Computers do make perfect knowledge closer to attainable, though. Improved algorithms would do so even better. Do you want to see what happens when a perfect market exists?
Everyone who uses google shop search, or most online sites, immediately clicks 'sort by price.' Great for reducing prices, of course, but it also means a race to the bottom on price. This isn't always a good thing. For one, it means new suppliers find it impossible to set up - there's no way they can match the price and distribution capabilities of an entrenched company benefiting from economy of scale. If the cost of a trade is really low, someone works out how to do something like high-frequency trading. Exploiting what little inefficiency exists to bring in a profit from shuffling bits around.
Perfect knowlege is when your company suddenly finds all their orders have dried up overnight because a supplier in Vietnam just cut their price to 0.5% less than yours, and your customer's procurment agents automatically switched to the cheaper source.
I expect speculation and grumbling to continue no matter what you say, until the feature is made available across all platforms. I understand it's basically a PR stunt at this point - the first demonstration of a technology that has great potential but is still some years away from maturity, and I imagine a feature to draw business customers' attention to Skype. They'd find translation to be a very valuable feature indeed.
There will be ways to game the system. Look at Hollywood, for example: The reason you see films given as 'making $X on a budget of $Y' is that no film, no matter how successful, ever turns a profit on paper. No profit, nothing to tax.
The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
The translation is only available if you use Windows 8.
There's no technical reason for this. It's a simple business issue. Microsoft wants people to upgrade to Windows 8. Microsoft owns Skype. So it's obvious what happened: Someone called the Skype management and told them that any new features are to be Windows 8 exclusive in future.
I'm really surprised Microsoft haven't ordered the linux client discontinued yet.
You have a larger chance of being struck by lightning in the us than being killed by a terrorist. Lightning killed about fifty people a year (US only), which is considerably more than terrorists ten-year average.
It grants them unprunability. That doesn't imply cancer-resistance. It's quite possible that aspect of sun damage would be worsened, as you're shutting down one of the evolved damage-mitigation mechanisms.
So they could come up with a cream that lets you remain wrinkle-free until you are past your nineties, but at the expense of being unable to tolerate prolonged exposure to sunlight?
Even if they were entirely open about this drawback, it'd still sell. A lot of people really are desperate to look young, and wouldn't mind giving up their time on the beach and having to douse themselves in sunscreen when attending outdoors events.
There were bigger birds once, eating bigger mammals. Haast's eagle, for one. Bloody huge, still capable of flight. The local tribes still tell legends of the terrifying creatures which could once descend from above and carry off human children.
Why do they have to kill them in the egg? I want to see what it looks like! Probably with horrible facial deformities, but come on... we kill billions of chickens painfully for food anyway, what's wrong with a couple more for science?
There is at least some brief attempt to explain this: English is no longer a widely spoken language, but there is a religion-like effort to preserve it as a ceremonial language, aided by conserving any text in a sufficiently durable form.
It's not a very good explanation considering the time scales involved, but it's better than no explanation at all. It does have some historical basis. Hebrew, for example, all but died out for a time before being revived by religious schoolers. Eight hundred thousand years, though, may be pressing things a little.
The morlocks don't need to preserve english - their leader is telepathic.
Yes, but CD wasn't designed for modern hardware. It was designed for the hardware of the era - and to be low-cost enough for the mass market on hardware of the era too.
I used to have one of those. From it I learned how to recognise the german label for 'Do not remove this retaining screw, the mechanism is spring loaded and will launch delicate parts at your face.'
I used it for a while, even though the sound was poor, just because I did like to have it running in the background and it looked cool. But it had no collector/ebay value, and I couldn't justify the price to replace another failed drive belt when my mobile phone and some cheap external speakers actually sounded better.
20KHz. The 'extra' 2KHz is to allow for the limitations of analog processing. No filter can be perfect, so you need a little padding to allow for that.
Nuclear also has a PR problem. It scares people - and if it scares people, politicians end up following the will of the people for once.
Look at Fukushima, for example. It was a media-fest for weeks. Minimal release of radiation, no nuclear-related fatalities, no land left unusable for a thousand years - but even so there was more coverage of that plant than all the rest of the tsunami damage put together. It was a bit hairy for a time when they needed to bring in emergency pumps for the cooldown, but even that was only due to a problem with the outdated plant putting all their cooling pumps in one place - not an issue with newer designs. You can blame the media for a lot of the panic, but they just can't resist a story about nuclear catastrophy. Even when there isn't actually a catastrophy, they still try to hype it up.
Even China is starting to lessen their population control program now. It was only intended to prevent a period of explosive growth that could otherwise outpace the country's ability to industrialise and construct infrastructure - and then to be abandoned once the population stabilised naturally.
The Nazis were also strongly opposed to abortion* and homosexuality, and frequently spoke of the richness of German Christian heritage and declared themselves a Christian party. Sound a lot like the American right-wing?
Or - and here is a notion that many may find strange - could it be that the left-vs-right divide is rather artificial, and not all political parties can be neatly fitted into one of two buckets?
*Though they did make exceptions for their eugenics programs, abortion was otherwise strictly prohibited.
Slashdot Mirror
Plastic fumes in an enclosed station must have been fun. One thing you don't notice from videos of 3D printers is the smell.
You will still need food, water, power and a communication infrastructure.
Congratulations, you have invented the sweat shop.
Computers do make perfect knowledge closer to attainable, though. Improved algorithms would do so even better. Do you want to see what happens when a perfect market exists?
Everyone who uses google shop search, or most online sites, immediately clicks 'sort by price.' Great for reducing prices, of course, but it also means a race to the bottom on price. This isn't always a good thing. For one, it means new suppliers find it impossible to set up - there's no way they can match the price and distribution capabilities of an entrenched company benefiting from economy of scale. If the cost of a trade is really low, someone works out how to do something like high-frequency trading. Exploiting what little inefficiency exists to bring in a profit from shuffling bits around.
Perfect knowlege is when your company suddenly finds all their orders have dried up overnight because a supplier in Vietnam just cut their price to 0.5% less than yours, and your customer's procurment agents automatically switched to the cheaper source.
With the NSA telling the ED-209's which 'domestic terrorists' to shoot first.
I always wondered about that model. ED-209? Would that imply a base model of ED-200? Seems odd to start your new product at a non-round number.
I expect speculation and grumbling to continue no matter what you say, until the feature is made available across all platforms. I understand it's basically a PR stunt at this point - the first demonstration of a technology that has great potential but is still some years away from maturity, and I imagine a feature to draw business customers' attention to Skype. They'd find translation to be a very valuable feature indeed.
There will be ways to game the system. Look at Hollywood, for example: The reason you see films given as 'making $X on a budget of $Y' is that no film, no matter how successful, ever turns a profit on paper. No profit, nothing to tax.
The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
The translation is only available if you use Windows 8.
There's no technical reason for this. It's a simple business issue. Microsoft wants people to upgrade to Windows 8. Microsoft owns Skype. So it's obvious what happened: Someone called the Skype management and told them that any new features are to be Windows 8 exclusive in future.
I'm really surprised Microsoft haven't ordered the linux client discontinued yet.
You have a larger chance of being struck by lightning in the us than being killed by a terrorist. Lightning killed about fifty people a year (US only), which is considerably more than terrorists ten-year average.
It grants them unprunability. That doesn't imply cancer-resistance. It's quite possible that aspect of sun damage would be worsened, as you're shutting down one of the evolved damage-mitigation mechanisms.
So they could come up with a cream that lets you remain wrinkle-free until you are past your nineties, but at the expense of being unable to tolerate prolonged exposure to sunlight?
Even if they were entirely open about this drawback, it'd still sell. A lot of people really are desperate to look young, and wouldn't mind giving up their time on the beach and having to douse themselves in sunscreen when attending outdoors events.
Oh, everything I said above was in relation to the film, not the book. The book has it much simpler: No-one in the future speaks english at all.
Only if your CD was recorded using that more recent technology, rather than an 80s ADC.
It doesn't matter anyway - you'd need superhuman hearing to tell the difference.
There were bigger birds once, eating bigger mammals. Haast's eagle, for one. Bloody huge, still capable of flight. The local tribes still tell legends of the terrifying creatures which could once descend from above and carry off human children.
Modern biologists tend to shy away from the idea of reptiles entirely. It's a bit of an ugly classification.
Why do they have to kill them in the egg? I want to see what it looks like! Probably with horrible facial deformities, but come on... we kill billions of chickens painfully for food anyway, what's wrong with a couple more for science?
There is at least some brief attempt to explain this: English is no longer a widely spoken language, but there is a religion-like effort to preserve it as a ceremonial language, aided by conserving any text in a sufficiently durable form.
It's not a very good explanation considering the time scales involved, but it's better than no explanation at all. It does have some historical basis. Hebrew, for example, all but died out for a time before being revived by religious schoolers. Eight hundred thousand years, though, may be pressing things a little.
The morlocks don't need to preserve english - their leader is telepathic.
Yes, but CD wasn't designed for modern hardware. It was designed for the hardware of the era - and to be low-cost enough for the mass market on hardware of the era too.
I've found a way to listen to vinyl and cassettes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Ridiculous, but cool.
I used to have one of those. From it I learned how to recognise the german label for 'Do not remove this retaining screw, the mechanism is spring loaded and will launch delicate parts at your face.'
I used it for a while, even though the sound was poor, just because I did like to have it running in the background and it looked cool. But it had no collector/ebay value, and I couldn't justify the price to replace another failed drive belt when my mobile phone and some cheap external speakers actually sounded better.
20KHz. The 'extra' 2KHz is to allow for the limitations of analog processing. No filter can be perfect, so you need a little padding to allow for that.
Nuclear also has a PR problem. It scares people - and if it scares people, politicians end up following the will of the people for once.
Look at Fukushima, for example. It was a media-fest for weeks. Minimal release of radiation, no nuclear-related fatalities, no land left unusable for a thousand years - but even so there was more coverage of that plant than all the rest of the tsunami damage put together. It was a bit hairy for a time when they needed to bring in emergency pumps for the cooldown, but even that was only due to a problem with the outdated plant putting all their cooling pumps in one place - not an issue with newer designs. You can blame the media for a lot of the panic, but they just can't resist a story about nuclear catastrophy. Even when there isn't actually a catastrophy, they still try to hype it up.
Even China is starting to lessen their population control program now. It was only intended to prevent a period of explosive growth that could otherwise outpace the country's ability to industrialise and construct infrastructure - and then to be abandoned once the population stabilised naturally.
The Nazis were also strongly opposed to abortion* and homosexuality, and frequently spoke of the richness of German Christian heritage and declared themselves a Christian party. Sound a lot like the American right-wing?
Or - and here is a notion that many may find strange - could it be that the left-vs-right divide is rather artificial, and not all political parties can be neatly fitted into one of two buckets?
*Though they did make exceptions for their eugenics programs, abortion was otherwise strictly prohibited.