Yeah, I suspect that's what happens when there is a speculative bubble in housing, when all you need is a greater fool who you can pass the unit on to at a profit. Just make sure to show it to the buyers on a cool day...
The first cities which were, curiously, built by hunter-gatherers were effectively a single building that got added to each time a new family moved in. The door of a home was either a hole in the roof or a hole in a wall facing the roof. These sort of cities are still being built today. They're called slums.
Now, before we run off and investigate this exciting idea of having a whole city inside a building, perhaps we should investigate why that idea has been tried and ultimately discarded over and over in countless times and at countless places.
This random sample voting idea is already in use on Google play. It came into effect a few months ago. If you open Google play on your Android device you will see a widget that invites you to vote for one of your recently installed apps.
I don't know how well this could work even if done perfectly. The ultimate measure of the quality and appeal of a product is whether or not you will recommend it to someone explicitly (and not just implicitly by liking it on Facebook or G+ or what not). I doubt Google has a way to measure that. Maybe they're working on it.
And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.
My understanding is that they're going to attempt to "land" the first stage on the ocean surface. If it works as intended the stage will hit the water at low speed and it will be perfectly vertical at the time of impact, which would then indicate that they could have landed it on dry land if they had tried.
Well, in that case that carbon alloy would have to be held together by a mysterious principle previously unknown to us. My understanding is that chemical bonds can only be so strong, at least in the absence of another force pushing the atoms closer together.
If someone found an artifact lightweight enough to hold in your hand, yet strong enough to be invulnerably to anything that we could throw at it, then that would be the most remarkable thing that has ever been recorded. It would take a long time and a lot of testing for people to accept it, but eventually we would have to incorporate it into our world view in one way or another. It would not be a smooth transition however way you choose to make it. Even a supposedly naturalistic explanation such as "hyper advanced space aliens who love Jesus kitsch" would be sufficiently strange that it would give birth to multiple new religions of people who would worship and call upon the aliens. The way I see it you might as well believe in the god of the Bible then.
Besides I've read the Bible and I haven't found anything that proves that the "Lord God" character could not be a space alien. It's a nutty idea, but if there was evidence for it we would have to take that evidence into consideration.
I suspect it will eventually be shown through logical argument (if it hasn't been already) that it is impossible to construct a coherent system of thought. The general trend in physics and philosophy alike seems to be that we progressively find out that the universe is stranger and nastier than we thought it could be, yet sufficiently nice for us to be able to exist.
The invulnerable Jesus toast would be sufficient for me to go through with the water on head ceremony and to place provisional belief in the idea that the Bible is essentially true. It would then take something equally remarkable to nudge that provisional belief in some other direction.
Nothing that breaks the rules can be proven as breaking them, from the inside. What if the exception is part of the rules?
That is only true in a strict sense of the word "rules". If say 99.9999% of space obeys a certain set of rules and 0.0001% breaks them then any intelligent being (intelligence being pattern recognition among other things) would stare at the other 0.0001% and wonder.
For example if someone produced an indestructible toast with the face of Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, I and many other atheists would be lining up outside whichever church, mosque or temple we were lead to.
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient. They discovered they are made of cells. They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
And the creatures were sensible. After all, if the guy at the PC wanted the creatures to figure it out he could easily have programmed the game with elements that blatantly break the rules of the game. Perhaps he could have made indestructible walls the shape of a guy sitting at a desk with a computer on it. The creatures would eventually have mapped it and marveled at the mysterious pattern.
Aha, and the nano machines that have evolved inside cells prove that it's a project worth pursuing. You could even start by merely high-jacking existing cellular machinery to do your bidding. Once you get a good grasp of how they work you could try to design new ones, machines that evolution hasn't stumbled on.
Just the titles of some of the footnotes of the paper should give you a good idea...
"The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians" "The epidemiology of infectious diseases among South American Indians: A call for guidelines for ethical research" "Massacre of the Brazilian Indians" "The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians" "Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century"
It sounds like they'd need body armor and rifles more than they'd need vaccines to protect themselves.
Good day Cryacin, my name is John. I'm calling from Windows Service Center to talk to you about a problem with your Windows computer.
I beg your pardon sir?
No, I'm calling from Windows Service Center. We often call Windows users who have Windows computers that have been infect...
No, we are not within cannon range of your "ship"!
Sir, are you sitting in front of your Windows computer right now? It is urgent that you solve your malicious software infection urgently. Can you see a key on your keyboard with a Windows icon on it?
*Sound of distant thunder*
*Sound of glass shattering*
*Sound of wall collapsing*
Sir, we need to speed this up. Just Google "team viewer" and install it on your Windo...
*Sound of screams and cutlasses striking against metal*
It is the crappy state of pre-Internet operating systems that is to blame for the sad state of affairs, IMO.
What specifically about Windows/Unix/Linux is holding back decentralization? Power management? Slow wake-up from low power modes?
I always thought the basic problem is that there isn't an always-on (or always ready to wake up) box in most people's homes that developers can target.
Religion as in church attendance or answers to surveys about beliefs has been in decline for probably close to a century and AFAIK there is little sign that the internet is accelerating it. Religion can't survive very well on the internet for exactly the reasons that you point out, but that doesn't mean that it can't survive offline. The problems offline are basically that a combination of social, economic, technological and scientific progress is inherently corrosive to the type of religion that we have in the west.
It's easy to forget in this day and age, but the central aspect of Christianity and Islam is and has always been the Santa Claus aspect of it. Just like Santa comes with presents for you at the end of the year if you have been good, God comes with a big present after the end of your life if you have been good. The central aspect of Christianity is that when Jesus comes back, the poorest will become the richest, the sickest will become the healthiest and so on and so fourth. This idea is utterly irresistible to people who expect to live their whole lives in poverty or illness. Now, if you live in a society where people don't starve to death and most illnesses can be treated to some extent Christianity is not going to be nearly as persuasive as it was to people say 150 years ago.
North Korea's system is a far-left totalitarian system in the same vein as Stalin's Soviet Union. The term 'totalitarian' refers to the scope of government and there is no direct connection to the left/right axis.
A totalitarian regime operates under the assumption that it has the right to decide, rule and enforce over anything it pleases, right down to the thoughts you think when you're all alone in your home. If there was a reliable implant that could detect anti-government sentiment in a person's thoughts the North Korean government could easily decide to implant it in every child at birth.
Future historians will place tremendous blame on China's government for doing virtually nothing to influence its neighbor and ally to stop the atrocities in the 2000's and 2010's when they easily could have with all their new-found economic and military power.
Uh, there are plenty of atrocities going on in China right now so it's absurd to expect the current rulers in China to do anything about atrocities in North Korea. China wishes to have a buffer between its border and capitalist democracy South Korea and the suffering of the North Korean people is of no concern to them (heck, they deport refugees back to NK to a certain death sentence). In addition to being such a buffer, NK is a bargaining chip in all negotiations China has with the US, Japan and SK. China can offer to reign in NK in return for something China wants.
Yes, but none of this is going to make China's inaction look any better to people looking back from the future at what China does (or what it doesn't do) today. The more we find out about the North Korean concentration camps the more difficult it becomes to brush it aside.
Living near North Korea is like living next door to a crazy man who walks outside and blasts away with a semi-auto rifle occasionally. Not aiming at you but just blazing away randomly while jibbering madly.
Yes, but it beats living inside North Korea.
Even if you're one of the few privileged middle class people who lead almost "normal" lives in Pyongyang you still live under the constant threat of ending up in one of the concentration camps, which can happen if someone thinks that you've said or done something that the leader clique doesn't like. Oh and by the way, they'll sometimes throw in your whole family with you, old Testament style. That is the ultimate means of how a totalitarian regime to keep the people that it has enslaved from doing anything to overthrow or reform it. Even if you manage to evade them and escape, they'll still get your family.
Future historians will place tremendous blame on China's government for doing virtually nothing to influence its neighbor and ally to stop the atrocities in the 2000's and 2010's when they easily could have with all their new-found economic and military power.
the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.
But hull losses in mid-flight are extremely uncommon, most major accidents happen in the first or last few minutes of the flight or even on the ground at the airport. I've been told that the singe most common class of reasons for hull losses in mid-flight is "deliberate action by a human". If that's true, then Occam's razor would guide us towards the least complicated explanation involving deliberate human action. But all of those hypotheses become extremely complicated once you scratch below the surface. Like, why would anyone bent on terror or suicide (or both) stay in the air until fuel ran out when they could have just crashed the plane into the ocean right away?
My Occam's razor-like hypothesis is that the plane took off, then something went wrong (possibly but not necessarily involving deliberate human action) and then someone onboard flew the plane until fuel exhaustion. That's really all we can say until the black boxes are found.
Not a threat to Apple(tm). Apple fans are the least likely to leave their chosen brand. We android users are a fickle lot though, and I'll jump ship in a millisecond to Ubuntu if Shuttleworth can get his shit together on the mobile platform. Until the next thing comes along that tweaks my interest.
This is off-topic, but I enjoy the desktop version of Ubuntu enough that I don't want to do anything that might encourage Mr. Shuttleworth to waste more resources on clutching the fifth or sixth spot in the mobile OS market after Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry and whatever the Chinese megacorporations decide on.
I like that when you donate to Canonical you can tell them how you want the donation to be spent. All on the desktop please.
It only comes with 8 gigs of storage and no expansion slot. Considering that a lot of games weigh in at more than a gigabyte nowadays it's pretty obvious that no "hardcore" gamer would buy this instead of a console even if the other hardware specs were reasonably good.
No, now you're exaggerating a bit. A typical 20A conductor in the home is only about 2 mm in diameter. That conductor has a huge safety margin built in because it's a permanent installation that could cause massive damage if it overheated.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I suspect that's what happens when there is a speculative bubble in housing, when all you need is a greater fool who you can pass the unit on to at a profit. Just make sure to show it to the buyers on a cool day...
The first cities which were, curiously, built by hunter-gatherers were effectively a single building that got added to each time a new family moved in. The door of a home was either a hole in the roof or a hole in a wall facing the roof. These sort of cities are still being built today. They're called slums.
Now, before we run off and investigate this exciting idea of having a whole city inside a building, perhaps we should investigate why that idea has been tried and ultimately discarded over and over in countless times and at countless places.
Google don't care whether their results are the best for consumers. Their customers are advertisers.
But then Google needs to have a selection of apps that are tolerable enough that you'll use the apps despite the Google ads.
Ad-free apps (often FOSS) might help make the experience as a whole more tolerable, especially for power users, so there's no reason to punish those.
This random sample voting idea is already in use on Google play. It came into effect a few months ago. If you open Google play on your Android device you will see a widget that invites you to vote for one of your recently installed apps.
I don't know how well this could work even if done perfectly. The ultimate measure of the quality and appeal of a product is whether or not you will recommend it to someone explicitly (and not just implicitly by liking it on Facebook or G+ or what not). I doubt Google has a way to measure that. Maybe they're working on it.
And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.
My understanding is that they're going to attempt to "land" the first stage on the ocean surface. If it works as intended the stage will hit the water at low speed and it will be perfectly vertical at the time of impact, which would then indicate that they could have landed it on dry land if they had tried.
Well, in that case that carbon alloy would have to be held together by a mysterious principle previously unknown to us. My understanding is that chemical bonds can only be so strong, at least in the absence of another force pushing the atoms closer together.
If someone found an artifact lightweight enough to hold in your hand, yet strong enough to be invulnerably to anything that we could throw at it, then that would be the most remarkable thing that has ever been recorded. It would take a long time and a lot of testing for people to accept it, but eventually we would have to incorporate it into our world view in one way or another. It would not be a smooth transition however way you choose to make it. Even a supposedly naturalistic explanation such as "hyper advanced space aliens who love Jesus kitsch" would be sufficiently strange that it would give birth to multiple new religions of people who would worship and call upon the aliens. The way I see it you might as well believe in the god of the Bible then.
Besides I've read the Bible and I haven't found anything that proves that the "Lord God" character could not be a space alien. It's a nutty idea, but if there was evidence for it we would have to take that evidence into consideration.
I suspect it will eventually be shown through logical argument (if it hasn't been already) that it is impossible to construct a coherent system of thought. The general trend in physics and philosophy alike seems to be that we progressively find out that the universe is stranger and nastier than we thought it could be, yet sufficiently nice for us to be able to exist.
The invulnerable Jesus toast would be sufficient for me to go through with the water on head ceremony and to place provisional belief in the idea that the Bible is essentially true. It would then take something equally remarkable to nudge that provisional belief in some other direction.
Nothing that breaks the rules can be proven as breaking them, from the inside. What if the exception is part of the rules?
That is only true in a strict sense of the word "rules". If say 99.9999% of space obeys a certain set of rules and 0.0001% breaks them then any intelligent being (intelligence being pattern recognition among other things) would stare at the other 0.0001% and wonder.
For example if someone produced an indestructible toast with the face of Jesus, or Mohammed, or Buddha, I and many other atheists would be lining up outside whichever church, mosque or temple we were lead to.
Let's simplify.
Conway's game of life creatures became sentient.
They discovered they are made of cells.
They said "Look, THE INFINITESIMAL CELL is always created from NOTHING. If things happens FROM NOTHING, there is NO NEED FOR A CREATOR, so THERE IS NO CREATOR, and besides NOBODY ever witnessed something different THAN THE DETERMINISTIC APPLICATION OF RULES. How smart are we?"
So the guy at the PC said to himself "Thank you for nothing, guys" and went making himself coffee.
And the creatures were sensible. After all, if the guy at the PC wanted the creatures to figure it out he could easily have programmed the game with elements that blatantly break the rules of the game. Perhaps he could have made indestructible walls the shape of a guy sitting at a desk with a computer on it. The creatures would eventually have mapped it and marveled at the mysterious pattern.
Aha, and the nano machines that have evolved inside cells prove that it's a project worth pursuing. You could even start by merely high-jacking existing cellular machinery to do your bidding. Once you get a good grasp of how they work you could try to design new ones, machines that evolution hasn't stumbled on.
Just the titles of some of the footnotes of the paper should give you a good idea...
"The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians"
"The epidemiology of infectious diseases among South American Indians: A call for guidelines for ethical research"
"Massacre of the Brazilian Indians"
"The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians"
"Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century"
It sounds like they'd need body armor and rifles more than they'd need vaccines to protect themselves.
And yet GP is correct.
On the graphs, there is a line for "pre 0", which is ~5x as high as the "year 0" line.
So, why are we blaming contact for the primary problems, if population fell by 80% (to the year 0 levels) from pre-contact?
Well, those 80% are presumably the ones that died when they came into non-peaceful contact by the less than peaceful Europeans who broke new ground.
The year zero on the graph is the approximate year of peaceful contact.
Good day Cryacin, my name is John. I'm calling from Windows Service Center to talk to you about a problem with your Windows computer.
I beg your pardon sir?
No, I'm calling from Windows Service Center. We often call Windows users who have Windows computers that have been infect...
No, we are not within cannon range of your "ship"!
Sir, are you sitting in front of your Windows computer right now? It is urgent that you solve your malicious software infection urgently. Can you see a key on your keyboard with a Windows icon on it?
*Sound of distant thunder*
*Sound of glass shattering*
*Sound of wall collapsing*
Sir, we need to speed this up. Just Google "team viewer" and install it on your Windo...
*Sound of screams and cutlasses striking against metal*
Sir, I'm going to have to call you ba.....
*Static*
Well, the American left has been remarkably non-violent and anti-authoritarian throughout history, so I guess it could be an artifact of that.
It is the crappy state of pre-Internet operating systems that is to blame for the sad state of affairs, IMO.
What specifically about Windows/Unix/Linux is holding back decentralization? Power management? Slow wake-up from low power modes?
I always thought the basic problem is that there isn't an always-on (or always ready to wake up) box in most people's homes that developers can target.
Religion as in church attendance or answers to surveys about beliefs has been in decline for probably close to a century and AFAIK there is little sign that the internet is accelerating it. Religion can't survive very well on the internet for exactly the reasons that you point out, but that doesn't mean that it can't survive offline. The problems offline are basically that a combination of social, economic, technological and scientific progress is inherently corrosive to the type of religion that we have in the west.
It's easy to forget in this day and age, but the central aspect of Christianity and Islam is and has always been the Santa Claus aspect of it. Just like Santa comes with presents for you at the end of the year if you have been good, God comes with a big present after the end of your life if you have been good. The central aspect of Christianity is that when Jesus comes back, the poorest will become the richest, the sickest will become the healthiest and so on and so fourth. This idea is utterly irresistible to people who expect to live their whole lives in poverty or illness. Now, if you live in a society where people don't starve to death and most illnesses can be treated to some extent Christianity is not going to be nearly as persuasive as it was to people say 150 years ago.
"If I told you that Facebook's strategy was to become the next Prodigy or AOL, you'd take me for crazy,"
That's not crazy, that's obvious. You're approximately the millionth pundit on the ball with regards to Facebook's strategy.
North Korea's system is a far-left totalitarian system in the same vein as Stalin's Soviet Union. The term 'totalitarian' refers to the scope of government and there is no direct connection to the left/right axis.
A totalitarian regime operates under the assumption that it has the right to decide, rule and enforce over anything it pleases, right down to the thoughts you think when you're all alone in your home. If there was a reliable implant that could detect anti-government sentiment in a person's thoughts the North Korean government could easily decide to implant it in every child at birth.
Future historians will place tremendous blame on China's government for doing virtually nothing to influence its neighbor and ally to stop the atrocities in the 2000's and 2010's when they easily could have with all their new-found economic and military power.
Uh, there are plenty of atrocities going on in China right now so it's absurd to expect the current rulers in China to do anything about atrocities in North Korea. China wishes to have a buffer between its border and capitalist democracy South Korea and the suffering of the North Korean people is of no concern to them (heck, they deport refugees back to NK to a certain death sentence). In addition to being such a buffer, NK is a bargaining chip in all negotiations China has with the US, Japan and SK. China can offer to reign in NK in return for something China wants.
Yes, but none of this is going to make China's inaction look any better to people looking back from the future at what China does (or what it doesn't do) today. The more we find out about the North Korean concentration camps the more difficult it becomes to brush it aside.
Living near North Korea is like living next door to a crazy man who walks outside and blasts away with a semi-auto rifle occasionally. Not aiming at you but just blazing away randomly while jibbering madly.
Yes, but it beats living inside North Korea.
Even if you're one of the few privileged middle class people who lead almost "normal" lives in Pyongyang you still live under the constant threat of ending up in one of the concentration camps, which can happen if someone thinks that you've said or done something that the leader clique doesn't like. Oh and by the way, they'll sometimes throw in your whole family with you, old Testament style. That is the ultimate means of how a totalitarian regime to keep the people that it has enslaved from doing anything to overthrow or reform it. Even if you manage to evade them and escape, they'll still get your family.
Future historians will place tremendous blame on China's government for doing virtually nothing to influence its neighbor and ally to stop the atrocities in the 2000's and 2010's when they easily could have with all their new-found economic and military power.
the only explanation that makes sense to me is okham's racer: plane was flying to beijing, a fire broke out or depressurization in the cabin or hold. pilot turned around to go back to the nearest airport, but they ran out of oxygen and it became a ghost ship on autopilot until it ran out of fuel in the indian ocean. the altitude changes is consistent with a fire because apparently one way to fight a fire on an airplane is to go really high where there is less oxygen.
But hull losses in mid-flight are extremely uncommon, most major accidents happen in the first or last few minutes of the flight or even on the ground at the airport. I've been told that the singe most common class of reasons for hull losses in mid-flight is "deliberate action by a human". If that's true, then Occam's razor would guide us towards the least complicated explanation involving deliberate human action. But all of those hypotheses become extremely complicated once you scratch below the surface. Like, why would anyone bent on terror or suicide (or both) stay in the air until fuel ran out when they could have just crashed the plane into the ocean right away?
My Occam's razor-like hypothesis is that the plane took off, then something went wrong (possibly but not necessarily involving deliberate human action) and then someone onboard flew the plane until fuel exhaustion. That's really all we can say until the black boxes are found.
Not a threat to Apple(tm). Apple fans are the least likely to leave their chosen brand. We android users are a fickle lot though, and I'll jump ship in a millisecond to Ubuntu if Shuttleworth can get his shit together on the mobile platform. Until the next thing comes along that tweaks my interest.
This is off-topic, but I enjoy the desktop version of Ubuntu enough that I don't want to do anything that might encourage Mr. Shuttleworth to waste more resources on clutching the fifth or sixth spot in the mobile OS market after Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry and whatever the Chinese megacorporations decide on.
I like that when you donate to Canonical you can tell them how you want the donation to be spent. All on the desktop please.
It only comes with 8 gigs of storage and no expansion slot. Considering that a lot of games weigh in at more than a gigabyte nowadays it's pretty obvious that no "hardcore" gamer would buy this instead of a console even if the other hardware specs were reasonably good.
No, now you're exaggerating a bit. A typical 20A conductor in the home is only about 2 mm in diameter. That conductor has a huge safety margin built in because it's a permanent installation that could cause massive damage if it overheated.