Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue.
For reference - the UK NHS budget is £120m (USD$153m) for 65m people.
Wow, healthcare for $2 per person per year? That figure cannot be correct. I suspect you need to multiply those numbers by 1000, and even then I'll bet that's not the full cost. £120B would make sense for operational expenses (salaries, supplies, etc.), with capital expenditures (buildings, durable equipment, etc.) accounted for separately.
It's perfectly fine if Google is on top because it's the most popular. It's not fine if Google takes extra effort to hide all the competition.
What makes you think Google is taking extra effort to hide the competition? What if the ranking is just the result of exactly the same algorithms that rank all other search results, and which represents Google's best effort at trying to give users what they're looking for first?
There's something of a catch-22 for Google here. Since there's no way to readily prove that they're not putting their thumb on the scales, Google's only option to satisfy you would be to take extra effort to boost the competition. Assuming their ranking algorithms accurately predict what people are looking for, that means giving their users a degraded experience.
Hmm. I'm not sure what you mean. Looks like any other Material Design app to me. Perhaps I'm just used to MD, but it all seems very straightforward to me.
I'm looking at the app and I don't see anything that needs edges but doesn't have them. In the list of conversation threads there are no lines between conversations but each is represented as a horizontal section with photo of the person, name and last message and time. I can tap anywhere on these conversation "bars" to open the conversation.
In the conversation view, I see the standard conversation bubbles plus a field on the bottom (clearly delineated) where I can type. The top has a heading bar with a back arrow, name of the other person and time since they've been online, plus icons for starting a video chat or phone call.
Tastes differ, but it seems functional, easy to use and even pretty. But then, I like the clean look of Material Design.
Imagine, an up shaft and a down shaft connected ladder style so the loading / unloading area is in the connecting tunnels. The car pulls in, loads/unloads while the other cars go up or down around it.
Very nice! Clearly, yes, this is the way to do it. In fact it's blindingly obvious:-)
Plus in very tall buildings some additional shafts for "express" trips should be used so that elevators don't have to slow down for others that are stopping to enter the pickup area.
Was not even mentioned in the summary. You can run multiple cabins in the same shaft, saving precious floor space (and move the cabins horizontally if they need to pass each other, or you can just assign up and down shafts). Thus, for larger buildings this type of elevator can actually be a major cost saver.
Just assigning up and down shafts would lose another important feature: the ability to load an elevator car at one floor and send it directly to the destination floor with no stops. That not only minimizes wait time for the people in the car, but also minimizes the time until the car is available again, increasing throughput.
Ideally, the elevator system needs to know how many people are waiting at each floor, and their destination floors. I've seen one elevator system, in Google's DeepMind office in London, which tries to optimize elevator traffic using that information. Rather than just up/down call buttons, there's a numeric entry pad. If you're alone, you just type your destination floor. If you're with a group, you hit a "group" key, then the number of people, then the destination. After a few seconds, the display then tells you which elevator shaft you should go to.
With this system, something similar should be done, but now a loaded car can move to a "through traffic only" shaft, where cars do not stop except briefly, to enter or leave the shaft. Perhaps the system should even designate a "long distance" shaft, used only by cars that are going to travel, say, 100+ floors without stopping... and then it could accelerate those cars to higher speed. Of course, the designation of a shaft for a given purpose need not be permanent. It's a dynamic optimization problem.
Because each shaft is carrying multiple cars, you'd probably need more information than just which shaft your car is coming in. Instead, cars would need numbers. When you enter your group size and location the system would to tell you which door to go to and which car to wait for.
In addition to the UI on the wall, you could also use your smartphone to call an elevator. Ideally, you could do that as you're walking to the elevator shaft, to reduce wait time at the elevator door. You could enter an elevator call request and the system could tell you through your phone which shaft to go to and how long before your car will arrive. When you're at the shaft, your phone could notify you when your car is arriving. With information about your precise location (perhaps via BLE beacons, or similar), the system could avoid scheduling a car too early, instead estimating your walking time to the elevator shaft based on your location and speed, perhaps revising your car assignment if you stop to chat or something.
This could also be integrated with calendaring. If you have a meeting on another floor, your phone could ask the elevator system for estimated transit time, then notify you when you need to leave to get to your meeting on time, much as Google Now does for external transit now. When you start moving to go to the meeting, your phone could notify the elevator system which would assign you to a car then notify your phone, which would buzz and tell you which shaft to go and what time to be there.
Turning it up to "ridiculous", the system could also optimize elevator sharing. Having a meeting with a group of people, all coming from the same floor (or close) and going to the same conference room on a distant floor? The phones and calendaring system could tell the system that these people would prefer to share a car, if all of them can be in one. Then you can just start your meeting while en route to the conference room. Or, work in the same building as your ex? Have your phone tell the system that you prefer not to share an elevator with that person. The system could also take status into account: some people could get preferential treatment, ensuring shorter wait times. I suppose it could also take urgency into account, giving preferential treatment to people who are running lat
Yikes, "dist-upgrade" certainly does *not* upgrade you to latest release of a debian based system.
Yes and no. No, dist-upgrade will not change your sources.list. Yes, it's needed for release upgrades, and those are why it exists.
Normal updates do not involve package refactoring, but release upgrades often do. The thing that "apt-get upgrade" does not do is remove packages or install new packages. This is normally a good thing, because it reduces the chance that your system may actually lose functionality. But releases change a lot more, and so dist-upgrade is required. The chance of breaking something during a release upgrade is acceptable because that's something that happens rarely (for most people).
If you're running Debian unstable then package refactors can happen at any time, and you can -- and should! -- expect your system to break at any time (though it doesn't break that much, in practice). You should use dist-upgrade if running unstable. If you're running testing, you may need it occasionally, when upgrade reports that it is refusing to do things because they would involve package refactors. If you're running stable you should basically need dist-upgrade only when a new release comes out (and you should test).
If you're running a Debian derivative, you should follow the recommendations of the distro. In most cases this will not involve using dist-upgrade very often.
I always use "dist-upgrade" because it actually does what most people would expect "upgrade" to do.
Not really. Most people don't expect upgrade to remove packages or install new packages, which dist-upgrade can do. Most of the time it doesn't (except on rolling release systems), but by using dist-upgrade you are increasing the probability that you'll break something on your system. It's safer to use upgrade. If upgrade reports that changes are being held back, you should investigate why, and then take appropriate action (which may be dist-upgrade).
Personally, I mostly do upgrades in aptitude, which makes it easier to see what's being done, easier to resolve conflicts, and is smarter about distinguishing between packages that were intentionally installed and those that were automatically installed to support some intentional installation. That makes it easier to ensure that automatic dependencies are removed when they're no longer needed; otherwise systems tend to accumulate a lot of cruft.
Trump got 304 electoral votes and Clinton got 232. Not very close at all.
Your numbers are wrong; it's 304 to 227. However, that is an extremely close election. Oh, the numbers look different enough, but only because the Electoral College tends to amplify margins.
...if Russia hacked the election and they knew about it more than 6 months prior...
WHY DID THEY NOT TELL THE PUBLIC?
Because telling the public would have undermined the democratic process.
When the election is very close, it's far more important for democracy that people have confidence in the accuracy of the election result than that it actually be accurate. That may seem like a bizarre thing to say, but think about it. If the election is very close, it's because the electorate does not have a clear preference. This isn't to say that individual voters don't have clear preferences, but the electorate as a whole, under the system we use for determining the will of the people, doesn't have a clear preference.
Since the people don't have a clear will the election can go either way without going against the will of the people. In fact, in very close elections the result can go either way based on various random factors which in an ideal world shouldn't have any effect, like the weather. This means that the actual result of a close election cannot undermine the legitimacy of the democracy.
What can, and does, undermine democracy is when people say "Not my president", and in a very close race it takes very little to create enough doubt to enable people to say that. Of course, even in a landslide victory it's always possible for the supporters of the loser to take this tack, but in doing so they're demonstrating contempt for the very notion of democratic process. When it's very close, though, it's easy for people to make the argument that their guy/gal lost only because of X, Y or Z inaccuracies in the electoral process, and so the elected officeholder is illegitimate, not because democracy isn't the proper way to choose government.
To be clear, I despise Donald Trump with a purple passion, but he is my president and I will absolutely continue to honor the office and respect his legal and proper actions within that office (while retaining the right to criticize vociferously any I disagree with, and to encourage investigation, impeachment and possibly prosecution in the event of any illegal and/or improper actions). This attitude with regard to the office (and every other elected office) is, IMNSHO, exactly what all Americans need to hold if we're to avoid undermining our nation.
So, IMO, Obama did exactly the right thing in trying to fight Russian interference on the one hand, and keeping it quiet on the other, because fear about the legitimacy of the electoral process would have severely undermined the legitimacy of whoever won... and in a close election legitimacy is distinct from and more important than accuracy. That said, we absolutely do need to investigate any identified weaknesses in the electoral processes, and fix them lest we find ourselves in a situation where the electorate does have a clear preference and the processes deliver a contrary result.
I also have to point out, though, that Obama thought the election result whose legitimacy he was trying to protect would have his party's candidate as the winner. I don't know if he'd have acted differently if he knew that it was the legitimacy of Trump's presidency that he was protecting. I choose to assume that he'd have acted the same, but it's possible that he might not have.
It's *not* placebo. I could hear my back and neck go "clack/clack/clack/clack/clack".
Those sounds are just explosive release of pockets of nitrogen gas, same as when you pop your fingers or other joints. The effect of chiropractic work on muscles is real, though, and can help quite a bit. But a masseuse can do the same, without the joint popping.
Hey, remember those assholes that would said this shit was impossible? Remember how when they landed a rocket that those same assholes said it wouldn't be reusable?
To be fair, to really achieve the savings that SpaceX is aiming for, they need to be able to reuse the same rocket many times (so far, they've only demonstrated a single reuse), and they need to be able to reuse it without extensive refurbishment. They're still a long way from achieving those goals.
What they're trying to do is difficult, and there will undoubtedly be a lot of other lessons they'll have to learn and adjustments they'll have to make to achieve it. And it's always possible that they'll fail, that they'll discover that building a rocket durable enough for heavy reuse requires too many other sacrifices. But the only way to know is to try, and if they can achieve it, it will significantly reduce launch costs -- again.
I realize there are many here who would view tat as a good thing, but yer math needs some help.
Heh. That's almost as good as the Virginia governor's repeated claim that the US loses 93 million lives per day to gun violence. If true, the US population would be wiped out in less than four days. (When called on it, it he clarified that he meant 93 per day, not 93 million per day. That figure is reasonably correct if you include suicides. It seems like more than a slip of the tongue, though, because he stated the 93 million figure twice, and enunciated it slowly and forcefully.)
I observe lots of non-technological life-forms near my house.
Indeed. Those species, unlike humans, are not technology-dependent. They have physical adaptations and instinctive knowledge that enables them to survive without having to invent ways to alter their environment. Note that some of them actually do alter their environment. For example, if you see squirrels, they have a well-known instinct for gathering and storing food to help them survive the winter. However, this is instinctual knowledge, not cultural knowledge.
It's also worth pointing out that humans aren't the only species that makes use of cultural knowledge, meaning knowledge received from parents or other members of the species. There may even be some other technology-dependent species, meaning species whose individuals could not survive without cultural knowledge. I suspect that many primates are like this, and dolphins and whales, elephants, perhaps many others.
The point, though, is that human life is especially technology-dependent. We've evolved to use our brains and cultural knowledge instead of instinct and the sort of physical abilities that other large species rely upon. We no longer have useful amounts of fur because that is not useful in a species that can learn from its tribe to make clothing (or to make other things which can be traded for clothing). We no longer have claws, because clubs, and spears, and swords and McMillan TAC-50s are more effective. We've even lost the ability to digest many kinds of food because we learned how to cook it.
I also don't see why I'd possibly want to.
Here you're talking about advanced technology, and I completely agree, I like my comforts, too. But I'm talking about the fullest meaning of the word, any and all techniques involving the application of learned knowledge. You and I needed someone to teach us not to drink bad water, eat poisonous things, play with rattlesnakes, or even wipe the feces from our butts to prevent sores. Your cat needed no one to teach it any of those things.
However, I will also point out that it is a ridiculous assumption since even creatures with brains the size of a grain of rice can figure that stuff out.
No, actually, they can't. Creatures with tiny brains don't figure anything out. Most of them have no capacity at all for learning, and absolutely none for abstract thought as needed to analyze problems and create solutions. Instead, they have "hard-wired" knowledge that comes from their genes. All of their actions are instinctual.
Note that I'm not claiming that humans are the only ones who do figure stuff out. Not by a long shot. Most larger creatures can and do learn, though in most cases they only learn that specific sequences of actions bring about specific results, with no ability to abstract the elements of the actions to synthesize variations that might be more effective. Many of them even pass knowledge (usually the same sort of rote knowledge) along to their young, meaning they have cultural knowledge. A few of them even evidence abstract thinking skills, and rudimentary communication. And in fact, I think there are other species on Earth which are technology-dependent, in that if you could remove all of their cultural knowledge they might lose the ability to survive. None of them, of course, have the same capacity for creation of knowledge that we do, which is why none of them are as incredibly adaptable as we are.
Homo Sapiens is the only species on the planet which is found (at least occasionally) on every continent, at every latitude, at every elevation, including moderately deep under water. Well, us and the species that we carry with us, either inside our bodies or in our engineered habitats. This is because with sufficient knowledge it's possible to live anywhere that it's physically possible to create the conditions needed for life. By "physically possible" I mean "does not defy the laws of physics".
Here is a counter example to your argument... Humans are here. Therefore, at least at some point in our past, we survived without technology.
You didn't think about that very hard:-)
Think about it from an evolutionary perspective. A species doesn't spring fully-formed from nothing, it arises as a small variation on an ancestor species. Clearly, our ability to use abstract reasoning to alter our environment to suit our needs didn't come into existence at exactly the same time as we lost physical adaptations and instinct. As our pre-human ancestors learned how to do things, and how to pass that knowledge on to their children and others in the tribe, various physical characteristics which previous generations had needed to survive became less important. Over time, the success of intelligence increasingly selected for bigger and more capable brains (including brains that were more able to share knowledge with other brains), and selected against useful amounts of fur, claws, instinctive ability to recognize foods, etc.
Note that the above paragraph seems to assume that evolution selects for organism/species survival traits, which isn't actually true. It selects for gene replication competitive advantage. But being careful about that just makes the explanation more complicated, without actually changing it.
Or, are you arguing from the absurd point that we are complete simpletons that can't know we are able to eat other animals or plants?
Sort of. Not "simpletons", but lacking knowledge of which animals and plants are safe, how to find them and collect them, how to prepare them, etc. Look at it this way: Imagine a person who has grown up in NYC, never left, never watched the nature channel, has never seen food outside of a grocery store, etc., and never really thought about where it might come from or how. Now, take that person and drop them in a wilderness preserve in the Great Rift Valley, where we believe Homo Sapiens first emerged. Drop them naked, shoeless, without any tools or any information about the local flora or fauna, how to distinguish between safe and unsafe water, etc. They'll die.
And note that this hypothetical New Yorker is actually not a fair test subject, because he or she has a tremendous amount of know-how, much of which probably can be applied for survival. I tried to pick a person whose knowledge would be as wrong as possible, but only because it's impossible to find the right kind of person, one with no knowledge at all. This is because it's impossible for a human to grow to adulthood without using and learning vast amounts of technology. A baby's level of knowledge is what we really need for the thought experiment, but we want to assume a full adult's physical and cognitive skills.
I wonder how much money was spent on this, rather than, say, cancer research. Sigh...
These are physicists. Whatever they might study, it won't be cancer.
Yes, but perhaps the suitcase industry would have hired biotechs to study cancer rather than physicists to study wheels if they knew about the pre-existing research.
Nobody hired anybody for this. This was just a couple of university physicists who got curious about something they noticed and decided to work out the cause.
However, the above poster's claim of a 50 year useful life on new construction actually makes me wonder if "modern" houses (those built since the 1980s or later) actually have a shorter expected lifespan due to the mass production techniques and engineered components which actually might not last, like truss joists, LVLs and some of the chipboard materials.
OTOH, in the last 15 years building codes have gotten a lot stricter, and require a lot more steel to be used in tying elements of the frame together, foundations are more thoroughly engineered, etc.
I suspect that houses built in the last decade or so will last a long time. Houses built in the 70s, 80s and 90s, maybe not so much.
On the gripping hand, it looks like there may be a wave of new construction techniques coming which will dramatically lower building costs, maybe by as much as 80%. That could well mean that the durability of current houses is irrelevant, because it could get to where it's cheaper to tear down and rebuild than to remodel. I'm in the middle of a major remodel project right now, and the cost will easily exceed 30% of new-build cost.
The main new construction technology I'm thinking of is 3D-printed concrete, whether 3D-printed in place or (perhaps more likely) 3D-printed forms, with most of the panels pre-cast and shipped in. The thing about the application of high-precision 3D printing to concrete forming is that it allows very precise control of shapes which in turn enables great strength without thickness (and hence weight). Your home's roof could be supported with flying buttresses, light but incredibly strong... and mostly dropped from construction because creating such complex shapes is too labor-intensive. Being able to model complex, precisely-engineered structures in CAD systems and then produce them cheaply and with fine tolerances may dramatically change construction.
And note that the effects of such an approach go far beyond just the basic structure. A lot of the cost of a modern house is in the stuff built after the frame is up: plumbing, ductwork, electrical and finish work. With precise control of concrete casting it should ultimately be possible to include channels for all of that stuff right in the walls. Air ducts -- and maybe even plumbing -- will no longer require any sort of pipes, just channels in the concrete. A great deal of interior finish work could be eliminated as well. Polished concrete walls could potentially require no additional wall finish at all. They could even be "painted" simply by mixing pigment into the concrete before pouring. Even things like toilets and bathtubs could be pre-cast as part of the structure (though I suspect probably wouldn't be, for a variety of reasons I won't elaborate here).
We may get to where a house can be fully assembled in a day, with a small and mostly automated crew. A design customized to the shape of the land could eliminate most excavation. Then pre-cast and mostly-finished pieces would be delivered, placed by automated cranes and joined with an appropriate sealant. Plumbing and air circulation would all be pre-cast in the walls. The HVAC system can be dropped into a slot cast for it... and dropped in with a crane before the roof or other overhead floors are installed, making installation easier. The same is true of all other appliances. Interior walls and floors could arrive mostly pre-finished. Carpet or other non-concrete flooring, plus light fixtures, cabinets, etc. could all be lowered in before the roof goes on. All that would be left is to install fixtures, cabinets, toilets, etc., pull electrical wiring through the pre-cast conduits, hook it all up and test. And installation of fixtures, etc., would be facilitated by having prepared spots for all of them with threaded holes cast for the bolts to attach them.
The downside of precisely-engineered concrete, of course, is that demolish-and-rebuild could become the only option if you want to do a major remodel. Not only would cutting new
the ONLY context that has ever made any sense for power-of-two units is RAM memory.
Well, it also makes sense for flash storage. But not for data rates, which are tied to signal frequencies measured in powers of 10, nor for spinning disk storage, nor for anything else.
Historically, do you think more women have harmed men with false allegations, or more men have harmed women with actual abuse?
You're using terms like "harm" and "abuse" for a wide range of ill-defined behaviors subject to shifting moral views, so I don't think that question has an answer.
This is both illogical and demonstrably false, since people have been living off of this planet for most of the last half century. All human life is technology-dependent. Many of the places lots of people live are unsurvivable without fairly extensive technology. Living on other planets, or in space, will require more and different technology, but there's nothing inherently impossible about it.
Humankind is *earth* dependent, not technology-dependent.
Nope. You'd die anywhere on Earth without technology.
Nearly all running in airports is by people trying to make tight connections, and happens inside the "sterile" area, not anywhere near security. No one is going to care if you're running unless it looks like you're trying to run through the security checkpoint. Not that you could get shot even there; TSA agents aren't armed.
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Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue.
For reference - the UK NHS budget is £120m (USD$153m) for 65m people.
Wow, healthcare for $2 per person per year? That figure cannot be correct. I suspect you need to multiply those numbers by 1000, and even then I'll bet that's not the full cost. £120B would make sense for operational expenses (salaries, supplies, etc.), with capital expenditures (buildings, durable equipment, etc.) accounted for separately.
It's perfectly fine if Google is on top because it's the most popular. It's not fine if Google takes extra effort to hide all the competition.
What makes you think Google is taking extra effort to hide the competition? What if the ranking is just the result of exactly the same algorithms that rank all other search results, and which represents Google's best effort at trying to give users what they're looking for first?
There's something of a catch-22 for Google here. Since there's no way to readily prove that they're not putting their thumb on the scales, Google's only option to satisfy you would be to take extra effort to boost the competition. Assuming their ranking algorithms accurately predict what people are looking for, that means giving their users a degraded experience.
Placebos do work.
So no: you can not alt tab to it. At least not on a Mac with "command-tab".
You can use command-~ to switch between windows of an app. I considered OS X badly broken until I discovered this. Now it's only somewhat broken.
Also, as an AC mentioned Ctrl-Tab works to switch between tabs in Chrome. This works fine on OS X.
Hmm. I'm not sure what you mean. Looks like any other Material Design app to me. Perhaps I'm just used to MD, but it all seems very straightforward to me.
I'm looking at the app and I don't see anything that needs edges but doesn't have them. In the list of conversation threads there are no lines between conversations but each is represented as a horizontal section with photo of the person, name and last message and time. I can tap anywhere on these conversation "bars" to open the conversation.
In the conversation view, I see the standard conversation bubbles plus a field on the bottom (clearly delineated) where I can type. The top has a heading bar with a back arrow, name of the other person and time since they've been online, plus icons for starting a video chat or phone call.
Tastes differ, but it seems functional, easy to use and even pretty. But then, I like the clean look of Material Design.
Hangout is one of the most ugly programs I have ever used
What's ugly about it? Don't like green?
Imagine, an up shaft and a down shaft connected ladder style so the loading / unloading area is in the connecting tunnels. The car pulls in, loads/unloads while the other cars go up or down around it.
Very nice! Clearly, yes, this is the way to do it. In fact it's blindingly obvious :-)
Plus in very tall buildings some additional shafts for "express" trips should be used so that elevators don't have to slow down for others that are stopping to enter the pickup area.
Was not even mentioned in the summary. You can run multiple cabins in the same shaft, saving precious floor space (and move the cabins horizontally if they need to pass each other, or you can just assign up and down shafts). Thus, for larger buildings this type of elevator can actually be a major cost saver.
Just assigning up and down shafts would lose another important feature: the ability to load an elevator car at one floor and send it directly to the destination floor with no stops. That not only minimizes wait time for the people in the car, but also minimizes the time until the car is available again, increasing throughput.
Ideally, the elevator system needs to know how many people are waiting at each floor, and their destination floors. I've seen one elevator system, in Google's DeepMind office in London, which tries to optimize elevator traffic using that information. Rather than just up/down call buttons, there's a numeric entry pad. If you're alone, you just type your destination floor. If you're with a group, you hit a "group" key, then the number of people, then the destination. After a few seconds, the display then tells you which elevator shaft you should go to.
With this system, something similar should be done, but now a loaded car can move to a "through traffic only" shaft, where cars do not stop except briefly, to enter or leave the shaft. Perhaps the system should even designate a "long distance" shaft, used only by cars that are going to travel, say, 100+ floors without stopping... and then it could accelerate those cars to higher speed. Of course, the designation of a shaft for a given purpose need not be permanent. It's a dynamic optimization problem.
Because each shaft is carrying multiple cars, you'd probably need more information than just which shaft your car is coming in. Instead, cars would need numbers. When you enter your group size and location the system would to tell you which door to go to and which car to wait for.
In addition to the UI on the wall, you could also use your smartphone to call an elevator. Ideally, you could do that as you're walking to the elevator shaft, to reduce wait time at the elevator door. You could enter an elevator call request and the system could tell you through your phone which shaft to go to and how long before your car will arrive. When you're at the shaft, your phone could notify you when your car is arriving. With information about your precise location (perhaps via BLE beacons, or similar), the system could avoid scheduling a car too early, instead estimating your walking time to the elevator shaft based on your location and speed, perhaps revising your car assignment if you stop to chat or something.
This could also be integrated with calendaring. If you have a meeting on another floor, your phone could ask the elevator system for estimated transit time, then notify you when you need to leave to get to your meeting on time, much as Google Now does for external transit now. When you start moving to go to the meeting, your phone could notify the elevator system which would assign you to a car then notify your phone, which would buzz and tell you which shaft to go and what time to be there.
Turning it up to "ridiculous", the system could also optimize elevator sharing. Having a meeting with a group of people, all coming from the same floor (or close) and going to the same conference room on a distant floor? The phones and calendaring system could tell the system that these people would prefer to share a car, if all of them can be in one. Then you can just start your meeting while en route to the conference room. Or, work in the same building as your ex? Have your phone tell the system that you prefer not to share an elevator with that person. The system could also take status into account: some people could get preferential treatment, ensuring shorter wait times. I suppose it could also take urgency into account, giving preferential treatment to people who are running lat
Yikes, "dist-upgrade" certainly does *not* upgrade you to latest release of a debian based system.
Yes and no. No, dist-upgrade will not change your sources.list. Yes, it's needed for release upgrades, and those are why it exists.
Normal updates do not involve package refactoring, but release upgrades often do. The thing that "apt-get upgrade" does not do is remove packages or install new packages. This is normally a good thing, because it reduces the chance that your system may actually lose functionality. But releases change a lot more, and so dist-upgrade is required. The chance of breaking something during a release upgrade is acceptable because that's something that happens rarely (for most people).
If you're running Debian unstable then package refactors can happen at any time, and you can -- and should! -- expect your system to break at any time (though it doesn't break that much, in practice). You should use dist-upgrade if running unstable. If you're running testing, you may need it occasionally, when upgrade reports that it is refusing to do things because they would involve package refactors. If you're running stable you should basically need dist-upgrade only when a new release comes out (and you should test).
If you're running a Debian derivative, you should follow the recommendations of the distro. In most cases this will not involve using dist-upgrade very often.
I always use "dist-upgrade" because it actually does what most people would expect "upgrade" to do.
Not really. Most people don't expect upgrade to remove packages or install new packages, which dist-upgrade can do. Most of the time it doesn't (except on rolling release systems), but by using dist-upgrade you are increasing the probability that you'll break something on your system. It's safer to use upgrade. If upgrade reports that changes are being held back, you should investigate why, and then take appropriate action (which may be dist-upgrade).
Personally, I mostly do upgrades in aptitude, which makes it easier to see what's being done, easier to resolve conflicts, and is smarter about distinguishing between packages that were intentionally installed and those that were automatically installed to support some intentional installation. That makes it easier to ensure that automatic dependencies are removed when they're no longer needed; otherwise systems tend to accumulate a lot of cruft.
Trump got 304 electoral votes and Clinton got 232. Not very close at all.
Your numbers are wrong; it's 304 to 227. However, that is an extremely close election. Oh, the numbers look different enough, but only because the Electoral College tends to amplify margins.
...if Russia hacked the election and they knew about it more than 6 months prior...
WHY DID THEY NOT TELL THE PUBLIC?
Because telling the public would have undermined the democratic process.
When the election is very close, it's far more important for democracy that people have confidence in the accuracy of the election result than that it actually be accurate. That may seem like a bizarre thing to say, but think about it. If the election is very close, it's because the electorate does not have a clear preference. This isn't to say that individual voters don't have clear preferences, but the electorate as a whole, under the system we use for determining the will of the people, doesn't have a clear preference.
Since the people don't have a clear will the election can go either way without going against the will of the people. In fact, in very close elections the result can go either way based on various random factors which in an ideal world shouldn't have any effect, like the weather. This means that the actual result of a close election cannot undermine the legitimacy of the democracy.
What can, and does, undermine democracy is when people say "Not my president", and in a very close race it takes very little to create enough doubt to enable people to say that. Of course, even in a landslide victory it's always possible for the supporters of the loser to take this tack, but in doing so they're demonstrating contempt for the very notion of democratic process. When it's very close, though, it's easy for people to make the argument that their guy/gal lost only because of X, Y or Z inaccuracies in the electoral process, and so the elected officeholder is illegitimate, not because democracy isn't the proper way to choose government.
To be clear, I despise Donald Trump with a purple passion, but he is my president and I will absolutely continue to honor the office and respect his legal and proper actions within that office (while retaining the right to criticize vociferously any I disagree with, and to encourage investigation, impeachment and possibly prosecution in the event of any illegal and/or improper actions). This attitude with regard to the office (and every other elected office) is, IMNSHO, exactly what all Americans need to hold if we're to avoid undermining our nation.
So, IMO, Obama did exactly the right thing in trying to fight Russian interference on the one hand, and keeping it quiet on the other, because fear about the legitimacy of the electoral process would have severely undermined the legitimacy of whoever won... and in a close election legitimacy is distinct from and more important than accuracy. That said, we absolutely do need to investigate any identified weaknesses in the electoral processes, and fix them lest we find ourselves in a situation where the electorate does have a clear preference and the processes deliver a contrary result.
I also have to point out, though, that Obama thought the election result whose legitimacy he was trying to protect would have his party's candidate as the winner. I don't know if he'd have acted differently if he knew that it was the legitimacy of Trump's presidency that he was protecting. I choose to assume that he'd have acted the same, but it's possible that he might not have.
It's *not* placebo. I could hear my back and neck go "clack/clack/clack/clack/clack".
Those sounds are just explosive release of pockets of nitrogen gas, same as when you pop your fingers or other joints. The effect of chiropractic work on muscles is real, though, and can help quite a bit. But a masseuse can do the same, without the joint popping.
Hey, remember those assholes that would said this shit was impossible? Remember how when they landed a rocket that those same assholes said it wouldn't be reusable?
To be fair, to really achieve the savings that SpaceX is aiming for, they need to be able to reuse the same rocket many times (so far, they've only demonstrated a single reuse), and they need to be able to reuse it without extensive refurbishment. They're still a long way from achieving those goals.
What they're trying to do is difficult, and there will undoubtedly be a lot of other lessons they'll have to learn and adjustments they'll have to make to achieve it. And it's always possible that they'll fail, that they'll discover that building a rocket durable enough for heavy reuse requires too many other sacrifices. But the only way to know is to try, and if they can achieve it, it will significantly reduce launch costs -- again.
1.5 billion?
Are you sure?
We'd all be gone in about 6 years.
I realize there are many here who would view tat as a good thing, but yer math needs some help.
Heh. That's almost as good as the Virginia governor's repeated claim that the US loses 93 million lives per day to gun violence. If true, the US population would be wiped out in less than four days. (When called on it, it he clarified that he meant 93 per day, not 93 million per day. That figure is reasonably correct if you include suicides. It seems like more than a slip of the tongue, though, because he stated the 93 million figure twice, and enunciated it slowly and forcefully.)
I observe lots of non-technological life-forms near my house.
Indeed. Those species, unlike humans, are not technology-dependent. They have physical adaptations and instinctive knowledge that enables them to survive without having to invent ways to alter their environment. Note that some of them actually do alter their environment. For example, if you see squirrels, they have a well-known instinct for gathering and storing food to help them survive the winter. However, this is instinctual knowledge, not cultural knowledge.
It's also worth pointing out that humans aren't the only species that makes use of cultural knowledge, meaning knowledge received from parents or other members of the species. There may even be some other technology-dependent species, meaning species whose individuals could not survive without cultural knowledge. I suspect that many primates are like this, and dolphins and whales, elephants, perhaps many others.
The point, though, is that human life is especially technology-dependent. We've evolved to use our brains and cultural knowledge instead of instinct and the sort of physical abilities that other large species rely upon. We no longer have useful amounts of fur because that is not useful in a species that can learn from its tribe to make clothing (or to make other things which can be traded for clothing). We no longer have claws, because clubs, and spears, and swords and McMillan TAC-50s are more effective. We've even lost the ability to digest many kinds of food because we learned how to cook it.
I also don't see why I'd possibly want to.
Here you're talking about advanced technology, and I completely agree, I like my comforts, too. But I'm talking about the fullest meaning of the word, any and all techniques involving the application of learned knowledge. You and I needed someone to teach us not to drink bad water, eat poisonous things, play with rattlesnakes, or even wipe the feces from our butts to prevent sores. Your cat needed no one to teach it any of those things.
Oops, missed this last part:
However, I will also point out that it is a ridiculous assumption since even creatures with brains the size of a grain of rice can figure that stuff out.
No, actually, they can't. Creatures with tiny brains don't figure anything out. Most of them have no capacity at all for learning, and absolutely none for abstract thought as needed to analyze problems and create solutions. Instead, they have "hard-wired" knowledge that comes from their genes. All of their actions are instinctual.
Note that I'm not claiming that humans are the only ones who do figure stuff out. Not by a long shot. Most larger creatures can and do learn, though in most cases they only learn that specific sequences of actions bring about specific results, with no ability to abstract the elements of the actions to synthesize variations that might be more effective. Many of them even pass knowledge (usually the same sort of rote knowledge) along to their young, meaning they have cultural knowledge. A few of them even evidence abstract thinking skills, and rudimentary communication. And in fact, I think there are other species on Earth which are technology-dependent, in that if you could remove all of their cultural knowledge they might lose the ability to survive. None of them, of course, have the same capacity for creation of knowledge that we do, which is why none of them are as incredibly adaptable as we are.
Homo Sapiens is the only species on the planet which is found (at least occasionally) on every continent, at every latitude, at every elevation, including moderately deep under water. Well, us and the species that we carry with us, either inside our bodies or in our engineered habitats. This is because with sufficient knowledge it's possible to live anywhere that it's physically possible to create the conditions needed for life. By "physically possible" I mean "does not defy the laws of physics".
Here is a counter example to your argument... Humans are here. Therefore, at least at some point in our past, we survived without technology.
You didn't think about that very hard :-)
Think about it from an evolutionary perspective. A species doesn't spring fully-formed from nothing, it arises as a small variation on an ancestor species. Clearly, our ability to use abstract reasoning to alter our environment to suit our needs didn't come into existence at exactly the same time as we lost physical adaptations and instinct. As our pre-human ancestors learned how to do things, and how to pass that knowledge on to their children and others in the tribe, various physical characteristics which previous generations had needed to survive became less important. Over time, the success of intelligence increasingly selected for bigger and more capable brains (including brains that were more able to share knowledge with other brains), and selected against useful amounts of fur, claws, instinctive ability to recognize foods, etc.
Note that the above paragraph seems to assume that evolution selects for organism/species survival traits, which isn't actually true. It selects for gene replication competitive advantage. But being careful about that just makes the explanation more complicated, without actually changing it.
Or, are you arguing from the absurd point that we are complete simpletons that can't know we are able to eat other animals or plants?
Sort of. Not "simpletons", but lacking knowledge of which animals and plants are safe, how to find them and collect them, how to prepare them, etc. Look at it this way: Imagine a person who has grown up in NYC, never left, never watched the nature channel, has never seen food outside of a grocery store, etc., and never really thought about where it might come from or how. Now, take that person and drop them in a wilderness preserve in the Great Rift Valley, where we believe Homo Sapiens first emerged. Drop them naked, shoeless, without any tools or any information about the local flora or fauna, how to distinguish between safe and unsafe water, etc. They'll die.
And note that this hypothetical New Yorker is actually not a fair test subject, because he or she has a tremendous amount of know-how, much of which probably can be applied for survival. I tried to pick a person whose knowledge would be as wrong as possible, but only because it's impossible to find the right kind of person, one with no knowledge at all. This is because it's impossible for a human to grow to adulthood without using and learning vast amounts of technology. A baby's level of knowledge is what we really need for the thought experiment, but we want to assume a full adult's physical and cognitive skills.
People who tow trailers have known about this for decades.
I wonder how much money was spent on this, rather than, say, cancer research. Sigh...
These are physicists. Whatever they might study, it won't be cancer.
Yes, but perhaps the suitcase industry would have hired biotechs to study cancer rather than physicists to study wheels if they knew about the pre-existing research.
Nobody hired anybody for this. This was just a couple of university physicists who got curious about something they noticed and decided to work out the cause.
I wasn't talking about Fowler's allegations. I was talking about the larger context, both historically and now.
However, the above poster's claim of a 50 year useful life on new construction actually makes me wonder if "modern" houses (those built since the 1980s or later) actually have a shorter expected lifespan due to the mass production techniques and engineered components which actually might not last, like truss joists, LVLs and some of the chipboard materials.
OTOH, in the last 15 years building codes have gotten a lot stricter, and require a lot more steel to be used in tying elements of the frame together, foundations are more thoroughly engineered, etc.
I suspect that houses built in the last decade or so will last a long time. Houses built in the 70s, 80s and 90s, maybe not so much.
On the gripping hand, it looks like there may be a wave of new construction techniques coming which will dramatically lower building costs, maybe by as much as 80%. That could well mean that the durability of current houses is irrelevant, because it could get to where it's cheaper to tear down and rebuild than to remodel. I'm in the middle of a major remodel project right now, and the cost will easily exceed 30% of new-build cost.
The main new construction technology I'm thinking of is 3D-printed concrete, whether 3D-printed in place or (perhaps more likely) 3D-printed forms, with most of the panels pre-cast and shipped in. The thing about the application of high-precision 3D printing to concrete forming is that it allows very precise control of shapes which in turn enables great strength without thickness (and hence weight). Your home's roof could be supported with flying buttresses, light but incredibly strong... and mostly dropped from construction because creating such complex shapes is too labor-intensive. Being able to model complex, precisely-engineered structures in CAD systems and then produce them cheaply and with fine tolerances may dramatically change construction.
And note that the effects of such an approach go far beyond just the basic structure. A lot of the cost of a modern house is in the stuff built after the frame is up: plumbing, ductwork, electrical and finish work. With precise control of concrete casting it should ultimately be possible to include channels for all of that stuff right in the walls. Air ducts -- and maybe even plumbing -- will no longer require any sort of pipes, just channels in the concrete. A great deal of interior finish work could be eliminated as well. Polished concrete walls could potentially require no additional wall finish at all. They could even be "painted" simply by mixing pigment into the concrete before pouring. Even things like toilets and bathtubs could be pre-cast as part of the structure (though I suspect probably wouldn't be, for a variety of reasons I won't elaborate here).
We may get to where a house can be fully assembled in a day, with a small and mostly automated crew. A design customized to the shape of the land could eliminate most excavation. Then pre-cast and mostly-finished pieces would be delivered, placed by automated cranes and joined with an appropriate sealant. Plumbing and air circulation would all be pre-cast in the walls. The HVAC system can be dropped into a slot cast for it... and dropped in with a crane before the roof or other overhead floors are installed, making installation easier. The same is true of all other appliances. Interior walls and floors could arrive mostly pre-finished. Carpet or other non-concrete flooring, plus light fixtures, cabinets, etc. could all be lowered in before the roof goes on. All that would be left is to install fixtures, cabinets, toilets, etc., pull electrical wiring through the pre-cast conduits, hook it all up and test. And installation of fixtures, etc., would be facilitated by having prepared spots for all of them with threaded holes cast for the bolts to attach them.
The downside of precisely-engineered concrete, of course, is that demolish-and-rebuild could become the only option if you want to do a major remodel. Not only would cutting new
the ONLY context that has ever made any sense for power-of-two units is RAM memory.
Well, it also makes sense for flash storage. But not for data rates, which are tied to signal frequencies measured in powers of 10, nor for spinning disk storage, nor for anything else.
You're using terms like "harm" and "abuse" for a wide range of ill-defined behaviors subject to shifting moral views, so I don't think that question has an answer.
Okay, replace "abuse" with "rape".
Humankind is *earth* dependent, not technology-dependent.
Nope. You'd die anywhere on Earth without technology.
I would think that would get you shot, nowadays.
Well to be honest I do get an overwhelming compulsion to kill any tool I see dragging a Drag Bag
Airports must be very difficult for you, since every other passenger (at least) has one.
I would think that would get you shot, nowadays.
Nearly all running in airports is by people trying to make tight connections, and happens inside the "sterile" area, not anywhere near security. No one is going to care if you're running unless it looks like you're trying to run through the security checkpoint. Not that you could get shot even there; TSA agents aren't armed.