Who said it would be expensive? Machines that replace humans tend to save money. A drug detector doesn't need to eat or feed its family. A drug detective tends to want to earn 50k+ a year. Out of all measures proposed by government to stop terrorism (oh, and drugs), this seems like one of the more cost effective.
It would still make more sense to compensate bomb victims with money than by going to foreign countries and blowing up people there, which seems to be the current standard course of action.
Well, anyone who has a friend or a relative with some resources could theoretically use the internet to tell faraway relatives that the kids are eating dirt and ask for any little bit of assistance that they could get.
The way they're actually doing this is by using simple GSM phones with voice and text. Mobile phone penetration is close to 50% in Africa as a whole and growing rapidly, so most people either own a phone or are able to borrow one if they need to make an important call or send an important text message.
It's hard to say when these people will decide to get smartphones so that Zuckerberg can gather them. In the grand scheme of things an iPhone 5S or a Galaxy Note 3 is only marginally more useful than an old GSM phone, so I guess it could take a while.
If we're picking champions Symbian has probably done more for humanity than any other operating system in terms of saving lives and helping people make important connections.
It's not impossible to fork Android. It's nearly impossible to fork Android and grow a market share, even if you're a big corporation with lots of cash to spend. And Google is making harder with every new update.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.
That Ars article doesn't seem to understand the difference between the OS and the applications that are bundled with it by the manufacturer.
Did you read the article? Put simply, Google has set up a system where it is impossible to fork Android and grow a market share. That's fully within their rights to do, but let's not pretend that Google is working on a free mobile OS.
Google is working on an OS that will prevent total and utter dominance by Apple. A worthy goal IMO since a duopoly is vastly better than a monopoly.
One of the most enlightening books I ever read was Peter Woit's crticicism of string theory The problem with modern physics is that it now takes so long to learn what has gone before that you are past your productivity peak by the time you have the tools needed to be able to contribute. Put very simply - mankind is close to the limit of what we can work out. We need either a genius way further out on the curve than Einstein or Hawkins (who doesn't want to just become an investment banker...) or we need an extrordinarily lucky break. We won't be getting better data than the LHC has provided for another century,
We won't get better data than the LHC will continue to provide during the next decade or so, not until China one-ups everyone with a more powerful machine. You know it's bound to happen sooner or later.
Maybe some of that data will help make the problem simpler.
The data of all registered chess players reflects this pretty well. Some can become great players in as little as 3000 hours, while others never reach above good no matter how many tens of thousands of hours they put in.
Your brother sounds like the physics equivalent of someone who could become a chess grand master in 2500 hours.
None of this is to say that it is genetic or even that we are born with talent. All it proves is that people are differently talented at a fairly young age.
Didn't the article say that they stole a ton off usernames and passwords?
You could try to use those username-password combinations as your dictionary and try to connect to a server that you believe provides access to the source... All it takes is one developer with source access who's sloppy with his passwords.
The teacher that I had from age 10 to 12 was closing in on retirement and had taught thousands of students. She once told me I was one of the 5% (or whatever, can't remember her wording) most talented math students she had had. I dreaded math class. My teacher was not surprised. For all I know most of the other top 5% students dreaded it too.
Don't get me wrong, I loved using math to figure out the answer to interesting questions. I'd do that on a Saturday if I happened to think of something. But that's not math class. Math class is a long march through a problem set that's been designed so that 99% of students will be able to march through 50% of the problems in the designated time. It's a boring, strenuous exercise is drudgery. It's also good for you, of course, because it teaches you about hard intellectual work and about putting in an effort even when you don't really want to. Those are very useful skills and should be taught, in moderation.
So what about programming? Well, programming would basically be a second math class. It would be a set of coding exercises designed so that 99% of students could march through 50% of the exercises in the designated time. You know the nerdy kid who spends his Saturday morning coding? He would probably dread programming class.
Maybe math teachers should be required to teach super basic algorithms like x=1 x=2*x x=2*x... That might be a useful and interesting break from the march through the problem set.
Teaching basic software engineering to all students? Please don't.
Actually now that I think of it, here is how it would play out: The nerdy kid would solve the coding problems, then he would make several different variations of the solutions be renaming variables and changing the order of some of the lines of code and then he would email different solutions to his classmates (so that it looks like they'd been made by different students) in exchange for less bullying.
How much does it cost to save a unit of energy of a certain type (heat, electricity, fuel)? How much does it cost to produce a unit of energy of the same type?
Don't be surprised if there's an order of magnitude difference in cost, and not in the direction that you might expect.
An empire that has nowhere to expand can only contract and fall, at least in the long run.
I think the US empire probably peaked in the late 1990's at the end of a 10-15 year long time when it could expand easily and relatively peacefully without any interference from the rest of the world which was largely taken by surprise by the fall of the Soviet Union. Now Russia, although still relatively poor, is arming itself like there's no tomorrow (Russia recently carried out its second or third largest military exercise ever, including the ones during the Soviet era!) and China has been growing its economy and influence at double digit percentages for years. It is only natural that US leaders and planners are becoming increasingly paranoid about signs that allies of the empire are planning to go their own way or defect to the other side or sides.
Right now the US is still by far the best choice for countries to align themselves with, so this is likely to go on for a long time.
That would be a better way than the way most stores work now.
I think a lot of apps ask a minority of their users, for example 10%, for ratings. That way most users aren't annoyed by it. You've probably used lots of apps that ask for ratings unbeknownst to you because you weren't one of the 10%. That percentage could then be lowered over time as the rating stabilizes at a high level, so for a mature app it may only be 5% who get asked to rate.
My understanding i that the main problems tend to be:
1. Modern digital signalling performs significantly worse than old analog signalling. Yes, seriously. 2. A single train that spends a few seconds too many at each stop can easily disrupt the whole subway line much like a single bad driver on the highway can cause a traffic jam.
The modern solution to that is to buy train sets that are half as long as the platforms. That way you can run full length trains during normal hours and half length trains when demand is expected to be low.
Corporations don't really want to be the government analog, corporations just want peace in their primary business areas so that they can do business and make money. If the incumbent government leaves corporations will ally themselves with whoever is ready to fill its place, be it private security companies, or druglords, or motorcycle gangs.
I think they look at the complete picture and make their best guess based on all the evidence that they have and the best models that they have. The species concept is also inherently fuzzy. I'm not a biologist, but I've been told it can be fairly hard to tell if two living organisms are of the same species or not. Obviously, we should not expect perfect certainty about individuals that died 2 million years ago.
Scientists never really know anything, because knowing something with full certainty is an absurd idea. When it comes to the distant past our best hope is to be able to paint a rough picture. Of course, advances in chemistry and physics may make it possible to analyze fossils at the molecular and atomic level and find out all sorts of amazing things about them that were previously thought impossible, but even then the whole detailed picture will always elude science.
Creationists love this, but the problem with biblical creationism and Islamic creationism is that if there was a global flood 4000 years ago there would still be a global flood today, because there is nowhere for the water to go. Also, the moon missions would have crashed into the firmament that holds the flood gates to the waters beyond when they orbited the moon since the moon is attached to the firmament. It's funny that there are grown men that hold on to early iron age beliefs about the cosmos...
People have traveled long distances for thousands of years and the way to do it has always been by boat. It turns out that rowing is typically more effective than walking and horseback riding even if the land route is shorter. This is especially true if you assume that the main purpose of the trip is to carry cargo (or loot...).
If you were a young man born and raised near the coast in the bronze age odds are you would end up travelling hundreds of kilometers/miles from home at least once in your life, perhaps as an oarsman for someone who was wealthy enough to own a small boat.
Now for some of my own speculation, I would hypothesize that once sailing was invented and spread across Europe it would have become increasingly unprofitable to row, which then meant that the barrier to entry into meaningful boat ownership would have been raised significantly (a small and simple row boat v.s. a large and complex sail boat) to the point where the only ones travelling long distance were people who were specializing in sailing and trade. It seems reasonable to assume that the average coastal-dwelling man in the bronze age saw more travel than the average coastal-dwelling man in the middle ages. Of course, if you take into account that populations spread further inland between the bronze age and the middle ages it becomes obvious that people must have become more stationary.
That said, my personal experience running a free app with banner ads on Android has been that I earn about $1.00 per 1000 ad impressions, which is roughly the normal rate for banner ads on iOS from what I've been told.
My users are mostly from northern Europe, USA and Canada, which are of course income regions. Maybe that explains why my app is doing okay even though it's and Android app.
Devices running iOS sell at a premium, to people who don't mind paying more for goods they consider superior. Of course people with extra money will be able to buy more advertised products! People who are more cost-conscious will tend to gravitate to Android, and will also likely be more wary of advertising.
True, in addition to that Apple does a lot to maintain the image in the minds of the customers that the iPhone is the ultimate smartphone and that it is the default and correct choice for high income and upper medium income people.
There is no way that Google could do the same for Android in general, but Google could make a premium brand of Android devices and try to market those. By premium I don't mean something like their reasonably priced Nexus series of devices, those are wonderful in terms of value for money, but they don't exactly send a message of being the default device for high income people. You need something a lot shinier and somewhat more unreasonably priced.
Either way, the study just confirms something that most people already knew via anecdote or stereotype: iOS users buy into advertising / marketing at a higher rate than other people.
Draw your own conclusions and discuss.
It's simpler than that. Both iOS and Android users buy into advertisement, click on ads, make purchases, etc. The difference is that iOS users are wealthier than Android users on average and therefore spend more money. Apple completely dominates the high-income customer segment of the smartphone market.
Enthusiasm is a great start, but enthusiasm alone has a divisive effect on groups of intelligent and creative people. You get lots of little groups going off and inventing incompatible stuff.
Cash has a cohesive effect on groups of intelligent and creative people. With cash you can get people to work in the same direction even though they'd prefer to work on their pet projects.
There are probably some exceptions to the rule where people stick together and focus on a single project, but I bet most of them also have cash rewards in some indirect form.
Great idea, now all we need is to found a nation based on Raspberry Pi ownership and/or the ability to host your own servers for email and other communication, outlaw communication with foreigners, and then we should be all set!
The world could really use someone or some corporation with lots of resources and no ties to government to fund, and fund indefinitely, an effort at remaking the internet from the ground up. I just can't think of who or what that someone is.
Most people who actively use it seem to be using it as a replacement for Skype. That's a pretty big market in terms of users, so I'd guess there are probably tens of millions of people actively using G+.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said it would be expensive? Machines that replace humans tend to save money. A drug detector doesn't need to eat or feed its family. A drug detective tends to want to earn 50k+ a year. Out of all measures proposed by government to stop terrorism (oh, and drugs), this seems like one of the more cost effective.
It would still make more sense to compensate bomb victims with money than by going to foreign countries and blowing up people there, which seems to be the current standard course of action.
I've we're going to be ridiculously nerdy and arbitrary we could all just just use seconds since the start of 1970.
"When will you arrive?
"I'll be there at 1383.408 megaseconds. I'll call you in case I'm more than a kilosecond late."
Well, anyone who has a friend or a relative with some resources could theoretically use the internet to tell faraway relatives that the kids are eating dirt and ask for any little bit of assistance that they could get.
The way they're actually doing this is by using simple GSM phones with voice and text. Mobile phone penetration is close to 50% in Africa as a whole and growing rapidly, so most people either own a phone or are able to borrow one if they need to make an important call or send an important text message.
It's hard to say when these people will decide to get smartphones so that Zuckerberg can gather them. In the grand scheme of things an iPhone 5S or a Galaxy Note 3 is only marginally more useful than an old GSM phone, so I guess it could take a while.
If we're picking champions Symbian has probably done more for humanity than any other operating system in terms of saving lives and helping people make important connections.
It's not impossible to fork Android. It's nearly impossible to fork Android and grow a market share, even if you're a big corporation with lots of cash to spend. And Google is making harder with every new update.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.
That Ars article doesn't seem to understand the difference between the OS and the applications that are bundled with it by the manufacturer.
Did you read the article? Put simply, Google has set up a system where it is impossible to fork Android and grow a market share. That's fully within their rights to do, but let's not pretend that Google is working on a free mobile OS.
Google is working on an OS that will prevent total and utter dominance by Apple. A worthy goal IMO since a duopoly is vastly better than a monopoly.
One of the most enlightening books I ever read was Peter Woit's crticicism of string theory The problem with modern physics is that it now takes so long to learn what has gone before that you are past your productivity peak by the time you have the tools needed to be able to contribute. Put very simply - mankind is close to the limit of what we can work out. We need either a genius way further out on the curve than Einstein or Hawkins (who doesn't want to just become an investment banker...) or we need an extrordinarily lucky break. We won't be getting better data than the LHC has provided for another century,
We won't get better data than the LHC will continue to provide during the next decade or so, not until China one-ups everyone with a more powerful machine. You know it's bound to happen sooner or later.
Maybe some of that data will help make the problem simpler.
The data of all registered chess players reflects this pretty well. Some can become great players in as little as 3000 hours, while others never reach above good no matter how many tens of thousands of hours they put in.
Your brother sounds like the physics equivalent of someone who could become a chess grand master in 2500 hours.
None of this is to say that it is genetic or even that we are born with talent. All it proves is that people are differently talented at a fairly young age.
Yes, but now that the Photoshop source is leaked they could just copy-paste the CMYK code into their project and hit compile.
Didn't the article say that they stole a ton off usernames and passwords?
You could try to use those username-password combinations as your dictionary and try to connect to a server that you believe provides access to the source... All it takes is one developer with source access who's sloppy with his passwords.
Does anyone remember how school was?
The teacher that I had from age 10 to 12 was closing in on retirement and had taught thousands of students. She once told me I was one of the 5% (or whatever, can't remember her wording) most talented math students she had had. I dreaded math class. My teacher was not surprised. For all I know most of the other top 5% students dreaded it too.
Don't get me wrong, I loved using math to figure out the answer to interesting questions. I'd do that on a Saturday if I happened to think of something. But that's not math class. Math class is a long march through a problem set that's been designed so that 99% of students will be able to march through 50% of the problems in the designated time. It's a boring, strenuous exercise is drudgery. It's also good for you, of course, because it teaches you about hard intellectual work and about putting in an effort even when you don't really want to. Those are very useful skills and should be taught, in moderation.
So what about programming? Well, programming would basically be a second math class. It would be a set of coding exercises designed so that 99% of students could march through 50% of the exercises in the designated time. You know the nerdy kid who spends his Saturday morning coding? He would probably dread programming class.
Maybe math teachers should be required to teach super basic algorithms like ...
x=1
x=2*x
x=2*x
That might be a useful and interesting break from the march through the problem set.
Teaching basic software engineering to all students? Please don't.
Actually now that I think of it, here is how it would play out: The nerdy kid would solve the coding problems, then he would make several different variations of the solutions be renaming variables and changing the order of some of the lines of code and then he would email different solutions to his classmates (so that it looks like they'd been made by different students) in exchange for less bullying.
How much does it cost to save a unit of energy of a certain type (heat, electricity, fuel)? How much does it cost to produce a unit of energy of the same type?
Don't be surprised if there's an order of magnitude difference in cost, and not in the direction that you might expect.
An empire that has nowhere to expand can only contract and fall, at least in the long run.
I think the US empire probably peaked in the late 1990's at the end of a 10-15 year long time when it could expand easily and relatively peacefully without any interference from the rest of the world which was largely taken by surprise by the fall of the Soviet Union. Now Russia, although still relatively poor, is arming itself like there's no tomorrow (Russia recently carried out its second or third largest military exercise ever, including the ones during the Soviet era!) and China has been growing its economy and influence at double digit percentages for years. It is only natural that US leaders and planners are becoming increasingly paranoid about signs that allies of the empire are planning to go their own way or defect to the other side or sides.
Right now the US is still by far the best choice for countries to align themselves with, so this is likely to go on for a long time.
That would be a better way than the way most stores work now.
I think a lot of apps ask a minority of their users, for example 10%, for ratings. That way most users aren't annoyed by it. You've probably used lots of apps that ask for ratings unbeknownst to you because you weren't one of the 10%. That percentage could then be lowered over time as the rating stabilizes at a high level, so for a mature app it may only be 5% who get asked to rate.
My understanding i that the main problems tend to be:
1. Modern digital signalling performs significantly worse than old analog signalling. Yes, seriously.
2. A single train that spends a few seconds too many at each stop can easily disrupt the whole subway line much like a single bad driver on the highway can cause a traffic jam.
The modern solution to that is to buy train sets that are half as long as the platforms. That way you can run full length trains during normal hours and half length trains when demand is expected to be low.
Corporations don't really want to be the government analog, corporations just want peace in their primary business areas so that they can do business and make money. If the incumbent government leaves corporations will ally themselves with whoever is ready to fill its place, be it private security companies, or druglords, or motorcycle gangs.
I think they look at the complete picture and make their best guess based on all the evidence that they have and the best models that they have. The species concept is also inherently fuzzy. I'm not a biologist, but I've been told it can be fairly hard to tell if two living organisms are of the same species or not. Obviously, we should not expect perfect certainty about individuals that died 2 million years ago.
Scientists never really know anything, because knowing something with full certainty is an absurd idea. When it comes to the distant past our best hope is to be able to paint a rough picture. Of course, advances in chemistry and physics may make it possible to analyze fossils at the molecular and atomic level and find out all sorts of amazing things about them that were previously thought impossible, but even then the whole detailed picture will always elude science.
Creationists love this, but the problem with biblical creationism and Islamic creationism is that if there was a global flood 4000 years ago there would still be a global flood today, because there is nowhere for the water to go. Also, the moon missions would have crashed into the firmament that holds the flood gates to the waters beyond when they orbited the moon since the moon is attached to the firmament. It's funny that there are grown men that hold on to early iron age beliefs about the cosmos...
People have traveled long distances for thousands of years and the way to do it has always been by boat. It turns out that rowing is typically more effective than walking and horseback riding even if the land route is shorter. This is especially true if you assume that the main purpose of the trip is to carry cargo (or loot...).
If you were a young man born and raised near the coast in the bronze age odds are you would end up travelling hundreds of kilometers/miles from home at least once in your life, perhaps as an oarsman for someone who was wealthy enough to own a small boat.
Now for some of my own speculation, I would hypothesize that once sailing was invented and spread across Europe it would have become increasingly unprofitable to row, which then meant that the barrier to entry into meaningful boat ownership would have been raised significantly (a small and simple row boat v.s. a large and complex sail boat) to the point where the only ones travelling long distance were people who were specializing in sailing and trade. It seems reasonable to assume that the average coastal-dwelling man in the bronze age saw more travel than the average coastal-dwelling man in the middle ages. Of course, if you take into account that populations spread further inland between the bronze age and the middle ages it becomes obvious that people must have become more stationary.
That said, my personal experience running a free app with banner ads on Android has been that I earn about $1.00 per 1000 ad impressions, which is roughly the normal rate for banner ads on iOS from what I've been told.
My users are mostly from northern Europe, USA and Canada, which are of course income regions. Maybe that explains why my app is doing okay even though it's and Android app.
Devices running iOS sell at a premium, to people who don't mind paying more for goods they consider superior. Of course people with extra money will be able to buy more advertised products! People who are more cost-conscious will tend to gravitate to Android, and will also likely be more wary of advertising.
True, in addition to that Apple does a lot to maintain the image in the minds of the customers that the iPhone is the ultimate smartphone and that it is the default and correct choice for high income and upper medium income people.
There is no way that Google could do the same for Android in general, but Google could make a premium brand of Android devices and try to market those. By premium I don't mean something like their reasonably priced Nexus series of devices, those are wonderful in terms of value for money, but they don't exactly send a message of being the default device for high income people. You need something a lot shinier and somewhat more unreasonably priced.
Either way, the study just confirms something that most people already knew via anecdote or stereotype: iOS users buy into advertising / marketing at a higher rate than other people.
Draw your own conclusions and discuss.
It's simpler than that. Both iOS and Android users buy into advertisement, click on ads, make purchases, etc. The difference is that iOS users are wealthier than Android users on average and therefore spend more money. Apple completely dominates the high-income customer segment of the smartphone market.
Enthusiasm is a great start, but enthusiasm alone has a divisive effect on groups of intelligent and creative people. You get lots of little groups going off and inventing incompatible stuff.
Cash has a cohesive effect on groups of intelligent and creative people. With cash you can get people to work in the same direction even though they'd prefer to work on their pet projects.
There are probably some exceptions to the rule where people stick together and focus on a single project, but I bet most of them also have cash rewards in some indirect form.
Great idea, now all we need is to found a nation based on Raspberry Pi ownership and/or the ability to host your own servers for email and other communication, outlaw communication with foreigners, and then we should be all set!
The world could really use someone or some corporation with lots of resources and no ties to government to fund, and fund indefinitely, an effort at remaking the internet from the ground up. I just can't think of who or what that someone is.
Trying to do it yourself is pointless.
Most people who actively use it seem to be using it as a replacement for Skype. That's a pretty big market in terms of users, so I'd guess there are probably tens of millions of people actively using G+.