1st-world countries should be capable of running nuclear power without serious problems if their governments actually demanded quality. (...) And Japan? Japan put a ton of reactors on a freaking crowded island, and then didn't bother to inspect them properly. (Any moron with a badge could have noticed their backup generators weren't on the required stilts above the waterline--which failed when flooded.) The story of Fukushima is a failure of government to regulate greedy corporations, not an inherent failure of technology.
So first we need to get rid of greed and incompetence, then nuclear will be safe? Let's be honest here, before Fukushima everyone was dismissing Chernobyl as being the Soviet Union playing fast and loose with nuclear safety that would never ever happen in a first world country like Japan. But it did anyway. And after the next accident I'm sure that in retrospect we'll find some reason why it shouldn't have happened too, we usually do. That it won't happen in a perfect world is not applicable to the real world. Not that anything is perfect, but other power sources tend to fail in less spectacular fashion.
Central to Agile is the proposition that the company is unable or unwilling to figure out what the requirements are before they develop the system.
The problem is that waterfall is presented as making extreme effort to try figuring it all out up front, while Agile then becomes to the exact opposite where you make no effort and just prioritize what's right in front of your nose. Reality is that you need some flexibility in waterfall projects and some structure in agile projects. In my opinion it's fine as a development method, it's all the people making requirements who don't even try anymore because agile. We're so dynamic, as long as we can spin in place it doesn't matter that we're not going anywhere.
The government isn't going to let fully automated trucks run around with nobody to watch them any time soon, but they will slip these features into trucks to reduce driver fatigue. The driver is there to watch the truck, and the truck will also watch the driver and wake them up if they're passing out â" but also not let them cream anyone. When the trucks can manage a good safety record with babysitters, then they'll be allowed to run around on their own.
Have you ever tried to be a driving instructor? You are far more stressed than if you're driving yourself, because you never know when the pupil doesn't react or does something unexpected. If they don't trust it, they're going to turn it off. If they do trust it, the truck will drive itself. Sure they might help if it gets stuck, but sitting there ready to intervene at any moment? No way. So I'm thinking the safety record with babysitters is going to be the same as the safety record without babysitters, it better be good enough from day one. The rest is about not getting stuck when the computer can't figure out what to do.
Yep. If he gets out of line the GOP congress will impeach him on any one of his many real scandals resulting in Mike Pence as president.
Not sure what delusions you have but impeaching their own president would be an ever bigger scandal for the GOP and be a months long circus show so unless it's proven that he takes orders direct from Putin it'd never happen. And even then they'd probably bury their heads in the sand and claim it's a fabrication. A million to one odds that won't happen.
Cheaper to manufacture means the price I pay for a TV/monitor is going to drop right? Right? *crickets*
I don't think anyone has said QLED TVs will be cheaper, only better. Like OLEDs, there's one light source per pixel so you don't have all the backlight and uniformity issues of LCDs - not even the latest full-array local dimming ones with 600+ zones come close to per-pixel dimming. Unlike OLEDs, the colors are produced by a quantum dot layer so you don't have the intensity and lifespan issues of OLED. So the sum should be a TV with insanely high contrast (0-4000 nits?), extremely wide colors (90%+ of Rec. 2020) and excellent edge-to-edge performance with no halos or bleeding backlight but the cost would probably be beyond OLED because you need 3840x2160 = 8 million LEDs with an additional, expensive QD layer on top. Except for extreme brightness - but then you don't want to wear sunglasses to watch TV either - it should be damn close to looking out the window.
Never underestimate the power of words, like how some employees go ballistic when they're called resources "like we were cattle". Well tough you're hired to do a job and in that context you're just another input, like the bricks and the blender you need a bricklayer to make the wall. I usually sarcastically agree they're right, the proper term should be prostitute since we're pimping out our brains for cash.
I know that no matter how much they care about my physical and social well-being it's ultimately a means to an end and I'm not the end. The same way that no matter how much I care about my job it's ultimately a means to get compensation, perks, promotions, goodwill, recognition, references and so on, it's their goal not mine. That's the core of an employer-employee relationship, they're not my friend, family or partner and nobody should lose sight of that.
Which is not to say we shouldn't be on good terms, I think there's a lot of win-win in that. But I don't get angry when they refer to me as a tool to get a job done. And if they try any cog in the machinery analogies, I don't mind going to a restaurant analogy to say it's more like what happens when you drop-in replace tenderloin with shank because they're both beef. Hint: It's not going to be very good. Which I suppose is comparing myself to cattle. Moo.
If you learned not to question Wikipedia in elementary school, that means I have moles on my ass that are older than you. That's exactly what I needed this holiday weekend. Thanks a lot.
If you lasted that long you got off easy, 13 years ago someone posted a troll post about how Stallman was a dinosaur from the 256 color era. I was thinking back to my C64 with 16 colors and that's when it really hit me that I was officially older than the dinosaurs. At the time I was 24, rythmic sports gymnastic and snowboarding got nothing on IT when it comes to obsolescence. I should probably be put in a museum by now.
It was never going to last, in the 20th century the US got it all laid out on a silver platter... the "Old World" fucked itself royally with two huge wars, the Soviet Union and China was stuck in a communist plan economy, many countries were colonies or stuck in old structures like caste systems or authoritarian structures or broken education systems and so on. It was not only that America had many opportunities but that other countries had few. Today I think most people feel there are opportunities at home and it's not like Americans are born smarter than other people, if other countries are achieving more of their potential the gap will narrow.
I was taught in elementary school to check sources and not rely on a single source. Even (especially) wikipedia was to be questioned. That seems to have all gone out the window. You don't need any qualifications to write news, and nobody would check anyway. The internet was supposed to level the playing field for everything and everybody. It did that, but it turns out that most players are terrible.
Welcome to clickonomics. Sure, you could verify every story... and you'd be very last to publish every time. The primary reason it sorta worked before was not that journalists were better or that they really cared more about the facts, it's was that in most cases there was a day's cycle. Spend an extra three hours researching? No problem as long as you meet the deadline, it's still in tomorrow's newspaper. And you know your competitors can't copy you until tomorrow and everybody would know that's yesterday's news. Today it's like the story is breaking NOW NOW NOW let's run with it and they all copy each other like crazy to not miss out. The exclusive material is often not "news" anymore, it's an in-depth story or featured topic because anything everyone legitimately can report on is near instantly copied even if it was your scoop. The incentives don't reward investigative journalism.
Sounds like a pretty big power budget. If it's as little as three feet, couldn't we erect a airtight greenhouse, lay the ice bare and have solar collectors = mirrors heat it up until the ice melts by itself, then collect it like a well? And once you have some water I think you need to get some kind of steam engine or stirling engine going via solar concentrators, I don't think solar panels will cut it.
Probably the same delusional budget/PR process we have some times:
1. Here's all the cool things we could do with lots of funding 2. Media/bloggers/politicians create lots of buzz around it 3. Actual budget is barely keeping lights on or less 4. Time passes, boring economic details get forgotten 5. Where are all the cool things you said you'd do??
I think you and the grandparent are talking about different things, he's mainly talking about the "premium" experience of a $100k car. I've heard others too say it falls short of high end Audis and BMWs, but really it sells to all those who want to "go green" but can't deal with the range of a Nissan Leaf, BMW i3 or Renault Zoe regardless of that. Once you get into Tesla Model 3 territory the customers aren't really obsessing over such details, they want as you say a cheap, reliable car and it's less about the finer details and nuances of the driving experience.
Do they have quality control/reliability issues, as in how often does the car need to be in the shop? From what I've heard certainly some, parts and repair time has also been an issue. But we're also hearing from early Model S customers, they have a lot more experience now than they had then so Model 3 might be decent. Not ever going to buy a Model X though, those doors are just begging for problems 3-5-10 years down the road. I think the Elon Musk drank a little too much "they said it can't be done, so I'm doing it" kool-aid there.
Well, according to Wikipedia there are 195 countries and the six listed are:
17. Germany 21. France 38. Canada 65. Netherlands 95. Austria 114. Finland
On the one hand, you can count that five out of six are in the upper half and not small island states that don't really do coal anyway. I mean it could be Bahamas, Barbados, Vanuatu, Samoa, Grenada and Tonga which would be considerably less impressive. On the other hand the top ten are about 4.3 billion people so even if the other 185 countries agreed the majority would still use coal. It's definitively still in the "we'll put our money where or mouth is" phase where they try to be practical, large scale examples that it's possible rather than really make a dent in world consumption.
But that's basically the EU led by Germany and France, realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down. Population will also rise to 10 billion from an aging population despite the explosive growth is over. So the EU is trying to find a greener way to deliver a high quality way of life, hoping the rest of the world will be more EU-like than US-like. CO2 emissions in US: 16.4, EU: 8.6, World: 4.9, so if the world follows the US example emissions will triple...
1) The "Ossietzky Prize" is awarded by an old organization of "Poets, Editors and Novelists" that have been fighting for freedom of speech for ages. There's not reason to believe that they're not genuine in their support of Snowden and the government could no more stop that than prevent employers naming the employee of the month. I doubt they're trying to trap Snowden and I doubt the legal system is trying to be intentionally obtuse, but when asked to preemptively rule on a hypothetical of what would happen when Snowden were to come to Norway and the US were to file an extradition request that's unreasonable. To say "No matter what charges and evidence the US has, we won't extradite" would be a far more political ruling than "No request has been made so we can't evaluate the merits until it's presented to us".
2) You have no idea how much the Norwegian legal system protects suspects and criminals, for example you could read the case of Mullah Krekar. Brief TL;DR summary: Leader of Islamic organization linked to terror, permanent expulsion order, declared a danger to national security, convicted to five years in prison for death threats but won't be expelled to Iraq where he's likely looking at a death sentence. Why? Because we don't extradite to any country where they might risk a death sentence. Looks like we might finally get rid of him now though since Italy wants him on terrorism charges and they don't have the death penalty. Another case is Anders Behring Breivik, the mass murderer who killed 77 people but the court ruled against the prison that his rights had been violated because the security regime had been insufficiently documented as necessary.
That said, Snowden's actions does seem to violate a lot of US law as written no matter his motivation. So as long as they pinky promise to avoid capital punishment and they dot the i's and cross the t's doing everything by the book, I also strongly doubt the court would say "but that aside it looks like you did it for all the right reasons, request denied". That would typically be for the legal system where he's being trialed to decide if the sentence should be reduced or commuted because of mitigating circumstances. Nor are they likely to shit list a modern western democracy by saying they don't think the US will give a fair trial, we don't even say that about dubious third world countries. He's been granted asylum by Russia because there Putin can simply decide, here we don't have any such authoritarian leaders that is likely to politically overrule the normal process. So while I don't think there's any malice involved, it might be best he stayed there.
This whole situation makes me happy to be 50 and have some health problems. Maybe, assuming things go really bad, I'll be able to get out of here honorably.
If I compare my home town here in Norway to say Mumbai, India it'd take +20C for us to become like them. In fact, they suggest the Gulf Stream could be messed with putting us closer to Alaska and Siberia so locally it could get colder rather than warmer. Currently the high end of the worst estimates if we just go nuts burning the rest of the fossil fuels is like +5C. The climate agreements are trying to push for +1.5C/+2C. People live here, people live there, maybe it'll seriously mess up parts of the world causing huge migrations, wars over resources and overall make supporting 7-10 billion people tough but we'll run out of oil long before we're able to make the planet totally uninhabitable. It's not going to be the end of the world, it could be bad but not that bad.
Yeah, I'll admire them more when they publish the source code of Quartz as open source.
No business case for that, in fact probably a negative one from clones and knock-offs. Like several have pointed out, Apple doesn't have to do this. They do it because it helps to split development costs between them and a bunch of companies using BSD tools/kernel for routers, firewalls, NAS, embedded, web servers etc. and reduces divergence so it's less work to maintain and incorporate patches from others. No real competitor to Apple's consumer products (iPhone, iPad, Macs) uses it and it's unlikely that anyone will. They got zero interest in helping anyone else make Mac-like GUIs.
More troubling to me was that there wasn't some basic sanity checking going on. (...) Same way I write my code (and spreadsheets) to calculate important numbers two, three, or sometimes even four different ways to make sure they all agree before proceeding to act on it.
Well it's not exactly like the lander can abort, it's do or die. So you got inconsistent or unlikely data, but what's good and what's bad? It is a glitch, is it defective, did a misfire flip us around or put us in a spin or block the sensor? Can we salvage it or is the mission fucked no matter what? That's really the million dollar question, is there a contingency plan that could work and if so what should trigger it.
I'm guessing that with combinatorics you'll have potentially very many possible failure modes and it's hard to find the realistic and salvageable ones while not screwing up non-sensor issues because you don't trust the data. I imagine you can spend a lot of time and resources on a few paths only to find it fails in a completely different way you didn't expect. It's a lot easier in hindsight...
Even if you know that, it is far from obvious that there will be a hardware and software interface that'll let you turn an apparent read-only/write-only device into a read/write device. It could have dedicated ports or use fused circuits to set it in a device, the coupling could have had mode indicators or firmware that forced it into headphone or microphone mode. I've never heard of any malware doing it before, so I'd say this is pretty clever.
And I just got a scary thought, many laptops have built-in speakers that you can't easily disconnect, can they too be reprogrammed as inputs? Even if it doesn't have much reach if you can hear what the person on the laptop is doing talking on the phone or whatever, that could be huge. I mean many headsets have a mic, so if you're worried about anyone listening in you'd have disconnected it anyway, this only adds the capability to pure headphones/earbuds.
Forget speech writers, supporters and everyone else, I doubt there was any plan behind it. If you've worked for something for a decade - I doubt this "it's her turn" came by itself - only to see it crash and burn so irrevocably and unexpectedly I think you're entitled to a personal breakdown. Like a scientist working on a space probe for many years and boom, go home mission is over before it started and even that is more of an expected risk. I think if she had walked out there that night you'd see a truly crushed woman. Of course that's pure speculation, but below all those layers of composure and statesmanship there must be a human being too that got a real kick in the nuts.
He's a fast learner at becoming a typical lying establishment politician, after having been briefed on the actual facts of the nation and the world.
If that was actually the case he'd be an ignorant politician that's been enlightened, it's not a lie to realize the basis of your position was lacking and the past conclusion wrong. Though I think you're closer on this one:
He just said whatever he thought would win him the election.
He did. But not in the "I'll tell you half a truth and go full crazy once I'm elected" way, pretty much every move after he was elected has been reconciliatory and moderating past extremes. We know Trump is far from the traditional, life long Republican. At the same time, in practice you have to be a Democrat or Republican to become president. He's a businessman, clearly he's got some economic theories that he really means but the rest or has he just been pandering?
This might be hilariously wrong in retrospect but just throwing it out there, what if Trump has been playing the long con like you see in reality shows and now that he's maneuvered his way into office he'll actually be a far more moderate, responsible and socially progressive president than anyone expected him to be? Because it's one thing that he flip-flops, but I can't see that all of these are necessary. In many cases he could probably stick to his guns and have the party back him up, but he does it anyway. Most peculiar.
...why would I pick Fedora? It's one thing if we're talking servers and I needed RHEL or Oracle Unbreakable, but for personal usage? When SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, why not pick a Ubuntu or even a Debian based distro?.deb is a lot easier to handle than.rpm
Well, most of the "under the hood" changes are pushed by Red Hat so you'll probably see them in Fedora first if that rocks your boat. Ubuntu is trying their own thing "over the hood" with Mir, Unity etc. which may or may not be to your liking. I kinda like KDE but it seems to always be on the sidelines for everyone but SuSE. Right now I'd probably go to Mint Linux's Cinnamon edition but realistically I hope to keep Win7 working a little longer. SteamOS and their Steam Machines kinda went nowhere, so it's still just Linux users pushing for Linux. It scored some big wins like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and X-COM 2, but I would still miss games like GTA V and Overwatch and it looks like DX11 support in WINE is way off.
it's probably just the classic case of watering down statistics to manipulate this into this some sort of seemingly still existent 'technical divide' problem in this world.
Africa still has countries like Niger with 20% literacy and you think the 'technical divide' is just a hoax, says most about you. China is approaching first world levels with 96.4%, India is still way behind at 72.1% but they are pulling themselves out of the mud. Africa is still a big cluster fuck. Sure one in ten means most people will know someone who they can ask for help, but since most access in the third world is mobile I doubt anyone will part with their cell phone for long except to close family even if they could use it. And it's probably on limited and relatively expensive plans so you don't get to use it frivolously.
Of course, being literate doesn't mean much unless you can put it to good use. I mean it's nice to be able to read textbooks, letters, package labels and instruction manuals but most truly poor people live on rural subsistence farms with little of that. Having Internet access is a great way to make being literate even more useful, you can learn more and find out things for yourself. It makes giving your kids an education more valuable. At the same time I don't think you should underestimate the challenge of going from the pre-industrial era to 21st century knowledge workers, the jobs are unskilled manual labor.
Civil engineers design with a safety margin such that their building's don't fall down. I work with a bunch of them. Civil engineers dread the thought that their building falls down. (...) Suppose I design a blood pressure monitoring machine for a hospital. It and a hundred other devices let the hospital run much more efficiently. The hospital only needs 1/2 the number of nurses. Now, someone discovers a bug in security camera, penetrates the network, discovers hundreds of Windows XP Embedded devices, and turns the hospital into a malware farm.
Except the latter is more akin to evildoers running trucks in complex resonance patterns or planting C4 charges to bring the bridge down. In complex software sure there are accidentally created and accidentally triggered bugs, but those are mostly contained by testing and rollback procedures so what you have today is not worse than what you had yesterday. If it's broken you can fairly easily put a business value to it and prioritize accordingly. And there's not many insider civil engineers who intentionally leaves an exploit or plants a backdoor to bring the bridge down.
Of course you can still screw up badly like when your Mars probe doesn't convert to metric or your whole system is down or corrupted instead of failing one particular operation on one particular set of inputs. But you're in control of these factors, if you haven't tested the results or that the bits go together it's your fault. If you haven't tested with 10x normal production load that's your fault. If you haven't tested what happens on malformed or out of range input you're not really trying. Specially crafted input with malicious intent is really a quite different ball game.
To be honest I feel software quality is generally pretty high, most my software runs very stable and rarely give errors - or maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, if it doesn't work well I don't use it. It's not the 90s anymore when it would blue-screen if you looked at it funny. What I worry about is illegal malware like cryptoviruses, password stealers and identity theft as well as an increasing trend of legal "malware" like telemetry, targeted advertising, online activation and other baked-in rights to rape my privacy, void consumer rights and create dependencies on external servers and their terms of service.
DRM exists so that approved parties can do approved actions, if everyone could use the CDM (content decryption module) to do anything it wouldn't be DRM at all. The EME (encrypted media extensions) is basically a framework to interact with a locked box but the actual lock is left to the implementation. Just like in the real world where you have tons of different locks and authentication schemes and what you trust to be "good enough" and who should have keys evolves. One "CDM to rule them all" would be like insisting everyone use a TSA lock, which would be quickly broken and useless. You can always try to make the DRM proponents shoot themselves in the foot, but it's not surprising they rejected it.
I bet they wanted to, they must have known Windows RT was a bad deal but it took them quite a while to get an Intel CPU in a non-"pro" tablet. With Intel cancelling their Broxton SoC in April, I don't think there's any suitable x86 hardware platform in production or on the roadmap. And with Qualcomm announcing the Snapdragon 835 on 10nm any process lead Intel had is caught up and possibly overtaken and Android/iPhone owns the market so Intel bailed. So now Microsoft has to bet on ARM and the unified windows platform, it's not working but they don't have any other alternatives than waving the white flag and dropping phones altogether. WinTel seem to have managed to draw a line in the sand with the Surface line though, the iPad and ChromeBook doesn't seem so menacing to their core business anymore.
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1st-world countries should be capable of running nuclear power without serious problems if their governments actually demanded quality. (...) And Japan? Japan put a ton of reactors on a freaking crowded island, and then didn't bother to inspect them properly. (Any moron with a badge could have noticed their backup generators weren't on the required stilts above the waterline--which failed when flooded.) The story of Fukushima is a failure of government to regulate greedy corporations, not an inherent failure of technology.
So first we need to get rid of greed and incompetence, then nuclear will be safe? Let's be honest here, before Fukushima everyone was dismissing Chernobyl as being the Soviet Union playing fast and loose with nuclear safety that would never ever happen in a first world country like Japan. But it did anyway. And after the next accident I'm sure that in retrospect we'll find some reason why it shouldn't have happened too, we usually do. That it won't happen in a perfect world is not applicable to the real world. Not that anything is perfect, but other power sources tend to fail in less spectacular fashion.
Central to Agile is the proposition that the company is unable or unwilling to figure out what the requirements are before they develop the system.
The problem is that waterfall is presented as making extreme effort to try figuring it all out up front, while Agile then becomes to the exact opposite where you make no effort and just prioritize what's right in front of your nose. Reality is that you need some flexibility in waterfall projects and some structure in agile projects. In my opinion it's fine as a development method, it's all the people making requirements who don't even try anymore because agile. We're so dynamic, as long as we can spin in place it doesn't matter that we're not going anywhere.
The government isn't going to let fully automated trucks run around with nobody to watch them any time soon, but they will slip these features into trucks to reduce driver fatigue. The driver is there to watch the truck, and the truck will also watch the driver and wake them up if they're passing out â" but also not let them cream anyone. When the trucks can manage a good safety record with babysitters, then they'll be allowed to run around on their own.
Have you ever tried to be a driving instructor? You are far more stressed than if you're driving yourself, because you never know when the pupil doesn't react or does something unexpected. If they don't trust it, they're going to turn it off. If they do trust it, the truck will drive itself. Sure they might help if it gets stuck, but sitting there ready to intervene at any moment? No way. So I'm thinking the safety record with babysitters is going to be the same as the safety record without babysitters, it better be good enough from day one. The rest is about not getting stuck when the computer can't figure out what to do.
Yep. If he gets out of line the GOP congress will impeach him on any one of his many real scandals resulting in Mike Pence as president.
Not sure what delusions you have but impeaching their own president would be an ever bigger scandal for the GOP and be a months long circus show so unless it's proven that he takes orders direct from Putin it'd never happen. And even then they'd probably bury their heads in the sand and claim it's a fabrication. A million to one odds that won't happen.
Cheaper to manufacture means the price I pay for a TV/monitor is going to drop right? Right? *crickets*
I don't think anyone has said QLED TVs will be cheaper, only better. Like OLEDs, there's one light source per pixel so you don't have all the backlight and uniformity issues of LCDs - not even the latest full-array local dimming ones with 600+ zones come close to per-pixel dimming. Unlike OLEDs, the colors are produced by a quantum dot layer so you don't have the intensity and lifespan issues of OLED. So the sum should be a TV with insanely high contrast (0-4000 nits?), extremely wide colors (90%+ of Rec. 2020) and excellent edge-to-edge performance with no halos or bleeding backlight but the cost would probably be beyond OLED because you need 3840x2160 = 8 million LEDs with an additional, expensive QD layer on top. Except for extreme brightness - but then you don't want to wear sunglasses to watch TV either - it should be damn close to looking out the window.
Never underestimate the power of words, like how some employees go ballistic when they're called resources "like we were cattle". Well tough you're hired to do a job and in that context you're just another input, like the bricks and the blender you need a bricklayer to make the wall. I usually sarcastically agree they're right, the proper term should be prostitute since we're pimping out our brains for cash.
I know that no matter how much they care about my physical and social well-being it's ultimately a means to an end and I'm not the end. The same way that no matter how much I care about my job it's ultimately a means to get compensation, perks, promotions, goodwill, recognition, references and so on, it's their goal not mine. That's the core of an employer-employee relationship, they're not my friend, family or partner and nobody should lose sight of that.
Which is not to say we shouldn't be on good terms, I think there's a lot of win-win in that. But I don't get angry when they refer to me as a tool to get a job done. And if they try any cog in the machinery analogies, I don't mind going to a restaurant analogy to say it's more like what happens when you drop-in replace tenderloin with shank because they're both beef. Hint: It's not going to be very good. Which I suppose is comparing myself to cattle. Moo.
If you learned not to question Wikipedia in elementary school, that means I have moles on my ass that are older than you. That's exactly what I needed this holiday weekend. Thanks a lot.
If you lasted that long you got off easy, 13 years ago someone posted a troll post about how Stallman was a dinosaur from the 256 color era. I was thinking back to my C64 with 16 colors and that's when it really hit me that I was officially older than the dinosaurs. At the time I was 24, rythmic sports gymnastic and snowboarding got nothing on IT when it comes to obsolescence. I should probably be put in a museum by now.
It was never going to last, in the 20th century the US got it all laid out on a silver platter... the "Old World" fucked itself royally with two huge wars, the Soviet Union and China was stuck in a communist plan economy, many countries were colonies or stuck in old structures like caste systems or authoritarian structures or broken education systems and so on. It was not only that America had many opportunities but that other countries had few. Today I think most people feel there are opportunities at home and it's not like Americans are born smarter than other people, if other countries are achieving more of their potential the gap will narrow.
I was taught in elementary school to check sources and not rely on a single source. Even (especially) wikipedia was to be questioned. That seems to have all gone out the window. You don't need any qualifications to write news, and nobody would check anyway. The internet was supposed to level the playing field for everything and everybody. It did that, but it turns out that most players are terrible.
Welcome to clickonomics. Sure, you could verify every story... and you'd be very last to publish every time. The primary reason it sorta worked before was not that journalists were better or that they really cared more about the facts, it's was that in most cases there was a day's cycle. Spend an extra three hours researching? No problem as long as you meet the deadline, it's still in tomorrow's newspaper. And you know your competitors can't copy you until tomorrow and everybody would know that's yesterday's news. Today it's like the story is breaking NOW NOW NOW let's run with it and they all copy each other like crazy to not miss out. The exclusive material is often not "news" anymore, it's an in-depth story or featured topic because anything everyone legitimately can report on is near instantly copied even if it was your scoop. The incentives don't reward investigative journalism.
Sounds like a pretty big power budget. If it's as little as three feet, couldn't we erect a airtight greenhouse, lay the ice bare and have solar collectors = mirrors heat it up until the ice melts by itself, then collect it like a well? And once you have some water I think you need to get some kind of steam engine or stirling engine going via solar concentrators, I don't think solar panels will cut it.
Uh......what on earth are you talking about?
Probably the same delusional budget/PR process we have some times:
1. Here's all the cool things we could do with lots of funding
2. Media/bloggers/politicians create lots of buzz around it
3. Actual budget is barely keeping lights on or less
4. Time passes, boring economic details get forgotten
5. Where are all the cool things you said you'd do??
I think you and the grandparent are talking about different things, he's mainly talking about the "premium" experience of a $100k car. I've heard others too say it falls short of high end Audis and BMWs, but really it sells to all those who want to "go green" but can't deal with the range of a Nissan Leaf, BMW i3 or Renault Zoe regardless of that. Once you get into Tesla Model 3 territory the customers aren't really obsessing over such details, they want as you say a cheap, reliable car and it's less about the finer details and nuances of the driving experience.
Do they have quality control/reliability issues, as in how often does the car need to be in the shop? From what I've heard certainly some, parts and repair time has also been an issue. But we're also hearing from early Model S customers, they have a lot more experience now than they had then so Model 3 might be decent. Not ever going to buy a Model X though, those doors are just begging for problems 3-5-10 years down the road. I think the Elon Musk drank a little too much "they said it can't be done, so I'm doing it" kool-aid there.
Well, according to Wikipedia there are 195 countries and the six listed are:
17. Germany
21. France
38. Canada
65. Netherlands
95. Austria
114. Finland
On the one hand, you can count that five out of six are in the upper half and not small island states that don't really do coal anyway. I mean it could be Bahamas, Barbados, Vanuatu, Samoa, Grenada and Tonga which would be considerably less impressive. On the other hand the top ten are about 4.3 billion people so even if the other 185 countries agreed the majority would still use coal. It's definitively still in the "we'll put our money where or mouth is" phase where they try to be practical, large scale examples that it's possible rather than really make a dent in world consumption.
But that's basically the EU led by Germany and France, realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down. Population will also rise to 10 billion from an aging population despite the explosive growth is over. So the EU is trying to find a greener way to deliver a high quality way of life, hoping the rest of the world will be more EU-like than US-like. CO2 emissions in US: 16.4, EU: 8.6, World: 4.9, so if the world follows the US example emissions will triple...
A few points:
1) The "Ossietzky Prize" is awarded by an old organization of "Poets, Editors and Novelists" that have been fighting for freedom of speech for ages. There's not reason to believe that they're not genuine in their support of Snowden and the government could no more stop that than prevent employers naming the employee of the month. I doubt they're trying to trap Snowden and I doubt the legal system is trying to be intentionally obtuse, but when asked to preemptively rule on a hypothetical of what would happen when Snowden were to come to Norway and the US were to file an extradition request that's unreasonable. To say "No matter what charges and evidence the US has, we won't extradite" would be a far more political ruling than "No request has been made so we can't evaluate the merits until it's presented to us".
2) You have no idea how much the Norwegian legal system protects suspects and criminals, for example you could read the case of Mullah Krekar. Brief TL;DR summary: Leader of Islamic organization linked to terror, permanent expulsion order, declared a danger to national security, convicted to five years in prison for death threats but won't be expelled to Iraq where he's likely looking at a death sentence. Why? Because we don't extradite to any country where they might risk a death sentence. Looks like we might finally get rid of him now though since Italy wants him on terrorism charges and they don't have the death penalty. Another case is Anders Behring Breivik, the mass murderer who killed 77 people but the court ruled against the prison that his rights had been violated because the security regime had been insufficiently documented as necessary.
That said, Snowden's actions does seem to violate a lot of US law as written no matter his motivation. So as long as they pinky promise to avoid capital punishment and they dot the i's and cross the t's doing everything by the book, I also strongly doubt the court would say "but that aside it looks like you did it for all the right reasons, request denied". That would typically be for the legal system where he's being trialed to decide if the sentence should be reduced or commuted because of mitigating circumstances. Nor are they likely to shit list a modern western democracy by saying they don't think the US will give a fair trial, we don't even say that about dubious third world countries. He's been granted asylum by Russia because there Putin can simply decide, here we don't have any such authoritarian leaders that is likely to politically overrule the normal process. So while I don't think there's any malice involved, it might be best he stayed there.
This whole situation makes me happy to be 50 and have some health problems. Maybe, assuming things go really bad, I'll be able to get out of here honorably.
If I compare my home town here in Norway to say Mumbai, India it'd take +20C for us to become like them. In fact, they suggest the Gulf Stream could be messed with putting us closer to Alaska and Siberia so locally it could get colder rather than warmer. Currently the high end of the worst estimates if we just go nuts burning the rest of the fossil fuels is like +5C. The climate agreements are trying to push for +1.5C/+2C. People live here, people live there, maybe it'll seriously mess up parts of the world causing huge migrations, wars over resources and overall make supporting 7-10 billion people tough but we'll run out of oil long before we're able to make the planet totally uninhabitable. It's not going to be the end of the world, it could be bad but not that bad.
Yeah, I'll admire them more when they publish the source code of Quartz as open source.
No business case for that, in fact probably a negative one from clones and knock-offs. Like several have pointed out, Apple doesn't have to do this. They do it because it helps to split development costs between them and a bunch of companies using BSD tools/kernel for routers, firewalls, NAS, embedded, web servers etc. and reduces divergence so it's less work to maintain and incorporate patches from others. No real competitor to Apple's consumer products (iPhone, iPad, Macs) uses it and it's unlikely that anyone will. They got zero interest in helping anyone else make Mac-like GUIs.
More troubling to me was that there wasn't some basic sanity checking going on. (...) Same way I write my code (and spreadsheets) to calculate important numbers two, three, or sometimes even four different ways to make sure they all agree before proceeding to act on it.
Well it's not exactly like the lander can abort, it's do or die. So you got inconsistent or unlikely data, but what's good and what's bad? It is a glitch, is it defective, did a misfire flip us around or put us in a spin or block the sensor? Can we salvage it or is the mission fucked no matter what? That's really the million dollar question, is there a contingency plan that could work and if so what should trigger it.
I'm guessing that with combinatorics you'll have potentially very many possible failure modes and it's hard to find the realistic and salvageable ones while not screwing up non-sensor issues because you don't trust the data. I imagine you can spend a lot of time and resources on a few paths only to find it fails in a completely different way you didn't expect. It's a lot easier in hindsight...
Even if you know that, it is far from obvious that there will be a hardware and software interface that'll let you turn an apparent read-only/write-only device into a read/write device. It could have dedicated ports or use fused circuits to set it in a device, the coupling could have had mode indicators or firmware that forced it into headphone or microphone mode. I've never heard of any malware doing it before, so I'd say this is pretty clever.
And I just got a scary thought, many laptops have built-in speakers that you can't easily disconnect, can they too be reprogrammed as inputs? Even if it doesn't have much reach if you can hear what the person on the laptop is doing talking on the phone or whatever, that could be huge. I mean many headsets have a mic, so if you're worried about anyone listening in you'd have disconnected it anyway, this only adds the capability to pure headphones/earbuds.
Forget speech writers, supporters and everyone else, I doubt there was any plan behind it. If you've worked for something for a decade - I doubt this "it's her turn" came by itself - only to see it crash and burn so irrevocably and unexpectedly I think you're entitled to a personal breakdown. Like a scientist working on a space probe for many years and boom, go home mission is over before it started and even that is more of an expected risk. I think if she had walked out there that night you'd see a truly crushed woman. Of course that's pure speculation, but below all those layers of composure and statesmanship there must be a human being too that got a real kick in the nuts.
He's a fast learner at becoming a typical lying establishment politician, after having been briefed on the actual facts of the nation and the world.
If that was actually the case he'd be an ignorant politician that's been enlightened, it's not a lie to realize the basis of your position was lacking and the past conclusion wrong. Though I think you're closer on this one:
He just said whatever he thought would win him the election.
He did. But not in the "I'll tell you half a truth and go full crazy once I'm elected" way, pretty much every move after he was elected has been reconciliatory and moderating past extremes. We know Trump is far from the traditional, life long Republican. At the same time, in practice you have to be a Democrat or Republican to become president. He's a businessman, clearly he's got some economic theories that he really means but the rest or has he just been pandering?
This might be hilariously wrong in retrospect but just throwing it out there, what if Trump has been playing the long con like you see in reality shows and now that he's maneuvered his way into office he'll actually be a far more moderate, responsible and socially progressive president than anyone expected him to be? Because it's one thing that he flip-flops, but I can't see that all of these are necessary. In many cases he could probably stick to his guns and have the party back him up, but he does it anyway. Most peculiar.
...why would I pick Fedora? It's one thing if we're talking servers and I needed RHEL or Oracle Unbreakable, but for personal usage? When SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, why not pick a Ubuntu or even a Debian based distro? .deb is a lot easier to handle than .rpm
Well, most of the "under the hood" changes are pushed by Red Hat so you'll probably see them in Fedora first if that rocks your boat. Ubuntu is trying their own thing "over the hood" with Mir, Unity etc. which may or may not be to your liking. I kinda like KDE but it seems to always be on the sidelines for everyone but SuSE. Right now I'd probably go to Mint Linux's Cinnamon edition but realistically I hope to keep Win7 working a little longer. SteamOS and their Steam Machines kinda went nowhere, so it's still just Linux users pushing for Linux. It scored some big wins like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and X-COM 2, but I would still miss games like GTA V and Overwatch and it looks like DX11 support in WINE is way off.
it's probably just the classic case of watering down statistics to manipulate this into this some sort of seemingly still existent 'technical divide' problem in this world.
Africa still has countries like Niger with 20% literacy and you think the 'technical divide' is just a hoax, says most about you. China is approaching first world levels with 96.4%, India is still way behind at 72.1% but they are pulling themselves out of the mud. Africa is still a big cluster fuck. Sure one in ten means most people will know someone who they can ask for help, but since most access in the third world is mobile I doubt anyone will part with their cell phone for long except to close family even if they could use it. And it's probably on limited and relatively expensive plans so you don't get to use it frivolously.
Of course, being literate doesn't mean much unless you can put it to good use. I mean it's nice to be able to read textbooks, letters, package labels and instruction manuals but most truly poor people live on rural subsistence farms with little of that. Having Internet access is a great way to make being literate even more useful, you can learn more and find out things for yourself. It makes giving your kids an education more valuable. At the same time I don't think you should underestimate the challenge of going from the pre-industrial era to 21st century knowledge workers, the jobs are unskilled manual labor.
Civil engineers design with a safety margin such that their building's don't fall down. I work with a bunch of them. Civil engineers dread the thought that their building falls down. (...) Suppose I design a blood pressure monitoring machine for a hospital. It and a hundred other devices let the hospital run much more efficiently. The hospital only needs 1/2 the number of nurses. Now, someone discovers a bug in security camera, penetrates the network, discovers hundreds of Windows XP Embedded devices, and turns the hospital into a malware farm.
Except the latter is more akin to evildoers running trucks in complex resonance patterns or planting C4 charges to bring the bridge down. In complex software sure there are accidentally created and accidentally triggered bugs, but those are mostly contained by testing and rollback procedures so what you have today is not worse than what you had yesterday. If it's broken you can fairly easily put a business value to it and prioritize accordingly. And there's not many insider civil engineers who intentionally leaves an exploit or plants a backdoor to bring the bridge down.
Of course you can still screw up badly like when your Mars probe doesn't convert to metric or your whole system is down or corrupted instead of failing one particular operation on one particular set of inputs. But you're in control of these factors, if you haven't tested the results or that the bits go together it's your fault. If you haven't tested with 10x normal production load that's your fault. If you haven't tested what happens on malformed or out of range input you're not really trying. Specially crafted input with malicious intent is really a quite different ball game.
To be honest I feel software quality is generally pretty high, most my software runs very stable and rarely give errors - or maybe I'm confusing cause and effect, if it doesn't work well I don't use it. It's not the 90s anymore when it would blue-screen if you looked at it funny. What I worry about is illegal malware like cryptoviruses, password stealers and identity theft as well as an increasing trend of legal "malware" like telemetry, targeted advertising, online activation and other baked-in rights to rape my privacy, void consumer rights and create dependencies on external servers and their terms of service.
DRM exists so that approved parties can do approved actions, if everyone could use the CDM (content decryption module) to do anything it wouldn't be DRM at all. The EME (encrypted media extensions) is basically a framework to interact with a locked box but the actual lock is left to the implementation. Just like in the real world where you have tons of different locks and authentication schemes and what you trust to be "good enough" and who should have keys evolves. One "CDM to rule them all" would be like insisting everyone use a TSA lock, which would be quickly broken and useless. You can always try to make the DRM proponents shoot themselves in the foot, but it's not surprising they rejected it.
Why not Windows 10 Mobile on x86?
I bet they wanted to, they must have known Windows RT was a bad deal but it took them quite a while to get an Intel CPU in a non-"pro" tablet. With Intel cancelling their Broxton SoC in April, I don't think there's any suitable x86 hardware platform in production or on the roadmap. And with Qualcomm announcing the Snapdragon 835 on 10nm any process lead Intel had is caught up and possibly overtaken and Android/iPhone owns the market so Intel bailed. So now Microsoft has to bet on ARM and the unified windows platform, it's not working but they don't have any other alternatives than waving the white flag and dropping phones altogether. WinTel seem to have managed to draw a line in the sand with the Surface line though, the iPad and ChromeBook doesn't seem so menacing to their core business anymore.