... missed your last paragraph, where you say Amazon's growth is likely a good thing. FWIW my feeling is that it had been until some time ago, but isn't anymore. Same with Google, Uber, Facebook. Same as with Microsoft in the past, but oddly now not as much.
Regardless of Trump, and regardless of whether something could be done about it, would you say that Amazon's power as it is now, and growing, is helping or hurting average Americans in the long run?
If you think it's the latter, then you are in agreement with Trump's intention -- it's just that his means of getting there are crazy and unconventional, as have always been.
As for me, I'm leaning towards "Amazon is hurting", much as I benefit from their book services. Big corporations, as well as big governments, don't seem to be the right way to go.
I disagree. Trump *benefits* from WaPo attacks because WaPo is seen as elitist, what better proof to your base that you're doing the right thing than when a "swamp-supporting" newspaper is upset with you.
Rather, in my opinion, Trump is a traditionalist (despite being socially fairly liberal), and he sees Amazon as attacking the American traditional way of life, hurting the working and middle class and so on. That attitude has been a pattern of his since the 80s. I don't know that Amazon can be stopped, and I'm not 100% sure that it should be, but I think it will be interesting to see Trump try it.
... I imagine, without knowing much about biotech (or RTFA). The bottleneck is the trial and experimentation, which takes a long time. You already have to be very discerning in deciding which synthesized compounds you want to try, what good does it do to you to be able to computer-generate more compounds?
FB is a great way to get useful -- as in life-useful -- information from those one or two people in your list who often post stuff that is somehow just what you need. It is also a great way for you to affect others in the same way with what you post or share.
Then, it is a great way to break the echo chamber. If I see, outside of FB, a relevant and provocative news article that I know my echo-chamber friends won't see, I'll make an effort to find that same article on FB and like or comment to it and so make sure it tickles my friends' (I'm using the term in FB sense) curiosity when it appears in their feed -- most won't be able to resist reading it. Wouldn't have happened without FB!
Finally, it is a great way to practice a bit of writing here and there by essentially using FB for blogging. If you write about provocative topics, sensibly, you won't get many likes but you will be read.
All that said, I deactivated my FB account a week before CA "scandal" (not that I believe they helped Trump and not that I would mind) simply because I couldn't bear the mental noise that frequent awareness of FB posts and comments created in my head. Now I feel like it's 2005, my thoughts are my own, I exchange them in measured ways with others, and it's all quiet again. I'm not going back.
I imagine there must be apps that let you "remote desktop" into your phone which is sitting in your pocket.
Actually it's better if the phone is in your briefcase/backpack. If it's sitting in your pocket it's best to have it turned off or in airplane mode to reduce the emissions to body tissue...
What if the positive ruling is such that somehow it only applies specifically to Java API and what Google has done with it? If so that may not be a bad outcome at all. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the Google's power, or even a good chunk of it, being transferred over to Oracle.
It doesn't matter whether it had any effect on the election -- the perception on the left is that it had. To them FB will be forever tainted with the unbearable thought that it helped Trump win. If this drives people away from FB and social media, or at least curbs the addiction, that alone will be a phenomenal consequence of Trump presidency.
I have found many people on the left to have a dreadful lack of curiosity. They are not interested in your argument, instead they will say "you don't have the right to make that argument." (On the account of you being male or white or whatever.) This disinterest in hearing the other side has often been attributed to the right, but the larger portion of people on the left are supposed to be intellectuals. Seems to me that seeing the apparent success of a worldview they loathe (Trump, Brexit) overrides their interest in hearing opposing arguments.
I hate to say it but you're probably right, the caveman who discovered fire must have experienced the level of amazement compared to which most of our own tech experiences pale. (Just thought about that the other day listening to Iron Maiden's historically inaccurate but emotionally true "Quest for Fire".:-)
But the state of the system changes and time is a factor. There's some sociological research which says, for what it's worth, that people who go to their favorite restaurant rarely e.g. once a month are most pleased always ordering their same meal they like best, while those who go to that favorite restaurant often are better off varying orders. With the latest tech we have been saturated with small deltas for years now and our appetite is low -- as you say it will be hard to top what we have now. That's why I think it will take some time and quite some breakthrough before we get collectively excited about tech as we were 30 years ago.
To go from CGA to EGA was an huge leap, in a world where monitors were not very many and most were monochrome. Compare to your phone going from small bezel to no bezel/curved screen or something.
More examples -- from Wolfenstein to Doom, from home computer to a PC (or even Amiga), from no modem to modem and the world of BBSes...
Human senses -- that includes the mental faculty -- are logarithmic in nature. From not eating any sweets to eating dark chocolate is a much bigger leap than to go from dark chocolate to sweet chocolate. To get the same technology delta today would require a breakthrough on the order of working quantum computers.
Imagine yourself having just landed at the airport and stepping out on the sidewalk at night in the rain. You have two choices for a cab for a destination that is 35 miles away: a regular human driver and an empty, driverless, robotic car that by *some metric* is claimed to be 20% better than people. You don't know the exact metric or how it was arrived at -- is it better than people on rainy nights or is it better than people in the rush hour but underperforming in rain? How many miles of testing has been done? Does the metric apply to the latest car firmware or the last year's model? For all of those, you have no idea. To make matters worse, the lone driverless car is sitting empty because the ignorant masses shun it and opt to wait for the human driver regardless of the wait times.
They don't! What more confirmation do you need than this quote by Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Ever since early 2016 I've been thinking what we call facts is entirely statistical, and, what's worse, filtered by our perception. We'll take a claim as true -- pick any nontrivial contentious topic, such as humans are the cause of global warming -- if we *believe* that a large number of PhDs (a journalist wrote that their number is large, we didn't sit with those people at a conference) who we *believe* are credible (we've never witnessed their theses defenses, so we rely on N-th hand accounts) are making the claim, and not just making, but if (we believe) they are repeating it because we keep hearing about it over and over.
And for all any such claim won't do squat for us if we are not going to make an actual decision based on it. (A decision may be I won't eat gluten for a month.) All these fake news and their pseudo-real counterparts -- such as whose inauguration size is bigger -- are entirely useless, they are just fuel for arguing online.
Why we need to argue online about things that don't affect us is a different question...
Also this was good for those complaining slashdot this slashdot that to see what it looks like without slashdot! If I had to pick only one news feed site to use it would be this.
I don't think it's even the R to Trump's name, it's just that they cannot absorb the idea of Trump leading the country.
As a thought experiment -- imagine if Trump ran as a Democrat (which he was until 2009) on a socially liberal but economically protectionist platform like Bernie's, defeating Hillary and becoming a D candidate to the dismay of all the establishment and intellectuals. I imagine blue collar and simple folks would vote for him, while actual liberal intellectuals would vote for any R candidate if he seemed at all reasonable, no matter how bland, like Jeb for example. They just can't stand the way Trump thinks and speaks.
You don't know history. What made Hitler possible is the circumstances. He was a bitter broken soldier speaking to millions of bitter broken soldiers like himself in a cripple of a country that had just been humiliated in a war they had lost and which they could not pay for.
Even a Hitler at another time in German history could not be Hitler, let alone a playboy billionaire businessman at this time in the United States, the richest and the most well armed nation in the history.
That's an interesting comparison Breitbart. I visit Breitbart from time to time (I consider myself independent/center-right), partly for fun partly to get the pulse of the far right. I wouldn't want it bankrupted. But I wouldn't want a far-left publication such as alternet or Vox to be bankrupted either.
But I'm still glad Gawker went down. I think the difference is that Breitbart/alternet fight for what they see as better future by whatever means. Gawker on the other hand seemed to just want exploit misery for profit, and even worse, for the sake of it. It reminds me of the "ugly clinic" from the Judge Dredd comics.
Trump has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to video games, I'm sure he's never played one or even looked at the screen with a FPS for more than two seconds in passing, kind of like when I see someone playing Candy Crush-like game on the phone and have no interest in what is going on. You can bet he's just rehashing what others say. It's empty talk. Movies may be a different story.
That may be true but what are we going to do about it? Blaming culture is like blaming our genes. It has been there for hundreds of years and it won't change anytime soon. The only solution seems to be what is happening now -- incremental changes in response to tragedies like mass shootings.
Thanks for listening. Rereading my reply I see there's a level of anger in it, I attribute that to the amount of social issues I had to deal with when I came out for Trump. I wasn't going to vote for a fringe anti-freedom third party lunatic but for a legitimate candidate by one of the two major parties (and I'm an Independent, a former Green, unregistered so I could vote against Clinton in the primaries), so in my mind the reaction in my social circles was entirely undeserved. My choice of Trump was due to the "clear and present danger" for the future of the society that I saw Clinton and her clique posed. Had his opponent been Joe Biden for instance, it would have been a harder choice for me.
That said, I cannot blame the left for succumbing to their emotions if I cannot entirely keep mine in check. Emotions have their own logic, and it is often hidden from us.
I don't disagree. Russia is another nation, and if one nation can take advantage of another to better itself, it will. In fairness that's what Americans also do to Russians and elsewhere. The Russians probably expected Clinton to win like everyone else and were working to create chaos, not that we weren't capable of it on our own. But at the end of the day, Russia is still quite weak and is continuously looking for ways to survive, whereas the US is at the peak of its power. This is why I find the whole Russian thing more like finding an excuse and a scapegoat rather than serious reflection on how to do things better.
In a wider sense I agree with you, the race was razor thin and everything mattered, the whole world was really choosing Clinton or Trump, even foreigners posting their valid criticisms of one or the other on Facebook must have had an impact.
In some ways it was like the battle of Midway, the Japanese should have won but by some miracle the Americans did and that took history on a very different course.
Slashdot Mirror
... missed your last paragraph, where you say Amazon's growth is likely a good thing. FWIW my feeling is that it had been until some time ago, but isn't anymore. Same with Google, Uber, Facebook. Same as with Microsoft in the past, but oddly now not as much.
Regardless of Trump, and regardless of whether something could be done about it, would you say that Amazon's power as it is now, and growing, is helping or hurting average Americans in the long run?
If you think it's the latter, then you are in agreement with Trump's intention -- it's just that his means of getting there are crazy and unconventional, as have always been.
As for me, I'm leaning towards "Amazon is hurting", much as I benefit from their book services. Big corporations, as well as big governments, don't seem to be the right way to go.
I disagree. Trump *benefits* from WaPo attacks because WaPo is seen as elitist, what better proof to your base that you're doing the right thing than when a "swamp-supporting" newspaper is upset with you.
Rather, in my opinion, Trump is a traditionalist (despite being socially fairly liberal), and he sees Amazon as attacking the American traditional way of life, hurting the working and middle class and so on. That attitude has been a pattern of his since the 80s. I don't know that Amazon can be stopped, and I'm not 100% sure that it should be, but I think it will be interesting to see Trump try it.
... I imagine, without knowing much about biotech (or RTFA). The bottleneck is the trial and experimentation, which takes a long time. You already have to be very discerning in deciding which synthesized compounds you want to try, what good does it do to you to be able to computer-generate more compounds?
FB is a great way to get useful -- as in life-useful -- information from those one or two people in your list who often post stuff that is somehow just what you need. It is also a great way for you to affect others in the same way with what you post or share.
Then, it is a great way to break the echo chamber. If I see, outside of FB, a relevant and provocative news article that I know my echo-chamber friends won't see, I'll make an effort to find that same article on FB and like or comment to it and so make sure it tickles my friends' (I'm using the term in FB sense) curiosity when it appears in their feed -- most won't be able to resist reading it. Wouldn't have happened without FB!
Finally, it is a great way to practice a bit of writing here and there by essentially using FB for blogging. If you write about provocative topics, sensibly, you won't get many likes but you will be read.
All that said, I deactivated my FB account a week before CA "scandal" (not that I believe they helped Trump and not that I would mind) simply because I couldn't bear the mental noise that frequent awareness of FB posts and comments created in my head. Now I feel like it's 2005, my thoughts are my own, I exchange them in measured ways with others, and it's all quiet again. I'm not going back.
I imagine there must be apps that let you "remote desktop" into your phone which is sitting in your pocket.
Actually it's better if the phone is in your briefcase/backpack. If it's sitting in your pocket it's best to have it turned off or in airplane mode to reduce the emissions to body tissue...
What if the positive ruling is such that somehow it only applies specifically to Java API and what Google has done with it? If so that may not be a bad outcome at all. I wouldn't mind seeing some of the Google's power, or even a good chunk of it, being transferred over to Oracle.
It doesn't matter whether it had any effect on the election -- the perception on the left is that it had. To them FB will be forever tainted with the unbearable thought that it helped Trump win. If this drives people away from FB and social media, or at least curbs the addiction, that alone will be a phenomenal consequence of Trump presidency.
I have found many people on the left to have a dreadful lack of curiosity. They are not interested in your argument, instead they will say "you don't have the right to make that argument." (On the account of you being male or white or whatever.) This disinterest in hearing the other side has often been attributed to the right, but the larger portion of people on the left are supposed to be intellectuals. Seems to me that seeing the apparent success of a worldview they loathe (Trump, Brexit) overrides their interest in hearing opposing arguments.
I hate to say it but you're probably right, the caveman who discovered fire must have experienced the level of amazement compared to which most of our own tech experiences pale. (Just thought about that the other day listening to Iron Maiden's historically inaccurate but emotionally true "Quest for Fire". :-)
But the state of the system changes and time is a factor. There's some sociological research which says, for what it's worth, that people who go to their favorite restaurant rarely e.g. once a month are most pleased always ordering their same meal they like best, while those who go to that favorite restaurant often are better off varying orders. With the latest tech we have been saturated with small deltas for years now and our appetite is low -- as you say it will be hard to top what we have now. That's why I think it will take some time and quite some breakthrough before we get collectively excited about tech as we were 30 years ago.
I just realize I meant to say milk chocolate but said sweet chocolate! Yes it's often so sweet it's disgusting. But it is a jump sweetness wise.
To go from CGA to EGA was an huge leap, in a world where monitors were not very many and most were monochrome. Compare to your phone going from small bezel to no bezel/curved screen or something.
More examples -- from Wolfenstein to Doom, from home computer to a PC (or even Amiga), from no modem to modem and the world of BBSes...
Human senses -- that includes the mental faculty -- are logarithmic in nature. From not eating any sweets to eating dark chocolate is a much bigger leap than to go from dark chocolate to sweet chocolate. To get the same technology delta today would require a breakthrough on the order of working quantum computers.
Imagine yourself having just landed at the airport and stepping out on the sidewalk at night in the rain. You have two choices for a cab for a destination that is 35 miles away: a regular human driver and an empty, driverless, robotic car that by *some metric* is claimed to be 20% better than people. You don't know the exact metric or how it was arrived at -- is it better than people on rainy nights or is it better than people in the rush hour but underperforming in rain? How many miles of testing has been done? Does the metric apply to the latest car firmware or the last year's model? For all of those, you have no idea. To make matters worse, the lone driverless car is sitting empty because the ignorant masses shun it and opt to wait for the human driver regardless of the wait times.
Which cab do you choose?
I see what you did there. :-) Fight fire with fire!
They don't! What more confirmation do you need than this quote by Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Ever since early 2016 I've been thinking what we call facts is entirely statistical, and, what's worse, filtered by our perception. We'll take a claim as true -- pick any nontrivial contentious topic, such as humans are the cause of global warming -- if we *believe* that a large number of PhDs (a journalist wrote that their number is large, we didn't sit with those people at a conference) who we *believe* are credible (we've never witnessed their theses defenses, so we rely on N-th hand accounts) are making the claim, and not just making, but if (we believe) they are repeating it because we keep hearing about it over and over.
And for all any such claim won't do squat for us if we are not going to make an actual decision based on it. (A decision may be I won't eat gluten for a month.) All these fake news and their pseudo-real counterparts -- such as whose inauguration size is bigger -- are entirely useless, they are just fuel for arguing online.
Why we need to argue online about things that don't affect us is a different question...
The killer app for VR seems to be being a plot device in SciFi stories. Don't need the latest hardware for that though.
Confession: I'm a little disappointed it hasn't become more than that yet.
Also this was good for those complaining slashdot this slashdot that to see what it looks like without slashdot! If I had to pick only one news feed site to use it would be this.
I don't think it's even the R to Trump's name, it's just that they cannot absorb the idea of Trump leading the country.
As a thought experiment -- imagine if Trump ran as a Democrat (which he was until 2009) on a socially liberal but economically protectionist platform like Bernie's, defeating Hillary and becoming a D candidate to the dismay of all the establishment and intellectuals. I imagine blue collar and simple folks would vote for him, while actual liberal intellectuals would vote for any R candidate if he seemed at all reasonable, no matter how bland, like Jeb for example. They just can't stand the way Trump thinks and speaks.
You don't know history. What made Hitler possible is the circumstances. He was a bitter broken soldier speaking to millions of bitter broken soldiers like himself in a cripple of a country that had just been humiliated in a war they had lost and which they could not pay for.
Even a Hitler at another time in German history could not be Hitler, let alone a playboy billionaire businessman at this time in the United States, the richest and the most well armed nation in the history.
That's an interesting comparison Breitbart. I visit Breitbart from time to time (I consider myself independent/center-right), partly for fun partly to get the pulse of the far right. I wouldn't want it bankrupted. But I wouldn't want a far-left publication such as alternet or Vox to be bankrupted either.
But I'm still glad Gawker went down. I think the difference is that Breitbart/alternet fight for what they see as better future by whatever means. Gawker on the other hand seemed to just want exploit misery for profit, and even worse, for the sake of it. It reminds me of the "ugly clinic" from the Judge Dredd comics.
Trump has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to video games, I'm sure he's never played one or even looked at the screen with a FPS for more than two seconds in passing, kind of like when I see someone playing Candy Crush-like game on the phone and have no interest in what is going on. You can bet he's just rehashing what others say. It's empty talk. Movies may be a different story.
That may be true but what are we going to do about it? Blaming culture is like blaming our genes. It has been there for hundreds of years and it won't change anytime soon. The only solution seems to be what is happening now -- incremental changes in response to tragedies like mass shootings.
Thanks for listening. Rereading my reply I see there's a level of anger in it, I attribute that to the amount of social issues I had to deal with when I came out for Trump. I wasn't going to vote for a fringe anti-freedom third party lunatic but for a legitimate candidate by one of the two major parties (and I'm an Independent, a former Green, unregistered so I could vote against Clinton in the primaries), so in my mind the reaction in my social circles was entirely undeserved. My choice of Trump was due to the "clear and present danger" for the future of the society that I saw Clinton and her clique posed. Had his opponent been Joe Biden for instance, it would have been a harder choice for me.
That said, I cannot blame the left for succumbing to their emotions if I cannot entirely keep mine in check. Emotions have their own logic, and it is often hidden from us.
I don't disagree. Russia is another nation, and if one nation can take advantage of another to better itself, it will. In fairness that's what Americans also do to Russians and elsewhere. The Russians probably expected Clinton to win like everyone else and were working to create chaos, not that we weren't capable of it on our own. But at the end of the day, Russia is still quite weak and is continuously looking for ways to survive, whereas the US is at the peak of its power. This is why I find the whole Russian thing more like finding an excuse and a scapegoat rather than serious reflection on how to do things better.
In a wider sense I agree with you, the race was razor thin and everything mattered, the whole world was really choosing Clinton or Trump, even foreigners posting their valid criticisms of one or the other on Facebook must have had an impact.
In some ways it was like the battle of Midway, the Japanese should have won but by some miracle the Americans did and that took history on a very different course.