Right, the medium sized town. The SI unit for power production is the one family home and the conversion factor is defined in homes per football field times the average number of football fields that a medium-sized town occupies.
The funny thing is that ever since Reagan and Thatcher launched a new form of right wing politics we live in an era where the "conservatives" are radicals who want to replace a working system with their utopian dream society, while the "socialists" or "liberals" are people who want to keep the tried and tested system with all or most of its government involvement in the economy.
Anyway, this particular problem could be solved in two ways: 1. Have the government determine standards and force companies to certify their products. 2. Have a private non-profit organization determine standards, encourage companies to certify their products, and name and shame the companies that don't do it. Consumer don't want to buy from brands that have a reputation for not caring about the environment.
So it's not completely impossible for the market to solve the problem. It's just unlikely to happen soon.
Previous attempts to do away with directory-based filesystems and go with a sea of tagged documents and a metadata database have crashed on the rocks of low disk performance. But those ideas are good in principle, they just weren't appropriate for actual hardware.
They were always a terrible idea because they don't scale in the human mind. For a music collection you can just about deal with artist name, album name, song name... But even when it comes to things like "genera" how many people can remember if a particular song they want to hear counts a pop, or rock, or soft rock, or maybe it was prog-rock, or is that "prog rock" or "progrock"?
It gets worse for documents. With a folder system you can drill down. It serves as a memory aid. With tags you need to search and sift through search results unless you can remember the name of that particular thing you needed, or some other fairly unique identifier. I'd contend that tagging is more effort than organizing in folders too, especially if you want to change tags in bulk without separating collections of related documents accidentally.
There are ways to reduce these problems with fuzzy search terms, hierarchical tags and the like, but they are all just lame attempts to polish a turd.
The problem of navigating a music collection is already solved at the application level by various apps. Any file system will do fine. You're not going to have more than 10-100 million music files on a system since that's about what humanity has created so far, so it's a fairly well bounded problem.
Innovation at the OS level should probably focus on problems where there is no upper limit to how many files you could realistically want to store and search.
In Europe that isn't even usually the case. In Sweden, one of the countries where Uber is whining about "regulation", the taxi market is deregulated. Anyone can offer taxi services, at any price, providing they meet four basic consumer-protection requirements:
1. They have a commercial driver's license
2. They have commercial vehicle insurance
3. They post their rates openly and visibly
4. They have a functioning meter, which is inspected occasionally to ensure that it is billing the same amount as the posted rates
And since the Swedish authorities have not cracked down on Uber we can probably surmise that rules 3 and 4 will get rewritten or reinterpreted to allow what Uber is doing. Uber is in compliance in spirit (if not in practice) since they do advertise their prices to anyone who has the ability to buy a ride and the driver does have a meter app on his or her phone.
The real wrongdoing here by the Swedish authorities is that they're not (not yet) giving other companies the same pass that they're giving Uber.
Not a bad list, honestly. Still not sure why Linnaeus is *that* high, but most of the rest is quite reasonable, methinks.
I would have to agree. I think that Linnaeus has gamed the system a bit. Every (or at least most) Wikipedia articles about a plant or animal species would have a link to back to Linnaeus or his nomenclature system. While he was certainly a notable scientist, he was in no way as influential as most of the others on the list. Perhaps I should change my name to "Citation Needed" so I would be the most influential person in history (according to this methodology).
He gamed the system more than that... Every Wikipedia article about a species contains a link to whoever named that species. And Linnaeus named a lot of species, something close to 10,000! He had a good head start on everyone else seeing as he came up with the naming system. He especially named pretty much all of the species that have the most "mindshare", the same ones that now have long and highly ranked Wikipedia articles.
Is this "Spotsetter" something I'm supposed to have heard of? I feel like I got dumped into a story halfway with a bunch of characters I have no reason to care about.
Nope, thy had an app that peaked at number 50 or so in their category ranking on iTunes.
Their blog talks about them working on wearable software, so I suppose Apple was behind on some software feature for their iWatch (probably a feature that lets you know when you are near good restaurants, cafes, shops, etc) and decided to source it from the outside.
Sweden and Finland have the means to produce nuclear weapons. Same goes for most other countries with nuclear research facilities. It's not as if it's difficult.
It is apparently fairly difficult and expensive to make small, lightweight nuclear weapons. France was still doing nuclear tests in the 1990's, presumably because they still had kinks to iron out in their design.
Yes, but a program on a computer is a pretty boring way to reinvent the ISS tracker. A fun way would be to invent a mechanical device that predicts when the ISS will be overhead.
When large corporate lobbyists and their politicians talk about the economy, simply substitute the word "profit" for "jobs" to get a more honest version of what they're saying.
Our joint endeavor is part of our overall agenda for growth and jobs to both sides of the Atlantic by boosting trade and investment.
Our joint endeavor is part of our overall agenda for growth and profits to both sides of the Atlantic by boosting trade and investment.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who pointed this out.
Anyway I'm all in favor of completely free trade between the EU and the US. Why the hell do we even need an agreement? That's like asking for horrible amounts of irrelevant big corporate crap to seep in and do damage to all sorts of areas of the economy. Just open the borders, remove the tolls and unnecessary government checks, and then we'll sort out the kinks after they happen, if they happen.
Betteridge's law of headlines says no and the summary pretty much nails it.
The bubble shape maximizes the amount of internal volume given an amount of materials, or minimizes the amount of materials needed to make a car with a given volume. Take a bubble and attach crumple zones front and back and you have the shape of a typical car. I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...
Well, Homeland Security... just that name is chilling.
Staatssicherheit meant "security of the state" where "state" refered to the government, so it really meant "security of the government". The main purpose was probably to make sure the East Germany stayed loyal to the Kremlin.
With net neutrality, the incentive for trying such ideas will be nonexistent.
As long as there is a significant bottleneck somewhere in the last mile or so (typically 4G/LTE or crowded WiFi) the incentive for efficient use of the available bandwidth will remain huge, regardless of politics.
The thing that might hamper development is if one company manages to get a monopoly on the creative content so that everyone have to use their service regardless of how shitty it performs.
I'm sure we've been over this a hundred times already int he thread, but blaming it on crazy is problematic for a couple of reasons: 1. It is usually based on circular reasoning. "Only crazy people commit murder, therefore a murderer is always crazy, therefore the problem with murder is crazy." 2. It puts the spotlight on the vast majority of crazy people who are in fact peaceful.
I skimmed his "manifesto" and I think this shooting spree could have been prevented if the US law dictated that people who buy a weapon have to be able to prove that they have legitimate use for that weapon and the means to store it safely and securely. Rodgers would probably have failed on both counts. I doubt he would have been able to join and maintain a membership in a sports shooting club, because he was basically the worlds greatest whiny quitter. I frankly doubt the guy ever once made an honest and sustained attempt to get a woman interested in him.
Sure, so an accident is often defined as an incident where a person reported any sort of injury. It's a lot harder to get comparable statistics on that. It's easy to make a list of every person who has died in a car, but it's not easy to list every sprained thumb.
The total accident rate nowadays is roughly on the order of one accident per 1M miles driven (there are on the order of 100 accidents per fatal accident), so we could expect the Google car to have its first minor accident soon if it is exactly on par with the average human driver, assuming they have the car drive an average traffic pattern and don't cancel their tests during difficult weather conditions or difficult traffic conditions. In reality they're not going to do that. It would be grossly irresponsible to do that sort of testing before they feel the car is as good as human drivers in virtually all imaginable traffic situations.
Traffic tickets are even harder to compare since it's a human making a judgement call depending on lots of factors.
Nah, 700k miles is nothing. Human drivers drive >70M miles between fatal accidents, and that's on average. Imagine how far highly trained drivers drive between fatal accidents. Humans are actually pretty good at driving!
Come back when the Google car has driven a few billion miles and we'll have a look at the statistics.
These people are parasites, and leeches, whose evasion is helping to drive UP the cost for everybody else. Public transportation is en expensive service, mostly subsidized through taxes, these hypocritical parasites help make it that much more expensive for everybody else.
I hope the Swedish authorities take an idea that was floated when the same was about to happen in Denmark.
The fines the "organization" pay, are to be treated as taxable income.
And give them free advertisement in the form of news coverage and other attention?
Planka.nu state that they have 600 members in the Stockholm metro area. That's about 0.03% of the population and perhaps 0.1% of daily transit travelers. They also state that all of their surplus revenue goes towards flyers and stickers and other means of spreading the word. Advertisement is hard, especially when you're barred from using billboards and other conventional outlets.
Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.
Right about what? Bill Gates has been one of the main public proponents of the importance of cheap smartphones and cellular networks in the poorest countries. If you don't have reasonably fast and reliable communication technology you can't solve any of the other problems.
For example rail lines and steam engines pretty much solved the communications problem in western Europe and North America in the 19:th century, along with telegraph lines for shorter messages.
No task can be accomplished in a single CPU cycle.
A human can actually do something in a second, like move or talk.
Uhhh, CPUs can not only do one task per cycle, a lot of them can do two if they have a fused add/multiply instruction. Add in dual FPUs and you could conceivably do four or more tasks per clock cycle. They can also do multi billion tasks per second as most CPUs operate with gigahertz clocks.
True, but I think the GP was probably thinking about latency and not about throughput.
Oh, the government is way beyond HAARP now. Some of the chemtrails that they spew out are probably seeded with quantum nano transmitters that inject negative frequencies directly into the ionosphere...
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Right, the medium sized town. The SI unit for power production is the one family home and the conversion factor is defined in homes per football field times the average number of football fields that a medium-sized town occupies.
It's all very clearly defined.
The funny thing is that ever since Reagan and Thatcher launched a new form of right wing politics we live in an era where the "conservatives" are radicals who want to replace a working system with their utopian dream society, while the "socialists" or "liberals" are people who want to keep the tried and tested system with all or most of its government involvement in the economy.
Anyway, this particular problem could be solved in two ways:
1. Have the government determine standards and force companies to certify their products.
2. Have a private non-profit organization determine standards, encourage companies to certify their products, and name and shame the companies that don't do it. Consumer don't want to buy from brands that have a reputation for not caring about the environment.
So it's not completely impossible for the market to solve the problem. It's just unlikely to happen soon.
Previous attempts to do away with directory-based filesystems and go with a sea of tagged documents and a metadata database have crashed on the rocks of low disk performance. But those ideas are good in principle, they just weren't appropriate for actual hardware.
They were always a terrible idea because they don't scale in the human mind. For a music collection you can just about deal with artist name, album name, song name... But even when it comes to things like "genera" how many people can remember if a particular song they want to hear counts a pop, or rock, or soft rock, or maybe it was prog-rock, or is that "prog rock" or "progrock"?
It gets worse for documents. With a folder system you can drill down. It serves as a memory aid. With tags you need to search and sift through search results unless you can remember the name of that particular thing you needed, or some other fairly unique identifier. I'd contend that tagging is more effort than organizing in folders too, especially if you want to change tags in bulk without separating collections of related documents accidentally.
There are ways to reduce these problems with fuzzy search terms, hierarchical tags and the like, but they are all just lame attempts to polish a turd.
The problem of navigating a music collection is already solved at the application level by various apps. Any file system will do fine. You're not going to have more than 10-100 million music files on a system since that's about what humanity has created so far, so it's a fairly well bounded problem.
Innovation at the OS level should probably focus on problems where there is no upper limit to how many files you could realistically want to store and search.
In Europe that isn't even usually the case. In Sweden, one of the countries where Uber is whining about "regulation", the taxi market is deregulated. Anyone can offer taxi services, at any price, providing they meet four basic consumer-protection requirements:
1. They have a commercial driver's license
2. They have commercial vehicle insurance
3. They post their rates openly and visibly
4. They have a functioning meter, which is inspected occasionally to ensure that it is billing the same amount as the posted rates
And since the Swedish authorities have not cracked down on Uber we can probably surmise that rules 3 and 4 will get rewritten or reinterpreted to allow what Uber is doing. Uber is in compliance in spirit (if not in practice) since they do advertise their prices to anyone who has the ability to buy a ride and the driver does have a meter app on his or her phone.
The real wrongdoing here by the Swedish authorities is that they're not (not yet) giving other companies the same pass that they're giving Uber.
I would have to agree. I think that Linnaeus has gamed the system a bit. Every (or at least most) Wikipedia articles about a plant or animal species would have a link to back to Linnaeus or his nomenclature system. While he was certainly a notable scientist, he was in no way as influential as most of the others on the list. Perhaps I should change my name to "Citation Needed" so I would be the most influential person in history (according to this methodology).
He gamed the system more than that... Every Wikipedia article about a species contains a link to whoever named that species. And Linnaeus named a lot of species, something close to 10,000! He had a good head start on everyone else seeing as he came up with the naming system. He especially named pretty much all of the species that have the most "mindshare", the same ones that now have long and highly ranked Wikipedia articles.
Is this "Spotsetter" something I'm supposed to have heard of? I feel like I got dumped into a story halfway with a bunch of characters I have no reason to care about.
Nope, thy had an app that peaked at number 50 or so in their category ranking on iTunes.
Their blog talks about them working on wearable software, so I suppose Apple was behind on some software feature for their iWatch (probably a feature that lets you know when you are near good restaurants, cafes, shops, etc) and decided to source it from the outside.
Sweden and Finland have the means to produce nuclear weapons.
Same goes for most other countries with nuclear research facilities. It's not as if it's difficult.
It is apparently fairly difficult and expensive to make small, lightweight nuclear weapons. France was still doing nuclear tests in the 1990's, presumably because they still had kinks to iron out in their design.
Yes, but a program on a computer is a pretty boring way to reinvent the ISS tracker. A fun way would be to invent a mechanical device that predicts when the ISS will be overhead.
Because under current laws in both the US and EU, there are barriers to entry of goods?
I don't know about the US, but the EU has a highly complex and detailed system of tariffs on goods entering the EU.
When large corporate lobbyists and their politicians talk about the economy, simply substitute the word "profit" for "jobs" to get a more honest version of what they're saying.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who pointed this out.
Anyway I'm all in favor of completely free trade between the EU and the US. Why the hell do we even need an agreement? That's like asking for horrible amounts of irrelevant big corporate crap to seep in and do damage to all sorts of areas of the economy. Just open the borders, remove the tolls and unnecessary government checks, and then we'll sort out the kinks after they happen, if they happen.
...your not running in a VM.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
Betteridge's law of headlines says no and the summary pretty much nails it.
The bubble shape maximizes the amount of internal volume given an amount of materials, or minimizes the amount of materials needed to make a car with a given volume. Take a bubble and attach crumple zones front and back and you have the shape of a typical car. I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...
Well, Homeland Security... just that name is chilling.
Staatssicherheit meant "security of the state" where "state" refered to the government, so it really meant "security of the government". The main purpose was probably to make sure the East Germany stayed loyal to the Kremlin.
With net neutrality, the incentive for trying such ideas will be nonexistent.
As long as there is a significant bottleneck somewhere in the last mile or so (typically 4G/LTE or crowded WiFi) the incentive for efficient use of the available bandwidth will remain huge, regardless of politics.
The thing that might hamper development is if one company manages to get a monopoly on the creative content so that everyone have to use their service regardless of how shitty it performs.
I'm sure we've been over this a hundred times already int he thread, but blaming it on crazy is problematic for a couple of reasons:
1. It is usually based on circular reasoning. "Only crazy people commit murder, therefore a murderer is always crazy, therefore the problem with murder is crazy."
2. It puts the spotlight on the vast majority of crazy people who are in fact peaceful.
I skimmed his "manifesto" and I think this shooting spree could have been prevented if the US law dictated that people who buy a weapon have to be able to prove that they have legitimate use for that weapon and the means to store it safely and securely. Rodgers would probably have failed on both counts. I doubt he would have been able to join and maintain a membership in a sports shooting club, because he was basically the worlds greatest whiny quitter. I frankly doubt the guy ever once made an honest and sustained attempt to get a woman interested in him.
I wonder how all this will affect my upcoming book Why Jeff Bezos Is More Awesome Than Elon Musk (working title).
Sure, so an accident is often defined as an incident where a person reported any sort of injury. It's a lot harder to get comparable statistics on that. It's easy to make a list of every person who has died in a car, but it's not easy to list every sprained thumb.
The total accident rate nowadays is roughly on the order of one accident per 1M miles driven (there are on the order of 100 accidents per fatal accident), so we could expect the Google car to have its first minor accident soon if it is exactly on par with the average human driver, assuming they have the car drive an average traffic pattern and don't cancel their tests during difficult weather conditions or difficult traffic conditions. In reality they're not going to do that. It would be grossly irresponsible to do that sort of testing before they feel the car is as good as human drivers in virtually all imaginable traffic situations.
Traffic tickets are even harder to compare since it's a human making a judgement call depending on lots of factors.
Nah, 700k miles is nothing. Human drivers drive >70M miles between fatal accidents, and that's on average. Imagine how far highly trained drivers drive between fatal accidents. Humans are actually pretty good at driving!
Come back when the Google car has driven a few billion miles and we'll have a look at the statistics.
A small level of radiation is one thing; it's the dihydrogen monoxide I worry about.
Don't worry, TFA says that it's totally free of chemicals.
These people are parasites, and leeches, whose evasion is helping to drive UP the cost for everybody else.
Public transportation is en expensive service, mostly subsidized through taxes, these hypocritical parasites help make it that much more expensive for everybody else.
I hope the Swedish authorities take an idea that was floated when the same was about to happen in Denmark.
The fines the "organization" pay, are to be treated as taxable income.
And give them free advertisement in the form of news coverage and other attention?
Planka.nu state that they have 600 members in the Stockholm metro area. That's about 0.03% of the population and perhaps 0.1% of daily transit travelers. They also state that all of their surplus revenue goes towards flyers and stickers and other means of spreading the word. Advertisement is hard, especially when you're barred from using billboards and other conventional outlets.
Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.
Right about what? Bill Gates has been one of the main public proponents of the importance of cheap smartphones and cellular networks in the poorest countries. If you don't have reasonably fast and reliable communication technology you can't solve any of the other problems.
For example rail lines and steam engines pretty much solved the communications problem in western Europe and North America in the 19:th century, along with telegraph lines for shorter messages.
No task can be accomplished in a single CPU cycle.
A human can actually do something in a second, like move or talk.
Uhhh, CPUs can not only do one task per cycle, a lot of them can do two if they have a fused add/multiply instruction. Add in dual FPUs and you could conceivably do four or more tasks per clock cycle. They can also do multi billion tasks per second as most CPUs operate with gigahertz clocks.
True, but I think the GP was probably thinking about latency and not about throughput.
Okay, but in this case the bug had little to do with the algorithm. The bug was triggered unconditionally for every input.
Sure would like to git me some of them quantum nano-thingys and their negative frequencies! (Um. uh, just whut is a negative frequency?)
Well, the government and the scientific establishment want you to think that it's merely a mathematical concept used in frequency analysis...
Oh, the government is way beyond HAARP now. Some of the chemtrails that they spew out are probably seeded with quantum nano transmitters that inject negative frequencies directly into the ionosphere...