And always a story about northern European success. Northern European socialists do ok. Northern European capitalists do ok. Maybe northern Europeans just have a strong, resilient culture?
It's a very collective culture, if you start bragging about a Norwegian he's probably going to blush and start listing all the other people he shares credit with. Or to discredit himself as special, even though he's done something few others can. Even when in fact you've worked very hard and long for it, you are supposed to undersell your accomplishments and let others talk you up. It makes for good teamwork but less competitiveness, so it's got both pros and cons. Particularly in early education and youth sports there's been a strong opposition to measuring and competition, focusing on learning and improving yourself and being part of a team.
It also has lead to a culture of everybody's job being important, if we didn't have construction workers the brain surgeon wouldn't have a hospital to operate in. Nowhere else in the world is the burger flipper at McDonald's paid so well compared to doctors, engineers, lawyers and so on. And those relatively low differences between "ordinary" people - we still have the 1%'ers - has lead to a very non-aggressive society and good universal services like public education and healthcare, that by far most of the population use. I also think WWII had an effect there, there was an enormous sense of unity built by the occupation and rebuilding the country, even though the generation that remembered that is dying out.
That collective culture also makes people want collective systems to work, rather than abandon it. You shouldn't have to send your kids to private school to get a good education, you shouldn't have to arm yourself because the police doesn't protect you. It's also expected that the government intervenes in the market on behalf of the consumer, like when Apple tried to exclusively bundle the iPhone to a single vendor. The government said we don't like that kind of lock-in, users must be able to terminate for a reasonable fee. So people signed up to get the iPhone, terminated immediately and signed up with their preferred vendor. And the lock-in went away.
If there is a downside, it's that the collective culture also tends to say we know what's good for you and through prohibitions, restrictions and taxes we're creating something of a nanny state. Maybe particularly taxes, I'm paying eight times as much for a beer here in Norway as when I go to Germany. On the other hand when I look at the capitalist US there's everything from dry communities to Las Vegas, so I'm not sure it's really related to economics. Maybe we just have a puritan streak, even though in other ways we're very liberal. And sometimes odd, I think we and Israel are the only two countries with conscription for both sexes. It only took a few insinuations of females being the weaker sex and we had feminists on the barricades to get equal duties and they did.
Actually, there is one big difference. With software development, the more you understand how it works the better. With UI/UX design you often know too much and think complex concepts, behaviors or interactions are obvious or see relations that aren't obvious from the user perspective. That said, I'd much rather have a domain expert like a photographer telling me how to make a photo editing software, an accountant how to make accounting software and so on. A generic UI/UX designer that doesn't know the actual workflows is likely to make something pretty and bad instead of ugly and bad.
Where is this "good content"? I can't find it and, frankly speaking, would have no problem if all ad-sponsored business would disappear from the web tomorrow, including this site.
You're lying to yourself. Why would you visit an ad-sponsored site if you didn't want their content? If you don't want it, don't go there and you'll never see any ads. Ad blockers exist for one reason, people want the content but not the ads. You want the product, but not paying for it. You're just mentally devaluing it to say it wasn't good enough to be worth paying for, thus they didn't lose anything when you took it for free. It's a perfect rationalization of ad blocking and piracy for cheapskates and the poor, because you wouldn't/couldn't pay for anything it's okay if you download everything. I'm not applying for sainthood either, but if we want to have an intellectual discussion let's at least be honest about it.
I'm not sure that traditional religion would appear, but you have things like New Age spirituality that has appeared well into modern day society. Many people have a desire to believe that there's something more than flesh and blood. It doesn't have to be God but things like fate, destiny, karma, soulmates and feng shui. And understanding is just one side of religion, when the doctors tell me what's going to kill me and why I don't care about knowledge, I want a divine power to change it. When I've been wronged I want divine justice. When I die, I want my divine spirit to live on. And a free pony. Religion lets you ask for the impossible and there will always be things that are impossible. Religion lets you believe that the things that happen by random chance don't, like that you missed your flight that crashed. Like you say it's always easier to cope with something that has a reason, even when you've only imagined it. And I think there'll always be people who need that crutch to lean on.
No, in the best-case scenario, any Mars outpost will be a massive money pit for nations and corporations on earth for a good 50-100 years. That's about the time you would need to build the ridiculous infrastructure and industrial base required to live independently on Mars. I wouldn't count on anything more than a token presence on Mars in our lifetimes. (...) There's no long-term survival on this frontier without a steady stream of expensively shipped parts from Earth. 3-d printing isn't going to keep a colony running, even if they could source the raw material on Mars. As for sourcing the raw materials on Mars, can you imagine establishing a mining operation?
I think that is not so much a matter of time as a matter of size. We can afford to sustain a few at a ridiculous cost per person. And if they're big enough to sustain themselves, great. But what's the curve between and the break-even point? Like, here's another guy from earth and we produce our own power, domes, pressure suits, air, food, water, medicine etc. at a >1:1 ratio so when we can put him to work we'll need less from Earth. That's not going to happen with ten or a hundred or a thousand people, maybe you could on Earth but not a society completely dependent on advanced technology to survive an extremely hostile environment and you lay out all the steps from mining to refining to manufacturing everything. And you need net gains which often means economics of scale, if you use more power and resources to make solar panels than you gain from them it doesn't work. In fact whether we can at all given the conditions on Mars is questionable. But assuming we could, I would think it's on the order of ten thousand people. And that's going to cost a bizarre amount of money to go from ten to ten thousand.
Unless of course we manage to advance robotics and automation to the point that they mine, refine and manufacture/repair/recycle themselves without humans in the loop, then the number of people is really only dependent on the size of the robot army to support them but then we don't really need them either. That could actually be the most valuable benefit from trying, assume human labor is extremely limited and that putting a repair tech on Mars costs $100,000/hour. That would create incentives to invent self-sustaining technology that would hopefully trickle down to us here on Earth too. Sure, we work on building things that "just work" here too but when you can get an electrician to wire your house at a fraction of the cost of designing a robot to do it you do that. But if you've already designed and built a robot to do it because it was cheaper than wiring the new Mars dome manually, maybe you can just build a copy and hand it the blueprints so it can do the same here. It's at least a tangible benefit, because there's few others.
Performance- Linux outperforms Windows at almost every task an OS does. The exception is if you write a game just to support Windows APIs, as many games do. Microsoft didn't do anything to make their platform perform better- far from it. They have a large userbase, so many developers jump through hoops to support it. The same thing applies to drivers- Microsoft didn't write those, third party companies did, and if the Linux version is ever less than the Windows version at something, it's the fault of those companies.
Uh huh, Microsoft didn't do anything to actually make their platform better or popular they just won the lottery. It actually reads like a stereotype of an angry Linux nerd rant.
Microsoft has invested a ton in libraries, languages, IDEs like DirectX, C#, Visual Studio and so on to make it easy for developers. They offered kool-aid and the developers drank deep. Windows has infinitely better binary compatibility than Linux, which matter to all these developers who write propriatery code. And being able to install random binaries from dubious sources, particularly pirated versions is the source of most botnet/virus/trojan problems yet if Microsoft makes an app store and go signed apps only well that's the evil empire ceasing control.
There are only two things I'd want to be genuinely happy with Windows: 1) A mode that defaults to privacy and security. No, you will not automatically log me in online. No, you will not send any data or metadata anywhere except with explicit permission. No telemetry, no Cortana, no advertising ID, no sharing WiFi passwords, nothing. And that choice manages defaults for future updates too. I'd actually be cool with a no third party software default here too, like Android. Call it enhanced security mode or something. 2) Keep the "Last version of Windows" idea, stop the forced bundling of features and security updates. The primary reason people didn't upgrade is that it costs money, it won't be like XP. Now I'm clinging to my Windows 7 because I know how it will look in 2016-2019, with Windows 10 I don't know if you'll make some change I absolutely hate next month but since it's bundled with security patches I got no choice and no time to adjust. Let the apps do the version pushing, if they require a newer version of Windows then I have a choice.
It doesn't matter if an EV battery is developed that has the same energy density and weight as petroleum fuels, if it costs $30k per battery it is next to useless for the general public. For those two applications I'd rather have a battery cell the size of a 5 gallon bucket that can store 1 kWh for a hundred bucks instead of a cell the size of a 16oz bottle that can store the same amount of energy but cost $500.
If that's one EV battery for $30k and not just a fuel cell it's a bargain. My gas tank is 14 gallons = 472 kWh and weighs about 14*6 lbs = 84 lbs. Compare that to Tesla's 85 kWh battery weighing 1200 lbs, which I believe costs roughly the same. Size doesn't matter that much, but weight does as the Tesla is starting to hit the practical limits on how much battery the car can hold before the added power is lost in additional weight.
It is a sad time when a technical specification has to undergo legal review.
Well, there is a huge hardware market with billions of dollars in sales that will be affected by what features goes into the API, I'm sure they have conflicting interests. I would think the legal review primarily involves verifying that all relevant parties got all relevant documentation, that all decisions has been done formally correctly and so on. If you miss an implementation detail of a feature in hardware, it might be a lot harder to fix than a patch and recompile.
GPU drivers. Like OpenGL, but.....modern. An open-source alternative to AMD/NVIDIA/Intel's closed-source proprietary drivers, but should work better than existing open-source solutions. At least, that's my basic understanding of it. I could be wrong.
Vulkan is not a driver, it's the next generation OpenGL API for writing accelerated 3D graphics and compute code. AMD, nVidia, Intel etc. will have drivers implementing this interface. Like DirectX 12 and the defunct AMD Mantle, it provides a much more low level interface than traditional DirectX/OpenGL which means drivers should be simpler. Intel has an open source driver, AMD starts closed source but has promised to open it up while nVidia will probably remain closed source. The offset is of course that when the driver does less, your code must do more. Typically that would be the job of a game engine or something similar.
This is the culmination of a process that has been going on for a very long time from fixed function hardware to programmable shaders to generic computing capability and what we call "drivers" today really being giant libraries running on top. The Vulkan API exposes that generic low-level capability directly. I don't think the high-level interface is going away though, but it's been unclear to me if that's going to stay in the 4.x series or not. At least Microsoft called it all DirectX 12, but then they control the whole platform. On open source it's likely you'll have full Vulkan support, but still OpenGL 4.x functions missing.
It's not hard finding the problem, it's hard finding a solution. Would you eat apples if you knew some were poisoned? I'm guessing probably not. Would you take in Syrian refugees when you know the IS has undercover jihadists among them? So far, Europe says yes. But there were eight terrorists in Paris and the IS has many hundreds preparing for waves of terror. People are going to be furious with Muslims, somebody's going to seek revenge. Sure it's playing right into their hands, but standing around looking weak and helpless while their reign of terror expands is not an option either. And there's only so many times you can keep saying our way of life will go on before it goes hollow as people rightfully fear for their lives.
And the other part are the non-terrorists that come to our country, regardless of that they come from a place with little tolerance for other religions, democracy, freedom of speech, equality, sexual freedom and so on. Many of them will be extremely traditional and opposed to our values, even if they won't be aggressive about it they won't integrate. And if they were relatively few, well we could always deal with a small minority. But >1% of the population in one year all from one culture like Sweden and Germany has done is far too much to handle. But hey I understand they go nowhere better to go and if we let them come they will. But magically the other Muslim countries like Saudi-Arabia don't take any, why do we have to bear the weight of the world?
Even Germany that has gone to extreme measures to bend over backwards and be anti-bigoted with their history and all is now starting to close down and say this is too much. The greatest burden is going to come on the welfare system, it's supposed to cover for the relatively few that fall through the cracks of normal society not deal with a mass influx of people that come with very little education or means to take care of themselves. What it costs today in emergency measures is only a small fraction of what it'll cost in total, but once they're here and settled well you're quite stuck with the bill for decades to come. So economics, culture and terror I think we'll pay dearly for our bad conscience.
As a fellow road user, your assertion that you don't have to follow the rules of the road is arrogant and dangerous. As far as I am concerned if you don't want to follow the rules of the road get off public roads.
If everybody followed the rules to the letter, traffic would deadlock the moment four cars arrived at a regular four-way intersection at the same time. I just checked and there's no provision or exception or process to resolve a deadlock, at least in my jurisdiction. If you've worked in IT for a while haven't you seen this situation happen:
A formal process is allegedly in place. The process is embedded into an IT system that rigorously follows the process to the letter. Things grinds to a halt and the people who have to work with the process complain like crazy and the person who made the Powerpoint presentation and flowcharts has to ease up and design a more flexible process that actually works in the real world and more resembles the system already in place. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of bad driving that shouldn't be allowed but I'd be very surprised if the current code actually permits all the reasonable and practical behavior that drivers also do.
Like today the road was blocked by some car that had broken down and the tow truck, in a sharp right curve. General rules for overtaking someone suggests I ought to have line of sight, well tough luck it's not possible. But it's only a 30 km/h zone (<20 mph) and the tow truck is there blinking big yellow warning lights for everyone to see something's going on, so out in the opposing lane and just ease past at walking speed. If there had been opposing traffic they'd probably have to stop and wait or worst case we'd block each other, the chances of an actual collision was basically none. And I doubt a cop would ticket me for it, if he saw it.
But I do think it's excessively optimistic that autonomous cars will operate smoothly in a system built for human drivers, just like the first cars were probably a major annoyance to the horse and buggy drivers. We need them to work within the existing system, but that we will build autonomous lanes, over/underpasses and whatnot to accomodate them like we do for trams and rail. Because any kind of automated system tends to get really, really cautious in close proximity to people. Just look at the kind of robots we have working with people vs in isolated cages, it's night and day.
I'm old enough to remember our state monopolist here in Norway, Televerket (1855-1995, now privatized as Telenor AS). They were the expensive, pay-per-minute giant who was slow as molasses to innovate because there was very little choice, cable always had a very limited roll-out here. We paid them tons of money for 64 kbps ISDN, which was after all faster than dial-up but when I finally got ADSL I got 16x the speed (1024 kbps vs 64 kbps) for 1/3rd the monthly cost and flat rate. As late as 2008 I was stuck with a <2 Mbit ADSL within the city limits of our >500k capital. The largest fiber network provider actually grew out of the power sector (Lyse, later becoming the Altibox franchise), not telecom.
Public services are great if what you want is very well defined and stable, like water and sewage pipes. If the water pressure is okay and the water is clean, great. If I flush the toilet and it goes away, great. If the garbage is collected on time, great. Telecoms has definitively not been in that category, neither fixed nor mobile solutions. I'm now on a 100/100 Mbit connection not from our ex-monopolist and quite happy with that. Maybe there will come a time in the not so distant future where fiber is "basic service" as 28% of the country already have it, but right now I'd say intense competition to be the first and corner the market is the driving force of the roll-out.
You might say why not manage the monopolist better and have it serve the needs of their customers. The problem is that you don't really have that power, if they're full of bloat and cruft and I give them less money they'll do less and still be full of bloat and cruft. The really hard cuts and true introspection doesn't come until a competitor is taking your business and it's either become more efficient or have your jobs go away. Even in the public utilities many of the actual tasks are done by competing contractors, if the city needs a new sewage pipe they get bids and pick one. Gone are the days where you more or less had a job for life, unless you were incompetent enough to get fired even though the boss has no market to lose.
Who really wants a car that you can't manually control yourself, ever? Seems like a real pain in the ass for doing things like moving it a few feet so you can get something out of the garage, or putting it up on ramps so you can change your oil.
I don't know about the US, but here in Norway (and I imagine most the EU) there's an exemption for anything that goes less than 10 km/h (6 mph) like electric wheelchairs and whatnot. If in addition it has 360 degree sensors and will refuse to bump into objects, run over kids or pets or off sharp drops I would think all but the mentally challenged, demented and very young children would be permitted to nudge it around. I don't think they want to want to map out the "rules of the road" for driveways and parking garages or where you just park on the lawn.
Sure, but the reason the block chain works for Bitcoin is that it has an omniscient view of all transactions ever and can prove whether or not you have "money" in your account. Unless every US dollar and all shares of the stock you're trading in is traded through this system, you'll always have clearance risk that whoever is claiming to sell you stock doesn't have it and the one claiming to buy your stock can't pay. Recording the promised transaction is really not that complicated, stock exchanges act as a neutral third party and do that for millions of trades each day. The risk is that the trade will never be completed as recorded.
Lying? Sure. Forgery? That is a rather nasty thing to have on your criminal record. Doesn't matter if it's for "trivial" reasons like getting into a club while underage, it's an official document and they do prosecute it. You can tell Facebook to go shove it because they have no right to see it, but if you present it as such you're on the hook. Don't expect them to unban your account though.
Ok, a new programming language that doesn't do anything new, but is better than the crap Apple forced people to use before? Yeah, sure, sounds really big! Not saying there is anything wrong with swift but there are tons of programming languages out there that are invented all the time. Nothing in swift is groundbreaking. The only reason for its popularity is that Objective-C is very bad.
Nothing is groundbreaking but for a number of reasons the open source community hasn't exactly embraced Java or C#, so most of it is written in C dating back to the 70s or its hacked-on OOP cousins C++ and Objective-C from the 80s. I'm not sure if Swift will do any better, but it's at least written will all the know-how we've gathered since then. A language is never going to make a poor developer into a good one though.
At least here in Norway I would say those tip-toeing on the line is mainly the Islamists. They're quoting selected passages from the scriptures and saying all true Muslims has a duty to obey the scriptures, but not in the same place so that it becomes a direct incitement to break the law. To use an example from the Bible (Leviticus 20:13):
If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
It's hard to ban quoting the book. And it's hard to ban saying every word in the Bible is God's will. But if I added 2+2 and said "All Christians have a moral duty to kill homosexuals" it'd almost certainly be illegal, so they don't do that but they mean it. Likewise incitement requires a form of call to action, while applauding terror is so far deemed legal even though it's pretty obvious that if you call them holy warriors and martyrs you want more of them. And if anyone else promised you rewards for terrorism it'd almost certainly be a crime, but if I point to a book and say Allah will reward you then somehow it's not.
Not that any of this is a secret, they've pretty publicly said they're going to use our freedoms to destroy us. But so far we haven't really come up with any better solutions, since taking away those freedoms would be destroying ourselves. But for many of these I'm not in the "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it" corner but more like "I know you want to slaughter my unbeliever hide, but until you break the law I can't put your homicidal beliefs behind bars." It's actually easier to deal with them once they've shown their true colors and joined Daesh, then it's open hunting season.
I also love how this is treated as a new problem ("A new quality of terrorism", as an European politician put it a short while ago), as if there never was an Unabomber, an IRA, a RAF, an ETA or a "top terrorist" Carlos The Jackal. And the fact that a mass shooting totally changes everything because it was political, in contrast to the several hundred other shootings that weren't;-)
But they were either: a) Lone wolves, that begin and end with them. or b) Limited to a particular cause in a particular region. or c) Attacking leaders or symbols or embassies.
If you weren't in Northern Ireland, IRA wasn't really on your radar. Same thing with RAF in West Germany, ETA in Basque. The Jackal was bombing OPEC leaders and such. But for the most part they didn't want to harm the average civilian, up until the 9/11 attacks you expected a hijacking to become a hostage situation not mass murder.
Daesh is different that: a) Massive organization with recruits from all over the world and b) Want true global domination in one Caliphate. and c) Openly targets random civilians and commits genocide.
Not to mention that terror organizations don't hold territory. Nowhere on the map was "IRA-controlled", "RAF-controlled" or "ETA-controlled" areas. They are training the next generation of terrorists right now and we don't seem to have the military will to stop them. The cancer is growing but we'd rather bomb it from afar and pretend the problem is going to go away. The cost of stopping it today would be horrible. The cost of not stopping it is going to be worse. But we all put off dreadful things.
Are you kidding? One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate.
And the steps are: 1. Grow biomass for hundreds of millions of years 2. Bury it under thick layers of sedimentary rock 3. Bake in high temperature and pressure a million years 4. Pump it all up and burn in a few centuries
You may find that Mars didn't go through steps 1-3...
Since we know that there is water on Mars, everything else is duck soup. Transplanting plants, especially algae, ferns, trees can turn massive amounts of carbon dioxide and water into oxygen on the long term. It is a fairly simple and straightforward process but it takes a long time.
And that oxygen will just disappear off into space. If Mars had a magnetosphere, we could have at least tried but as it is the more air pressure you build, the faster it'll get stripped away. Unless you got a way to restart Mars' magnetic core - there's a Nobel prize or three in your future if you do - it's pointless.
Well, technically you could hire somebody to listen in on all phone calls, but it'd be massive with tons of people involved and excessively costly. Or you could hire a few smart people at the NSA and give a computer the Siri + Watson treatment. Target has been able to figure out a teenage was pregnant before her father did. It might not be smarter than you but with enough data we become predictable. And perhaps more important, mallable. For example, say Target's shopping history show you have a sweet tooth. Could they make you more obese by offering you special deals on candy? Or should they perhaps give you a deal on salad for public health reasons?
I'm not so concerned about true AI, because I don't think we'll see that in a very long time. But I am concerned about AI that's smart enough to manipulate you. Like freemium games trying to trigger your reward centers, only more adaptive and tailored to you. And a few people holding the strings controlling and puppeteering the masses. Unfortunately no amount of AI research is going to help that, because the humans creating it don't want an ethics subroutine. They want computers who'll stick to their goal function and run experiments without considering the ethical implications. P.S. Grocery stores have found that sales on base products like fish and meat lead to substitution, while snacks and candy increase total sales.
And that's not counting the fun when we start putting AI in military hardware, the first time we have a real drone-on-drone war we're probably going full automatic. Fortunately it doesn't look like we'll be building terminators any time soon, but the crazy thing is that things are moving too fast to have humans in the equation. See also high frequency trading.
I am in the process of moving my fiancee's dvd/bluray collection to my server and putting her physical copies in storage. Using Handbrake, switching from x264 to x265 saves me at lease 10 % on dvd sources and closer to 30+% on the bluray sources.
And in dollars? You can get an 8TB drive perfect for the task for $260, it's only the random write speeds that are slow. A remux (best quality you can get) is ususally around 25 GB / BluRay or 320 on a drive... less than $1 each. Seems like a fairly cheap investment compared to buying all the discs...
is this the last gasp for amd? i.e. similar to how Netscape went open source right before "Netscape" the commercial company went away (bought by aol... then becomes mozilla which outputs current firefox).
Probably not, but it is an act of desperation. It's no secret that in the past AMD and nVidia has been very anxious to keep Intel out of the high performance graphics market. That gap is closing fast, even though they don't do discrete cards they're quite efficient and well-supported with almost 20% market share on Steam. Meanwhile nVidia has been very successful pushing their GameWorks middleware, G-Sync, CUDA and other proprietary nVidia-only technologies. So I think this is AMD realizing they can't win a war on two fronts and trying to make common cause with Intel to share AMD's middleware to get game support, while still hopefully being able to find a niche for their hardware.
Of course the risk is that Intel just gobbles up AMD's graphics market share the same way Intel's almost completely gobbled up the x86_64 market but the way the gaming market is heading right now I don't think they have a choice. If letting Intel use their middleware can lead to better game support (probably) and Intel stays out of discrete cards (probably) and AMD can come up with discrete GPUs that match nVidia (maybe...) it might work. At least if this flops some good technology got open sourced, I don't like the implication that open sourcing is a last ditch attempt though. Intel is working hard on open source drivers in Mesa and that's hardly a failure.
"Implied" contracts - IE non-signed - are inadmissable and not enforceable in a court of law. (...) A signed receipt for sales or services is not an agreement to a legal contract.
I'm sorry, but you are plain wrong. If you go to a hair dresser, describe the hair cut you want and afterwards refuse to pay because you never explicitly agreed to that neither verbally nor in writing the courts will consider it an implied-in-fact contract. Same reason the grocery store can't have you arrested for shoplifting, the courts will imply a sales contract even though it's nowhere in writing. If witnesses or the CCTV shows you paid, the reciept isn't even necessary.
In your case I'm guessing DirecTV didn't just appear out of nowhere, you probably ordered it somewhere and I'm guessing in some part of the ordering process you agreed to their terms and conditions. They probably let it slide because if they didn't deliver it's a question of who breached the contract first. If you just wanted out early, I doubt they'd let you go that easily. After using and paying for the service a while, even the signature would be a moot point. It's like having the neighbor's kid click through your EULAs, it's not going to hold up in court.
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And always a story about northern European success. Northern European socialists do ok. Northern European capitalists do ok. Maybe northern Europeans just have a strong, resilient culture?
It's a very collective culture, if you start bragging about a Norwegian he's probably going to blush and start listing all the other people he shares credit with. Or to discredit himself as special, even though he's done something few others can. Even when in fact you've worked very hard and long for it, you are supposed to undersell your accomplishments and let others talk you up. It makes for good teamwork but less competitiveness, so it's got both pros and cons. Particularly in early education and youth sports there's been a strong opposition to measuring and competition, focusing on learning and improving yourself and being part of a team.
It also has lead to a culture of everybody's job being important, if we didn't have construction workers the brain surgeon wouldn't have a hospital to operate in. Nowhere else in the world is the burger flipper at McDonald's paid so well compared to doctors, engineers, lawyers and so on. And those relatively low differences between "ordinary" people - we still have the 1%'ers - has lead to a very non-aggressive society and good universal services like public education and healthcare, that by far most of the population use. I also think WWII had an effect there, there was an enormous sense of unity built by the occupation and rebuilding the country, even though the generation that remembered that is dying out.
That collective culture also makes people want collective systems to work, rather than abandon it. You shouldn't have to send your kids to private school to get a good education, you shouldn't have to arm yourself because the police doesn't protect you. It's also expected that the government intervenes in the market on behalf of the consumer, like when Apple tried to exclusively bundle the iPhone to a single vendor. The government said we don't like that kind of lock-in, users must be able to terminate for a reasonable fee. So people signed up to get the iPhone, terminated immediately and signed up with their preferred vendor. And the lock-in went away.
If there is a downside, it's that the collective culture also tends to say we know what's good for you and through prohibitions, restrictions and taxes we're creating something of a nanny state. Maybe particularly taxes, I'm paying eight times as much for a beer here in Norway as when I go to Germany. On the other hand when I look at the capitalist US there's everything from dry communities to Las Vegas, so I'm not sure it's really related to economics. Maybe we just have a puritan streak, even though in other ways we're very liberal. And sometimes odd, I think we and Israel are the only two countries with conscription for both sexes. It only took a few insinuations of females being the weaker sex and we had feminists on the barricades to get equal duties and they did.
Actually, there is one big difference. With software development, the more you understand how it works the better. With UI/UX design you often know too much and think complex concepts, behaviors or interactions are obvious or see relations that aren't obvious from the user perspective. That said, I'd much rather have a domain expert like a photographer telling me how to make a photo editing software, an accountant how to make accounting software and so on. A generic UI/UX designer that doesn't know the actual workflows is likely to make something pretty and bad instead of ugly and bad.
Where is this "good content"? I can't find it and, frankly speaking, would have no problem if all ad-sponsored business would disappear from the web tomorrow, including this site.
You're lying to yourself. Why would you visit an ad-sponsored site if you didn't want their content? If you don't want it, don't go there and you'll never see any ads. Ad blockers exist for one reason, people want the content but not the ads. You want the product, but not paying for it. You're just mentally devaluing it to say it wasn't good enough to be worth paying for, thus they didn't lose anything when you took it for free. It's a perfect rationalization of ad blocking and piracy for cheapskates and the poor, because you wouldn't/couldn't pay for anything it's okay if you download everything. I'm not applying for sainthood either, but if we want to have an intellectual discussion let's at least be honest about it.
I'm not sure that traditional religion would appear, but you have things like New Age spirituality that has appeared well into modern day society. Many people have a desire to believe that there's something more than flesh and blood. It doesn't have to be God but things like fate, destiny, karma, soulmates and feng shui. And understanding is just one side of religion, when the doctors tell me what's going to kill me and why I don't care about knowledge, I want a divine power to change it. When I've been wronged I want divine justice. When I die, I want my divine spirit to live on. And a free pony. Religion lets you ask for the impossible and there will always be things that are impossible. Religion lets you believe that the things that happen by random chance don't, like that you missed your flight that crashed. Like you say it's always easier to cope with something that has a reason, even when you've only imagined it. And I think there'll always be people who need that crutch to lean on.
No, in the best-case scenario, any Mars outpost will be a massive money pit for nations and corporations on earth for a good 50-100 years. That's about the time you would need to build the ridiculous infrastructure and industrial base required to live independently on Mars. I wouldn't count on anything more than a token presence on Mars in our lifetimes. (...) There's no long-term survival on this frontier without a steady stream of expensively shipped parts from Earth. 3-d printing isn't going to keep a colony running, even if they could source the raw material on Mars. As for sourcing the raw materials on Mars, can you imagine establishing a mining operation?
I think that is not so much a matter of time as a matter of size. We can afford to sustain a few at a ridiculous cost per person. And if they're big enough to sustain themselves, great. But what's the curve between and the break-even point? Like, here's another guy from earth and we produce our own power, domes, pressure suits, air, food, water, medicine etc. at a >1:1 ratio so when we can put him to work we'll need less from Earth. That's not going to happen with ten or a hundred or a thousand people, maybe you could on Earth but not a society completely dependent on advanced technology to survive an extremely hostile environment and you lay out all the steps from mining to refining to manufacturing everything. And you need net gains which often means economics of scale, if you use more power and resources to make solar panels than you gain from them it doesn't work. In fact whether we can at all given the conditions on Mars is questionable. But assuming we could, I would think it's on the order of ten thousand people. And that's going to cost a bizarre amount of money to go from ten to ten thousand.
Unless of course we manage to advance robotics and automation to the point that they mine, refine and manufacture/repair/recycle themselves without humans in the loop, then the number of people is really only dependent on the size of the robot army to support them but then we don't really need them either. That could actually be the most valuable benefit from trying, assume human labor is extremely limited and that putting a repair tech on Mars costs $100,000/hour. That would create incentives to invent self-sustaining technology that would hopefully trickle down to us here on Earth too. Sure, we work on building things that "just work" here too but when you can get an electrician to wire your house at a fraction of the cost of designing a robot to do it you do that. But if you've already designed and built a robot to do it because it was cheaper than wiring the new Mars dome manually, maybe you can just build a copy and hand it the blueprints so it can do the same here. It's at least a tangible benefit, because there's few others.
Before they announced the name they called it the "next generation OpenGL initiative" or "glNext", so it's their words not mine.
Performance- Linux outperforms Windows at almost every task an OS does. The exception is if you write a game just to support Windows APIs, as many games do. Microsoft didn't do anything to make their platform perform better- far from it. They have a large userbase, so many developers jump through hoops to support it. The same thing applies to drivers- Microsoft didn't write those, third party companies did, and if the Linux version is ever less than the Windows version at something, it's the fault of those companies.
Uh huh, Microsoft didn't do anything to actually make their platform better or popular they just won the lottery. It actually reads like a stereotype of an angry Linux nerd rant.
Microsoft has invested a ton in libraries, languages, IDEs like DirectX, C#, Visual Studio and so on to make it easy for developers. They offered kool-aid and the developers drank deep. Windows has infinitely better binary compatibility than Linux, which matter to all these developers who write propriatery code. And being able to install random binaries from dubious sources, particularly pirated versions is the source of most botnet/virus/trojan problems yet if Microsoft makes an app store and go signed apps only well that's the evil empire ceasing control.
There are only two things I'd want to be genuinely happy with Windows:
1) A mode that defaults to privacy and security. No, you will not automatically log me in online. No, you will not send any data or metadata anywhere except with explicit permission. No telemetry, no Cortana, no advertising ID, no sharing WiFi passwords, nothing. And that choice manages defaults for future updates too. I'd actually be cool with a no third party software default here too, like Android. Call it enhanced security mode or something.
2) Keep the "Last version of Windows" idea, stop the forced bundling of features and security updates. The primary reason people didn't upgrade is that it costs money, it won't be like XP. Now I'm clinging to my Windows 7 because I know how it will look in 2016-2019, with Windows 10 I don't know if you'll make some change I absolutely hate next month but since it's bundled with security patches I got no choice and no time to adjust. Let the apps do the version pushing, if they require a newer version of Windows then I have a choice.
It doesn't matter if an EV battery is developed that has the same energy density and weight as petroleum fuels, if it costs $30k per battery it is next to useless for the general public. For those two applications I'd rather have a battery cell the size of a 5 gallon bucket that can store 1 kWh for a hundred bucks instead of a cell the size of a 16oz bottle that can store the same amount of energy but cost $500.
If that's one EV battery for $30k and not just a fuel cell it's a bargain. My gas tank is 14 gallons = 472 kWh and weighs about 14*6 lbs = 84 lbs. Compare that to Tesla's 85 kWh battery weighing 1200 lbs, which I believe costs roughly the same. Size doesn't matter that much, but weight does as the Tesla is starting to hit the practical limits on how much battery the car can hold before the added power is lost in additional weight.
It is a sad time when a technical specification has to undergo legal review.
Well, there is a huge hardware market with billions of dollars in sales that will be affected by what features goes into the API, I'm sure they have conflicting interests. I would think the legal review primarily involves verifying that all relevant parties got all relevant documentation, that all decisions has been done formally correctly and so on. If you miss an implementation detail of a feature in hardware, it might be a lot harder to fix than a patch and recompile.
GPU drivers. Like OpenGL, but.....modern. An open-source alternative to AMD/NVIDIA/Intel's closed-source proprietary drivers, but should work better than existing open-source solutions. At least, that's my basic understanding of it. I could be wrong.
Vulkan is not a driver, it's the next generation OpenGL API for writing accelerated 3D graphics and compute code. AMD, nVidia, Intel etc. will have drivers implementing this interface. Like DirectX 12 and the defunct AMD Mantle, it provides a much more low level interface than traditional DirectX/OpenGL which means drivers should be simpler. Intel has an open source driver, AMD starts closed source but has promised to open it up while nVidia will probably remain closed source. The offset is of course that when the driver does less, your code must do more. Typically that would be the job of a game engine or something similar.
This is the culmination of a process that has been going on for a very long time from fixed function hardware to programmable shaders to generic computing capability and what we call "drivers" today really being giant libraries running on top. The Vulkan API exposes that generic low-level capability directly. I don't think the high-level interface is going away though, but it's been unclear to me if that's going to stay in the 4.x series or not. At least Microsoft called it all DirectX 12, but then they control the whole platform. On open source it's likely you'll have full Vulkan support, but still OpenGL 4.x functions missing.
It's not hard finding the problem, it's hard finding a solution. Would you eat apples if you knew some were poisoned? I'm guessing probably not. Would you take in Syrian refugees when you know the IS has undercover jihadists among them? So far, Europe says yes. But there were eight terrorists in Paris and the IS has many hundreds preparing for waves of terror. People are going to be furious with Muslims, somebody's going to seek revenge. Sure it's playing right into their hands, but standing around looking weak and helpless while their reign of terror expands is not an option either. And there's only so many times you can keep saying our way of life will go on before it goes hollow as people rightfully fear for their lives.
And the other part are the non-terrorists that come to our country, regardless of that they come from a place with little tolerance for other religions, democracy, freedom of speech, equality, sexual freedom and so on. Many of them will be extremely traditional and opposed to our values, even if they won't be aggressive about it they won't integrate. And if they were relatively few, well we could always deal with a small minority. But >1% of the population in one year all from one culture like Sweden and Germany has done is far too much to handle. But hey I understand they go nowhere better to go and if we let them come they will. But magically the other Muslim countries like Saudi-Arabia don't take any, why do we have to bear the weight of the world?
Even Germany that has gone to extreme measures to bend over backwards and be anti-bigoted with their history and all is now starting to close down and say this is too much. The greatest burden is going to come on the welfare system, it's supposed to cover for the relatively few that fall through the cracks of normal society not deal with a mass influx of people that come with very little education or means to take care of themselves. What it costs today in emergency measures is only a small fraction of what it'll cost in total, but once they're here and settled well you're quite stuck with the bill for decades to come. So economics, culture and terror I think we'll pay dearly for our bad conscience.
As a fellow road user, your assertion that you don't have to follow the rules of the road is arrogant and dangerous. As far as I am concerned if you don't want to follow the rules of the road get off public roads.
If everybody followed the rules to the letter, traffic would deadlock the moment four cars arrived at a regular four-way intersection at the same time. I just checked and there's no provision or exception or process to resolve a deadlock, at least in my jurisdiction. If you've worked in IT for a while haven't you seen this situation happen:
A formal process is allegedly in place. The process is embedded into an IT system that rigorously follows the process to the letter. Things grinds to a halt and the people who have to work with the process complain like crazy and the person who made the Powerpoint presentation and flowcharts has to ease up and design a more flexible process that actually works in the real world and more resembles the system already in place. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of bad driving that shouldn't be allowed but I'd be very surprised if the current code actually permits all the reasonable and practical behavior that drivers also do.
Like today the road was blocked by some car that had broken down and the tow truck, in a sharp right curve. General rules for overtaking someone suggests I ought to have line of sight, well tough luck it's not possible. But it's only a 30 km/h zone (<20 mph) and the tow truck is there blinking big yellow warning lights for everyone to see something's going on, so out in the opposing lane and just ease past at walking speed. If there had been opposing traffic they'd probably have to stop and wait or worst case we'd block each other, the chances of an actual collision was basically none. And I doubt a cop would ticket me for it, if he saw it.
But I do think it's excessively optimistic that autonomous cars will operate smoothly in a system built for human drivers, just like the first cars were probably a major annoyance to the horse and buggy drivers. We need them to work within the existing system, but that we will build autonomous lanes, over/underpasses and whatnot to accomodate them like we do for trams and rail. Because any kind of automated system tends to get really, really cautious in close proximity to people. Just look at the kind of robots we have working with people vs in isolated cages, it's night and day.
I'm old enough to remember our state monopolist here in Norway, Televerket (1855-1995, now privatized as Telenor AS). They were the expensive, pay-per-minute giant who was slow as molasses to innovate because there was very little choice, cable always had a very limited roll-out here. We paid them tons of money for 64 kbps ISDN, which was after all faster than dial-up but when I finally got ADSL I got 16x the speed (1024 kbps vs 64 kbps) for 1/3rd the monthly cost and flat rate. As late as 2008 I was stuck with a <2 Mbit ADSL within the city limits of our >500k capital. The largest fiber network provider actually grew out of the power sector (Lyse, later becoming the Altibox franchise), not telecom.
Public services are great if what you want is very well defined and stable, like water and sewage pipes. If the water pressure is okay and the water is clean, great. If I flush the toilet and it goes away, great. If the garbage is collected on time, great. Telecoms has definitively not been in that category, neither fixed nor mobile solutions. I'm now on a 100/100 Mbit connection not from our ex-monopolist and quite happy with that. Maybe there will come a time in the not so distant future where fiber is "basic service" as 28% of the country already have it, but right now I'd say intense competition to be the first and corner the market is the driving force of the roll-out.
You might say why not manage the monopolist better and have it serve the needs of their customers. The problem is that you don't really have that power, if they're full of bloat and cruft and I give them less money they'll do less and still be full of bloat and cruft. The really hard cuts and true introspection doesn't come until a competitor is taking your business and it's either become more efficient or have your jobs go away. Even in the public utilities many of the actual tasks are done by competing contractors, if the city needs a new sewage pipe they get bids and pick one. Gone are the days where you more or less had a job for life, unless you were incompetent enough to get fired even though the boss has no market to lose.
Who really wants a car that you can't manually control yourself, ever? Seems like a real pain in the ass for doing things like moving it a few feet so you can get something out of the garage, or putting it up on ramps so you can change your oil.
I don't know about the US, but here in Norway (and I imagine most the EU) there's an exemption for anything that goes less than 10 km/h (6 mph) like electric wheelchairs and whatnot. If in addition it has 360 degree sensors and will refuse to bump into objects, run over kids or pets or off sharp drops I would think all but the mentally challenged, demented and very young children would be permitted to nudge it around. I don't think they want to want to map out the "rules of the road" for driveways and parking garages or where you just park on the lawn.
Sure, but the reason the block chain works for Bitcoin is that it has an omniscient view of all transactions ever and can prove whether or not you have "money" in your account. Unless every US dollar and all shares of the stock you're trading in is traded through this system, you'll always have clearance risk that whoever is claiming to sell you stock doesn't have it and the one claiming to buy your stock can't pay. Recording the promised transaction is really not that complicated, stock exchanges act as a neutral third party and do that for millions of trades each day. The risk is that the trade will never be completed as recorded.
Lying? Sure. Forgery? That is a rather nasty thing to have on your criminal record. Doesn't matter if it's for "trivial" reasons like getting into a club while underage, it's an official document and they do prosecute it. You can tell Facebook to go shove it because they have no right to see it, but if you present it as such you're on the hook. Don't expect them to unban your account though.
Ok, a new programming language that doesn't do anything new, but is better than the crap Apple forced people to use before? Yeah, sure, sounds really big!
Not saying there is anything wrong with swift but there are tons of programming languages out there that are invented all the time. Nothing in swift is groundbreaking. The only reason for its popularity is that Objective-C is very bad.
Nothing is groundbreaking but for a number of reasons the open source community hasn't exactly embraced Java or C#, so most of it is written in C dating back to the 70s or its hacked-on OOP cousins C++ and Objective-C from the 80s. I'm not sure if Swift will do any better, but it's at least written will all the know-how we've gathered since then. A language is never going to make a poor developer into a good one though.
At least here in Norway I would say those tip-toeing on the line is mainly the Islamists. They're quoting selected passages from the scriptures and saying all true Muslims has a duty to obey the scriptures, but not in the same place so that it becomes a direct incitement to break the law. To use an example from the Bible (Leviticus 20:13):
If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
It's hard to ban quoting the book. And it's hard to ban saying every word in the Bible is God's will. But if I added 2+2 and said "All Christians have a moral duty to kill homosexuals" it'd almost certainly be illegal, so they don't do that but they mean it. Likewise incitement requires a form of call to action, while applauding terror is so far deemed legal even though it's pretty obvious that if you call them holy warriors and martyrs you want more of them. And if anyone else promised you rewards for terrorism it'd almost certainly be a crime, but if I point to a book and say Allah will reward you then somehow it's not.
Not that any of this is a secret, they've pretty publicly said they're going to use our freedoms to destroy us. But so far we haven't really come up with any better solutions, since taking away those freedoms would be destroying ourselves. But for many of these I'm not in the "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it" corner but more like "I know you want to slaughter my unbeliever hide, but until you break the law I can't put your homicidal beliefs behind bars." It's actually easier to deal with them once they've shown their true colors and joined Daesh, then it's open hunting season.
I also love how this is treated as a new problem ("A new quality of terrorism", as an European politician put it a short while ago), as if there never was an Unabomber, an IRA, a RAF, an ETA or a "top terrorist" Carlos The Jackal. And the fact that a mass shooting totally changes everything because it was political, in contrast to the several hundred other shootings that weren't ;-)
But they were either:
a) Lone wolves, that begin and end with them.
or
b) Limited to a particular cause in a particular region.
or
c) Attacking leaders or symbols or embassies.
If you weren't in Northern Ireland, IRA wasn't really on your radar. Same thing with RAF in West Germany, ETA in Basque. The Jackal was bombing OPEC leaders and such. But for the most part they didn't want to harm the average civilian, up until the 9/11 attacks you expected a hijacking to become a hostage situation not mass murder.
Daesh is different that:
a) Massive organization with recruits from all over the world
and
b) Want true global domination in one Caliphate.
and
c) Openly targets random civilians and commits genocide.
Not to mention that terror organizations don't hold territory. Nowhere on the map was "IRA-controlled", "RAF-controlled" or "ETA-controlled" areas. They are training the next generation of terrorists right now and we don't seem to have the military will to stop them. The cancer is growing but we'd rather bomb it from afar and pretend the problem is going to go away. The cost of stopping it today would be horrible. The cost of not stopping it is going to be worse. But we all put off dreadful things.
Are you kidding? One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate.
And the steps are:
1. Grow biomass for hundreds of millions of years
2. Bury it under thick layers of sedimentary rock
3. Bake in high temperature and pressure a million years
4. Pump it all up and burn in a few centuries
You may find that Mars didn't go through steps 1-3...
Since we know that there is water on Mars, everything else is duck soup. Transplanting plants, especially algae, ferns, trees can turn massive amounts of carbon dioxide and water into oxygen on the long term. It is a fairly simple and straightforward process but it takes a long time.
And that oxygen will just disappear off into space. If Mars had a magnetosphere, we could have at least tried but as it is the more air pressure you build, the faster it'll get stripped away. Unless you got a way to restart Mars' magnetic core - there's a Nobel prize or three in your future if you do - it's pointless.
Well, technically you could hire somebody to listen in on all phone calls, but it'd be massive with tons of people involved and excessively costly. Or you could hire a few smart people at the NSA and give a computer the Siri + Watson treatment. Target has been able to figure out a teenage was pregnant before her father did. It might not be smarter than you but with enough data we become predictable. And perhaps more important, mallable. For example, say Target's shopping history show you have a sweet tooth. Could they make you more obese by offering you special deals on candy? Or should they perhaps give you a deal on salad for public health reasons?
I'm not so concerned about true AI, because I don't think we'll see that in a very long time. But I am concerned about AI that's smart enough to manipulate you. Like freemium games trying to trigger your reward centers, only more adaptive and tailored to you. And a few people holding the strings controlling and puppeteering the masses. Unfortunately no amount of AI research is going to help that, because the humans creating it don't want an ethics subroutine. They want computers who'll stick to their goal function and run experiments without considering the ethical implications. P.S. Grocery stores have found that sales on base products like fish and meat lead to substitution, while snacks and candy increase total sales.
And that's not counting the fun when we start putting AI in military hardware, the first time we have a real drone-on-drone war we're probably going full automatic. Fortunately it doesn't look like we'll be building terminators any time soon, but the crazy thing is that things are moving too fast to have humans in the equation. See also high frequency trading.
I am in the process of moving my fiancee's dvd/bluray collection to my server and putting her physical copies in storage. Using Handbrake, switching from x264 to x265 saves me at lease 10 % on dvd sources and closer to 30+% on the bluray sources.
And in dollars? You can get an 8TB drive perfect for the task for $260, it's only the random write speeds that are slow. A remux (best quality you can get) is ususally around 25 GB / BluRay or 320 on a drive... less than $1 each. Seems like a fairly cheap investment compared to buying all the discs...
is this the last gasp for amd?
i.e. similar to how Netscape went open source right before "Netscape" the commercial company went away (bought by aol... then becomes mozilla which outputs current firefox).
Probably not, but it is an act of desperation. It's no secret that in the past AMD and nVidia has been very anxious to keep Intel out of the high performance graphics market. That gap is closing fast, even though they don't do discrete cards they're quite efficient and well-supported with almost 20% market share on Steam. Meanwhile nVidia has been very successful pushing their GameWorks middleware, G-Sync, CUDA and other proprietary nVidia-only technologies. So I think this is AMD realizing they can't win a war on two fronts and trying to make common cause with Intel to share AMD's middleware to get game support, while still hopefully being able to find a niche for their hardware.
Of course the risk is that Intel just gobbles up AMD's graphics market share the same way Intel's almost completely gobbled up the x86_64 market but the way the gaming market is heading right now I don't think they have a choice. If letting Intel use their middleware can lead to better game support (probably) and Intel stays out of discrete cards (probably) and AMD can come up with discrete GPUs that match nVidia (maybe...) it might work. At least if this flops some good technology got open sourced, I don't like the implication that open sourcing is a last ditch attempt though. Intel is working hard on open source drivers in Mesa and that's hardly a failure.
Are you sure you haven't agreed to a binding arbitration agreement? >:-)
"Implied" contracts - IE non-signed - are inadmissable and not enforceable in a court of law. (...) A signed receipt for sales or services is not an agreement to a legal contract.
I'm sorry, but you are plain wrong. If you go to a hair dresser, describe the hair cut you want and afterwards refuse to pay because you never explicitly agreed to that neither verbally nor in writing the courts will consider it an implied-in-fact contract. Same reason the grocery store can't have you arrested for shoplifting, the courts will imply a sales contract even though it's nowhere in writing. If witnesses or the CCTV shows you paid, the reciept isn't even necessary.
In your case I'm guessing DirecTV didn't just appear out of nowhere, you probably ordered it somewhere and I'm guessing in some part of the ordering process you agreed to their terms and conditions. They probably let it slide because if they didn't deliver it's a question of who breached the contract first. If you just wanted out early, I doubt they'd let you go that easily. After using and paying for the service a while, even the signature would be a moot point. It's like having the neighbor's kid click through your EULAs, it's not going to hold up in court.