised there is no middle ground between the infinite combinations of the PC markets and the "one console to rule them all". Like say you declare - in advance - that you'll issue bi-annually updated consoles. All released games are required to minimum support the N-1 and N-2 versions. So instead of the PS3 (2006) and PS4 (2013) you'd have PS 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and any game released today must support 2012-2016. You'd have a six year rolling window before your console is too old to play the latest games, a game only has to deal with three configurations (low, medium, high) and there's never a "bad time" to buy a new console. Though I guess the pre-x86 generations were different, but now when they're just PCs in drag I don't see why a 7 year cycle is useful.
Smart watches will become as popular as Smart phones only when they become functional enough to completely replace Smart phones. Until then, most people aren't going to bother carrying around (and recharge) two devices when carrying around one will do.
I already put my smartphone on the charger and take off my "dumbwatch" every night, plugging in my watch would only take a few seconds. It's the intersection between things that are more complicated than checking the time and things that'd take less time than whipping out my smartphone I'm struggling to find. Then again I have a small iPhone SE, maybe if have one of those plus size phones you feel the need for a smaller device but then I think you got the wrong phone not the right watch.
You can fake it in software. I've been saying for over a decade that two small lenses with some lateral separation should allow an algorithm to estimate distance and blur the parts of the picture outside the focal plane appropriately to simulate bokeh. But it's not real bokeh, it's a digital manipulation.
Not sure I care. Reality is as my eyes see it, either way you're trying to manipulate reality except one limits you to physical effects and the other uses both physical and digital effects. Particularly if you are measuring focused light and simulate the out of focus effect you could have had with a different lens, I think it's more in the direction towards adjusting color/contrast/white balance and not photoshopping in Gollum. I suppose if you're in some kind of nature photography competition or news reporting where accuracy to reality is paramount this might be off limits, but for average people who'll just as easily use snapchat and instagram filters this is about a 1/10 on the photo manipulation scale.
This is why I am waiting for the iPhone 7s. It's going to remove the Lightning plug and all you have to do is say a 4 hour prayer to save Steve Job's soul every day to charge the device.
Well, I suppose that could be useful after the App-ocalypse. We might actually get temples dedicated to Jobs, where they recite the book of Jobs aka the Apple EULA. We could have the orthodox church all in white and a reformed church where they worship the rose gold, gray, silver and black which of course hate each other. His followers will declare that there is no god but Jobs, and Siri is his prophet. And they'll all be awaiting the rAPPture, where all the faithful will be uploaded to the iCloud to live forever. Okay, I'll go take my meds now...
About 90% of the women who learn their child will have Down's syndrome choose to have an abortion. Very few will say much if anything at all about it out of respect for the other 10% and those who didn't have the test at all. Maybe we won't do designer babies but at least remove genes strongly corrolated with bad medical conditions, because ultimately nobody wants their kid to have potential heart/lung/liver/kidney diseases, be predisposed for cancer and whatnot. But the implied critique against other parents who didn't have their kids screened means it's going to be an extremely touchy subject. Particular if you insult mom, accusations of being deadbeat dads don't seem to carry the same weight but tell a mom she's a bad parent then all hell will come raining down on you.
On the other hand:
- The ARM "microserver" thing seem to have flopped, Xeons rule unchallenged
- Fewer discrete GPUs, Intel now has 72% market share in graphics
- Win10 is spyware on any CPU, not that most people care anyway
- Premium convertibles seem to do well against iPad Pro and such
- Post-Sandy Bridge: Smaller CPUs (mm^2) at same price & performance = more profit
Intel has mostly backtracked on their smartphone/tablet ambitions, but ARM hasn't exactly found a foothold in Intel's domain either. And AMD are so on the ropes that even if they pull out a killer product they need time to recover before they can significantly hurt Intel and they're struggling against nVidia too and as it seems Zen will be a 2017 launch that's 5 long years they've been out of the high-end business. I wouldn't invest in their stock but I'd say Intel could make bigger blunders than the Pentium 4 and still easily stay on top.
Are you willing to pay for it? Can you convince another million users to do so? if not, why should they add new features to an 8 year old OS? What were you doing 8 years ago and are you willing to stop what you are doing now and spend the next year supporting it for no gain?
To be honest, what I really want isn't really Win7, I'd like a "Win10 Nano" home edition that ships with everything off, defaults to security patches only like the Enterprise LTSB and only serves as an application execution environment. I doubt it would cost Microsoft much to offer such an alternative, because the bits and pieces already exist they just choose not to offer that kind of combination. Yes, that means more than one edition to support but they already do that and I don't think enterprise applications will play by the home edition any time soon, so it's really just to let power/paranoid users tap into that.
We still use Skype for DM, but all voice chat now goes over Discord as Skype had a habit of throwing us out of full screen when people joined/left the conversation. We are fairly casual gamers and form groups based on whoever is online, so it's not unusual for someone to join late or leave early. Also you can easily adjust volume per participant, which lets you decide your own mix if someone is being loud or quiet or talking too close/far from the mic. Otherwise the sound quality has been pretty equal and we pretty much never close connection, so it's not like Skype is bad... but it's not the best.
It is surprisingly easy using tools like Handbrake (it really does hammer your PC though) to convert from one codec to another as well as converting 8bit to 10bit or even 12bit. The main reason to convert H264 to H265 is the fact that you can get a reduction in file size from 55% to 65%
transcoding from one loss codec to another -> *facepalm 1*
8 bit source -> 10/12 bit destination *facepalm 2*
55-65% and in some cases much better than that -> *facepalm 3*
Sometimes, even Picard and Riker is not enough...
It only makes sense to self insure if you have a large number of things that you can average the risk over. It's also often a good idea to take a middle path. For example, the university that I work for gets a good deal on travel insurance, because the underwriters only have to cover very rare (and expensive) payouts.
In that particular case it might also be to have a professional organization that can help travelers in need, do fraud detection and so on, not the monetary risk as such. It also depends on how deep pockets you can pull on, like NASA is not really just NASA they're a branch of the US government. If you have an understanding that this business unit will ordinarily deliver a good profit and occasionally a huge loss the parent unit/company/owners might decide they'll be your de facto insurance, eating the loss when it happens.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you can count this one towards failed launches, if you count a failed ground test then you'd also have to count all the successful ones. They did blow up the payload though, maybe next time they'll use a dummy until it's for real. I mean with this super-chilled fuel they use now they have to drain it after the test and do it again when the launch window opens, it's not like the rocket stands there ready to go. Though I suppose you'll need an awfully big crane....
VIDEO: PHILIPS 901F 4K UHD OLED TV
I'd probably pick the Panasonic HC-X1, a 1" UHD/60 fps camcorder for $3199. After having had 1080p60 cameras I couldn't imagine going back to 30 fps, haters gonna hate on HFR but the "movie feel" is a fuzzy wish for things the way they were like gramophone records as opposed to the cold and sterile CDs. Hopefully it shows up in a consumer camcorder next CES.
Isn't there some penalty .. for trying to take down what shouldn't be taken down?
Nope. There isn't. (...) Let's say I do hold the copyright on Hogan's Heroes and I send a DMCA notice about your Cowboy Bebop fanpage (and your Ride the Lightning lyrics page) (and your game walk-through) (and your Scientology OT III tuition invoice) (and a poem you wrote when you were 12 years old), claiming you are infringing my Hogan's Heroes copyright. Consequences: none.
Actually if you ran some kind of targeted attack trying to harass someone there are penalties if you "knowingly materially misrepresents" infringing activity, even if you own the copyright. It doesn't cover accidental or reckless notices by a bot though, so ignorance is bliss.
I'm always impressed that software devs and project managers and database architects understand business strategy so well that they only need about 10% of the contextual information about what's going on in the business, and no access to financial statements... and yet can tell that the C-suite has it all wrong. Have you ever thought about being CEO? We would love to have you.
At the CEO level I think nerds might be way off the mark at times like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." because average people don't think the way we do. When it comes to funny new systems / technology / organization / methods though we're often the ones stuck trying to make things work after the executives have read buzzwords in trade magazines and the salesmen has collected their commissions. I think we very early get an idea who knows what they're doing and not but as a "support" organization we don't get a choice so we waste tons of time on projects that'll flop miserably. I know that I've written a lot of good code that was ultimately utterly futile and that's grounds for resentment.
My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
Except you know.... the house? If that's downpaid or at least eligible for a bigger loan I'd consider that a rather healthy savings. I mean it's one thing to run a tight ship on liquidity if you really have the assets and you're just aggressively paying off a loan or investing and use the remainder of the paycheck as a form of self-procrastination, as opposed to running on fumes. I'm usually not cutting it that close as $400... but if I did I'd have a $6000 credit limit that I'm not using and much more once I've increased the mortgage so it's not like I'm really cutting it close. It's the 14% that said "no can do" that have a real problem, the other 33%... maybe, maybe not.
More generally, it is necessary that the universal basic income is sufficient not to force those on it into defacto poverty.
The way national poverty is typically defined as those earning less than a percentage of the average (50 or 60%, usually) there will always be poverty. If you could have almost the same by not working as you could by working, what would you choose? It's supposed to be enough to cover the essentials so you won't freeze or starve but it's not going to be great. Since everyone else also gets UBI if you don't have any other income you'll be at the absolute bottom of the pool. That guy who works minimum wage at McD will live considerably better than you. It's a life of Ramen noodles and the cheapest accommodation money can buy.
The one and only thing that can hope to work is to provide an income that not only covers all the basics but also leaves money left over to spend on things that are not basic needs. If we do not do this we will surely face a total economic collapse and a loss of our nation.
Nothing is gained if you tax people who would have spent it anyways, then you're just redistributing and not helping the economy. To improve the economy you need to coerce those who accumulate money or take it abroad (rich people and corporations mostly) to use it in the local economy. Both of those are pretty skilled at avoiding taxes though, so for the most part you hit the middle class resulting in their purchasing power going down by the same amount the poor's goes up. UBI's main claim is to reduce overhead and administration, increasing consumer spending without a basis in the underlying economy only leads to disaster.
It's important to not let short-sighted goals get in the way of your vision. It's also important to not let your vision get in the way of making progress. I have this colleague at work who said something like "I've been trying to get them to do this for more than ten years now" and to be honest I didn't have the heart to tell him he could try another ten and it would make no difference at all. Basically because he's arguing for a big bang change where we switch from way A to way B overnight. The arguments are in fact strong but the leap is just too great. Meanwhile I've been making progress because I got them from A to A' to A'' to A''' nibbling away at the worst flaws and drawbacks. There is still resistance to change but it's manageable.
SpaceX probably have limited resources like everybody else, everyone working on FH and MCT and reuse and whatnot is not working the basics of launching new F9s. It is important that they don't declare themselves done too soon but keep pushing for higher and higher reliability. I think it was said the Shuttle had ~250k parts, I don't know about an F9 but certainly far too many to wait for a part to go bad and cause mission failure. You have to keep testing and inspecting and simulating to push every part into the 99.99999%+ reliability rate for the overall rocket to hit 99%. Otherwise you'll have rockets blowing up and always for a new reason, you can't just whack at it until no more bugs show up because it'd take a thousand years.
No mass media would ever work if the first person to read/hear/watch it had to carry all the costs. Nor would donations work because most people would wait and see if they could get it for free anyway without donating or they'd complain about what they did or didn't get like on Kickstarter. We need to split the costs somehow. But it's not good that online news sites track every article you read tied to a subscription, it's another wet dream for totalitarian governments. If reading radical ideas and critical voices about the government filters back to the government you might end up on some kind of subversives list and that'd be the end of an informed public as they'd self-censor away from knowing what's going on.
Um, no. It couldn't be. "A few thousand lightyears apart" is um, too far. How would someone travel a few thousand light years?
Probably slowly, by human standards. Project Orion in the 1950s studied a hypothetical fission propulsion systems that could reach ~0.01c. So a few thousand kly = a few hundred thousand years. That's certainly a long time, but consider that it's 65 million years since the dinosaurs and billions of years since life began. If our civilization gets to be several million years old and we can't figure out anything better we might say it's better than not spreading at all. And we still have some ideas for fusion and anti-matter drives we might figure out eventually. We're pretty close to fantasy here but not wormhole/warp drive/hyperspace degrees of fantasy.
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You know, your argument would come across better if you could divide it into paragraphs. I think where most of it starts and ends is that despite totally dominating other sectors like cell phones and supercomputers, Linux has not been able to conquer the basic corporate desktop. Even if what you do today is just mail and office, chances are better that you're running Windows/Outlook/MS Office than anything else. I've heard for almost 20 years that MS Office was pretty much "done" around Office 97 but none the less it's utterly dominating.
I'm not hoping for an utopia where all software will be written by magic fairies, but I still have a lingering hope that some day you won't expect to pay for software that covers the basics. Some 99% of what I see could have been created in Libre Office or Google Docs, it's not that they really need MS Office. People use it because that's what other people use. I think my workplace could have done just as well on open source, if the situation was reversed. It's being the odd one out trying to lead a change that costs dearly.
Is that the relevant point? You don't think that agreements should be ratified when they don't have penalties? You're saying it's okay for the president to speak for the country and make agreements without oversight? Could there be any bad consequences down the road if we let it pass this one time?
Well, it'd hardly be the first time (source):
Presidents often have chosen to exclude the Senate in making some controversial and historic international pacts through the channel of executive agreements, among them, the destroyer-base deal with Great Britain in 1940, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements of 1945, the Vietnam peace agreement of 1973, and the Sinai agreements of 1975.
If you can end WWII with a few executive agreements, a fluffy climate promise seems like small potatoes. It's constitutionally controversial, but there's also tons of small practical agreements made here and there with other nations. It was probably never the intent that the president had to run back to Congress to get their permission to give an embassy an extra parking spot. It's actually an odd coupling, Congress can declare war but the President can apparently end one, seems like a mismatch even though he's commander-in-chief. Unfortunately I don't think you'll get a do-over to make it clearer any time soon.