That there are so few goals is what makes soccer so huge. I played a different sport where the result might be more like 10-4, nobody really cares about a bad referee call or a few missed chances or the lucky goal it's obvious the better team won anyway. In soccer the result might be 2-1 and there's no end to the bullshit fans will make up about controversial decisions, missed chances, lucky shots and whatnot that meant that they could have, should have, would have won or drawn. It's somewhere between sports and Texas Hold 'Em, the poker pro will win on average but on a good day the worst team walks away with the victory. Fully deserved of course *cough*.
The only reason trolls win is we give them the reaction that they are looking for. If people just ignored them more often instead of getting all bent out of shape, the trend would go away.
I'm about to horribly abuse this quote:
WALKER: What if they don't arrest you? What if they don't react at all? GANDHI: Do you still have your notebook? The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they change the law. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of civil resistance.
YOU: What if they don't take the bait? What if they don't react at all? BULLIES: Do you still have your notebook? The function of bullying is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they have a mental breakdown. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of bullying.
Bullies do not quit easily though feigned indifference. They're on a mission to break you and they know that deep down it probably hurt anyway. And shutting down your real emotional responses is so not a good idea for a number of reasons, it's practically inflicting yourself a mental injury.
You're being very dishonest when you leave this part out:
Not by the same degree as computing.
By those standards, airplanes have basically stood still for the last 50 years. Sure they get a bit lighter, a bit better engines, a bit better aerodynamics but they're not radically different nor faster. Already the very first commercial transatlantic flight Berlin-New York was done in 25 hours, like orders faster than a boat and still on the same order - 8.5 hours - today. Same with cars, they've come a long way since the T-Ford but it could do 40-45 mph with 13-21 MPG. What would you get today, 35 MPG? You don't drive cross country on a thimble, that's for sure.
We're not talking about that kind of improvements when it comes to computers. We're talking about that 30 years ago memory was measured in kilobytes, today it's in gigabytes. If computers double performance in 10 years, we think that's awfully slow progress. 30+ years for a 10x improvement? 100 years until a terabyte is last century's gigabyte? Let's be honest, the kind of marginal - or rather, normal - improvements you're talking about would only be scoffed at. When - not if - we hit that limit that the walls are so thin they can't be thinner they might be roughly as good as they'll ever get.
C++ is one of the most complex, inscrutable computer languages ever created. (...) Is that by intent, or did it just happen?
Yes and no, depending on how you look at it. Once upon a time like 40+ years ago there was C. While there was others, C was massively successful in the 1970s because it was a very good but really thin abstraction layer over assembler, which was very common at the time. That means you could write C and it'd run on many different kinds of machines, conversely if your platform wanted to go anywhere it had to have a C compiler. It was imperative and procedural, which was fine but computer scientists also wanted an object oriented language. How do you do that when you don't have a massive staff and budget? You extend C. Early C++ compiled down to C which then compiled on every platform with a C compiler. All the other very low level C-isms just came along for the ride. And any behavior that wasn't defined in C, well it couldn't be defined in C++.
A lot of it is simply the result of C++ paving the way, it was often the first C-derived language to do it and a lot of it turned into ungodly kludges, but you were pretty much committed to keeping that syntax working. So you keep adding and adding but never subtracting, never cleaning up. It's easy to say "lets start over and do a clean rewrite" but hard to achieve the necessary momentum, many have tried and failed. And with locked down devices it's now the device manufacturers that control if a given language will be available, you can make UltraC but if you can't make an iOS app in UltraC then the value is more limited. Outside Apple, Google and Microsoft I don't see who can pull it off, Sun could once but Oracle could never make a new language. Not counting web server languages like Perl/PHP/RoR, but local end user software.
That depends on whether you think it's fundamentally inequality or some absolute threshold of poverty that causes people to rebel. When you have like no job, no money and you're short on food, shelter and healthcare for you and your family, then I can imagine becoming an extremist. But the fact that there's people like Bill Gates who have so ridiculously much more money than I'll ever have doesn't really bother me. I have good place to live, a working car, food and drink on my table and sure I could have fun with a billion dollars, but I'm not hurting myself either.
Of course I know I'm very well off myself, globally speaking. But the number of living in extreme poverty is dwindling, illiteracy is dropping, some 99.9% don't starve - the big scary numbers are from malnourishment enhancing the effect of other diseases, almost 90% have clean drinking water and it doesn't mean the last 10% drink poison. Trends on life expectancy are good, even in Africa. In short, even the poorest are moving out of the "nothing to lose" category to where they might have a shitty job for shitty pay to make a very modest living, but it's not nothing.
It's one thing to think your minimum wage job at McDonald's suck and barely pays enough to make a living. But it is really enough to want to start a revolution and throw the world as you know it into chaos? I don't really think so.
The next century will be on the Internet and artificial scarcity will be seen as a quixotic relic.
Unless the future is the cloud, web services, central game servers, always-on DRM and remote attestation where essential bits of the code don't run on your machine. Any "Secure Boot" Windows 8 machine now comes with a TPM chip active to support this, in a generation or two I'm sure they'll make it a requirement. If you've tampered with your PC, no Netflix/Spotify/Steam for you. Same with Android, install AOSP all you like but it won't be able to fake the signatures.
Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.
It's certainly running on entirely different hardware with a completely different programming model. Instead of one CPU or even a couple thousand steam processors you got 100 billion neurons operating in parallel. We have artificial neural networks but we're struggling real bad to program them effectively - to really more like train them, compared to von Neumann machines it's like programming with the lights out in braille wearing oven mittens.
The difference is that the code is distributed for free. No judge is going to award damages for the redistribution of something that is free.
If you sue under US law there's statutory damages, the kind that lets the RIAA/MPAA charge a $750 minimum (that can go down to $200 if you're an innocent infringer) and $150,000 maximum per work. Make that $250,000 and up to 5 years in prison if you can show it was for profit, which shouldn't be a problem in this case. If they can hire a lawyer to get a $10,000/song verdict for a 99 cent product, surely you can make up some imaginary numbers of lost commercial licenses too. However that's got nothing to do with the customers of the infringing party as they didn't violate copyright. That part is about patents, basically as a result of taking this GPLv2 code but not getting a patent license, they're in violation of patents. Just like I can download and use x264 but still infringe on the H.264 patents.
The catch here though is that they're trying for an estoppel defense, because XimpleWare is the one with both the code and the patents. That may or may not work as the GPLv2 still means you can distribute it freely except in countries where it's patented - like the US - and if you bring it to the US and use it there then you're on the hook for patent infringement. I don't see the very big principal implications though.
If it was so simple to send applications everywhere, people would. It doesn't cost them anything, but it costs you time and/or money to have someone process them. If you make them jump through a few hoops, you'll at least filter away some of the worst spammers who can't be arsed unless they can email their generic application letter and CV. If it's a job you genuinely want, what's taking 5-10 minutes out your day to apply? Personally I've spent much longer tuning my application and CV to show I've read the advertisement and made a good effort to show what skills I have that's particularly relevant to that job. I suppose if I was out of a job it's different, but I don't need to carpet bomb the market. I look for jobs I'd really like and make a few, but serious efforts.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. 30 years ago, applications were built with long life-spans in mind, so dropping into very low-level code could make financial sense.
No, it was utter necessity. For 30 years ago I hadn't even gotten my C64 with all of 65536 bytes of RAM yet, 38911 of which would be left available once BASIC was loaded. Store one uncompressed screenshot of the 320x240x4 bit (16 color) screen and 38400 of those was gone. If you tried storing the Lord of the Rings trilogy in memory - compressed to ~12 bits/word, you'd get about halfway into the Fellowship of the Ring. True, today we waste space but back then we lacked essential space. Every corner was cut, every optimization taken to avoid using any of our precious bytes. See the Y2K problem.
For a more modern but similar issue, I used to have the same attitude to my bandwidth. It used to be slow, costly (pay per minute) and it was important to use it as a precious resource. Today I might end up downloading a whole season of a show after watching the first episode, go bored after three and delete the other twenty. It's there to be used, not to sit idle. I've got 16GB of RAM, there's no point to waste but there's nothing to be gained by hiding in a 1GB corner. If it makes life easier for developers to pull in a 10MB library than write a 100kB function, do it. If you can get it working, working well and working fast then maybe we'll get around to the resource usage.. someday. It's not a big deal.
The average human head is 14.5cm x 23cm x 20cm, so you are quite correct that it would mean that the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel
I'd argue a little differently, that pixel is primarily made up of your face/head (>50%). It's probably good enough to tell your skin or hair color, depending on angle.
It is important to note that if a person was observed laying down on the ground, they would occupy *up to* 10 pixels in the case of the world's tallest person, but the average would only require 6.
He'd be up to 10 pixels long. Actually 11 pixels, if you don't restrict yourself to tallest living person. But I'm guessing he's more than 10 inches wide, so I expect around twice the area except maybe the top pixel for the head. And more if you stretch out your arms, say two more to each side. So more like 1 (head) + 2*5 (body, legs) + 2*2 (arms) = 15 pixels, not 6.
One more generation and graphics will be pretty capable of mainstream gaming.
I'm not sure if I should disagree with you because there's plenty gaming on phones/tablets today or because the bar of what's mainstream keeps going up but I don't agree. Every time they do a better tablet they also release a new generation of graphics cards and a new generation of games comes out to use it. We no longer run Quake and Crysis is no longer all it's cracked up to be, so next generation I expect the situation to be exactly the same - many games will be playable with medium/low settings. And there's no catching up because you can't do in a 15W tablet power budget what a 150W desktop can do. It's always going to look much better, relatively speaking.
I know I'm probably going to burn for this comment, but you don't need a ceiling or a floor to define superior and inferior. If you were stress testing parts in a machine and 20 out of 100 of brand A broke while 80 out of 100 of brand B did the same I think most people would reasonably call brand A better than B, even though the best from brand B did better than the worst from brand A.
Racists don't look at the individual, they want all of them gone for the greater good. It's the only way you can "justify" genocide, nobody could claim the children who died in the gas chambers ever personally harmed anyone. But the were Jews and Jews in the plural was considered a problem, so they wanted to end it permanently. Anecdotes are like one straw in a field of weeds, you still plow it up and reseed from the good stock.
It's not like the Nazis considered themselves perfect, they had breeding programs to "purify" themselves and various kinds of "degenerates" often ended up next to the Jews in the concentration camps. Like a bad strain of cow that doesn't deliver much milk, you're not allowed to breed on. So basically what I'm saying is that while you make a good point, I don't think it actually has any impact on racists.
The Whitestar fleet or at least one example thereof should have been turned over to Earthforce R&D after the war, but that would required Sheridan to surrender power, so of course it didn't happen.
The Whitestar fleet was built on Minbari/Vorlon technology, it had Minbari crews with the occasional human ranger from the Anla'shok and once Sinclair was gone they followed Delenn as their leader, not Sheridan. True, Sheridan and Ivanova got to command a few but they were never Earthforce ships. Just like when Delenn came to Babylon 5's rescue in the first place, they stood with Sinclair but that didn't mean the Minbari were giving away the ships or their technology. In short, he wouldn't have the authority to make that kind of decision. He did step down and resign from Earthforce. All the Earthforce ships and crew that followed him got the amnesty. The Whitestar fleet and League ships returned to their true masters.
The most important piece of back story was pretty damned stupid, the Minbari have thousands of years in space but start a war of annihilation (a pathetic one at that, only 250,000 deaths in two years of war, JMS needs to read about the Eastern Front....) over a botched first contact?
Think more like ancient monarchies, the first contact is basically assassinating the king. That would be enough justification for a small genocide as the nobility won't stop until the enemy's leader has paid the same price in return with commoners as their cannon fodder. This is a caste society, all men are absolutely not created equal. As for 250,000 deaths that was Earth's outposts and colonies and crews - you can't kill more than there is to kill. The final battle where they surrendered was on Earth's doorstep, just as the last lines of defense were falling. So far 536 people have been to space and only 6 of them are currently there. I'd say we'd need to speed way up to put 250,000 humans in space at once by 2245.
Then they stop the war because of some religious nonsense?
Have you looked at actual religious nonsense? You do know we've had civilizations that practiced human sacrifice and so much fucked up shit you wouldn't believe. And that it was too crazy for the people to know was part of the plot, it was a secret only held by the Grey Council and probably not many of the religious caste either - if they told one third of their population someone would surely tell. The Grey Council wanted to surrender, so surrender they did. There's a lot of regimes like that here on Earth today where questioning your orders would be a very stupid thing indeed. Particularly when it's a rather harmless order and not something that's likely to get you killed.
There were a few discontinuous episodes in Season 1, but seasons 2-4 were like old soap operas; you didn't dare miss an episode, or you wouldn't be able to catch up.
Which was also why it was totally impenetrable for anyone who hadn't been watching since season one, episode one. I remember seeing one episode in season one or two and thinking "WTF? Who are they? Why are they fighting? What's going on?" and totally lost interest. I finally got hooked on it during the Shadow War, bad-ass black ships against everyone else in the galaxy as that one was rather obvious. It was only after that I bothered to watch the reruns and figure out what the heck happened leading up to that. Was it really that hard to have a 20-30 second "Previously on Babylon 5" giving you at least the essentials of the back story? Or was it just too much arrogance like that this music must be enjoyed as a full album and not as a single track? Either way, this was not to B5's advantage.
As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter. It's just that we can't actually see it.
Repeating the ignorant doesn't make it true, that "dark matter" is simply ordinary matter we couldn't detect was a good first guess. Very strong evidence indicate it's not because that would create other interactions as well that aren't there. There's some small fraction that is regular matter and some is neutrinos, but without some other form of particles it just doesn't add up.
Those numbers look clearly inflated to sell their own consulting reports and services. Like in-app purchases, so because Angry Bird lets you buy the Mighty Eagle it has a "risky behavior"? Oh please. It'd be easier to take serious without the hyperbole.
Apple is in the hardware business. Their goal is to sell you hardware with a basket of software that enhances the experiences and showcases the hardware. Blackberry is in the enterprise software business. Their goal is to sell you hardware that ties you to a management system from which they make their margin. Microsoft is in the productivity software business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases the features of their productivity suites including their server / cloud based collaboration tools. Google is in the advertising business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases their web services. Those web services are designed to collect information about you to sell to advertisers.
Apple is selling simplicity, they'll never give you the tools to manage your privacy. Blackberry is selling central control, a satellite designed to talk to the mothership (BES). Microsoft is trying to sell you Windows across the board = everything through the cloud. Google is like you say a data siphon, their first party services are all about market data.
I'd say there's one black sheep and three shades of dark gray. However all of that doesn't matter nearly as much as you'd think as the real issue is third party apps. All of them want third party developers for their phone. The developers go where the money is. The money is in selling your data. So the platform will sell out your data. Until or unless someone is willing to cash out extra for a phone that doesn't "subsidize" itself by being a trojan horse, the current situation will continue. The Blackphone is interesting, but so stripped bare that most users won't use it. I think you need a sandbox/VM where you can run apps normally with fake contact/location/etc. data.
Yes. I have actually done phone support, and you would not believe how dumb some people are. Many will call for support before they even turn their computer on. They want someone to babysit them through the entire process before they even try to do it themselves.
Come on, those kinds of people don't run Linux at all. The Linux problem is pretty much the exact opposite, you've got a bunch of dangerously knowledgeable users who've all tweaked their setup and expect all their special little snowflakes to be supported even though it's not.
Parent AC really doesn't belong at -1, I was thinking the same thing. I need to wear glasses or hard contacts and LASIK is out of the question, there's a ton of reasons I'd like to get rid of my glasses like to avoid them fogging up, going swimming, having them edge forward as I carry something and can't push them back, leaning over edges and so on. And hard contacts, well trust me nobody who doesn't have to wear them does for good reason. But virtual reality? That's the "killer feature" that tipped him over the edge? To me that's a bit of a WTF, really...
This is from a Norwegian perspective, so anything here may or may not apply to the US. Here in Norway the three last weeks of July are extremely common to take vacation in, it's known as the "fellesferie" = "common vacation". It's a leftover from when many industries literally stopped in the summer, with the exception of those doing maintenance/upgrades. Basically where it's hard to run with half the staff, everyone gets the the same forced vacation. There's a huge network effect so everything is closed/on skeleton crew because everything else is too. What it practically means though is that every vacation resort or activity is crowded and overbooked, prices are insane and those who can avoid it.
For this reason being able to take vacation before (June) or after (August) or really any other time has become a perk and so it's been spread relatively thin. The school vacations though, they're like forced vacations so yes they're roughly 8 weeks to accommodate when their parents have time off, and even that is challenged as they want to travel in the off season. If the vacations had been shorter, all the parents would all have to squish together in those same weeks. Either that or you'd have to make the school vacation flexible, but then you'd have to run it all summer long for those who happen to be there at that time.
As I recall, in summer school was always a place to send your kids to if both parents had to work and you needed someone to take care of you, but that was not school. There were no teachers, no classrooms. It was more like supervised play, basically they kept track that you didn't get lost or hurt but we were left to make up our own activities with those we wanted to play with and there was no forced participation in anything, though they did try to get something going if all looked bored. I suppose in retrospect I'd call it big kid daycare, that's really what it was but there was a completely different level of freedom to it than school.
Nothing beat the sense of freedom from NOT going there though, to really be unsupervised even for just a few hours. I think it's a natural part of growing up, if you're always in school with people looking after you and then always with your parents looking after you then sooner or later you're going to drop off a cliff when you're on your own. I'm mostly glad I didn't have a cell phone as a kid, I couldn't go crying to mommy and daddy and they couldn't be overprotective as independence was sort of a necessity. I think as a parent today it would be awfully hard to let go simply because you have the technological ability not to.
The problem is that most attempts to define sports would exclude commonly accepted sports. For example curling, equestrian dressage and air pistol shooting are all Olympic sports. There's certainly a very high degree of skill involved, but very low physical requirements when it comes to strength, dexterity, endurance and so on. Certainly you can say there's a lot of fine motor skills to hit a tiny target precisely and consistently, but then you're arguing for eSports not against it. Outside the Olympics, what about physically unchallenging activities like bowling, croquet, darts, snooker and so on? And though it may put demands on the driver, motorsports is hardly athletics. It should also be noted that the origin of the word "sports" is not physical competition.
sport (n.) early 15c., "pleasant pastime," shortening of disport "activity that offers amusement or relaxation; entertainment, fun" (c.1300)
With a narrow understanding of sports, many other uses would be meaningless like sports car. It's a car that's fun to drive, not a car that's exhausting to drive. I don't think competition is a necessary element to sports either, say if someone goes to aerobics or jogging every day calling them sporty seem natural even though they don't measure or compare results in any way. Then again I wouldn't say sporty about anyone not engaged in intense physical activity like sitting inside playing chess all day is not sporty. Then again professional gamer just seems like a contradiction in terms because if you take it seriously it's not a game anymore. On the other hand, people use it like "championship game" instead of "championship match", so it's not all fun and games.
In conclusion, I think we should just nuke the English language from orbit. "eSports" and "eAthletes" won't fuck it up more than it already is.
Post-collapse, sure. During the actual collapse though we'll have tons of people in utter desperation who are short on water, food, firewood and all the basic essentials for survival and has absolutely nothing to lose and who'll totally overwhelm what nature can provide. The first wave of power structures will be all about stealing what other people have, totally unsustainable but sure to cause great grief until they run out of easy targets or run into a bigger pack.
A good example is nuclear holocaust - it's not about the ones killed directly, after an all-out nuclear war global temperatures would drop 10-35C. Can you imagine the massive crop failures world wide we'd have? Billions would starve. And even if you could grow crops, they'd take months of defending in the field so little would in practice be even less. Game would be wiped out, lakes fished empty, survival today before worrying about tomorrow.
Preppers expect to survive the initial chaos by bugging out, locking down and basically waiting it out in a bunker for a year or two. Personally I think it sounds like a rather good plan, once the initial dust has settled there'll be plenty of time to come out of hiding and try to find allies and barter supplies. Sure some 1% may be "winners" and warlords and such, but 9% are probably serfs and 90% dead and that's mostly a lottery.
I've ended up creating a few solutions where I think I'd rather spend three hours doing something creative than one hour doing it mindnumbingly dumb and repetitive. Often the maintenance of tweaking it eats up the savings.
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That there are so few goals is what makes soccer so huge. I played a different sport where the result might be more like 10-4, nobody really cares about a bad referee call or a few missed chances or the lucky goal it's obvious the better team won anyway. In soccer the result might be 2-1 and there's no end to the bullshit fans will make up about controversial decisions, missed chances, lucky shots and whatnot that meant that they could have, should have, would have won or drawn. It's somewhere between sports and Texas Hold 'Em, the poker pro will win on average but on a good day the worst team walks away with the victory. Fully deserved of course *cough*.
The only reason trolls win is we give them the reaction that they are looking for. If people just ignored them more often instead of getting all bent out of shape, the trend would go away.
I'm about to horribly abuse this quote:
WALKER: What if they don't arrest you? What if they don't react at all?
GANDHI: Do you still have your notebook? The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they change the law. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of civil resistance.
YOU: What if they don't take the bait? What if they don't react at all?
BULLIES: Do you still have your notebook? The function of bullying is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they have a mental breakdown. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of bullying.
Bullies do not quit easily though feigned indifference. They're on a mission to break you and they know that deep down it probably hurt anyway. And shutting down your real emotional responses is so not a good idea for a number of reasons, it's practically inflicting yourself a mental injury.
You're being very dishonest when you leave this part out:
Not by the same degree as computing.
By those standards, airplanes have basically stood still for the last 50 years. Sure they get a bit lighter, a bit better engines, a bit better aerodynamics but they're not radically different nor faster. Already the very first commercial transatlantic flight Berlin-New York was done in 25 hours, like orders faster than a boat and still on the same order - 8.5 hours - today. Same with cars, they've come a long way since the T-Ford but it could do 40-45 mph with 13-21 MPG. What would you get today, 35 MPG? You don't drive cross country on a thimble, that's for sure.
We're not talking about that kind of improvements when it comes to computers. We're talking about that 30 years ago memory was measured in kilobytes, today it's in gigabytes. If computers double performance in 10 years, we think that's awfully slow progress. 30+ years for a 10x improvement? 100 years until a terabyte is last century's gigabyte? Let's be honest, the kind of marginal - or rather, normal - improvements you're talking about would only be scoffed at. When - not if - we hit that limit that the walls are so thin they can't be thinner they might be roughly as good as they'll ever get.
C++ is one of the most complex, inscrutable computer languages ever created. (...) Is that by intent, or did it just happen?
Yes and no, depending on how you look at it. Once upon a time like 40+ years ago there was C. While there was others, C was massively successful in the 1970s because it was a very good but really thin abstraction layer over assembler, which was very common at the time. That means you could write C and it'd run on many different kinds of machines, conversely if your platform wanted to go anywhere it had to have a C compiler. It was imperative and procedural, which was fine but computer scientists also wanted an object oriented language. How do you do that when you don't have a massive staff and budget? You extend C. Early C++ compiled down to C which then compiled on every platform with a C compiler. All the other very low level C-isms just came along for the ride. And any behavior that wasn't defined in C, well it couldn't be defined in C++.
A lot of it is simply the result of C++ paving the way, it was often the first C-derived language to do it and a lot of it turned into ungodly kludges, but you were pretty much committed to keeping that syntax working. So you keep adding and adding but never subtracting, never cleaning up. It's easy to say "lets start over and do a clean rewrite" but hard to achieve the necessary momentum, many have tried and failed. And with locked down devices it's now the device manufacturers that control if a given language will be available, you can make UltraC but if you can't make an iOS app in UltraC then the value is more limited. Outside Apple, Google and Microsoft I don't see who can pull it off, Sun could once but Oracle could never make a new language. Not counting web server languages like Perl/PHP/RoR, but local end user software.
That depends on whether you think it's fundamentally inequality or some absolute threshold of poverty that causes people to rebel. When you have like no job, no money and you're short on food, shelter and healthcare for you and your family, then I can imagine becoming an extremist. But the fact that there's people like Bill Gates who have so ridiculously much more money than I'll ever have doesn't really bother me. I have good place to live, a working car, food and drink on my table and sure I could have fun with a billion dollars, but I'm not hurting myself either.
Of course I know I'm very well off myself, globally speaking. But the number of living in extreme poverty is dwindling, illiteracy is dropping, some 99.9% don't starve - the big scary numbers are from malnourishment enhancing the effect of other diseases, almost 90% have clean drinking water and it doesn't mean the last 10% drink poison. Trends on life expectancy are good, even in Africa. In short, even the poorest are moving out of the "nothing to lose" category to where they might have a shitty job for shitty pay to make a very modest living, but it's not nothing.
It's one thing to think your minimum wage job at McDonald's suck and barely pays enough to make a living. But it is really enough to want to start a revolution and throw the world as you know it into chaos? I don't really think so.
The next century will be on the Internet and artificial scarcity will be seen as a quixotic relic.
Unless the future is the cloud, web services, central game servers, always-on DRM and remote attestation where essential bits of the code don't run on your machine. Any "Secure Boot" Windows 8 machine now comes with a TPM chip active to support this, in a generation or two I'm sure they'll make it a requirement. If you've tampered with your PC, no Netflix/Spotify/Steam for you. Same with Android, install AOSP all you like but it won't be able to fake the signatures.
Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.
It's certainly running on entirely different hardware with a completely different programming model. Instead of one CPU or even a couple thousand steam processors you got 100 billion neurons operating in parallel. We have artificial neural networks but we're struggling real bad to program them effectively - to really more like train them, compared to von Neumann machines it's like programming with the lights out in braille wearing oven mittens.
The difference is that the code is distributed for free. No judge is going to award damages for the redistribution of something that is free.
If you sue under US law there's statutory damages, the kind that lets the RIAA/MPAA charge a $750 minimum (that can go down to $200 if you're an innocent infringer) and $150,000 maximum per work. Make that $250,000 and up to 5 years in prison if you can show it was for profit, which shouldn't be a problem in this case. If they can hire a lawyer to get a $10,000/song verdict for a 99 cent product, surely you can make up some imaginary numbers of lost commercial licenses too. However that's got nothing to do with the customers of the infringing party as they didn't violate copyright. That part is about patents, basically as a result of taking this GPLv2 code but not getting a patent license, they're in violation of patents. Just like I can download and use x264 but still infringe on the H.264 patents.
The catch here though is that they're trying for an estoppel defense, because XimpleWare is the one with both the code and the patents. That may or may not work as the GPLv2 still means you can distribute it freely except in countries where it's patented - like the US - and if you bring it to the US and use it there then you're on the hook for patent infringement. I don't see the very big principal implications though.
If it was so simple to send applications everywhere, people would. It doesn't cost them anything, but it costs you time and/or money to have someone process them. If you make them jump through a few hoops, you'll at least filter away some of the worst spammers who can't be arsed unless they can email their generic application letter and CV. If it's a job you genuinely want, what's taking 5-10 minutes out your day to apply? Personally I've spent much longer tuning my application and CV to show I've read the advertisement and made a good effort to show what skills I have that's particularly relevant to that job. I suppose if I was out of a job it's different, but I don't need to carpet bomb the market. I look for jobs I'd really like and make a few, but serious efforts.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. 30 years ago, applications were built with long life-spans in mind, so dropping into very low-level code could make financial sense.
No, it was utter necessity. For 30 years ago I hadn't even gotten my C64 with all of 65536 bytes of RAM yet, 38911 of which would be left available once BASIC was loaded. Store one uncompressed screenshot of the 320x240x4 bit (16 color) screen and 38400 of those was gone. If you tried storing the Lord of the Rings trilogy in memory - compressed to ~12 bits/word, you'd get about halfway into the Fellowship of the Ring. True, today we waste space but back then we lacked essential space. Every corner was cut, every optimization taken to avoid using any of our precious bytes. See the Y2K problem.
For a more modern but similar issue, I used to have the same attitude to my bandwidth. It used to be slow, costly (pay per minute) and it was important to use it as a precious resource. Today I might end up downloading a whole season of a show after watching the first episode, go bored after three and delete the other twenty. It's there to be used, not to sit idle. I've got 16GB of RAM, there's no point to waste but there's nothing to be gained by hiding in a 1GB corner. If it makes life easier for developers to pull in a 10MB library than write a 100kB function, do it. If you can get it working, working well and working fast then maybe we'll get around to the resource usage.. someday. It's not a big deal.
The average human head is 14.5cm x 23cm x 20cm, so you are quite correct that it would mean that the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel
I'd argue a little differently, that pixel is primarily made up of your face/head (>50%). It's probably good enough to tell your skin or hair color, depending on angle.
It is important to note that if a person was observed laying down on the ground, they would occupy *up to* 10 pixels in the case of the world's tallest person, but the average would only require 6.
He'd be up to 10 pixels long. Actually 11 pixels, if you don't restrict yourself to tallest living person. But I'm guessing he's more than 10 inches wide, so I expect around twice the area except maybe the top pixel for the head. And more if you stretch out your arms, say two more to each side. So more like 1 (head) + 2*5 (body, legs) + 2*2 (arms) = 15 pixels, not 6.
One more generation and graphics will be pretty capable of mainstream gaming.
I'm not sure if I should disagree with you because there's plenty gaming on phones/tablets today or because the bar of what's mainstream keeps going up but I don't agree. Every time they do a better tablet they also release a new generation of graphics cards and a new generation of games comes out to use it. We no longer run Quake and Crysis is no longer all it's cracked up to be, so next generation I expect the situation to be exactly the same - many games will be playable with medium/low settings. And there's no catching up because you can't do in a 15W tablet power budget what a 150W desktop can do. It's always going to look much better, relatively speaking.
I know I'm probably going to burn for this comment, but you don't need a ceiling or a floor to define superior and inferior. If you were stress testing parts in a machine and 20 out of 100 of brand A broke while 80 out of 100 of brand B did the same I think most people would reasonably call brand A better than B, even though the best from brand B did better than the worst from brand A.
Racists don't look at the individual, they want all of them gone for the greater good. It's the only way you can "justify" genocide, nobody could claim the children who died in the gas chambers ever personally harmed anyone. But the were Jews and Jews in the plural was considered a problem, so they wanted to end it permanently. Anecdotes are like one straw in a field of weeds, you still plow it up and reseed from the good stock.
It's not like the Nazis considered themselves perfect, they had breeding programs to "purify" themselves and various kinds of "degenerates" often ended up next to the Jews in the concentration camps. Like a bad strain of cow that doesn't deliver much milk, you're not allowed to breed on. So basically what I'm saying is that while you make a good point, I don't think it actually has any impact on racists.
The Whitestar fleet or at least one example thereof should have been turned over to Earthforce R&D after the war, but that would required Sheridan to surrender power, so of course it didn't happen.
The Whitestar fleet was built on Minbari/Vorlon technology, it had Minbari crews with the occasional human ranger from the Anla'shok and once Sinclair was gone they followed Delenn as their leader, not Sheridan. True, Sheridan and Ivanova got to command a few but they were never Earthforce ships. Just like when Delenn came to Babylon 5's rescue in the first place, they stood with Sinclair but that didn't mean the Minbari were giving away the ships or their technology. In short, he wouldn't have the authority to make that kind of decision. He did step down and resign from Earthforce. All the Earthforce ships and crew that followed him got the amnesty. The Whitestar fleet and League ships returned to their true masters.
The most important piece of back story was pretty damned stupid, the Minbari have thousands of years in space but start a war of annihilation (a pathetic one at that, only 250,000 deaths in two years of war, JMS needs to read about the Eastern Front....) over a botched first contact?
Think more like ancient monarchies, the first contact is basically assassinating the king. That would be enough justification for a small genocide as the nobility won't stop until the enemy's leader has paid the same price in return with commoners as their cannon fodder. This is a caste society, all men are absolutely not created equal. As for 250,000 deaths that was Earth's outposts and colonies and crews - you can't kill more than there is to kill. The final battle where they surrendered was on Earth's doorstep, just as the last lines of defense were falling. So far 536 people have been to space and only 6 of them are currently there. I'd say we'd need to speed way up to put 250,000 humans in space at once by 2245.
Then they stop the war because of some religious nonsense?
Have you looked at actual religious nonsense? You do know we've had civilizations that practiced human sacrifice and so much fucked up shit you wouldn't believe. And that it was too crazy for the people to know was part of the plot, it was a secret only held by the Grey Council and probably not many of the religious caste either - if they told one third of their population someone would surely tell. The Grey Council wanted to surrender, so surrender they did. There's a lot of regimes like that here on Earth today where questioning your orders would be a very stupid thing indeed. Particularly when it's a rather harmless order and not something that's likely to get you killed.
There were a few discontinuous episodes in Season 1, but seasons 2-4 were like old soap operas; you didn't dare miss an episode, or you wouldn't be able to catch up.
Which was also why it was totally impenetrable for anyone who hadn't been watching since season one, episode one. I remember seeing one episode in season one or two and thinking "WTF? Who are they? Why are they fighting? What's going on?" and totally lost interest. I finally got hooked on it during the Shadow War, bad-ass black ships against everyone else in the galaxy as that one was rather obvious. It was only after that I bothered to watch the reruns and figure out what the heck happened leading up to that. Was it really that hard to have a 20-30 second "Previously on Babylon 5" giving you at least the essentials of the back story? Or was it just too much arrogance like that this music must be enjoyed as a full album and not as a single track? Either way, this was not to B5's advantage.
As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter. It's just that we can't actually see it.
Repeating the ignorant doesn't make it true, that "dark matter" is simply ordinary matter we couldn't detect was a good first guess. Very strong evidence indicate it's not because that would create other interactions as well that aren't there. There's some small fraction that is regular matter and some is neutrinos, but without some other form of particles it just doesn't add up.
Those numbers look clearly inflated to sell their own consulting reports and services. Like in-app purchases, so because Angry Bird lets you buy the Mighty Eagle it has a "risky behavior"? Oh please. It'd be easier to take serious without the hyperbole.
Apple is in the hardware business. Their goal is to sell you hardware with a basket of software that enhances the experiences and showcases the hardware.
Blackberry is in the enterprise software business. Their goal is to sell you hardware that ties you to a management system from which they make their margin.
Microsoft is in the productivity software business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases the features of their productivity suites including their server / cloud based collaboration tools.
Google is in the advertising business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases their web services. Those web services are designed to collect information about you to sell to advertisers.
Apple is selling simplicity, they'll never give you the tools to manage your privacy.
Blackberry is selling central control, a satellite designed to talk to the mothership (BES).
Microsoft is trying to sell you Windows across the board = everything through the cloud.
Google is like you say a data siphon, their first party services are all about market data.
I'd say there's one black sheep and three shades of dark gray. However all of that doesn't matter nearly as much as you'd think as the real issue is third party apps. All of them want third party developers for their phone. The developers go where the money is. The money is in selling your data. So the platform will sell out your data. Until or unless someone is willing to cash out extra for a phone that doesn't "subsidize" itself by being a trojan horse, the current situation will continue. The Blackphone is interesting, but so stripped bare that most users won't use it. I think you need a sandbox/VM where you can run apps normally with fake contact/location/etc. data.
Yes. I have actually done phone support, and you would not believe how dumb some people are. Many will call for support before they even turn their computer on. They want someone to babysit them through the entire process before they even try to do it themselves.
Come on, those kinds of people don't run Linux at all. The Linux problem is pretty much the exact opposite, you've got a bunch of dangerously knowledgeable users who've all tweaked their setup and expect all their special little snowflakes to be supported even though it's not.
Parent AC really doesn't belong at -1, I was thinking the same thing. I need to wear glasses or hard contacts and LASIK is out of the question, there's a ton of reasons I'd like to get rid of my glasses like to avoid them fogging up, going swimming, having them edge forward as I carry something and can't push them back, leaning over edges and so on. And hard contacts, well trust me nobody who doesn't have to wear them does for good reason. But virtual reality? That's the "killer feature" that tipped him over the edge? To me that's a bit of a WTF, really...
This is from a Norwegian perspective, so anything here may or may not apply to the US. Here in Norway the three last weeks of July are extremely common to take vacation in, it's known as the "fellesferie" = "common vacation". It's a leftover from when many industries literally stopped in the summer, with the exception of those doing maintenance/upgrades. Basically where it's hard to run with half the staff, everyone gets the the same forced vacation. There's a huge network effect so everything is closed/on skeleton crew because everything else is too. What it practically means though is that every vacation resort or activity is crowded and overbooked, prices are insane and those who can avoid it.
For this reason being able to take vacation before (June) or after (August) or really any other time has become a perk and so it's been spread relatively thin. The school vacations though, they're like forced vacations so yes they're roughly 8 weeks to accommodate when their parents have time off, and even that is challenged as they want to travel in the off season. If the vacations had been shorter, all the parents would all have to squish together in those same weeks. Either that or you'd have to make the school vacation flexible, but then you'd have to run it all summer long for those who happen to be there at that time.
As I recall, in summer school was always a place to send your kids to if both parents had to work and you needed someone to take care of you, but that was not school. There were no teachers, no classrooms. It was more like supervised play, basically they kept track that you didn't get lost or hurt but we were left to make up our own activities with those we wanted to play with and there was no forced participation in anything, though they did try to get something going if all looked bored. I suppose in retrospect I'd call it big kid daycare, that's really what it was but there was a completely different level of freedom to it than school.
Nothing beat the sense of freedom from NOT going there though, to really be unsupervised even for just a few hours. I think it's a natural part of growing up, if you're always in school with people looking after you and then always with your parents looking after you then sooner or later you're going to drop off a cliff when you're on your own. I'm mostly glad I didn't have a cell phone as a kid, I couldn't go crying to mommy and daddy and they couldn't be overprotective as independence was sort of a necessity. I think as a parent today it would be awfully hard to let go simply because you have the technological ability not to.
The problem is that most attempts to define sports would exclude commonly accepted sports. For example curling, equestrian dressage and air pistol shooting are all Olympic sports. There's certainly a very high degree of skill involved, but very low physical requirements when it comes to strength, dexterity, endurance and so on. Certainly you can say there's a lot of fine motor skills to hit a tiny target precisely and consistently, but then you're arguing for eSports not against it. Outside the Olympics, what about physically unchallenging activities like bowling, croquet, darts, snooker and so on? And though it may put demands on the driver, motorsports is hardly athletics. It should also be noted that the origin of the word "sports" is not physical competition.
sport (n.) early 15c., "pleasant pastime," shortening of disport "activity that offers amusement or relaxation; entertainment, fun" (c.1300)
With a narrow understanding of sports, many other uses would be meaningless like sports car. It's a car that's fun to drive, not a car that's exhausting to drive. I don't think competition is a necessary element to sports either, say if someone goes to aerobics or jogging every day calling them sporty seem natural even though they don't measure or compare results in any way. Then again I wouldn't say sporty about anyone not engaged in intense physical activity like sitting inside playing chess all day is not sporty. Then again professional gamer just seems like a contradiction in terms because if you take it seriously it's not a game anymore. On the other hand, people use it like "championship game" instead of "championship match", so it's not all fun and games.
In conclusion, I think we should just nuke the English language from orbit. "eSports" and "eAthletes" won't fuck it up more than it already is.
Post-collapse, sure. During the actual collapse though we'll have tons of people in utter desperation who are short on water, food, firewood and all the basic essentials for survival and has absolutely nothing to lose and who'll totally overwhelm what nature can provide. The first wave of power structures will be all about stealing what other people have, totally unsustainable but sure to cause great grief until they run out of easy targets or run into a bigger pack.
A good example is nuclear holocaust - it's not about the ones killed directly, after an all-out nuclear war global temperatures would drop 10-35C. Can you imagine the massive crop failures world wide we'd have? Billions would starve. And even if you could grow crops, they'd take months of defending in the field so little would in practice be even less. Game would be wiped out, lakes fished empty, survival today before worrying about tomorrow.
Preppers expect to survive the initial chaos by bugging out, locking down and basically waiting it out in a bunker for a year or two. Personally I think it sounds like a rather good plan, once the initial dust has settled there'll be plenty of time to come out of hiding and try to find allies and barter supplies. Sure some 1% may be "winners" and warlords and such, but 9% are probably serfs and 90% dead and that's mostly a lottery.
I've ended up creating a few solutions where I think I'd rather spend three hours doing something creative than one hour doing it mindnumbingly dumb and repetitive. Often the maintenance of tweaking it eats up the savings.
Relevant XKCDs:
Automation
Is it worth the time?
Trying to find a positive spin on this but.... no. Anyone?