Google's approach seems to involve throwing money at lots of high-risk projects. Most flop, horribly. But when they go achieve success, they come up with something like gmail that can potentially be successful enough to offset all the money wasted on failures. High risk, high reward.
That's the business mode of the Blueseed project. They've been stuck in the hunt for venture capital for years - no investor wants to put money into a high-risk venture, because profitability depends entirely on US tax and immigration law and thus is subject to abrubt change.
Not network games. They wouldn't get through the firewall. In this school - and I assume most - the big problem is flash game sites. Students love them - flappy birds clones were for a while, but Happy Wheels used to be huge, and there was a big tower defense game fad too. We block them, of course - but students are persistent, and will go to great lengths. Even if that means spending an hour going through page after page of google results looking for a site that isn't on the blocklist. Some of them even discovered you can put 'game' into google translate and search on that to find whole new game sites that aren't blocked.
We'd disable flash if we could, but a lot of education sites and various important testing services demand it.
Everyone who has worked in end-user support thinks of lusers. Some of them say it, some have the social awareness not to utter the word, but they all think it or something to that effect. There are websites devoted to swapping stories of luser ignorance.
My personal favorite is the user I met who used to manage all her documents by running word, going to save-as and dragging files around in the little save dialog, right-clicking to make folders and delete things. In her years of using a computer, she never figured out that you could go to start->documents.
Runner-up is shared between all of those who have summoned me from across the building because 'sound not working' when someone has turned off the speakers.
Ideally, but office politics is complicated. Sometimes making one person's life easier makes another's harder - teach the micromanager that he has the ability to add items to his underlings' outlook calanders, and said underlings are going to be annoyed. Sometimes people actually like their lives to be harder, for not-apparent reasons.
For example, having worked at a school in IT support, part of my job was to maintain the various measures used to keep the students away from games in lessons. Due to some sadistic tendencies, I have become quite skilled at this. New games sites appeared all the time, and were quickly blocked - often while a student was trying to use them. We watched their screens.
Until some of the teachers started acting very annoyed, and complaining about us interfering in lessons. Why would they do this? We were trying to make their lives easier, keeping the students from entertaining distractions so they would focus on their work. We were enforcing the usage policy, everything by the book. What we hadn't realised is that many of the teachers were well aware of the gaming going on in lessons, and turning a blind eye to the class clown. Games keep the disruptive student busy, and if he weren't playing the latest flappy bird clone he would just be jumping around the room, distracting his friends or demanding most of the teacher's attention. So when we stepped in to 'help' the teachers, we actually got in the way of a little trick of theirs by turning the silent non-working student into a class-ruining joker that kept everyone else from working too. All they needed was an excuse to stop us, and it wasn't hard to find one - they just argued to the boss's boss that we were performing 'classroom management,' a function that the union said must be the exclusive domain of teachers.
The way the workplace actually functioned differed from the way it actually functioned. By not noticing the unwritten procedure in use, we disrupted it and caused friction with another department.
We still block the games, of course. Teachers should learn to manage their students, not just give them an electronic pacifier. We're just a bit more subtle about it.
There have been a number of drivers' strikes that I'm sure make them unpopular. No doubt management would leap at the chance to be rid of them. The hard part will be keeping the union from finding out too soon and taking preemptive protest action against redundencies.
The sun still doesn't set on the British Empire. The phrase was and remains literal: It spans enough timezones that it's always daytime on British soil somewhere
So long as we keep control of the Falklands, the observation remains accurate.
I've thought of this possibility, though in a different manner. Off-grid solar. Those setups need enough panel capacity to generate requirements during cloudy winter days, which means that in summer or better weather they have excess capacity - once the batteries are charged, it's just going to waste. So it might make sense to put this 'free' energy into something like bitcoin mining or scientific computing.
If you had a really big off-grid renewable setup, you could concievably rent out the space: Put your gear in this small rack, we'll sell you power at a tenth the price of the grid operator, but only on the understanding that we can't promise when you'll get it and you have to be ready to go into power-saving mode when the clouds start lingering.
Risk aversion. If you mine the coins, you're subject to the highly unpredictable swings of the market - your vast bitcoin fortune could be reduced to a tiny fraction overnight. If you rent the miners, then even if that happens you still have your money.
In the case of most drugs, not only is it a chemical effect, but it's possible to point to the exact chemical receptors. Morphine, for example, binds to -opioid receptors - causing analgesic and euphoric effects. This causes the receptors to desensitise - which both means the morphine doesn't work so well and the dosage must be increased, and that the subject feels like crap any time they don't have enough morphine in them to counter the desensitisation to the point of physical symptoms. That's why opioids are generally not used medically unless the patient is in very severe pain, or terminal.
Nicotine works in a similar way, affecting nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. The effect is less dramatic, but the basic mechanism is the same. Just ask someone who has quit smoking how hard it was for them.
The Lords can't actually do anything themselves these days. The only power they have is to block the commons, something they rarely do. Some consider them a useful safeguard against popular fads - as they don't have to worry about reelection they can take a longer-term view, and not get caught up in the public's demand for hasty ill-considered action on a particular issue.
I've witnessed similar behavior. One particular individual was of the hyper-partisan political nature - I will not speak details, but suffice to say he was one of those who strongly identified with left/right, and considered those of the opposite faction to be treasonous scum, and it his personal patriotic duty to purge the world of them. He got increasingly carried away with this in the usual agresssive internet flame wars, which culminated in him registering a domain name using the alias of one of his opponents and proceeding to impersonate them, both there and on various forums, posting material advocating for elimination of the age of consent and the benefits of sexual relationships with children. Fortunately his target was sensible enough to have never revealed their real name, but you can imagine what he could have gotten up to had he known it.
That particular case was political - but tribalism is human nature, and it could as easily have been nationalism, religion, sports team rivalry, or a fangirl attacking anyone who criticised her beloved Bieber.
Never mind human. Be more creative. You can have the humanform robot for working, then switch to your customised Creature from Outer Space body for partying.
There are other factors too. Some foods get metabolised into energy in different ways, affecting metabolic rate. High fructose is a particular issue, as it's very common in the American diet and rapidly becoming so in Europe too - it causes blood sugar to peak quickly, so the body starts putting on fat stocks right away, then falls and leaves the person quickly hungry for more sugary goodness.
On the basic model though, you're right. The key to weight management is to eat less energy and exercise more. Easier said than done, as it requires defying some powerful instinctive urges.
If you ignore the genocide issue, it was still a settlement. People came to claim land, at great personal risk. Some of them came seeking material wealth. A few came for more abstract reasons, settling on a religious mission or to escape conflict back in Europe. In their isolation, there was a cultural change - the society that emerged had different values from the old, far more individualistic and anti-authoritarian, culminating in the American Revolution.
Sure it does. Some people still find the old sci-fi dreams inspirational. They are terribly inaccurate dreams, it is true - but they are an ideal to aspire to, not something one might reasonably expect to achieve. Robots in space are a little bit exciting, and they do advance scientific knowledge. A worthfile aim in itsself, but that is all they can do. Human expansion promises new worlds. Not very good worlds, and the process of settling them is going to cost trillions of dollars and more than a few human lives, but it is also something really worth being excited over. There's a whole solar system out there, including a couple of miserable lumps of rock that can potentially be made livable. You don't need a strict economic justification for some things: You go there because it's a part of human nature. Virgin territory, however inhospitable, begs to be tamed. Beyond that, it's just a matter of time, money, and enough foolhardy people willing to go first and do the construction work.
If someone were to invent a magic techno-thingie tomorrow that made travel to Mars affordable, do you think people wouldn't go?
No. A static charge will always attract neutral particles, due to the magic of induced dipoles. Positive, negative, alternating, it makes no difference.
The settling of the Americas counts. There was the small issue of first emptying them of their former occupants, but that aside it had quite an impact. We're still telling (rather romanticised) stories about it. It did foster some social and political revolution.
In the event of a very large rock heading our way, there isn't much to do about it - neither robots nor humans are currently capable of diverting it. One way or another, a lot of people are going to die.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's approach seems to involve throwing money at lots of high-risk projects. Most flop, horribly. But when they go achieve success, they come up with something like gmail that can potentially be successful enough to offset all the money wasted on failures. High risk, high reward.
That's the business mode of the Blueseed project. They've been stuck in the hunt for venture capital for years - no investor wants to put money into a high-risk venture, because profitability depends entirely on US tax and immigration law and thus is subject to abrubt change.
Not network games. They wouldn't get through the firewall. In this school - and I assume most - the big problem is flash game sites. Students love them - flappy birds clones were for a while, but Happy Wheels used to be huge, and there was a big tower defense game fad too. We block them, of course - but students are persistent, and will go to great lengths. Even if that means spending an hour going through page after page of google results looking for a site that isn't on the blocklist. Some of them even discovered you can put 'game' into google translate and search on that to find whole new game sites that aren't blocked.
We'd disable flash if we could, but a lot of education sites and various important testing services demand it.
I managed to mess up in editing to the extent of making a statement that cannot be logically true. Hmm.
Everyone who has worked in end-user support thinks of lusers. Some of them say it, some have the social awareness not to utter the word, but they all think it or something to that effect. There are websites devoted to swapping stories of luser ignorance.
My personal favorite is the user I met who used to manage all her documents by running word, going to save-as and dragging files around in the little save dialog, right-clicking to make folders and delete things. In her years of using a computer, she never figured out that you could go to start->documents.
Runner-up is shared between all of those who have summoned me from across the building because 'sound not working' when someone has turned off the speakers.
Ideally, but office politics is complicated. Sometimes making one person's life easier makes another's harder - teach the micromanager that he has the ability to add items to his underlings' outlook calanders, and said underlings are going to be annoyed. Sometimes people actually like their lives to be harder, for not-apparent reasons.
For example, having worked at a school in IT support, part of my job was to maintain the various measures used to keep the students away from games in lessons. Due to some sadistic tendencies, I have become quite skilled at this. New games sites appeared all the time, and were quickly blocked - often while a student was trying to use them. We watched their screens.
Until some of the teachers started acting very annoyed, and complaining about us interfering in lessons. Why would they do this? We were trying to make their lives easier, keeping the students from entertaining distractions so they would focus on their work. We were enforcing the usage policy, everything by the book. What we hadn't realised is that many of the teachers were well aware of the gaming going on in lessons, and turning a blind eye to the class clown. Games keep the disruptive student busy, and if he weren't playing the latest flappy bird clone he would just be jumping around the room, distracting his friends or demanding most of the teacher's attention. So when we stepped in to 'help' the teachers, we actually got in the way of a little trick of theirs by turning the silent non-working student into a class-ruining joker that kept everyone else from working too. All they needed was an excuse to stop us, and it wasn't hard to find one - they just argued to the boss's boss that we were performing 'classroom management,' a function that the union said must be the exclusive domain of teachers.
The way the workplace actually functioned differed from the way it actually functioned. By not noticing the unwritten procedure in use, we disrupted it and caused friction with another department.
We still block the games, of course. Teachers should learn to manage their students, not just give them an electronic pacifier. We're just a bit more subtle about it.
There have been a number of drivers' strikes that I'm sure make them unpopular. No doubt management would leap at the chance to be rid of them. The hard part will be keeping the union from finding out too soon and taking preemptive protest action against redundencies.
The sun still doesn't set on the British Empire. The phrase was and remains literal: It spans enough timezones that it's always daytime on British soil somewhere
So long as we keep control of the Falklands, the observation remains accurate.
Europe has very strict laws which everyone ignores requiring recycling of electronic waste.
Recycleable rare earth metals.
I've thought of this possibility, though in a different manner. Off-grid solar. Those setups need enough panel capacity to generate requirements during cloudy winter days, which means that in summer or better weather they have excess capacity - once the batteries are charged, it's just going to waste. So it might make sense to put this 'free' energy into something like bitcoin mining or scientific computing.
If you had a really big off-grid renewable setup, you could concievably rent out the space: Put your gear in this small rack, we'll sell you power at a tenth the price of the grid operator, but only on the understanding that we can't promise when you'll get it and you have to be ready to go into power-saving mode when the clouds start lingering.
Risk aversion. If you mine the coins, you're subject to the highly unpredictable swings of the market - your vast bitcoin fortune could be reduced to a tiny fraction overnight. If you rent the miners, then even if that happens you still have your money.
Slashdot, get some unicode support here! -opioid indeed.
In the case of most drugs, not only is it a chemical effect, but it's possible to point to the exact chemical receptors. Morphine, for example, binds to -opioid receptors - causing analgesic and euphoric effects. This causes the receptors to desensitise - which both means the morphine doesn't work so well and the dosage must be increased, and that the subject feels like crap any time they don't have enough morphine in them to counter the desensitisation to the point of physical symptoms. That's why opioids are generally not used medically unless the patient is in very severe pain, or terminal.
Nicotine works in a similar way, affecting nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. The effect is less dramatic, but the basic mechanism is the same. Just ask someone who has quit smoking how hard it was for them.
But as far as the internet is concerned, I have ten names and none of them are my real one.
The Lords can't actually do anything themselves these days. The only power they have is to block the commons, something they rarely do. Some consider them a useful safeguard against popular fads - as they don't have to worry about reelection they can take a longer-term view, and not get caught up in the public's demand for hasty ill-considered action on a particular issue.
I've witnessed similar behavior. One particular individual was of the hyper-partisan political nature - I will not speak details, but suffice to say he was one of those who strongly identified with left/right, and considered those of the opposite faction to be treasonous scum, and it his personal patriotic duty to purge the world of them. He got increasingly carried away with this in the usual agresssive internet flame wars, which culminated in him registering a domain name using the alias of one of his opponents and proceeding to impersonate them, both there and on various forums, posting material advocating for elimination of the age of consent and the benefits of sexual relationships with children. Fortunately his target was sensible enough to have never revealed their real name, but you can imagine what he could have gotten up to had he known it.
That particular case was political - but tribalism is human nature, and it could as easily have been nationalism, religion, sports team rivalry, or a fangirl attacking anyone who criticised her beloved Bieber.
The solution to many of these problems consists of having enough self-confidence to shrug off insults.
Never mind human. Be more creative. You can have the humanform robot for working, then switch to your customised Creature from Outer Space body for partying.
There are other factors too. Some foods get metabolised into energy in different ways, affecting metabolic rate. High fructose is a particular issue, as it's very common in the American diet and rapidly becoming so in Europe too - it causes blood sugar to peak quickly, so the body starts putting on fat stocks right away, then falls and leaves the person quickly hungry for more sugary goodness.
On the basic model though, you're right. The key to weight management is to eat less energy and exercise more. Easier said than done, as it requires defying some powerful instinctive urges.
If you ignore the genocide issue, it was still a settlement. People came to claim land, at great personal risk. Some of them came seeking material wealth. A few came for more abstract reasons, settling on a religious mission or to escape conflict back in Europe. In their isolation, there was a cultural change - the society that emerged had different values from the old, far more individualistic and anti-authoritarian, culminating in the American Revolution.
Sure it does. Some people still find the old sci-fi dreams inspirational. They are terribly inaccurate dreams, it is true - but they are an ideal to aspire to, not something one might reasonably expect to achieve. Robots in space are a little bit exciting, and they do advance scientific knowledge. A worthfile aim in itsself, but that is all they can do. Human expansion promises new worlds. Not very good worlds, and the process of settling them is going to cost trillions of dollars and more than a few human lives, but it is also something really worth being excited over. There's a whole solar system out there, including a couple of miserable lumps of rock that can potentially be made livable. You don't need a strict economic justification for some things: You go there because it's a part of human nature. Virgin territory, however inhospitable, begs to be tamed. Beyond that, it's just a matter of time, money, and enough foolhardy people willing to go first and do the construction work.
If someone were to invent a magic techno-thingie tomorrow that made travel to Mars affordable, do you think people wouldn't go?
The mac pro* is quiet, but it isn't actually silent. It's close, but there's still a fan in there. You just can't see it clearly - it's on the bottom.
*I assume you mean the flower vase model.
No. A static charge will always attract neutral particles, due to the magic of induced dipoles. Positive, negative, alternating, it makes no difference.
I was referring to the more recent settling by Europeans, thus the comment about "first emptying them of their former occupants."
It's not like star trek. Robots are even less like star trek.
The settling of the Americas counts. There was the small issue of first emptying them of their former occupants, but that aside it had quite an impact. We're still telling (rather romanticised) stories about it. It did foster some social and political revolution.
In the event of a very large rock heading our way, there isn't much to do about it - neither robots nor humans are currently capable of diverting it. One way or another, a lot of people are going to die.