"economies in Eastern Europe have led to severe labor shortages"
Aren't these the same countries that are refusing to accept refugees? I'm missing the logic here. Or maybe they feel that keeping a 'pure' ethnic environment is more important than a good economy.
"gases that might hint at the presence of life... methane "
Excuse me, just because our atmosphere reeks with cow (& human) farts doesn't mean that all life has these problems. Any advanced civilization not obsessed with making weapons would have solved the problem.
Sorry, but wrong. Remember, it's Firesign; the gender of the bird is an important part of the joke. Do a search and you'll find this exact wording supported by Phil Proctor.
It's been puzzling me for some time, so I asked Google:
"Why does the porridge-bird lay his eggs in the air?"
You know, they can beat Go players and Jeopardy and stuff, right? So I gotta wonder how they missed this. Very unsatisfactory reply. Maybe you'll have better luck.
In my case it's the city, county, state and federal government. They require me to interact via MailChimp and similar services. They process financial transactions and set appointments via outside services. Presumably the bureaucrats are saving money by giving up citizens' privacy. Possibly some particular bureaucrat is getting a kickback from these companies.
These services typically don't identify themselves- at the top of every page is the logo of a government agency, even though the URL is for a dot com. They are fraudulently impersonating the government at our expense! And, of course you won't find any privacy policy on those pages except perhaps that of the government. If you do find the corporation and its privacy policy, it will say that they may share your data with 'affiliates', which means anyone they want to call an affiliate when the mood strikes them.
If you have a driver license, social security account, military connection, utility bills, or any other business with any government--you may have no alternative. Oh, by the way, many non-profits are also selling you out this way.
We were smart enough to be born in the US. We chose educated parents with a privileged lifestyle and disposable income. Take a moment right now to pat yourself on the back for your well deserved advantages. Why should we be concerned about some fool who chose to be born in a dirt-poor family of seven far from 'civilized' life? Why should a billion refugees concern us? Why should we care that no education is available to those people, no paying work available and no hope for the future?
If by some odd accident of fate, we had been born under those circumstances, we would just sit down and take our slow death without any fuss, right? We would never consider risking everything to seek greener pastures.
Absolutely, it can be deadly. Especially if your shirt is red.
But remember that the transporter is a fantastically complex device that manipulates more data than all the computers on earth today, and does it in about one second. So, we have to ask ourselves: was it designed by Microsoft or by Apple? Is Intel inside? Do any components come from untrusted sources such as China or the Klingon home world? We are not informed of the state of hacking in the Star Trek universe, so there's that; every crewmember on the Enterprise has access to the transporter room.
For a conclusive answer to this Star Trek question, we really have to step outside that reality and ask the HAL 9000.
Those born before Netflix might remember network TV shows with bland family content where you never see naked people or hear swearing. When Lucy, of 'I Love Lucy', got pregnant, she was not allowed to be seen on screen in that condition. We listened to Lawrence Welk music and saw the art of Norman Rockwell on magazine covers. We waved the flag on 4th of July and cheered for our baseball team and joined Boy Scouts. Yes, youngsters, that was life before the internet. We had to read National Geographic magazine to see naked people.
But why was that so? Because of the Religious Right. Because of the Moral Majority. Because of Puritans who ran the country. But mostly because of advertising sponsors who were afraid to be associated with anything 'immoral'.
We now swim in porn of all kinds with Game of Thrones and other films by Amazon, Netflix and other new media innovators. We have chat rooms where we are free to swear and say outrageous things. We freely criticize politicians and corporations and media and each other. The internet has freed us from Moral Morons and Patriotic Pimps and Advertising Assholes who suppressed free thought since the Dark Ages.
But it's happening again. The Wild West internet is gradually coming under the thumb of the Pompous Puritans. Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit are shutting down free speech bit by bit. And yes it's largely due to advertising sponsors and partly due to threats by governments around the world.
Was Reddit the last major bastion of Free Speech? Is the internet going to become as bland and mindless as 1956 television?
Cute. You really think it's deleted? How trusting! Maybe you don't have access any more, but everyone else does.
There is no deleting. Not only that but there is no shelter from FB. I have never had an account there but they still gather information about me from friends, business associates and family. I'd love to know what they've got on me but asking them would simply confirm that I exist and make their file look more valid.
This is no different from the credit reporting agencies in the US that gather your financial information from a variety of sources without your knowledge or consent. There is no escape.
Gloria Origgi brings up an interesting point of discussion. It purports to relate to the 'information age', but it has always been there.
Every time someone asserts a 'fact', we must evaluate their motives. If they don't have a discernable motive, we have to look to the source--where did that 'fact' originate, whose hands did it pass through? It's a tedious process but the only way to begin evaluating that 'fact'.
Unfortunately, we have to continually monitor our own belief in facts. They tend to become rooted to the extent that their source is forgotten. Those of us who adhere to a religion were probably indoctrinated before we were capable of rationally evaluating information. How can we now go back and confront those assumptions?
Thus, entire societies are pawns in a flow of 'information' circulating endlessly, invisibly in the ether causing a contagion that is nearly insurmountable.
Belief is a matter of accepting 'facts' without question. No sensible person would allow this. Every 'fact' can be evaluated for accuracy on a scale, say from 0 to 9. One gathers the best information available and gives a particular fact a value between those numbers. As more information becomes available, the score may change. It is never zero or nine.
But most people are averse to shades of grey. They need up or down; on or off; left or right; and nothing in between. They like slogans and easy solutions. No painful thinking required. If a fact is asserted loud enough, often enough, then it must be true. Educational systems perpetuate this problem by rote learning with no critical thought process allowed.
"When people feel insecure about their children surviving, then tend to hedge their bets by having more and investing fewer resources in each child."
Gotta say this is bullshit. It happens in nature but these places and populations are far from natural.
The reality is that we, Republican America, pay them to have more children. We send aid to these countries contingent upon their NOT using birth control, NOT allowing abortions, NOT educating citizens about family planning. If they distribute condoms, they lose the money we send. Praise Jesus!
"the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years"
If you think that you've been sleeping for a long time. Amazon was never about profits and always about taking over markets. The day they moved beyond bookselling was the day that other retailers (and manufacturers) should have awakened.
Soon you can show your kids/grandkids what it was like in the days when people drove their own cars. Grand Theft Auto VIII will be feature filled with authentic noise, smog, congestion and best of all--pedestrians! The young'uns may find it hard to believe it was really like that, but you'll have proof, of a sort.
Meanwhile I'll continue to enjoy the exciting nostalgia of Grand Theft Covered Wagon in the wild west. Giddyup!
TFS is missing the important test of accuracy: translate Chinese > English, then back to Chinese. Will any Chinese person be able to understand it? Go back and forth twice for a more serious serious test. If you can't get access to Microsoft's software you can easily try this test with existing software. The results can be comical if your business doesn't depend on accuracy.
This seems to be the same three word system created by Chris Sheldrick and discussed last year on a TED talk. He describes the rationale behind it and how it is currently being used in remote areas. The three word concept is nice in that words are easy to remember, but those words are meaningless as a guide to where the location is. Latitude/longitude are the opposite. Google's system somewhere in between.
We've been doing that for a while now. How's it working out? These new humans eat, make noise and shit. It goes on for years. One can only hope they might become productive after two or more decades. Until then, they are far more a burden than a blessing to the commonweal.
OTOH, a fine brain like that of gweihir is a known quantity, ready to be of value almost immediately upon awakening.
The existing economy favors monopolies. All the talk lately about the imbalance between rich & poor relates to power, control and dependence. Ownership of the electric grid or the oil supply or the communication network is the source of power and wealth. Dependence on them is the source of weakness and poverty.
A successful fusion design will help consolidate energy distribution in a few very wealthy hands. It may be able to fight off wind & solar competitors with the 'right' legislation. Those competitors are the hope of the masses; distributed ownership of the source of energy.
To the extent that we are dependent upon landlords, cable & telecom monopolies, energy suppliers, etc, we are literally powerless slaves. Power to the people! Invest in solar and wind energy and begin to tear down the rest of the monopolies.
Lots of assholes don't hate- you haven't identified the specific group. And if you give them a 'sexy' name such as nazi, jihadist, IS, genocidists, yadda- you only create a rallying point for them. A boring name like 'hate group' may be less likely to draw more recruits.
Neo-Nazis have been around for about 70 years now. Many are retired or dead. 'Neo' means 'new' and they aren't new. Many living ones don't know or care much about the original Nazis, they just wanna hate. They need a new name.
It's not sexy, but I'm happy calling them 'hate groups'. A universal term we can apply to white Americans, Moslems, Hindus and anyone else who prefers that lifestyle. Let's include loyal followers of Kim, Assad and other petty dictators around the world and in Washington DC.
This is simply a response to the failure to communicate. In CA as in many other places, it is customary for drivers and pedestrians to enjoy a lively communication. This typically involves vigorous hand, arm and facial body language as well as enthusiastic vocal invitations to do various things with various body parts.
In order to comply with this tradition, my wife and I would share this responsibility. Whichever was NOT driving the vehicle would yell at the assholes in other vehicles, and pedestrians who got out of the way, and apply the appropriate gestures. In this fashion, the driver was relieved of the duty and able to focus clearly on the next target down the road.
Self-driving cars are not yet sophisticated enough to participate in this essential communication, which causes understandable frustration.
Thanks for the link Ace. Interesting but it doesn't help me identify a random bird by its sound. I hear them during my walks but I rarely see them. Yesterday it was a flock of parrots, easy to recognize that sound, but usually they are just a mystery.
Maybe I can reach the people who put that experiment together. Should be as easy for them/Google to do a search based on a sound as a search based on an image. I could record the sound with my phone during my travels and paste it into their search engine.
I'd like to identify bird calls. I'm new to SoCal and don't recognize the sounds of many birds here. If Google can't do it, do you know of any catalog of bird sounds? Gak. How would they be indexed? There's no way to index noises! Google is my only hope.
Time has value. Cruising a topic at +4 takes less time than +2 and provides most of the good stuff available. If most people are up-voting, there are more +4s and the benefit is lost.
It is a kindness to the reader to remove irrelevant, illiterate, uninformed and angry comments. While it may hurt someone's feelings, the masses of readers will benefit. Those posters who are downmodded should consider why and find ways to improve their contributions.
Some suggestions: Stay on topic. Review your post for readability before submitting. Don't be smartass/sarcastic to others. Use your spelling checker. If you provide a link, please tell why- don't expect others to click it blindly. Don't expect anyone to see your AC comments.
My personal peeve: +1 funny. Fortunately that shit can be filtered, but very little of it interests me. It should be -1.
Slashdot Mirror
"economies in Eastern Europe have led to severe labor shortages"
Aren't these the same countries that are refusing to accept refugees? I'm missing the logic here. Or maybe they feel that keeping a 'pure' ethnic environment is more important than a good economy.
"gases that might hint at the presence of life ... methane "
Excuse me, just because our atmosphere reeks with cow (& human) farts doesn't mean that all life has these problems. Any advanced civilization not obsessed with making weapons would have solved the problem.
Sorry, but wrong. Remember, it's Firesign; the gender of the bird is an important part of the joke. Do a search and you'll find this exact wording supported by Phil Proctor.
It's been puzzling me for some time, so I asked Google:
"Why does the porridge-bird lay his eggs in the air?"
You know, they can beat Go players and Jeopardy and stuff, right? So I gotta wonder how they missed this. Very unsatisfactory reply. Maybe you'll have better luck.
In my case it's the city, county, state and federal government. They require me to interact via MailChimp and similar services. They process financial transactions and set appointments via outside services. Presumably the bureaucrats are saving money by giving up citizens' privacy. Possibly some particular bureaucrat is getting a kickback from these companies.
These services typically don't identify themselves- at the top of every page is the logo of a government agency, even though the URL is for a dot com. They are fraudulently impersonating the government at our expense! And, of course you won't find any privacy policy on those pages except perhaps that of the government. If you do find the corporation and its privacy policy, it will say that they may share your data with 'affiliates', which means anyone they want to call an affiliate when the mood strikes them.
If you have a driver license, social security account, military connection, utility bills, or any other business with any government--you may have no alternative. Oh, by the way, many non-profits are also selling you out this way.
We were smart enough to be born in the US. We chose educated parents with a privileged lifestyle and disposable income. Take a moment right now to pat yourself on the back for your well deserved advantages. Why should we be concerned about some fool who chose to be born in a dirt-poor family of seven far from 'civilized' life? Why should a billion refugees concern us? Why should we care that no education is available to those people, no paying work available and no hope for the future?
If by some odd accident of fate, we had been born under those circumstances, we would just sit down and take our slow death without any fuss, right? We would never consider risking everything to seek greener pastures.
Absolutely, it can be deadly. Especially if your shirt is red.
But remember that the transporter is a fantastically complex device that manipulates more data than all the computers on earth today, and does it in about one second. So, we have to ask ourselves: was it designed by Microsoft or by Apple? Is Intel inside? Do any components come from untrusted sources such as China or the Klingon home world? We are not informed of the state of hacking in the Star Trek universe, so there's that; every crewmember on the Enterprise has access to the transporter room.
For a conclusive answer to this Star Trek question, we really have to step outside that reality and ask the HAL 9000.
Those born before Netflix might remember network TV shows with bland family content where you never see naked people or hear swearing. When Lucy, of 'I Love Lucy', got pregnant, she was not allowed to be seen on screen in that condition. We listened to Lawrence Welk music and saw the art of Norman Rockwell on magazine covers. We waved the flag on 4th of July and cheered for our baseball team and joined Boy Scouts. Yes, youngsters, that was life before the internet. We had to read National Geographic magazine to see naked people.
But why was that so? Because of the Religious Right. Because of the Moral Majority. Because of Puritans who ran the country. But mostly because of advertising sponsors who were afraid to be associated with anything 'immoral'.
We now swim in porn of all kinds with Game of Thrones and other films by Amazon, Netflix and other new media innovators. We have chat rooms where we are free to swear and say outrageous things. We freely criticize politicians and corporations and media and each other. The internet has freed us from Moral Morons and Patriotic Pimps and Advertising Assholes who suppressed free thought since the Dark Ages.
But it's happening again. The Wild West internet is gradually coming under the thumb of the Pompous Puritans. Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit are shutting down free speech bit by bit. And yes it's largely due to advertising sponsors and partly due to threats by governments around the world.
Was Reddit the last major bastion of Free Speech? Is the internet going to become as bland and mindless as 1956 television?
Cute. You really think it's deleted? How trusting! Maybe you don't have access any more, but everyone else does.
There is no deleting. Not only that but there is no shelter from FB. I have never had an account there but they still gather information about me from friends, business associates and family. I'd love to know what they've got on me but asking them would simply confirm that I exist and make their file look more valid.
This is no different from the credit reporting agencies in the US that gather your financial information from a variety of sources without your knowledge or consent. There is no escape.
Gloria Origgi brings up an interesting point of discussion. It purports to relate to the 'information age', but it has always been there.
Every time someone asserts a 'fact', we must evaluate their motives. If they don't have a discernable motive, we have to look to the source--where did that 'fact' originate, whose hands did it pass through? It's a tedious process but the only way to begin evaluating that 'fact'.
Unfortunately, we have to continually monitor our own belief in facts. They tend to become rooted to the extent that their source is forgotten. Those of us who adhere to a religion were probably indoctrinated before we were capable of rationally evaluating information. How can we now go back and confront those assumptions?
Thus, entire societies are pawns in a flow of 'information' circulating endlessly, invisibly in the ether causing a contagion that is nearly insurmountable.
Belief is a matter of accepting 'facts' without question. No sensible person would allow this. Every 'fact' can be evaluated for accuracy on a scale, say from 0 to 9. One gathers the best information available and gives a particular fact a value between those numbers. As more information becomes available, the score may change. It is never zero or nine.
But most people are averse to shades of grey. They need up or down; on or off; left or right; and nothing in between. They like slogans and easy solutions. No painful thinking required. If a fact is asserted loud enough, often enough, then it must be true. Educational systems perpetuate this problem by rote learning with no critical thought process allowed.
"When people feel insecure about their children surviving, then tend to hedge their bets by having more and investing fewer resources in each child."
Gotta say this is bullshit. It happens in nature but these places and populations are far from natural.
The reality is that we, Republican America, pay them to have more children. We send aid to these countries contingent upon their NOT using birth control, NOT allowing abortions, NOT educating citizens about family planning. If they distribute condoms, they lose the money we send. Praise Jesus!
"the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years"
If you think that you've been sleeping for a long time. Amazon was never about profits and always about taking over markets. The day they moved beyond bookselling was the day that other retailers (and manufacturers) should have awakened.
Soon you can show your kids/grandkids what it was like in the days when people drove their own cars. Grand Theft Auto VIII will be feature filled with authentic noise, smog, congestion and best of all--pedestrians! The young'uns may find it hard to believe it was really like that, but you'll have proof, of a sort.
Meanwhile I'll continue to enjoy the exciting nostalgia of Grand Theft Covered Wagon in the wild west. Giddyup!
TFS is missing the important test of accuracy: translate Chinese > English, then back to Chinese. Will any Chinese person be able to understand it? Go back and forth twice for a more serious serious test. If you can't get access to Microsoft's software you can easily try this test with existing software. The results can be comical if your business doesn't depend on accuracy.
This seems to be the same three word system created by Chris Sheldrick and discussed last year on a TED talk. He describes the rationale behind it and how it is currently being used in remote areas. The three word concept is nice in that words are easy to remember, but those words are meaningless as a guide to where the location is. Latitude/longitude are the opposite. Google's system somewhere in between.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chri...
"far to easy to make more humans"
We've been doing that for a while now. How's it working out? These new humans eat, make noise and shit. It goes on for years. One can only hope they might become productive after two or more decades. Until then, they are far more a burden than a blessing to the commonweal.
OTOH, a fine brain like that of gweihir is a known quantity, ready to be of value almost immediately upon awakening.
uneconomical for who?
The existing economy favors monopolies. All the talk lately about the imbalance between rich & poor relates to power, control and dependence. Ownership of the electric grid or the oil supply or the communication network is the source of power and wealth. Dependence on them is the source of weakness and poverty.
A successful fusion design will help consolidate energy distribution in a few very wealthy hands. It may be able to fight off wind & solar competitors with the 'right' legislation. Those competitors are the hope of the masses; distributed ownership of the source of energy.
To the extent that we are dependent upon landlords, cable & telecom monopolies, energy suppliers, etc, we are literally powerless slaves. Power to the people! Invest in solar and wind energy and begin to tear down the rest of the monopolies.
- "I call them assholes"
Lots of assholes don't hate- you haven't identified the specific group. And if you give them a 'sexy' name such as nazi, jihadist, IS, genocidists, yadda- you only create a rallying point for them. A boring name like 'hate group' may be less likely to draw more recruits.
Neo-Nazis have been around for about 70 years now. Many are retired or dead. 'Neo' means 'new' and they aren't new. Many living ones don't know or care much about the original Nazis, they just wanna hate. They need a new name.
It's not sexy, but I'm happy calling them 'hate groups'. A universal term we can apply to white Americans, Moslems, Hindus and anyone else who prefers that lifestyle. Let's include loyal followers of Kim, Assad and other petty dictators around the world and in Washington DC.
Ouch! My brain is inflamed 46% and blood pressure up 18%. Too many numbers! Will someone please translate this for me?
This is simply a response to the failure to communicate. In CA as in many other places, it is customary for drivers and pedestrians to enjoy a lively communication. This typically involves vigorous hand, arm and facial body language as well as enthusiastic vocal invitations to do various things with various body parts.
In order to comply with this tradition, my wife and I would share this responsibility. Whichever was NOT driving the vehicle would yell at the assholes in other vehicles, and pedestrians who got out of the way, and apply the appropriate gestures. In this fashion, the driver was relieved of the duty and able to focus clearly on the next target down the road.
Self-driving cars are not yet sophisticated enough to participate in this essential communication, which causes understandable frustration.
Thanks for the link Ace. Interesting but it doesn't help me identify a random bird by its sound. I hear them during my walks but I rarely see them. Yesterday it was a flock of parrots, easy to recognize that sound, but usually they are just a mystery.
Maybe I can reach the people who put that experiment together. Should be as easy for them/Google to do a search based on a sound as a search based on an image. I could record the sound with my phone during my travels and paste it into their search engine.
I'd like to identify bird calls. I'm new to SoCal and don't recognize the sounds of many birds here. If Google can't do it, do you know of any catalog of bird sounds? Gak. How would they be indexed? There's no way to index noises! Google is my only hope.
We did this last year it seems:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
and
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
But hey, it's still interesting
Time has value. Cruising a topic at +4 takes less time than +2 and provides most of the good stuff available. If most people are up-voting, there are more +4s and the benefit is lost.
It is a kindness to the reader to remove irrelevant, illiterate, uninformed and angry comments. While it may hurt someone's feelings, the masses of readers will benefit. Those posters who are downmodded should consider why and find ways to improve their contributions.
Some suggestions: Stay on topic. Review your post for readability before submitting. Don't be smartass/sarcastic to others. Use your spelling checker. If you provide a link, please tell why- don't expect others to click it blindly. Don't expect anyone to see your AC comments.
My personal peeve: +1 funny. Fortunately that shit can be filtered, but very little of it interests me. It should be -1.