An alien civilization might use them for terraforming (or Xanthaforming) new homes.
My question is: Why would they terraform at all? Any civilization capable of meaningfully terraforming a planet is bound to be capable of not having to live on a planet or not having to care whether there is oxygen and atmospheric pressure on it.
Is it really? Save for the gulf stream reversing, most effects of global warming actually happen in a gradual fashion. No properly developed country should have any real problems in adapting to rising sea levels, hurricanes happening more often etc.
In all the discussions about global warming the poor countries tend to be the fucked ones (see TFA, f.i.). It seems to me that pooling large amounts of money to specifically provide for countermeasures in the poorer regions affected by global warming would be more effective in preventing 'catastrophes' than the current strategy.
Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that 'reduce carbon emissions!' spurs on technological development that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, but other than that, I see very little use for it.
Your three references are to completely different things.
Yes, that was kind of the point. I was trying to illustrate that public debt perhaps isn't the only metric that is useful in comparing countries. I do agree that private debt (and thus external debt and the NIIP) is a different matter.
As I understand it, all debt figures cited by the CIA World Factbook are public debt.
I wish I could find a credible source that has a strict definition of public debt and a ranking of countries based on that definition, but I can't. What we can agree on, I believe, is that pretty much all the first world countries are in a bit of a bind when it comes to the matters of debt and the solidity of their economies.
Well, I intentionally included three different appreciations of 'debt' to show that there is more than one way to look at it (one could argue that the NIIP is much more interesting that the other two). I'd say my three Wikipedia references trumped your 'no references at all'. Your initial statement was clearly a gross oversimplification of matters.
The CIA world factbook says this about their figure for US public debt: "note: data cover only what the United States Treasury denotes as "Debt Held by the Public," which includes all debt instruments issued by the Treasury that are owned by non-US Government entities; the data include Treasury debt held by foreign entities; the data exclude debt issued by individual US states, as well as intra-governmental debt; intra-governmental debt consists of Treasury borrowings from surpluses in the trusts for Federal Social Security, Federal Employees, Hospital Insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), Disability and Unemployment, and several other smaller trusts; if data for intra-government debt were added, "Gross Debt" would increase by about one-third of GDP"
As far as I can see, such discounting of the debt figure is not done for the other countries in the list, which skews the position of the US. I wouldn't know how such discounting would influence the positions of the EU-countries, but it seems only fair to perform it for either all or none of the countries in the list.
It is a very good feature, as it allows you to have sideloaded apps checked as well. Whatever you think of Google, they take their platforms and fundamentally improving them serious.
Yes, so many people overlook how easy and cheap it is to slap Android on pretty much anything with a screen.
I long for the days when consumer electronics are no longer held back by slow crappy OSD menu interfaces created from scratch. Although the apps by some of those companies prove they are still pretty damn effective at sucking hard in designing interfaces, at least the excuse of 'well, we had to write an operating system and the basics of a GUI for our TV first' will become a thing of the past.
The optimist in me even thinks that community created custom interfaces for consumer electronics would be a possibility. It should lead to power usability heaven.
I think your (very justified) frustration made you miss the sarcasm in my post. We very much agree on the shortsightedness of humans when it comes to paying taxes.
I wonder what percentage of Americans would favor pleasing the gods by sacrificing a convict each month versus paying more taxes to build storm surges. Considering the direction in which republican 'logic' is shifting, it might actually be a pretty impressive percentage by 2020;-)
Well, to be fair, it took about 2000 dead bodies in 1953 before the Netherlands built the Delta Works, so I guess NY just has to wait for that to happen.
That's how government spending should work, right? You should only want to pay for it after lots of people have died?
It's pretty hard to hang out with somebody and not know they're a drug dealer. It's pretty easy to have 400 'friends' on a social network and have no fucking idea where they currently live, work or how they spend their days.
I'm not so sure about the imminent demise of the spinning platter. Homemade video (didn't GoPro release a 1080p60-cam recently?) and high-res photo's are still on the rise and the existing data isn't going anywhere. Well, the stuff that people really care about, at least. I wouldn't trust any childhood memories to the cloud.
Of course, other high data density technologies (which flash is not, or so I've been told) could supplant the spinning platter. I'm not aware of any commercially viable ones, though.
Also, I'm not sure what your definition of a 'killer mail client' is, but Windows Mobile was equally ruling that world for an even longer time.
People ask me why I have a negative stance towards Apple and its products. It is because of people like the parent poster: people that have no clue how technological development has progressed and have probably derided many an early adopter in the past ("Hmph, I just want my phone to make calls!"), yet now boast with technologically ancient features that are supposedly something exceptional.
I haven't read any of the papers concerning this matter, so in that sense I am not adding a lot to this discussion. I just believe that at some point in our future it ought to be possible to move away from colored pencils and pieces of paper as a means of voting.
We shouldn't have to rely on government issued machines or corruptible humans counting bits of paper. We should strive for a system in which everybody can count and verify the votes of an election, if they so please.
I'm no distributed computing expert, but my gut feeling is that it is not beyond the realms of possibility to create a secure system that allows everybody to submit their vote from their home (using some kind of token) and have their machine be a peer of a network that continuously propagates the (anonimized) voting results throughout.
Seconded, but: only the 'fine point' version. They will not smudge at all. I recently found a couple of Bic Clic 'fine point'-pens that I hadn't used in 14 years. Still work perfectly.
The gravity of the effects of viruses is not something that will increase due to evolutionary pressure.
In fact, most viruses have very little use for their host dying or functioning particularly badly. After all, a dead host is pretty bad at spreading the viral RNA or at least worse than one walking around. That is why Ebola is such a fail of a virus and viruses with mild effects are such a success (when looking at population count and age). Some would point to HIV as having really bad effects on the host and being really successful, but the reality is that it's a very young virus and that if no countermeasures would be developed against it, it would have very little future (because pretty much all humans would eventually be dead). Its probable ancestor SIV is much more successful exactly because it generally has very little adverse effect its hosts.
Bacteria are much more resilient and generally have fewer issues in spreading themselves or even reproducing out of host bodies. Most viruses deteriorate pretty quickly outside of a host body (and out of water, see: Virus survival in the environment... ), whereas bacteria can linger on non-organic materials for long times. They have fewer problems with a malfunctioning or dead host, although having their host work for them and collecting all the food is still a pretty sensible strategy.
You know, bridges are actually one of the few places where this might make sense.
Realistically though: "The Netherlands is moving forward with plans to build 'smart' highways" and "The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed" aren't really the same.
This is where I stopped taking TFA seriously:
"One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave," the designer behind the concept, Daan Roosegaarde
I'd have given it to one of the last two as they actually seem to be promising for improving the quality of life, but I guess 'glow in the dark smart highways' sounds better and more designy. Well, it got 'em on Slashdot..
Yeah, well I don't. I don't and I don't want to have to buy one and I don't want to have to carry one and charge one and sync one.
Yes, exactly. It's simply egocentric and flawed to say "I'd just buy an MP3 player" - as if there is any merit in reason to that statement.
I store offline maps, offline music and offline documents on my 2-year old 32GB microSD card. This means that I always have a PND, an MP3 player and a sizeable USB-stick with me. Reading data off it is easy, always possible and a lot more power-efficient than streaming it from the cloud.
I've even (temporarily, admittedly) used an old 8GB microSD card in an SD adapter as a replacement in a camera (and I'm pretty sure the 32GB will have a similar function in the future). The versatility of dirt cheap internationally standardized little slabs of large amounts of solid state memory is just amazing.
Sure, having an SD slot has some drawbacks, but not having one is unnecessarily stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
An alien civilization might use them for terraforming (or Xanthaforming) new homes.
My question is: Why would they terraform at all?
Any civilization capable of meaningfully terraforming a planet is bound to be capable of not having to live on a planet or not having to care whether there is oxygen and atmospheric pressure on it.
The overall effect is quite undesirable
Is it really?
Save for the gulf stream reversing, most effects of global warming actually happen in a gradual fashion. No properly developed country should have any real problems in adapting to rising sea levels, hurricanes happening more often etc.
In all the discussions about global warming the poor countries tend to be the fucked ones (see TFA, f.i.). It seems to me that pooling large amounts of money to specifically provide for countermeasures in the poorer regions affected by global warming would be more effective in preventing 'catastrophes' than the current strategy.
Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that 'reduce carbon emissions!' spurs on technological development that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, but other than that, I see very little use for it.
"As it turned out, the man now in custody turned in his own DNA, resulting in a 100% match."
If he was really the guy who did it: Was he wondering whether the DNA-research would work? Why not just turn himself in?
Your three references are to completely different things.
Yes, that was kind of the point. I was trying to illustrate that public debt perhaps isn't the only metric that is useful in comparing countries. I do agree that private debt (and thus external debt and the NIIP) is a different matter.
As I understand it, all debt figures cited by the CIA World Factbook are public debt.
Well, there are apparently a lot of definitions of public debt used in the listing. Just look at the differences between the 'notes':
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2186.html
I wish I could find a credible source that has a strict definition of public debt and a ranking of countries based on that definition, but I can't. What we can agree on, I believe, is that pretty much all the first world countries are in a bit of a bind when it comes to the matters of debt and the solidity of their economies.
Well, I intentionally included three different appreciations of 'debt' to show that there is more than one way to look at it (one could argue that the NIIP is much more interesting that the other two). I'd say my three Wikipedia references trumped your 'no references at all'. Your initial statement was clearly a gross oversimplification of matters.
The CIA world factbook says this about their figure for US public debt:
"note: data cover only what the United States Treasury denotes as "Debt Held by the Public," which includes all debt instruments issued by the Treasury that are owned by non-US Government entities; the data include Treasury debt held by foreign entities; the data exclude debt issued by individual US states, as well as intra-governmental debt; intra-governmental debt consists of Treasury borrowings from surpluses in the trusts for Federal Social Security, Federal Employees, Hospital Insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), Disability and Unemployment, and several other smaller trusts; if data for intra-government debt were added, "Gross Debt" would increase by about one-third of GDP"
As far as I can see, such discounting of the debt figure is not done for the other countries in the list, which skews the position of the US. I wouldn't know how such discounting would influence the positions of the EU-countries, but it seems only fair to perform it for either all or none of the countries in the list.
Wrong. As of 2011, US public debt was at >100% of its GDP, almost putting it in the top ten:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
If you look at external debt, it's a different picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
If you cancel out what all the countries owe each other, it becomes even more interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position
Actually..
http://www.androidauthority.com/android-4-2-verify-apps-security-feature-explained-by-google-131514/
It is a very good feature, as it allows you to have sideloaded apps checked as well. Whatever you think of Google, they take their platforms and fundamentally improving them serious.
Not only do you have to worry about processors, screen ratio, resolution and anything else hardware related
Don't even think about going into web development. You'd probably burst into flames.
Yes, so many people overlook how easy and cheap it is to slap Android on pretty much anything with a screen.
I long for the days when consumer electronics are no longer held back by slow crappy OSD menu interfaces created from scratch. Although the apps by some of those companies prove they are still pretty damn effective at sucking hard in designing interfaces, at least the excuse of 'well, we had to write an operating system and the basics of a GUI for our TV first' will become a thing of the past.
The optimist in me even thinks that community created custom interfaces for consumer electronics would be a possibility. It should lead to power usability heaven.
Undoing false mod. +1 Funny intended.
Agreed. The producers of LA Noire can pretty much do it realtime:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZY7RYCsE9KQ#t=103s
I'd say a static model of a full body shouldn't last 15 minutes. Probably a matter of cost.
I think Polaroid isn't doing too well these days.
Storm surge barriers. I meant storm surge barriers.
Who the hell builds storm surges?
I think your (very justified) frustration made you miss the sarcasm in my post. We very much agree on the shortsightedness of humans when it comes to paying taxes.
I wonder what percentage of Americans would favor pleasing the gods by sacrificing a convict each month versus paying more taxes to build storm surges. Considering the direction in which republican 'logic' is shifting, it might actually be a pretty impressive percentage by 2020 ;-)
Well, to be fair, it took about 2000 dead bodies in 1953 before the Netherlands built the Delta Works, so I guess NY just has to wait for that to happen.
That's how government spending should work, right? You should only want to pay for it after lots of people have died?
It's pretty hard to hang out with somebody and not know they're a drug dealer.
It's pretty easy to have 400 'friends' on a social network and have no fucking idea where they currently live, work or how they spend their days.
Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
And Toshiba has only about 10% of the market: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-seagate-toshiba-hdd-hard-drives,17227.html
I'm not so sure about the imminent demise of the spinning platter. Homemade video (didn't GoPro release a 1080p60-cam recently?) and high-res photo's are still on the rise and the existing data isn't going anywhere. Well, the stuff that people really care about, at least. I wouldn't trust any childhood memories to the cloud.
Of course, other high data density technologies (which flash is not, or so I've been told) could supplant the spinning platter. I'm not aware of any commercially viable ones, though.
Do you remember web browsers on cell phones before the iPhone? WAP nightmares on T9 candybar phones.
Wrong. Your memory of history is incorrect. Windows Mobile ruled that world 4 years before the first iPhone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mobile#History (WinMo in 2003).
Also, I'm not sure what your definition of a 'killer mail client' is, but Windows Mobile was equally ruling that world for an even longer time.
People ask me why I have a negative stance towards Apple and its products. It is because of people like the parent poster: people that have no clue how technological development has progressed and have probably derided many an early adopter in the past ("Hmph, I just want my phone to make calls!"), yet now boast with technologically ancient features that are supposedly something exceptional.
Good point. Again, I'm not an expert on this subject, but it seems that such concerns have been looked into scientifically:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=coercion+voting
I haven't read any of the papers concerning this matter, so in that sense I am not adding a lot to this discussion. I just believe that at some point in our future it ought to be possible to move away from colored pencils and pieces of paper as a means of voting.
We should have distributed vote administration.
We shouldn't have to rely on government issued machines or corruptible humans counting bits of paper. We should strive for a system in which everybody can count and verify the votes of an election, if they so please.
I'm no distributed computing expert, but my gut feeling is that it is not beyond the realms of possibility to create a secure system that allows everybody to submit their vote from their home (using some kind of token) and have their machine be a peer of a network that continuously propagates the (anonimized) voting results throughout.
Seconded, but: only the 'fine point' version. They will not smudge at all.
I recently found a couple of Bic Clic 'fine point'-pens that I hadn't used in 14 years. Still work perfectly.
The gravity of the effects of viruses is not something that will increase due to evolutionary pressure.
In fact, most viruses have very little use for their host dying or functioning particularly badly. After all, a dead host is pretty bad at spreading the viral RNA or at least worse than one walking around. That is why Ebola is such a fail of a virus and viruses with mild effects are such a success (when looking at population count and age).
Some would point to HIV as having really bad effects on the host and being really successful, but the reality is that it's a very young virus and that if no countermeasures would be developed against it, it would have very little future (because pretty much all humans would eventually be dead). Its probable ancestor SIV is much more successful exactly because it generally has very little adverse effect its hosts.
Bacteria are much more resilient and generally have fewer issues in spreading themselves or even reproducing out of host bodies. Most viruses deteriorate pretty quickly outside of a host body (and out of water, see: Virus survival in the environment ... ), whereas bacteria can linger on non-organic materials for long times. They have fewer problems with a malfunctioning or dead host, although having their host work for them and collecting all the food is still a pretty sensible strategy.
You know, bridges are actually one of the few places where this might make sense.
Realistically though:
"The Netherlands is moving forward with plans to build 'smart' highways" and "The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed" aren't really the same.
This is where I stopped taking TFA seriously:
"One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave," the designer behind the concept, Daan Roosegaarde
(my emphasis)
Apparently, this visionary had to compete with 6 other entries: http://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/finalists/future_concepts/
I'd have given it to one of the last two as they actually seem to be promising for improving the quality of life, but I guess 'glow in the dark smart highways' sounds better and more designy.
Well, it got 'em on Slashdot..
Yeah, well I don't. I don't and I don't want to have to buy one and I don't want to have to carry one and charge one and sync one.
Yes, exactly. It's simply egocentric and flawed to say "I'd just buy an MP3 player" - as if there is any merit in reason to that statement.
I store offline maps, offline music and offline documents on my 2-year old 32GB microSD card. This means that I always have a PND, an MP3 player and a sizeable USB-stick with me. Reading data off it is easy, always possible and a lot more power-efficient than streaming it from the cloud.
I've even (temporarily, admittedly) used an old 8GB microSD card in an SD adapter as a replacement in a camera (and I'm pretty sure the 32GB will have a similar function in the future). The versatility of dirt cheap internationally standardized little slabs of large amounts of solid state memory is just amazing.
Sure, having an SD slot has some drawbacks, but not having one is unnecessarily stupid.
You assume that such a thing does not exist yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhRZSifQe98
At least the Star Trek one is animated:
http://www.mwmw.com/bbradley/SHG/geek/stream.html (warning: sound - and an eyesore in general)