You are clearly a reasonably intelligent and capable person, and that doesn't go away with age. It does become harder to memorize things as you age. (Remember when you were 6 and could recite whole episodes of cartoons that you had only seen two or three times? That's not happening again.)
Whenever you spend time studying and fail to learn it's always because of one of two problems: lack of smarts, or the wrong studying techniques / studying environment. In your case it must be the latter. Did you go to college and if so did you study math and other technical subjects or did you study fussy things like English? If you've never learned how to learn then the place to start is to Google "studying techniques" and become an expert at that.
For example there are many technical concepts that are best learnt by drawing charts and diagrams on sheets of papers, crumbling them up and throwing them away and redrawing the charts and diagrams on new sheets of papers until you get something that corresponds to what the texbook is telling you. Also, just copying diagrams and other drawings straight out of textbooks can help. It's a cheap trick, but it works. There are lots of these "cheap tricks". Learn them.
And considering that arcs (as presented) do not have error brackets on them is a dead giveaway that qualifications of people who did the calculations are highly suspect.
But we haven't necessarily seen the maps that the search effort uses internally. This: http://static01.nyt.com/images... looks like someone drew it in 20 seconds in MS Paint, I'm guessing while in a hurry.
you can get aviation fuel most anywhere, and just use kerosene if you don't care much about long term
But you first have to land somewhere. My point is that if you think you have longer range than you actually have you're prone to end up running out of fuel before you reach your intended destination. No big deal if you're in a car. Very, very bad if you're in a plane over the ocean.
Landing a 777 takes a significant airstrip. Really significant. Once there, it's not simply a taxi to some secluded spot. If your scenario is true, the plane should be visible by satellite.
Well, maybe the highjacker thought that the plane had longer range than it actually had. In that scenario we're looking at painstakingly scanning the ocean with sonar to find the wreckage.
Never going to happen. We don't even have accurate charts for the depth of most of the ocean -- it's just extrapolated from gravity measurements from satellites.
The petroleum industry has some pretty awesome equipment that they use to look for oil and gas. They also maps of much of the sea floor that are way beyond anything that's publicly available. You can certainly find the wreckage given enough time and funding, especially if you can narrow the search area down based on the known facts of the disappearance and create a probability distribution across that search area so that you can search the most probable areas first.
Landing a 777 takes a significant airstrip. Really significant. Once there, it's not simply a taxi to some secluded spot. If your scenario is true, the plane should be visible by satellite.
Well, maybe the highjacker thought that the plane had longer range than it actually had. In that scenario we're looking at painstakingly scanning the ocean with sonar to find the wreckage.
Well, a person who takes hundreds of people with them in their suicide probably has things going on in their heads that we'd find difficult to understand. Suicidal people sometimes commit suicide in ways that are planned and designed to look like accidents.
Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.
We can hope that Putin will be satisfied with Crimea, but it looks like Moldova is next on his list. One can hope that that will be all that he takes and that he wouldn't for example risk invading Lithuania, a NATO country. But on the other hand, what could be a greater victory for Putin and his dream of breaking the west's dominance than invading a NATO country Crimea-style, without a shot fired? It would shatter the idea that NATO is a strong and relevant player in one fell swoop.
The thing that is both hopeful and frightening depending on how you look at it is that Russia's neighbors and Russia are both dependent on the trade of Russian gas. The neighbors for their survival and Russia for it's trade balance. Whatever he does, Putin is probably not going to risk a shooting war that could destroy gas pipelines and ruin trade relationships.
It's nice that we've had 25 year break from facing global thermonuclear war, but Russia is an expansionist aggressive nation again. Mutually assured destruction may not work this time if Putin would rather die and take the rest of the world out with him rather then relinquish power.
I suspect you're quite wrong. Men like Putin (megalomaniac psychopaths) adore and respect military strength in others and, as with all psychopaths, they love themselves far to much to risk dying. If Obama had responded by moving intermediate range nuclear missiles into Poland and the Baltic countries thus enabling a faster first strike capability, Putin might have been angry at first, but the US would have won his respect in the long run.
If history is anything to go by Putin is going to keep doing land grabs until someone with a good arsenal of nukes agrees to play the brinksmanship game with him.
Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model or have carriers who aren't crooked enough that they'd want to do something like that, so the data plan for a smartphone is not necessarily going to be more expensive if you already have a data plan for your feature phone.
A minimal 100MB data plan is probably only a dollar or two in many low income countries, so it's no big deal.
How does Google employees waiting at bus stops cost the city money? Where's this loss coming from that Google must compensate for? Or is this just knee-jerk hostility from the usual suspects?
Well, it is probably not a coincidence that gentrification became an official problem about when it got to where white middle class people began to get priced out of inner city neighborhoods.
Actual fact of the drug trade: Former customers who are in recovery are usually the ones who get offered free hits. The dealer knows they're likely to become good paying customers again if they get another taste.
The first industrial revolution freed people from having to do muscle work in agriculture to go do muscle work in factories. The second industrial revolution freed people from doing muscle work to go do brain work (truck drivers for example work with their brains). The third industrial revolution is freeing people from doing brain work to doing... Well, what exactly?
In the short run we see people going from drone-like brain work like truck driving to doing slightly less drone-like brain work like salesmanship, but what happens if computers beat humans at that too? The only work that seems completely safe is work that is marketed as hand-made in order to appear more "genuine".
This seems to be THE main question that people that are first introduced to free software ask. If Stallman manages to provide a compelling answer to this, it absolutely HAS to be published on GNU.org as one of the primary articles, it would make it much easier to convince people to accept free software ideals.
I've heard him answer the question in the Q&A section of a couple of his talks on Youtube. I don't want to speak for him, but let's just say that I think his answers so far to that question, if they were more widely know, would not make it easier to convince most people who work in the software industry. That doesn't say anything about whether or not he is right or wrong in principle it just says that he probably will never have things his way.
I guess maybe Stallman is playing the "take the idealistic extreme position, leave the pragmatic compromising to others" game.
Yes, but he's right about storage. 32 or 64GB sounds like a lot until you try to use your device to shoot high resolution video or play the latest games. And Google's non-inclusion of expandable storage on their Nexus line of devices? Not cool.
I've lost about $150 worth of BTC and I for one saw it coming, but I was ultimately too lazy and/or too greedy to cut my losses and transfer my BTC out of Mt. Gox while there was still time. I wonder how people who lost real money (like $500+) and who didn't see it coming feel now.
The thing that makes me feel bad about the whole thing is that I had a tiny part in enabling the incompetent owners and maintainers of Mt. Gox and the thieves who were able to steal from them.
It will probably be trivial to port apps as long as they don't use Google Play Services or other Google stuff. It's also pretty easy to mirror a lot of Google Play content on your own app store.
The way this is probably going to work for a lot of apps is that Nokia will have an automatic script that downloads runnables from Google Play (it's questionable if this is allowed by Google's terms of use, but they haven't gone after anyone for doing it), installs them on their hardware, does some automatic testing to see which apps crash and which don't. For the ones that don't the script will email the developer offering to upload the runnable to Nokia's app store. All the developer has to do is click a link, or answer "yes" to the email.
Sure that's true, but it probably doesn't matter as long as we're talking about analyzing English text written by people in 2014 +/- 10 years or so.
The important thing to remember is that statements about the difference about men and women should not automatically be taken to say anything about the underlying mechanisms. In case of hair length it's surely a cultural thing, probably originating when men had to cut their hair short in order to not have accidents when they worked in factories in the 1850-1950 industrial age in the west. It is perhaps not a coincidence that short haircuts on women became fashionable after WW1 when many women had worked in factories.
Nonsense. Men don't have to act a certain way, and neither do women.
That's true, of course. Men could all grow their hair long and women could all cut theirs short, but in reality it's the other way around in many cultures.
Studies about differences between men and women are just that - studies about differences. They usually don't find the mechanisms that cause the differences.
Men v.s. women ought to be fairly simple as long as we're dealing with untrained writers. Women use social words like pronouns and verbs about people more often than men. Women are also, arguably, slightly better writers than men on average because they make more of an effort in primary school.
Who needs advertising when you can sell the company for $16B? They'll just punt the founders and add in-stream/in-text ads related to the content of the text streams the user recently engaged in. Done.
The service apparently costs $1 per year with a free one-year trial. Assuming they can get those 450 million (and counting) to go through the trouble of entering a payment method they're going to be making hundreds of millions of dollars without having to hire lots of people to device clever snooping and ad-targeting schemes. Sounds like a surprisingly sound business to me, if they can get the enter payment method flow to work smoothly.
Apparently you're not one of the 400M global users certainly. However, I think the keyword there is "global"; it seems to be pretty prevalent in non-Western countries from what I can gather.
Yep, and presumably among teenagers and children in western countries, the ones who presumably hold the dagger that could kill any of the incumbent social networks.
Animals are actually an incredibly ineffective way of creating nutrients. Animal farming is really only energy efficient if you also use the animals as land clearing machines and fertilizer spreading machines like people used to do before the industrial era.
How come factory farms are the cheapest way of producing meat? To answer my own question: cheap energy. Petroleum is still cheap enough that we can turn it into tons of artificial fertilizer, spread that over enormous fields of maize and soy, feed the plants to animals and then eat the animals and their milk and eggs as if there was an endless supply of them.
Well, it's really China's imperative to do something about the monsters that they create. China shouldn't have to stop trading with North Korea, they should want to stop. Until we get to that point it won't matter much what the rest of the world thinks.
What does this mean exactly? Does it deny that AIDS exists? Does it deny that HIV leads to AIDS? Does it deny that non-gay people or non-Africans can get AIDS? Does it say it's all a government conspiracy and really caused by chemtrails?
One way or another, it doesn't sound like something that warrants debunking, but then again, I'm often surprised at just how stupid people can be.
It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:
AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc. HIV either does not exist, or exists and is harmless, or exists and is harmful and created by evil men in their evil laboratories but does not cause AIDS. Chemtrails could totally cause AIDS, but more evidence is needed. In other words some dude on the internet needs to write a speculative blogpost that claims that chemtrails cause AIDS before we can say with certainty that it does.
If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.
Slashdot Mirror
You are clearly a reasonably intelligent and capable person, and that doesn't go away with age. It does become harder to memorize things as you age. (Remember when you were 6 and could recite whole episodes of cartoons that you had only seen two or three times? That's not happening again.)
Whenever you spend time studying and fail to learn it's always because of one of two problems: lack of smarts, or the wrong studying techniques / studying environment. In your case it must be the latter. Did you go to college and if so did you study math and other technical subjects or did you study fussy things like English? If you've never learned how to learn then the place to start is to Google "studying techniques" and become an expert at that.
For example there are many technical concepts that are best learnt by drawing charts and diagrams on sheets of papers, crumbling them up and throwing them away and redrawing the charts and diagrams on new sheets of papers until you get something that corresponds to what the texbook is telling you. Also, just copying diagrams and other drawings straight out of textbooks can help. It's a cheap trick, but it works. There are lots of these "cheap tricks". Learn them.
Well, am an engeneer and a scientist.
And considering that arcs (as presented) do not have error brackets on them is a dead giveaway that qualifications of people who did the calculations are highly suspect.
But we haven't necessarily seen the maps that the search effort uses internally. This: http://static01.nyt.com/images... looks like someone drew it in 20 seconds in MS Paint, I'm guessing while in a hurry.
you can get aviation fuel most anywhere, and just use kerosene if you don't care much about long term
But you first have to land somewhere. My point is that if you think you have longer range than you actually have you're prone to end up running out of fuel before you reach your intended destination. No big deal if you're in a car. Very, very bad if you're in a plane over the ocean.
Landing a 777 takes a significant airstrip. Really significant. Once there, it's not simply a taxi to some secluded spot. If your scenario is true, the plane should be visible by satellite.
Well, maybe the highjacker thought that the plane had longer range than it actually had. In that scenario we're looking at painstakingly scanning the ocean with sonar to find the wreckage.
Never going to happen. We don't even have accurate charts for the depth of most of the ocean -- it's just extrapolated from gravity measurements from satellites.
The petroleum industry has some pretty awesome equipment that they use to look for oil and gas. They also maps of much of the sea floor that are way beyond anything that's publicly available. You can certainly find the wreckage given enough time and funding, especially if you can narrow the search area down based on the known facts of the disappearance and create a probability distribution across that search area so that you can search the most probable areas first.
But the plane would only have had enough fuel to fly to Beijing (plus some additional safety margin).
One possibility is that a highjacker made the same mistake that you did and ran out of fuel over the ocean.
Landing a 777 takes a significant airstrip. Really significant. Once there, it's not simply a taxi to some secluded spot. If your scenario is true, the plane should be visible by satellite.
Well, maybe the highjacker thought that the plane had longer range than it actually had. In that scenario we're looking at painstakingly scanning the ocean with sonar to find the wreckage.
Well, a person who takes hundreds of people with them in their suicide probably has things going on in their heads that we'd find difficult to understand. Suicidal people sometimes commit suicide in ways that are planned and designed to look like accidents.
Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.
We can hope that Putin will be satisfied with Crimea, but it looks like Moldova is next on his list. One can hope that that will be all that he takes and that he wouldn't for example risk invading Lithuania, a NATO country. But on the other hand, what could be a greater victory for Putin and his dream of breaking the west's dominance than invading a NATO country Crimea-style, without a shot fired? It would shatter the idea that NATO is a strong and relevant player in one fell swoop.
The thing that is both hopeful and frightening depending on how you look at it is that Russia's neighbors and Russia are both dependent on the trade of Russian gas. The neighbors for their survival and Russia for it's trade balance. Whatever he does, Putin is probably not going to risk a shooting war that could destroy gas pipelines and ruin trade relationships.
It's nice that we've had 25 year break from facing global thermonuclear war, but Russia is an expansionist aggressive nation again. Mutually assured destruction may not work this time if Putin would rather die and take the rest of the world out with him rather then relinquish power.
I suspect you're quite wrong. Men like Putin (megalomaniac psychopaths) adore and respect military strength in others and, as with all psychopaths, they love themselves far to much to risk dying. If Obama had responded by moving intermediate range nuclear missiles into Poland and the Baltic countries thus enabling a faster first strike capability, Putin might have been angry at first, but the US would have won his respect in the long run.
If history is anything to go by Putin is going to keep doing land grabs until someone with a good arsenal of nukes agrees to play the brinksmanship game with him.
Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model or have carriers who aren't crooked enough that they'd want to do something like that, so the data plan for a smartphone is not necessarily going to be more expensive if you already have a data plan for your feature phone.
A minimal 100MB data plan is probably only a dollar or two in many low income countries, so it's no big deal.
How does Google employees waiting at bus stops cost the city money? Where's this loss coming from that Google must compensate for? Or is this just knee-jerk hostility from the usual suspects?
Well, it is probably not a coincidence that gentrification became an official problem about when it got to where white middle class people began to get priced out of inner city neighborhoods.
Actual fact of the drug trade: Former customers who are in recovery are usually the ones who get offered free hits. The dealer knows they're likely to become good paying customers again if they get another taste.
The first industrial revolution freed people from having to do muscle work in agriculture to go do muscle work in factories. The second industrial revolution freed people from doing muscle work to go do brain work (truck drivers for example work with their brains). The third industrial revolution is freeing people from doing brain work to doing... Well, what exactly?
In the short run we see people going from drone-like brain work like truck driving to doing slightly less drone-like brain work like salesmanship, but what happens if computers beat humans at that too? The only work that seems completely safe is work that is marketed as hand-made in order to appear more "genuine".
This seems to be THE main question that people that are first introduced to free software ask. If Stallman manages to provide a compelling answer to this, it absolutely HAS to be published on GNU.org as one of the primary articles, it would make it much easier to convince people to accept free software ideals.
I've heard him answer the question in the Q&A section of a couple of his talks on Youtube. I don't want to speak for him, but let's just say that I think his answers so far to that question, if they were more widely know, would not make it easier to convince most people who work in the software industry. That doesn't say anything about whether or not he is right or wrong in principle it just says that he probably will never have things his way.
I guess maybe Stallman is playing the "take the idealistic extreme position, leave the pragmatic compromising to others" game.
Yes, but he's right about storage. 32 or 64GB sounds like a lot until you try to use your device to shoot high resolution video or play the latest games. And Google's non-inclusion of expandable storage on their Nexus line of devices? Not cool.
I've lost about $150 worth of BTC and I for one saw it coming, but I was ultimately too lazy and/or too greedy to cut my losses and transfer my BTC out of Mt. Gox while there was still time. I wonder how people who lost real money (like $500+) and who didn't see it coming feel now.
The thing that makes me feel bad about the whole thing is that I had a tiny part in enabling the incompetent owners and maintainers of Mt. Gox and the thieves who were able to steal from them.
It will probably be trivial to port apps as long as they don't use Google Play Services or other Google stuff. It's also pretty easy to mirror a lot of Google Play content on your own app store.
The way this is probably going to work for a lot of apps is that Nokia will have an automatic script that downloads runnables from Google Play (it's questionable if this is allowed by Google's terms of use, but they haven't gone after anyone for doing it), installs them on their hardware, does some automatic testing to see which apps crash and which don't. For the ones that don't the script will email the developer offering to upload the runnable to Nokia's app store. All the developer has to do is click a link, or answer "yes" to the email.
Sure that's true, but it probably doesn't matter as long as we're talking about analyzing English text written by people in 2014 +/- 10 years or so.
The important thing to remember is that statements about the difference about men and women should not automatically be taken to say anything about the underlying mechanisms. In case of hair length it's surely a cultural thing, probably originating when men had to cut their hair short in order to not have accidents when they worked in factories in the 1850-1950 industrial age in the west. It is perhaps not a coincidence that short haircuts on women became fashionable after WW1 when many women had worked in factories.
Nonsense. Men don't have to act a certain way, and neither do women.
That's true, of course. Men could all grow their hair long and women could all cut theirs short, but in reality it's the other way around in many cultures.
Studies about differences between men and women are just that - studies about differences. They usually don't find the mechanisms that cause the differences.
Men v.s. women ought to be fairly simple as long as we're dealing with untrained writers. Women use social words like pronouns and verbs about people more often than men. Women are also, arguably, slightly better writers than men on average because they make more of an effort in primary school.
Who needs advertising when you can sell the company for $16B? They'll just punt the founders and add in-stream/in-text ads related to the content of the text streams the user recently engaged in. Done.
The service apparently costs $1 per year with a free one-year trial. Assuming they can get those 450 million (and counting) to go through the trouble of entering a payment method they're going to be making hundreds of millions of dollars without having to hire lots of people to device clever snooping and ad-targeting schemes. Sounds like a surprisingly sound business to me, if they can get the enter payment method flow to work smoothly.
Apparently you're not one of the 400M global users certainly. However, I think the keyword there is "global"; it seems to be pretty prevalent in non-Western countries from what I can gather.
Yep, and presumably among teenagers and children in western countries, the ones who presumably hold the dagger that could kill any of the incumbent social networks.
Animals are actually an incredibly ineffective way of creating nutrients. Animal farming is really only energy efficient if you also use the animals as land clearing machines and fertilizer spreading machines like people used to do before the industrial era.
How come factory farms are the cheapest way of producing meat? To answer my own question: cheap energy. Petroleum is still cheap enough that we can turn it into tons of artificial fertilizer, spread that over enormous fields of maize and soy, feed the plants to animals and then eat the animals and their milk and eggs as if there was an endless supply of them.
Well, it's really China's imperative to do something about the monsters that they create. China shouldn't have to stop trading with North Korea, they should want to stop. Until we get to that point it won't matter much what the rest of the world thinks.
What does this mean exactly? Does it deny that AIDS exists? Does it deny that HIV leads to AIDS? Does it deny that non-gay people or non-Africans can get AIDS? Does it say it's all a government conspiracy and really caused by chemtrails?
One way or another, it doesn't sound like something that warrants debunking, but then again, I'm often surprised at just how stupid people can be.
It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:
AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.
HIV either does not exist, or exists and is harmless, or exists and is harmful and created by evil men in their evil laboratories but does not cause AIDS.
Chemtrails could totally cause AIDS, but more evidence is needed. In other words some dude on the internet needs to write a speculative blogpost that claims that chemtrails cause AIDS before we can say with certainty that it does.
If you think this is harmless stupidity, think again. IIRC there is at least one case of an HIV positive mother who refused to test her child. The child later died in an illness with symptoms like those of someone who has AIDS. The mother also died, naturally.