Interesting opportunities and useful connections are not as scarce as social media proponents claim. In my own professional life, for example, as I improved my standing as an academic and a writer
Academics is all about getting works published. Writing is all about getting works published. In 95% of all careers, only your boss, coworkers and maybe a few direct recipients know what you've done. From him it's probably not wise to put out to much drivel on social media because he'll become another blogger with mouth diarrhea, if you read anything with his name on it should be a high quality work that leaves you impressed. For most everybody else though networking is their little way of telling the world here am I and these are my skills, recognition by other professionals is key to making a career. Not that I really have the patience or desire to engage in much of that outside working hours, but there's no denying that a lot of people who are good at it and spend a lot of time doing it get good opportunities.
Many of these products used the "freemium" model in which the base functionality was good enough for customers to use without having to take the plunge and actually pay for the product.
Well it's tough to convince people to take the plunge on a relatively obscure product too, companies spend a lot of money essentially making sure the market knows what solutions they provide and the quality of their product. That's the point of this model which separates it from a demo or trial version, you actually get some basic functionality for free and because of that lots of people use it and lots of people have heard of you. The free part is basically advertising, it's not a bad model. It's only a bad model if you used up all your killer features on the free part because volume is everything and forgot that you need to have a conversion rate to actually make money.
It's hard to tell how the price/quantity curve works, if you got 1000 customers willing to pay $1000 that's a million. If you got a million customers and 10% willing to pay $10 that's also a million. If you got a hundred million customers and 1% willing to pay $1 it's still a million. Are you making the most money increasing margins with a better "premium" product or increasing volume by making a better "free" product? Most startups tries for "go big or go home", if you first hit a critical mass you might suddenly be making lots of money. Most will fail though, but then most ideas do fail in general.
"Pros: It's not Windows 10 Cons: It's trying to look like Windows 10"
I've never understood the marketing philosophy that pretty much says let's try chasing the customers who really like our competitor's product by making a cheap knock-off just like it. Unless you're trying to make some kind of counterfeit for people who like to pretend they have a Rolex or Louis Vuitton bag, but who wants to pretend to have Windows 10? I'd be looking for the customers looking for a fork in the road, I have version $n-1 but don't really like change in version $n so what alternative can you offer me? Sure, a lot of us will probably painfully and begrudgingly upgrade Windows when push comes to shove but at least you stand a chance.
But what he's missing is that the concept of "everyone should get a job" is just plain wrong. The increase in productivity, and in automation, ought to lead to a situation where goods are so plentiful that we do not need to work, or maybe only work 20 hrs/week for 15 years before retiring.
Well maybe we could if we undid several decades of improved living conditions. My parents still talk about the one time they took a charter trip to Mallorca in the 70s, I've been on three other continents and a dozen countries in Europe from here in Norway and I still got more on my bucket list. Growing up I think our TV was a 20" CRT or so and now I have a 60" LCD, even a $100 screen is an upgrade. And the phone was wired to the wall, okay so I couldn't really go back there but even the cheapest $20 dumbphone must be considered an upgrade but it's no match for an iPhone SE. I guess some things haven't changed that much but it's easy to forget how poor some things actually were.
And I certainly don't want to compare my childhood to my parent's childhood, growing up in post-WWII conditions the toy budget was about $0 and most everything was handed down, I remember him telling about getting a pair of brand new shoes as his Christmas thing like that was the best thing ever. I think even in my childhood that would be barely above "yay, socks" territory unless they were really cool. Or the autumn school vacation that my parents call "potato vacation", because then they were working on the family farm. I don't recall working in any vacation and these days it's more what leisure activity will you be doing.
I don't think I could retire in 15 years, but if I wanted to go into WoW addict/ramen noodle territory I think I could live off a 25% position by living extremely frugally without like freezing or starving. I just don't want that though, I want to have nice things. I want to have a nice and big apartment, not just a tiny bedroom in a collective. I want to have a decent car and not rely on public transportation. And if my friends want to do something, I don't want to have to say no because I can't afford it. And that's the way for most people it seems, in fact some highly paid occupations like doctors and lawyers seem to usually work above 100% even though they already earn very well. Few people feel enough is enough.
So, with the equality of opportunity achieved long ago, the inequality of results is telling us something... Instead of admitting, that maybe, just maybe, there is something inherently different about the genders, these people double and triple on their dogmas.
In chess perhaps, because nobody can stop you from playing like a world champion. But in almost every other walk of life where you depend on recognition from your peers or your potential or actual employers there can be a lot of non-legal barriers. Not to mention the social acceptance from everyone around you from colleagues, friends and family to society at large could disproportionally discourage one sex over the other.
For example, I really doubt that a porn actress is treated the same way as a porn actor is even though they both have sex on camera for money. Getting paid for fucking pussy all day would probably lead to a round of cheers and high fives in many high school locker rooms, don't quite see women reacting the same way. Pretty sure there would be questions and concerns you'd never ask a guy too.
It's tough to say when you've reached equality in practice, when people are genuinely treated the same regardless of sex. Some people think that if it's less than 50% share then there must be some hidden glass ceiling or discrimination going on and sometimes they're right. Sometimes it just doesn't appeal to most men or most women, those who choose it are treated fairly but they're just not very many.
Of course some see that as a cultural problem too, that we should work on it with programs and quotas until all the imbalances are evened out and we have 50% female fire fighters and 50% men in daycare. It's back to nature vs nurture, how much are boys and girls as they are because of genetics and how much is imposed social roles that says girls like baby pink and boys baby blue. The experts disagree...
Apart from the click-bait headline, I think the actual content is valid. If you gave me ten guys from a random selection in a line-up and asked who's here the ex-con, the best guess would probably be the black guy. Not because I'm racist, but because of the makeup of the US prison population compared to the general population. On the other hand, many politically correct people could easily accuse me of being racist because in their minds the moment I see his mug I jump to the conclusion that it must be the black guy. So the politically correct answer is to say you can't say anything from a person's mug shot, to intentionally be color blind.
Big data and algorithms refuse to be color blind, if there's a pattern to it they'll assign it a weight. Live in a black neighborhood? Dinged on the score. Have a "black" sounding name? Dinged on the score. Only extremely rarely is there a fuss about it, like when those black kids were making funny faces and Google's algorithm guessed it was monkeys in the picture. Even then it's like it's only an algorithm, it can't be racist... but you know it wouldn't mistake white kids for monkeys. Basically it's about demanding equal treatment and in many cases they get it when humans are involved, but let a computer do it and you can get away with weights that would otherwise be considered racist.
Welcome to the difficulty of having say a justice system. Do you want to put innocent people in jail? No. Do you want to let guilty people go free? No. But the system is imperfect and you must make a choice. It's the same with anonymity. if you allow it people will make blatant lies and false accusations. If you don't, the people in harm's way won't come forward because they'll get fucked. There is no perfect solution, pick the lesser evil.
From my experience, I'd guess that about 90% of Oracle installations do not need Oracle.
True, but many Oracle customers turn into all-Oracle shops because the DBAs claim it's the "enterprise quality" solution that they can get for a pittance more on top of the already expensive contract - not to mention a vested self interest - and the executives see the costs of managing an Oracle database environment and fear that they'll be hit with another huge bill. And that drives a lot of software to support installation on Oracle and so the circle is complete.
I've worked with Oracle and when it works "right" it's a beast. But I often found that in complex SQL it's a system that wants it "the Oracle way" or need handholding with indexes and execution hints even though there's several ways to achieve the same results. MS SQL and PostgreSQL would usually do something roughly right performance-wise as long as it was logically right. It's okay if you would have to make those kinds of optimizations anyway, but a giant pain in the ass when that's not a priority.
When the cheapest internet you can buy is almost $50 it's still far more expensive than it should be for low income access. Basic services should only be $20 for phone, internet, or TV yet we see more than double that. When compared to other countries in the world we are far more expensive for far less service.
If you want really cheap with limited bandwidth/quota (like <20GB/month), then normally mobile broadband is the best solution. A wired connection will always have a lot of fixed overhead no matter what you do. here in Norway it's about $35 for a basic ADSL line, but very often you get close to 10x the speed for 2x the price like 5/1 -> 60/20 ADSL, 30/10 -> 250/30 cable, 50/50 -> 500/500 fiber. It's clear that having a connection and barely using it is a poor value for everyone involved.
And the pattern at least here is that copper networks are getting increasingly expensive to operate because customers are getting fewer and fewer, both PSTN/ISDN and xDSL so I doubt they'll cut prices. Cable is holding steady because it's not worth it to replace coax with fiber, but fiber is the only thing that is growing. That has a higher baseline cost, usually around $60/mo for 50/50 broadband. Which I don't think you should complain about if you can afford $60, if not well they don't really go slower or cheaper. Though in apartment buildings the usually offer some "free" 1/1 Mbit for people included in the base agreement for who don't want to pay extra.
The choice is clearly easy to make. For someone like me who has lived the majority of their expected life, I would not freeze myself. I love being alive but I realize that at some point it should end so new ideas can enter the arena.
Screw that, I've never understood the people who've basically given up on life... sure I can understand those ravaged by disease or injury or old age who don't like this existence anymore, but in a future where they can resurrect the dead surely they can make you as healthy and fit as a twenty year old again. Under those circumstances, what's barely a century? I'd want a million years or more, no ticking clock saying I'm wasting my precious life, I could see it all and do it all and if I just want to sit inside and play WoW for a year what's the rush?
I'm just not going to waste the life I have chasing a slim hope of a life to come. And that goes for cryonics and all the people looking for an afterlife or rebirth through karma and whatever else variation they got on that. It's really the same decision process as whether to party today or or work for a better career tomorrow, you don't want to fuck your future and at the same time life is about the present, if you're always chasing the next objective sooner or later you'll meet the grim reaper and realized you never really took time to enjoy the journey.
Cryo **may** be the best currently-available method of maintaining structure as much as possible after death, but generally causes severe enough damage to be un-recoverable, with current tech. But this young lady isn't counting on current tech, she's counting on FUTURE tech.
She's counting on magic, if you swipe all the pieces off a chess board and onto the floor the position is lost, no matter what kind of future technology you invent it can never be recovered. It can't just sorta look like your brain, it actually has to preserve the very links and chemical composition that make up your thought patterns and memories. Sometimes there's so much hand-waving involved you'd think they could find an urn, un-incinerate the remains and wake that person back up. Whatever is damaged or decomposed will very often be lost, full stop.
Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
I think the six years without contact said that:
The girls' parents were divorced and the girl had not had any contact with her father for six years before she became ill.
Not sure what he was looking for, if it was malice towards the mother or the girl or getting paid off to let it go but I strongly doubt it was over any real concern about her well-being.
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally. (...) So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age.
Consider the vast multitude of cultures today, she's probably no worse off than that odd foreign kid. For that matter, what you describe is not much different from what many refugees experience today. And 14 is young enough to get a perfectly normal education, job, find friends and start a family same as your peers. I'd take 70 more years of that over dying at 14 any day. Cryogenics is a fantasy, but I'd take the fantasy over reality any day of the week.
No, the population crisis that is coming is one of not *enough* people, rather than too many. Some northern European countries are already facing this issue, especially since their systems for supporting the elderly require that there be plenty of young people working. Denmark, for example, has been running ads for several years now, encouraging couples to do the patriotic thing for their country by having babies.
And this is where it doesn't add up anymore, jobs are going away due to automation... but we don't have enough young people to fill the jobs? You can't simultaneously have too few jobs and too few employees.
The technology we would need to survive on any other planet besides Earth would also make surviving any catastrophe that could b fall Earth -- including catastrophic climate change, nuclear winter, or a giant meteor -- trivially easy in comparison.
Well, the assumption here is that the disaster is of a such magnitude that 99.9999% of the human race won't survive anyway. The question is whether we should send 0.0001% into space to carry on mankind's legacy. Personally I think sending 0.0001% into deep underground vaults in solid rock, supplied with all kinds of supplies and equipment to outlive the immediate effects and reboot life on Earth stands a much better chance than any other place in the solar system, unless the planet is pretty much obliterated.
The "Investigatory Powers Bill" is not quite as bad as the "Communications Data Bill" that was shot down, this one passed by a huge majority:
In March 2016, the House of Commons passed the second reading of the Investigatory Powers Bill on a 281 to 15 vote, moving the bill to the committee stage.
Wasn't exactly surprising the House of Lords passed it too, almost as much a formality as the Queen's Royal Assent.
No. The component cost would not double. Only the labor cost. The component cost for an iPhone 7 is estimated to be about $250, and the assembly labor is estimated to be about $10. The average sale price is $649, leaving a marginal profit of roughly $390 per phone. If the cost of assembly doubled, that would decline to $380.
Assuming they actually move the whole assembly process, many companies do some form of pre-assembly if they're required by law to make final assembly somewhere or just want the "Made in <country>" tag without false advertising.
Call me paranoid, but I'd NEVER allow ANY MS software on any Linux machine *I* control. Just like using Windows 10, you can't audit who/what the OS is talking to, and what its sending to the "mothership"
No, but I'd be much less concerned about an app... you can run it with any kind of restricted user or SELinux policy, firewall it, run all sorts of process and network monitoring and so on... sure you can't control the code but you can isolate the potential harm pretty well. You can't do much about Windows 10 though, it 0wns you.
The Ubuntu Windows thing is designed to hurt Linux by giving people a reason to not run Linux, instead allowing them to avoid Linux and run Linux apps on Windows, this will weaken the Linux user base and the Linux kernel.
The kernel is supported by everything from Android to supercomputers and it really wouldn't matter if desktop share fell to 0%. Many if not most of the major open source apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP etc. already run on Windows, there are no Linux-only "killer apps" to sell out. Think of it as a LiveCD with less effort, just try it... you can try out how much of your needs it covers and I think Ubuntu can only gain by Windows users getting a taste. Those who feel it actually works 100% for them won't be coming back just because you can now run it inside a different OS.
Exactly what i was thinking when i read this. TLC is cheap consumer tech and never used on enterprise SSDs.
Of course "enterprise" is also code word for "market differentiation we can charge really much for". Nothing wrong with TLC if your workloads aren't write intense. For example I work for a registry, we have lots of data but only a relatively small amount is added or corrected mostly it's just accumulated. Of course the best thing is lots of memory, but beyond that I'd much rather take the IOPS of SSDs over HDDs and TLC is plenty endurance for the occasional index rebuild. There's no value ot SLC/eMLC unless you'll really be pounding it with writes. Sure those workloads are mostly in enterprise, but enterprise is a lot more than that.
I will say that a laptop that can drive two 5K displays and it's internal HD display, without additional hardware, is impressive. But then maybe I'm easily impressed and/or I'm just ignorant of how laptops have improved lately.
It's mostly a matter of priorities, each screen takes some circuitry and beyond three (for an external left/center/right setup) has been a tiny niche. They've had solutions for digital signage for a long time, they've just not put that in a laptop. It's one thing to display 2*5120x2880+2560x1600 = 33.5 MP if you just want light 2D graphics, but it's roughly the same MP as one 8K screen (7680x4320 = 33.1 MP) and even the heaviest discrete GFX cards work hard on 4K gaming. To drive 4x the pixels, I think even a quad-SLI/CF would struggle. So it's a lot of pixels, but a Radeon 455 is a tiny engine to drive that huge load.
Software freedom is no substitute for jail time and massive fines for covert surveillance, which is exactly what should happen when you intentionally pretend the microphone is off. Not to mention this should get you yanked from any serious app store as malware. Don't get me wrong I like open source, but when an application goes from user-unfriendly to plain out deceptive that should be outright illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting opportunities and useful connections are not as scarce as social media proponents claim. In my own professional life, for example, as I improved my standing as an academic and a writer
Academics is all about getting works published. Writing is all about getting works published. In 95% of all careers, only your boss, coworkers and maybe a few direct recipients know what you've done. From him it's probably not wise to put out to much drivel on social media because he'll become another blogger with mouth diarrhea, if you read anything with his name on it should be a high quality work that leaves you impressed. For most everybody else though networking is their little way of telling the world here am I and these are my skills, recognition by other professionals is key to making a career. Not that I really have the patience or desire to engage in much of that outside working hours, but there's no denying that a lot of people who are good at it and spend a lot of time doing it get good opportunities.
Many of these products used the "freemium" model in which the base functionality was good enough for customers to use without having to take the plunge and actually pay for the product.
Well it's tough to convince people to take the plunge on a relatively obscure product too, companies spend a lot of money essentially making sure the market knows what solutions they provide and the quality of their product. That's the point of this model which separates it from a demo or trial version, you actually get some basic functionality for free and because of that lots of people use it and lots of people have heard of you. The free part is basically advertising, it's not a bad model. It's only a bad model if you used up all your killer features on the free part because volume is everything and forgot that you need to have a conversion rate to actually make money.
It's hard to tell how the price/quantity curve works, if you got 1000 customers willing to pay $1000 that's a million. If you got a million customers and 10% willing to pay $10 that's also a million. If you got a hundred million customers and 1% willing to pay $1 it's still a million. Are you making the most money increasing margins with a better "premium" product or increasing volume by making a better "free" product? Most startups tries for "go big or go home", if you first hit a critical mass you might suddenly be making lots of money. Most will fail though, but then most ideas do fail in general.
"Pros: It's not Windows 10
Cons: It's trying to look like Windows 10"
I've never understood the marketing philosophy that pretty much says let's try chasing the customers who really like our competitor's product by making a cheap knock-off just like it. Unless you're trying to make some kind of counterfeit for people who like to pretend they have a Rolex or Louis Vuitton bag, but who wants to pretend to have Windows 10? I'd be looking for the customers looking for a fork in the road, I have version $n-1 but don't really like change in version $n so what alternative can you offer me? Sure, a lot of us will probably painfully and begrudgingly upgrade Windows when push comes to shove but at least you stand a chance.
But what he's missing is that the concept of "everyone should get a job" is just plain wrong. The increase in productivity, and in automation, ought to lead to a situation where goods are so plentiful that we do not need to work, or maybe only work 20 hrs/week for 15 years before retiring.
Well maybe we could if we undid several decades of improved living conditions. My parents still talk about the one time they took a charter trip to Mallorca in the 70s, I've been on three other continents and a dozen countries in Europe from here in Norway and I still got more on my bucket list. Growing up I think our TV was a 20" CRT or so and now I have a 60" LCD, even a $100 screen is an upgrade. And the phone was wired to the wall, okay so I couldn't really go back there but even the cheapest $20 dumbphone must be considered an upgrade but it's no match for an iPhone SE. I guess some things haven't changed that much but it's easy to forget how poor some things actually were.
And I certainly don't want to compare my childhood to my parent's childhood, growing up in post-WWII conditions the toy budget was about $0 and most everything was handed down, I remember him telling about getting a pair of brand new shoes as his Christmas thing like that was the best thing ever. I think even in my childhood that would be barely above "yay, socks" territory unless they were really cool. Or the autumn school vacation that my parents call "potato vacation", because then they were working on the family farm. I don't recall working in any vacation and these days it's more what leisure activity will you be doing.
I don't think I could retire in 15 years, but if I wanted to go into WoW addict/ramen noodle territory I think I could live off a 25% position by living extremely frugally without like freezing or starving. I just don't want that though, I want to have nice things. I want to have a nice and big apartment, not just a tiny bedroom in a collective. I want to have a decent car and not rely on public transportation. And if my friends want to do something, I don't want to have to say no because I can't afford it. And that's the way for most people it seems, in fact some highly paid occupations like doctors and lawyers seem to usually work above 100% even though they already earn very well. Few people feel enough is enough.
So, with the equality of opportunity achieved long ago, the inequality of results is telling us something... Instead of admitting, that maybe, just maybe, there is something inherently different about the genders, these people double and triple on their dogmas.
In chess perhaps, because nobody can stop you from playing like a world champion. But in almost every other walk of life where you depend on recognition from your peers or your potential or actual employers there can be a lot of non-legal barriers. Not to mention the social acceptance from everyone around you from colleagues, friends and family to society at large could disproportionally discourage one sex over the other.
For example, I really doubt that a porn actress is treated the same way as a porn actor is even though they both have sex on camera for money. Getting paid for fucking pussy all day would probably lead to a round of cheers and high fives in many high school locker rooms, don't quite see women reacting the same way. Pretty sure there would be questions and concerns you'd never ask a guy too.
It's tough to say when you've reached equality in practice, when people are genuinely treated the same regardless of sex. Some people think that if it's less than 50% share then there must be some hidden glass ceiling or discrimination going on and sometimes they're right. Sometimes it just doesn't appeal to most men or most women, those who choose it are treated fairly but they're just not very many.
Of course some see that as a cultural problem too, that we should work on it with programs and quotas until all the imbalances are evened out and we have 50% female fire fighters and 50% men in daycare. It's back to nature vs nurture, how much are boys and girls as they are because of genetics and how much is imposed social roles that says girls like baby pink and boys baby blue. The experts disagree...
Apart from the click-bait headline, I think the actual content is valid. If you gave me ten guys from a random selection in a line-up and asked who's here the ex-con, the best guess would probably be the black guy. Not because I'm racist, but because of the makeup of the US prison population compared to the general population. On the other hand, many politically correct people could easily accuse me of being racist because in their minds the moment I see his mug I jump to the conclusion that it must be the black guy. So the politically correct answer is to say you can't say anything from a person's mug shot, to intentionally be color blind.
Big data and algorithms refuse to be color blind, if there's a pattern to it they'll assign it a weight. Live in a black neighborhood? Dinged on the score. Have a "black" sounding name? Dinged on the score. Only extremely rarely is there a fuss about it, like when those black kids were making funny faces and Google's algorithm guessed it was monkeys in the picture. Even then it's like it's only an algorithm, it can't be racist... but you know it wouldn't mistake white kids for monkeys. Basically it's about demanding equal treatment and in many cases they get it when humans are involved, but let a computer do it and you can get away with weights that would otherwise be considered racist.
Welcome to the difficulty of having say a justice system. Do you want to put innocent people in jail? No. Do you want to let guilty people go free? No. But the system is imperfect and you must make a choice. It's the same with anonymity. if you allow it people will make blatant lies and false accusations. If you don't, the people in harm's way won't come forward because they'll get fucked. There is no perfect solution, pick the lesser evil.
From my experience, I'd guess that about 90% of Oracle installations do not need Oracle.
True, but many Oracle customers turn into all-Oracle shops because the DBAs claim it's the "enterprise quality" solution that they can get for a pittance more on top of the already expensive contract - not to mention a vested self interest - and the executives see the costs of managing an Oracle database environment and fear that they'll be hit with another huge bill. And that drives a lot of software to support installation on Oracle and so the circle is complete.
I've worked with Oracle and when it works "right" it's a beast. But I often found that in complex SQL it's a system that wants it "the Oracle way" or need handholding with indexes and execution hints even though there's several ways to achieve the same results. MS SQL and PostgreSQL would usually do something roughly right performance-wise as long as it was logically right. It's okay if you would have to make those kinds of optimizations anyway, but a giant pain in the ass when that's not a priority.
s/Oracle/Matlab
s/PostreSQL/Python
Welcome to engineering.
Well I understand why you have a hard time replacing Matlab with PostgreSQL :)
When the cheapest internet you can buy is almost $50 it's still far more expensive than it should be for low income access. Basic services should only be $20 for phone, internet, or TV yet we see more than double that. When compared to other countries in the world we are far more expensive for far less service.
If you want really cheap with limited bandwidth/quota (like <20GB/month), then normally mobile broadband is the best solution. A wired connection will always have a lot of fixed overhead no matter what you do. here in Norway it's about $35 for a basic ADSL line, but very often you get close to 10x the speed for 2x the price like 5/1 -> 60/20 ADSL, 30/10 -> 250/30 cable, 50/50 -> 500/500 fiber. It's clear that having a connection and barely using it is a poor value for everyone involved.
And the pattern at least here is that copper networks are getting increasingly expensive to operate because customers are getting fewer and fewer, both PSTN/ISDN and xDSL so I doubt they'll cut prices. Cable is holding steady because it's not worth it to replace coax with fiber, but fiber is the only thing that is growing. That has a higher baseline cost, usually around $60/mo for 50/50 broadband. Which I don't think you should complain about if you can afford $60, if not well they don't really go slower or cheaper. Though in apartment buildings the usually offer some "free" 1/1 Mbit for people included in the base agreement for who don't want to pay extra.
The choice is clearly easy to make. For someone like me who has lived the majority of their expected life, I would not freeze myself. I love being alive but I realize that at some point it should end so new ideas can enter the arena.
Screw that, I've never understood the people who've basically given up on life... sure I can understand those ravaged by disease or injury or old age who don't like this existence anymore, but in a future where they can resurrect the dead surely they can make you as healthy and fit as a twenty year old again. Under those circumstances, what's barely a century? I'd want a million years or more, no ticking clock saying I'm wasting my precious life, I could see it all and do it all and if I just want to sit inside and play WoW for a year what's the rush?
I'm just not going to waste the life I have chasing a slim hope of a life to come. And that goes for cryonics and all the people looking for an afterlife or rebirth through karma and whatever else variation they got on that. It's really the same decision process as whether to party today or or work for a better career tomorrow, you don't want to fuck your future and at the same time life is about the present, if you're always chasing the next objective sooner or later you'll meet the grim reaper and realized you never really took time to enjoy the journey.
Reminds me of this one:
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth
Cryo **may** be the best currently-available method of maintaining structure as much as possible after death, but generally causes severe enough damage to be un-recoverable, with current tech. But this young lady isn't counting on current tech, she's counting on FUTURE tech.
She's counting on magic, if you swipe all the pieces off a chess board and onto the floor the position is lost, no matter what kind of future technology you invent it can never be recovered. It can't just sorta look like your brain, it actually has to preserve the very links and chemical composition that make up your thought patterns and memories. Sometimes there's so much hand-waving involved you'd think they could find an urn, un-incinerate the remains and wake that person back up. Whatever is damaged or decomposed will very often be lost, full stop.
Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
I think the six years without contact said that:
The girls' parents were divorced and the girl had not had any contact with her father for six years before she became ill.
Not sure what he was looking for, if it was malice towards the mother or the girl or getting paid off to let it go but I strongly doubt it was over any real concern about her well-being.
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally. (...) So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age.
Consider the vast multitude of cultures today, she's probably no worse off than that odd foreign kid. For that matter, what you describe is not much different from what many refugees experience today. And 14 is young enough to get a perfectly normal education, job, find friends and start a family same as your peers. I'd take 70 more years of that over dying at 14 any day. Cryogenics is a fantasy, but I'd take the fantasy over reality any day of the week.
No, the population crisis that is coming is one of not *enough* people, rather than too many. Some northern European countries are already facing this issue, especially since their systems for supporting the elderly require that there be plenty of young people working. Denmark, for example, has been running ads for several years now, encouraging couples to do the patriotic thing for their country by having babies.
And this is where it doesn't add up anymore, jobs are going away due to automation... but we don't have enough young people to fill the jobs? You can't simultaneously have too few jobs and too few employees.
The technology we would need to survive on any other planet besides Earth would also make surviving any catastrophe that could b fall Earth -- including catastrophic climate change, nuclear winter, or a giant meteor -- trivially easy in comparison.
Well, the assumption here is that the disaster is of a such magnitude that 99.9999% of the human race won't survive anyway. The question is whether we should send 0.0001% into space to carry on mankind's legacy. Personally I think sending 0.0001% into deep underground vaults in solid rock, supplied with all kinds of supplies and equipment to outlive the immediate effects and reboot life on Earth stands a much better chance than any other place in the solar system, unless the planet is pretty much obliterated.
The "Investigatory Powers Bill" is not quite as bad as the "Communications Data Bill" that was shot down, this one passed by a huge majority:
In March 2016, the House of Commons passed the second reading of the Investigatory Powers Bill on a 281 to 15 vote, moving the bill to the committee stage.
Wasn't exactly surprising the House of Lords passed it too, almost as much a formality as the Queen's Royal Assent.
No. The component cost would not double. Only the labor cost. The component cost for an iPhone 7 is estimated to be about $250, and the assembly labor is estimated to be about $10. The average sale price is $649, leaving a marginal profit of roughly $390 per phone. If the cost of assembly doubled, that would decline to $380.
Assuming they actually move the whole assembly process, many companies do some form of pre-assembly if they're required by law to make final assembly somewhere or just want the "Made in <country>" tag without false advertising.
Call me paranoid, but I'd NEVER allow ANY MS software on any Linux machine *I* control. Just like using Windows 10, you can't audit who/what the OS is talking to, and what its sending to the "mothership"
No, but I'd be much less concerned about an app... you can run it with any kind of restricted user or SELinux policy, firewall it, run all sorts of process and network monitoring and so on... sure you can't control the code but you can isolate the potential harm pretty well. You can't do much about Windows 10 though, it 0wns you.
The Ubuntu Windows thing is designed to hurt Linux by giving people a reason to not run Linux, instead allowing them to avoid Linux and run Linux apps on Windows, this will weaken the Linux user base and the Linux kernel.
The kernel is supported by everything from Android to supercomputers and it really wouldn't matter if desktop share fell to 0%. Many if not most of the major open source apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP etc. already run on Windows, there are no Linux-only "killer apps" to sell out. Think of it as a LiveCD with less effort, just try it... you can try out how much of your needs it covers and I think Ubuntu can only gain by Windows users getting a taste. Those who feel it actually works 100% for them won't be coming back just because you can now run it inside a different OS.
Exactly what i was thinking when i read this. TLC is cheap consumer tech and never used on enterprise SSDs.
Of course "enterprise" is also code word for "market differentiation we can charge really much for". Nothing wrong with TLC if your workloads aren't write intense. For example I work for a registry, we have lots of data but only a relatively small amount is added or corrected mostly it's just accumulated. Of course the best thing is lots of memory, but beyond that I'd much rather take the IOPS of SSDs over HDDs and TLC is plenty endurance for the occasional index rebuild. There's no value ot SLC/eMLC unless you'll really be pounding it with writes. Sure those workloads are mostly in enterprise, but enterprise is a lot more than that.
I will say that a laptop that can drive two 5K displays and it's internal HD display, without additional hardware, is impressive. But then maybe I'm easily impressed and/or I'm just ignorant of how laptops have improved lately.
It's mostly a matter of priorities, each screen takes some circuitry and beyond three (for an external left/center/right setup) has been a tiny niche. They've had solutions for digital signage for a long time, they've just not put that in a laptop. It's one thing to display 2*5120x2880+2560x1600 = 33.5 MP if you just want light 2D graphics, but it's roughly the same MP as one 8K screen (7680x4320 = 33.1 MP) and even the heaviest discrete GFX cards work hard on 4K gaming. To drive 4x the pixels, I think even a quad-SLI/CF would struggle. So it's a lot of pixels, but a Radeon 455 is a tiny engine to drive that huge load.
Disclosure is no substitute for software freedom.
Software freedom is no substitute for jail time and massive fines for covert surveillance, which is exactly what should happen when you intentionally pretend the microphone is off. Not to mention this should get you yanked from any serious app store as malware. Don't get me wrong I like open source, but when an application goes from user-unfriendly to plain out deceptive that should be outright illegal.
and says that they've heard clearly that a version of SteamVR is wanted on other operating systems.
According to the latest hw/sw survey:
Windows 95.46%
OS X 3.52%
Linux 0.89%
I'm sure they're vocal, but I doubt Steam is any real hurry.