There's a bit of a practicality problem there -- every website would need to reformat its layout to handle the "has ads" vs "doesn't have ads" contexts.
And if they don't (and lets be honest, you have to expect that most of them won't,) the adspace will just have to be filled up with something else. So you're essentially replacing one waste of space with a different waste of space.
I suppose if the different waste of space was at least not a link, it would save the occasional misclick taking you to some BS sales site and having to hit the back button.
Maybe you'll learn not to spend your money on platforms designed first and foremost for lock-in.
Well you'd save a lot of money, but you'd be pretty short on the gaming stick. No Playstation, no XBox, no Steam, no Origin, no MMOs, no Minecraft, etc etc. You'd be limited to basically whatever Good Old Games has available and the occasionally indie game you stumble across by chance.
then link them together meaningfully, which is the missing part really.
That's really the trick. Unfortunately its close to impossible. What meaningful link could there possibly be between my 60-level, 1000-max-stat fantasy game and your 200-level, 100-max-stat science fiction game?
Even among similar games, there will be huge disconnects in content and lore making this particularly challenging. You could set up farms of a handful of cooperating servers to be sure, but to get that "Massively" part in there, you really won't get away with just "linking them together." Someone will have to spend the money and time on developing an actual large-scale server farm, advertising the game to enough people to make it worthwhile, etc.
All of that is expensive.
But if you just want a small MUD-scale server of a few dozen people, that should be totally in the realm of possibility.
That's far too wide. Any new laws or changes to existing laws to address this particular problem will need to be specific to the issue of online-mediated DRM. Because if its not, too many counter-examples crop up (or more likely, are made up) in order to shut the law down before it comes into effect.
Really though, what the EFF is asking for is probably the best you can do.. its not really plausible to burden the developer with this -- they can't keep unprofitable servers running without going bankrupt (and then guess what -- those servers will stop running anyway) and requiring them to release a serverless patch is at best going to get you some shoddy half-assed patch that probably breaks so much that the game's unplayable anyway.
Sony, Microsoft and Steam could in theory push something like this through -- as part of their certification process, they could require that the developers provide a server-free version to be held in escrow until such time as said servers are actually shut down (and would have to be updated with every new submitted patch of course.)
But of course none of those companies have any reason to accept such a large responsibility other than being nice to consumers.. its something I could see Steam doing if the outrage got big enough.. not going to hold my breath on MS or Sony bothering.
Yep. That one got me too. Which I probably wouldn't have even cared all that much about if the damned thing didn't take like 3-4 minutes to connect the first time I tried to play it. Don't know what was up with their servers that day but holy fuck.
Steam really should try to pressure developers to reduce this kind of BS as much as possible. Steam's DRM works just fine. There's no real need for the games on Steam to include a second level of DRM other than the developers just being too lazy to remove it for the Steam edition of the game.
(Things like Origin or Live popping up are another story -- they're still fucking obnoxious but at least those have a purpose outside of pure DRM.. namely that achievements/leaderboards/etc aren't shared between Steam and the other companies so a Steam-only login would fragment the games' communities.)
This isn't about breaking the DRM so much as working around company servers that no longer exist.
Of course, there are cases where these overlap (call-home style copy protection,) but in those cases, if the servers were still available for non-abandoned games then they'd also still be available for abandoned games.
Unless the company is such a dick that they use the exact same server tech and just change the IP address or similar in order to explicitly break older games. I'm pretty sure they'd find themselves in a class action lawsuit really fast if that was discovered though.. its one thing to actually shut down a server after its unprofitable.. its quite another for that server to still exist and just be rejecting authorization requests purely because the company wants you to go buy a new game.
Because food isn't free and someone has to make the things you want. In the interwebs that generally means one of three things: - Selling things outright. - Blasting you with ads. - Asking for donations.
Of course there's always the unscrupulous bastard who will pick more than one (finding ads in something you purchased in particular is hardly uncommon.)
But generally speaking unless its something the dev needed to create anyway and thought it was useful enough to release, there are few cases where things are truly 100% free (and in those cases, good luck getting any support because said dev will probably be working a day job in order to obtain that aforementioned food.)
When was the last time you gave away something completely for free and then actually dedicated months, years or even decades to maintaining whenever some random person on the internet had a problem?
That's like saying the term "sports" should only encompass the national leagues and that minor players or even casuals playing with friends in their back yard can't use that old definition any more.
Gaming is what you make of it. I certainly won't claim that the current AAA direction of over-promised, retailer-specific preorder bonuses and micropayments for hats and required-to-play social media tie-ins and whatever other crap is good for the industry long-term, but there's a hell of a lot of game producers at all levels that include more than the letters "EA" in their logo.
An AAA game these days is like a blockbuster action movie -- the spectacle is amazing but if you're looking for much beyond that you're deluding yourself. But that doesn't mean nothing else exists.
And really at the end of the day, if they push it too far then they'll just be replaced in the #1 spot by some other company who's a bit less pushy about those things. The one nice thing about most modern AAA games being practically clones of each other is that they're a lot closer to being in true competition with each other. Switching to Battlefield when Call of Duty bites a turd is a lot smaller of a hop than switching from say, Mario to Sonic.
I don't know that this is the kind of thing feminists have been fighting. Certainly the logic behind it is horribly patronizing but at the end of the day it does end up with an equality of sorts.
Of course, this is going about it in completely the wrong direction. Its treating a symptom rather than a cause. Why does she consider women to be worse negotiators? Does she have research to back that up? If so, then why are we not looking at ways to teach women how to improve their negotiating skills rather than just ignoring those skills completely?
Alternatively, is it more of a situation where women don't necessarily negotiate worse but differently? If so, maybe training your HR to recognize and adapt to that is the better course of action.
Hopefully this turns out to be a "better than doing nothing" scenario even if its not exactly a particularly brilliant move.
And even then you don't have to go too far up the price ladder before negotiations becomes plausible.. most electronics retailers, furniture stores, etc, grant their employees the power to reduce prices up to a certain percentage.
We're talking about things worth only a few hundred to few thousand dollars. A lot more than a tube of toothpaste to be sure but its well within the realm of things that your average middle and even high end of the lower income groups will get to deal with a few times in their lives.
Japanese is very "simple" in two ways: - Their phonetic alphabets have, for the most part, exactly one pronunciation per character (/character pair.) There's a few small quirks like minimizing the 'u' sound at the end of a word and the 'i' sound in a few places, but even if you pronounce them fully you won't sound too terribly bad as long as you know the general readings of the characters.
- Their grammar rules are fairly consistent. They do have exceptions of course, but there's not a whole lot of them (at least compared to English..)
Where Japanese gets horribly confusing, and why it has such a bad rap in terms of language learning (not as bad as English but getting up there) is also mostly two factors: - Kanji. Just. Kanji. They took an already fairly complex (but structured) system from Chinese and decided to replace that "structured" bit with even more complexity in order to mash it into their (completely different) spoken language. This of course happened hundreds of years ago and has gone through some revisions since then but its still quite a massive disaster to learn.
- The fact that they only have somewhere around 50 phonemes means that there is a LOT of homonyms. That makes it a lot harder to just "pick up" from context because you need to know the context in order to pick it up and you get a bit of a circular logic problem there. Kanji actually helps this greatly as for the most part, different words get different Kanji even if (and especially if) they sound the same. But that only helps with written language, and is still subject to the previous point of Kanji being a disaster in its own right.
Obviously none of those are show-stoppers.. there's 130+ million people proving the system works just fine if you can get past that initial learning step but hot damn is it a big step!
I'm sure if you had access to all of the design files in any of those companies, you'd find more than a few that have goofy things added to them "just because."
The difference of course is that its a lot easier to overlook a small chunk of code in a million line program than it is to overlook your latest car design having bat wings.
There's a convergence though.. I would be totally unsurprised if it was discovered that some of these new digital devices in cars have Easter eggs in them. Because its software as well and while the UI is a lot more restricted than a mouse and keyboard (or even a gamepad in a lot of cases,) there's still enough buttons that an Easter egg could easily be hidden.
Of course making sure Easter eggs are documented and tested would be even more important in a vehicle due to the safety concerns.
Why not do both? Open plan for day to day activities and a quiet room that people can go to when they need to concentrate -- kind of like what the library is often used for at universities.
Yeah, it's pretty funny when you realize that a country of 35m people have more stringent data, personal and privacy laws than a country of 300m+ people.
Not really. The US govt isn't a whole lot larger than its Canadian counterpart (well, in terms of the actual sitting lawmakers that is,) but has to deal with almost 10 times as many complaints, lobbyists and other bullshit. Its not really surprising that they're more susceptible to the pressures when the scale is that much different.
No, it works as long as you use FB to _supplement_ your friendship. That's not the same as using FB to _replace_ a friendship.
All of the social media haters seem to think that so-called "social" people have replaced their social lives with FB stalking and that's 100% not the case.
What has happened is that many people who would previously have had little or no social interactions in the first place now have _some_ social interactions through FB and you're telling them that they'd be better off not using FB. Which is not correct because again they're not using FB to _replace_ a social life, they're using FB because they don't have a social life in the first place and FB is better than literally having nothing.
But of course, there will be the odd person who used to be real-life social and kind of sunk into FB-only after a while.. and as long as there's at least one example that fits our pre-existing beliefs, that's all we need to prove our point for all examples right?
That's what Mailinator is for (and I'm sure there's other similar sites by now.)
Admittedly you have to "use" email in a sense, but its not really the same as "having an email address."
Of course there's also lots of sites that use your email for more than just signup confirmation and ad spam, and for those sites its usually less convenient for it all to be going to a dump box.
I recently upgrade from a 4" to a 5.5". I must say that for all the extra pocket annoyance, that extra almost 40% screen area is amazingly great for web browsing and other such things that I do regularly. I'd have trouble going back to a 4".
Not that one anecdote means much in the grand scheme of things..
I have a phone. Almost never use it for calling people and rarely get calls on it either. I use it more as a glorified GPS+music player+reminder pad+internet browser+basically everything else a modern phone can do except actually be on the phone.
Honestly, I couldn't live without the thing anymore. Its just so damned convenient for everything. Being able to receive phone calls is almost a detriment to an otherwise amazingly useful tool.
That said.. if you want to talk to me, I'd much rather you send me a text message. I hate when people just drop by out of the blue. I hate when people call out of the blue. If you want to do lunch, text me a time and I'll get back to you when I can. The only acceptable reason for a call rather than a text is if you want to do lunch in the next 10 minutes and "when I can" may not be a reasonable response time.
The big difference is that people treat Google like a training manual when its more of a reference manual.
That is, Google is great for looking up something specific. If you need to know how to write a Quicksort algorithm, Google that shit and you'll have it in moments.
If you need to know whether a Quicksort algorithm is applicable in your application, Google will maybe help, occasionally not tell you anything, and very very often send you on a wild goose chase following threads of people who had similar problems but not quite similar enough to answer your question.
Google gives you facts and a shitload of (usually uniformed) opinion. It rarely gives you the wisdom to use those facts appropriately, and that's where a lot of people get mistaken with regards to how much they "know."
Wikipedia is a similar thing. Everyone always tells me not to trust Wikipedia but nobody really clarifies that. If I want to look up something completely non-controversial like how Quicksort works, Wikipedia is great. If I want to look up something horribly controversial like a political candidate, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be at least somewhat lopsided in one direction or the other depending on whether the candidate's staff or opposition happened to make the most recent edit.
Like Google, its great for facts.. decent for opinion. Absolutely useless for wisdom (in this case the wisdom to differential uncontestable facts from politicized garbage.)
Really, our modern definition of "intelligence" needs to somewhat revolve around the ability to distinguish fact from bullshit, as there's so much of both floating around that knowing "stuff" isn't the biggest problem anymore -- its knowing which stuff is real and which is just trolling that really differentiates people in the internet age.
The term "dark" is used specifically as short hand for "we don't fucking know." Just because you don't understand (or refuse to acknowledge) that terminology doesn't mean some other terminology will be any better.
That said, for dark matter particularly, there is evidence beyond galaxy rotation to suggest that it is in fact an actual form of matter. We still don't have any clue what form that might be, but we do know some properties of it: It interacts gravitationally and it doesn't interact electromagnetically. Those two facts are pulled from actual observations not just "any old bullshit."
We generally assume other properties based on the math (for example, we often assume that its interacts via the weak force because the measured energy scales are very consistent, but that hasn't actually been proven via observation.)
That said, generating predictions using the math is not "any old bullshit." Its very systematically derived values based on what we already know. In the same way that we predicted anti-particles, the top quark and most recently the Higgs boson based purely on "well the math works out really nicely" and then a couple decades later we actually find the things we predicted.
Yes its "bullshit" in the sense that we don't have direct evidence of every single property, and yes there can be (and are) competing theories, but its not just pulled out of someone's ass for no reason either.
If you don't like the dark matter idea, go look up MOND. If you don't like MOND go look up something else. Or make your own theory (but remember it has to match existing, actual measurements as well in order to be useful.) There's plenty of possibilities.
Dark matter gets the most recognition because it so far is the best match for the (yes, limited) amount of data we've managed to collect so far. If we find evidence that the dark matter theory is wrong, it will be fixed or disposed to match the new observations. Its how science works.
But nobody anywhere (except you apparently) just wants to say "fuck it I don't know" and ignore the problem. Making a wrong step is better than making no step when you want to progress.
1) I can't find an exact measurement, but its more like 300-350km which is a hell of a lot closer than 450mi.
2) "Unprecedented" was perhaps an exaggeration, but "common" isn't exactly a word I'd apply either. There's been a couple dozen on this scale around the entire world since we started tracking these things 100 or so years ago.
3) And that was exactly my point: Even with all of the human error, it still took 40 years and a 10m high tsunami to break it in an area of the world known for geological disturbances.
I'm not trying to excuse the incompetence by any means -- this disaster could have been fully averted with some simple (though presumably expensive) changes to the layout of the plant -- higher walls, backup generators not in the basement, etc -- but its still fairly amazing that this hasn't happened earlier or more frequently around the world. Japan isn't the only country that's been lax with their nuclear upkeep (perhaps partly because its so rare -- "well it didn't happen in the last 40 years probably won't happen this year either.")
No but some of them, Gates in particular, are pretty well-versed in the fact that any computer system will get hacked and some fraction of those hackers will be both malicious and competent.
"Robots" is a bit of a misnomer though. A "robot" can be anything -- we use thousands of them in nearly every factory on the planet already.
Similarly, "AI" doesn't have to be a terminator-like humanoid robot. Think more along the lines of the original Skynet -- just a program running on someone's server that manages to get access to dangerous systems and wasn't programmed with any sort of conscience to go along with its intelligence.
Actually many (maybe even most) modern designs feature passive safety mechanisms for exactly this reason. Its not like the designers haven't learned their lesson.
The problem is that a new reactor is on the order of a billion dollars to build, while the old reactors are already there. So we just try to keep those old designs running well past their life expectancy and somehow consider it surprising when they fuck up once in a while.
Honestly, the surprising part is that more of them haven't melted down yet. Everyone bitches about Fukushima but even with all of the human error and failure to invest in maintenance, it still took an almost unprecedented natural disaster to break it.
Not especially peculiar. Gravity is a tiny tiny effect compared to the other forces, which equates to being extremely hard to detect (and remember its not just a question of "is there gravity" which is an obvious yes -- the Earth is pulling us in, the Sun is pulling us in, etc.. so you can't just detect gravity you have to be able to separate out the gravity that you're looking for from all of the other gravitational effects in the area.)
We had no confirmation of the top quark until we built an accelerator large enough to confirm it.. we had no confirmation of the Higgs boson until we built an accelerator large enough to confirm it.
And we'll have no confirmation of gravity waves until we can build a device large enough to confirm it (which will likely be a massive interferometer rather than accelerator.. but when I say massive I mean that some of the suggestions are along the lines of "a few million km".)
"Haven't seen it yet" is not the same as "it doesn't exist."
Well the "constant" that Einstein defined was never really given a value. It was shown fairly early that "if" it had certain ranges of values, we would be able to observe certain effects. Einstein for whatever reason decided that his constant was a mistake ("his biggest blunder" according to him) and that it should always be zero.
Newer observations ended up showing that rather than being a blunder, a non-zero constant ended up being the simplest way to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe, which pretty much nobody expected to even be a possibility prior to finding out that yep, its actually the way things are.
All that said, its no secret that GR and/or QM (or more likely both) are just limits of some deeper theory as you noted. Whether that ends up being M-theory or something completely different is up for grabs (and it could be generations before we can build accelerators large enough to probe those energy levels.)
But a really good approximation is still very useful (hell we still use Newtonian mechanics for the most part in the real world.. pretty much only theoretical physicists, spacecraft/satellite designers and computer engineers really care about the high energy / high speed / small size scales where Newton breaks down (well I'm sure there's other fields that I'm not thinking of but the number of them is comparatively small.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a bit of a practicality problem there -- every website would need to reformat its layout to handle the "has ads" vs "doesn't have ads" contexts.
And if they don't (and lets be honest, you have to expect that most of them won't,) the adspace will just have to be filled up with something else. So you're essentially replacing one waste of space with a different waste of space.
I suppose if the different waste of space was at least not a link, it would save the occasional misclick taking you to some BS sales site and having to hit the back button.
Maybe you'll learn not to spend your money on platforms designed first and foremost for lock-in.
Well you'd save a lot of money, but you'd be pretty short on the gaming stick. No Playstation, no XBox, no Steam, no Origin, no MMOs, no Minecraft, etc etc. You'd be limited to basically whatever Good Old Games has available and the occasionally indie game you stumble across by chance.
decent free/open MMO engines
http://sourceforge.net/directory/games/mmorpg/os:windows/freshness:recently-updated/Didn't Google that one too hard I take it..
then link them together meaningfully, which is the missing part really.
That's really the trick. Unfortunately its close to impossible. What meaningful link could there possibly be between my 60-level, 1000-max-stat fantasy game and your 200-level, 100-max-stat science fiction game?
Even among similar games, there will be huge disconnects in content and lore making this particularly challenging. You could set up farms of a handful of cooperating servers to be sure, but to get that "Massively" part in there, you really won't get away with just "linking them together." Someone will have to spend the money and time on developing an actual large-scale server farm, advertising the game to enough people to make it worthwhile, etc.
All of that is expensive.
But if you just want a small MUD-scale server of a few dozen people, that should be totally in the realm of possibility.
That's far too wide. Any new laws or changes to existing laws to address this particular problem will need to be specific to the issue of online-mediated DRM. Because if its not, too many counter-examples crop up (or more likely, are made up) in order to shut the law down before it comes into effect.
Really though, what the EFF is asking for is probably the best you can do.. its not really plausible to burden the developer with this -- they can't keep unprofitable servers running without going bankrupt (and then guess what -- those servers will stop running anyway) and requiring them to release a serverless patch is at best going to get you some shoddy half-assed patch that probably breaks so much that the game's unplayable anyway.
Sony, Microsoft and Steam could in theory push something like this through -- as part of their certification process, they could require that the developers provide a server-free version to be held in escrow until such time as said servers are actually shut down (and would have to be updated with every new submitted patch of course.)
But of course none of those companies have any reason to accept such a large responsibility other than being nice to consumers.. its something I could see Steam doing if the outrage got big enough.. not going to hold my breath on MS or Sony bothering.
Yep. That one got me too. Which I probably wouldn't have even cared all that much about if the damned thing didn't take like 3-4 minutes to connect the first time I tried to play it. Don't know what was up with their servers that day but holy fuck.
Steam really should try to pressure developers to reduce this kind of BS as much as possible. Steam's DRM works just fine. There's no real need for the games on Steam to include a second level of DRM other than the developers just being too lazy to remove it for the Steam edition of the game.
(Things like Origin or Live popping up are another story -- they're still fucking obnoxious but at least those have a purpose outside of pure DRM.. namely that achievements/leaderboards/etc aren't shared between Steam and the other companies so a Steam-only login would fragment the games' communities.)
This isn't about breaking the DRM so much as working around company servers that no longer exist.
Of course, there are cases where these overlap (call-home style copy protection,) but in those cases, if the servers were still available for non-abandoned games then they'd also still be available for abandoned games.
Unless the company is such a dick that they use the exact same server tech and just change the IP address or similar in order to explicitly break older games. I'm pretty sure they'd find themselves in a class action lawsuit really fast if that was discovered though.. its one thing to actually shut down a server after its unprofitable.. its quite another for that server to still exist and just be rejecting authorization requests purely because the company wants you to go buy a new game.
Because food isn't free and someone has to make the things you want. In the interwebs that generally means one of three things:
- Selling things outright.
- Blasting you with ads.
- Asking for donations.
Of course there's always the unscrupulous bastard who will pick more than one (finding ads in something you purchased in particular is hardly uncommon.)
But generally speaking unless its something the dev needed to create anyway and thought it was useful enough to release, there are few cases where things are truly 100% free (and in those cases, good luck getting any support because said dev will probably be working a day job in order to obtain that aforementioned food.)
When was the last time you gave away something completely for free and then actually dedicated months, years or even decades to maintaining whenever some random person on the internet had a problem?
That's like saying the term "sports" should only encompass the national leagues and that minor players or even casuals playing with friends in their back yard can't use that old definition any more.
Gaming is what you make of it. I certainly won't claim that the current AAA direction of over-promised, retailer-specific preorder bonuses and micropayments for hats and required-to-play social media tie-ins and whatever other crap is good for the industry long-term, but there's a hell of a lot of game producers at all levels that include more than the letters "EA" in their logo.
An AAA game these days is like a blockbuster action movie -- the spectacle is amazing but if you're looking for much beyond that you're deluding yourself. But that doesn't mean nothing else exists.
And really at the end of the day, if they push it too far then they'll just be replaced in the #1 spot by some other company who's a bit less pushy about those things. The one nice thing about most modern AAA games being practically clones of each other is that they're a lot closer to being in true competition with each other. Switching to Battlefield when Call of Duty bites a turd is a lot smaller of a hop than switching from say, Mario to Sonic.
I don't know that this is the kind of thing feminists have been fighting. Certainly the logic behind it is horribly patronizing but at the end of the day it does end up with an equality of sorts.
Of course, this is going about it in completely the wrong direction. Its treating a symptom rather than a cause. Why does she consider women to be worse negotiators? Does she have research to back that up? If so, then why are we not looking at ways to teach women how to improve their negotiating skills rather than just ignoring those skills completely?
Alternatively, is it more of a situation where women don't necessarily negotiate worse but differently? If so, maybe training your HR to recognize and adapt to that is the better course of action.
Hopefully this turns out to be a "better than doing nothing" scenario even if its not exactly a particularly brilliant move.
And even then you don't have to go too far up the price ladder before negotiations becomes plausible.. most electronics retailers, furniture stores, etc, grant their employees the power to reduce prices up to a certain percentage.
We're talking about things worth only a few hundred to few thousand dollars. A lot more than a tube of toothpaste to be sure but its well within the realm of things that your average middle and even high end of the lower income groups will get to deal with a few times in their lives.
Japanese is very "simple" in two ways:
- Their phonetic alphabets have, for the most part, exactly one pronunciation per character (/character pair.) There's a few small quirks like minimizing the 'u' sound at the end of a word and the 'i' sound in a few places, but even if you pronounce them fully you won't sound too terribly bad as long as you know the general readings of the characters.
- Their grammar rules are fairly consistent. They do have exceptions of course, but there's not a whole lot of them (at least compared to English..)
Where Japanese gets horribly confusing, and why it has such a bad rap in terms of language learning (not as bad as English but getting up there) is also mostly two factors:
- Kanji. Just. Kanji. They took an already fairly complex (but structured) system from Chinese and decided to replace that "structured" bit with even more complexity in order to mash it into their (completely different) spoken language. This of course happened hundreds of years ago and has gone through some revisions since then but its still quite a massive disaster to learn.
- The fact that they only have somewhere around 50 phonemes means that there is a LOT of homonyms. That makes it a lot harder to just "pick up" from context because you need to know the context in order to pick it up and you get a bit of a circular logic problem there. Kanji actually helps this greatly as for the most part, different words get different Kanji even if (and especially if) they sound the same. But that only helps with written language, and is still subject to the previous point of Kanji being a disaster in its own right.
Obviously none of those are show-stoppers.. there's 130+ million people proving the system works just fine if you can get past that initial learning step but hot damn is it a big step!
I'm sure if you had access to all of the design files in any of those companies, you'd find more than a few that have goofy things added to them "just because."
The difference of course is that its a lot easier to overlook a small chunk of code in a million line program than it is to overlook your latest car design having bat wings.
There's a convergence though.. I would be totally unsurprised if it was discovered that some of these new digital devices in cars have Easter eggs in them. Because its software as well and while the UI is a lot more restricted than a mouse and keyboard (or even a gamepad in a lot of cases,) there's still enough buttons that an Easter egg could easily be hidden.
Of course making sure Easter eggs are documented and tested would be even more important in a vehicle due to the safety concerns.
Why not do both? Open plan for day to day activities and a quiet room that people can go to when they need to concentrate -- kind of like what the library is often used for at universities.
Yeah, it's pretty funny when you realize that a country of 35m people have more stringent data, personal and privacy laws than a country of 300m+ people.
Not really. The US govt isn't a whole lot larger than its Canadian counterpart (well, in terms of the actual sitting lawmakers that is,) but has to deal with almost 10 times as many complaints, lobbyists and other bullshit. Its not really surprising that they're more susceptible to the pressures when the scale is that much different.
No, it works as long as you use FB to _supplement_ your friendship. That's not the same as using FB to _replace_ a friendship.
All of the social media haters seem to think that so-called "social" people have replaced their social lives with FB stalking and that's 100% not the case.
What has happened is that many people who would previously have had little or no social interactions in the first place now have _some_ social interactions through FB and you're telling them that they'd be better off not using FB. Which is not correct because again they're not using FB to _replace_ a social life, they're using FB because they don't have a social life in the first place and FB is better than literally having nothing.
But of course, there will be the odd person who used to be real-life social and kind of sunk into FB-only after a while.. and as long as there's at least one example that fits our pre-existing beliefs, that's all we need to prove our point for all examples right?
That's what Mailinator is for (and I'm sure there's other similar sites by now.)
Admittedly you have to "use" email in a sense, but its not really the same as "having an email address."
Of course there's also lots of sites that use your email for more than just signup confirmation and ad spam, and for those sites its usually less convenient for it all to be going to a dump box.
I recently upgrade from a 4" to a 5.5". I must say that for all the extra pocket annoyance, that extra almost 40% screen area is amazingly great for web browsing and other such things that I do regularly. I'd have trouble going back to a 4".
Not that one anecdote means much in the grand scheme of things..
I *am* antisocial.
Interactions are face to face
You're doing it wrong.
or not at all.
That's the ticket!
I have a phone. Almost never use it for calling people and rarely get calls on it either. I use it more as a glorified GPS+music player+reminder pad+internet browser+basically everything else a modern phone can do except actually be on the phone.
Honestly, I couldn't live without the thing anymore. Its just so damned convenient for everything. Being able to receive phone calls is almost a detriment to an otherwise amazingly useful tool.
That said.. if you want to talk to me, I'd much rather you send me a text message. I hate when people just drop by out of the blue. I hate when people call out of the blue. If you want to do lunch, text me a time and I'll get back to you when I can. The only acceptable reason for a call rather than a text is if you want to do lunch in the next 10 minutes and "when I can" may not be a reasonable response time.
The big difference is that people treat Google like a training manual when its more of a reference manual.
That is, Google is great for looking up something specific. If you need to know how to write a Quicksort algorithm, Google that shit and you'll have it in moments.
If you need to know whether a Quicksort algorithm is applicable in your application, Google will maybe help, occasionally not tell you anything, and very very often send you on a wild goose chase following threads of people who had similar problems but not quite similar enough to answer your question.
Google gives you facts and a shitload of (usually uniformed) opinion. It rarely gives you the wisdom to use those facts appropriately, and that's where a lot of people get mistaken with regards to how much they "know."
Wikipedia is a similar thing. Everyone always tells me not to trust Wikipedia but nobody really clarifies that. If I want to look up something completely non-controversial like how Quicksort works, Wikipedia is great. If I want to look up something horribly controversial like a political candidate, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be at least somewhat lopsided in one direction or the other depending on whether the candidate's staff or opposition happened to make the most recent edit.
Like Google, its great for facts.. decent for opinion. Absolutely useless for wisdom (in this case the wisdom to differential uncontestable facts from politicized garbage.)
Really, our modern definition of "intelligence" needs to somewhat revolve around the ability to distinguish fact from bullshit, as there's so much of both floating around that knowing "stuff" isn't the biggest problem anymore -- its knowing which stuff is real and which is just trolling that really differentiates people in the internet age.
So what would you rather call it?
The term "dark" is used specifically as short hand for "we don't fucking know." Just because you don't understand (or refuse to acknowledge) that terminology doesn't mean some other terminology will be any better.
That said, for dark matter particularly, there is evidence beyond galaxy rotation to suggest that it is in fact an actual form of matter. We still don't have any clue what form that might be, but we do know some properties of it: It interacts gravitationally and it doesn't interact electromagnetically. Those two facts are pulled from actual observations not just "any old bullshit."
We generally assume other properties based on the math (for example, we often assume that its interacts via the weak force because the measured energy scales are very consistent, but that hasn't actually been proven via observation.)
That said, generating predictions using the math is not "any old bullshit." Its very systematically derived values based on what we already know. In the same way that we predicted anti-particles, the top quark and most recently the Higgs boson based purely on "well the math works out really nicely" and then a couple decades later we actually find the things we predicted.
Yes its "bullshit" in the sense that we don't have direct evidence of every single property, and yes there can be (and are) competing theories, but its not just pulled out of someone's ass for no reason either.
If you don't like the dark matter idea, go look up MOND. If you don't like MOND go look up something else. Or make your own theory (but remember it has to match existing, actual measurements as well in order to be useful.) There's plenty of possibilities.
Dark matter gets the most recognition because it so far is the best match for the (yes, limited) amount of data we've managed to collect so far. If we find evidence that the dark matter theory is wrong, it will be fixed or disposed to match the new observations. Its how science works.
But nobody anywhere (except you apparently) just wants to say "fuck it I don't know" and ignore the problem. Making a wrong step is better than making no step when you want to progress.
1) I can't find an exact measurement, but its more like 300-350km which is a hell of a lot closer than 450mi.
2) "Unprecedented" was perhaps an exaggeration, but "common" isn't exactly a word I'd apply either. There's been a couple dozen on this scale around the entire world since we started tracking these things 100 or so years ago.
3) And that was exactly my point: Even with all of the human error, it still took 40 years and a 10m high tsunami to break it in an area of the world known for geological disturbances.
I'm not trying to excuse the incompetence by any means -- this disaster could have been fully averted with some simple (though presumably expensive) changes to the layout of the plant -- higher walls, backup generators not in the basement, etc -- but its still fairly amazing that this hasn't happened earlier or more frequently around the world. Japan isn't the only country that's been lax with their nuclear upkeep (perhaps partly because its so rare -- "well it didn't happen in the last 40 years probably won't happen this year either.")
No but some of them, Gates in particular, are pretty well-versed in the fact that any computer system will get hacked and some fraction of those hackers will be both malicious and competent.
"Robots" is a bit of a misnomer though. A "robot" can be anything -- we use thousands of them in nearly every factory on the planet already.
Similarly, "AI" doesn't have to be a terminator-like humanoid robot. Think more along the lines of the original Skynet -- just a program running on someone's server that manages to get access to dangerous systems and wasn't programmed with any sort of conscience to go along with its intelligence.
Actually many (maybe even most) modern designs feature passive safety mechanisms for exactly this reason. Its not like the designers haven't learned their lesson.
The problem is that a new reactor is on the order of a billion dollars to build, while the old reactors are already there. So we just try to keep those old designs running well past their life expectancy and somehow consider it surprising when they fuck up once in a while.
Honestly, the surprising part is that more of them haven't melted down yet. Everyone bitches about Fukushima but even with all of the human error and failure to invest in maintenance, it still took an almost unprecedented natural disaster to break it.
Of course, terrorists are well known as the most law abiding citizens on the planet.
Or maybe this guy thinks the universe will just make prime numbers and whatnot stop working because he doesn't like what they can do.
Both are equally likely to produce useful counter-terrorism results.
Not especially peculiar. Gravity is a tiny tiny effect compared to the other forces, which equates to being extremely hard to detect (and remember its not just a question of "is there gravity" which is an obvious yes -- the Earth is pulling us in, the Sun is pulling us in, etc.. so you can't just detect gravity you have to be able to separate out the gravity that you're looking for from all of the other gravitational effects in the area.)
We had no confirmation of the top quark until we built an accelerator large enough to confirm it.. we had no confirmation of the Higgs boson until we built an accelerator large enough to confirm it.
And we'll have no confirmation of gravity waves until we can build a device large enough to confirm it (which will likely be a massive interferometer rather than accelerator.. but when I say massive I mean that some of the suggestions are along the lines of "a few million km".)
"Haven't seen it yet" is not the same as "it doesn't exist."
Well the "constant" that Einstein defined was never really given a value. It was shown fairly early that "if" it had certain ranges of values, we would be able to observe certain effects. Einstein for whatever reason decided that his constant was a mistake ("his biggest blunder" according to him) and that it should always be zero.
Newer observations ended up showing that rather than being a blunder, a non-zero constant ended up being the simplest way to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe, which pretty much nobody expected to even be a possibility prior to finding out that yep, its actually the way things are.
All that said, its no secret that GR and/or QM (or more likely both) are just limits of some deeper theory as you noted. Whether that ends up being M-theory or something completely different is up for grabs (and it could be generations before we can build accelerators large enough to probe those energy levels.)
But a really good approximation is still very useful (hell we still use Newtonian mechanics for the most part in the real world.. pretty much only theoretical physicists, spacecraft/satellite designers and computer engineers really care about the high energy / high speed / small size scales where Newton breaks down (well I'm sure there's other fields that I'm not thinking of but the number of them is comparatively small.)