I've been at places where managers get a variation on this lovely idea: Hey, maybe you would be more careful coders if you had to do your own testing. You're all so sloppy!
Oddly enough, this is mostly from non-coders, or folks without technical acumen.
Here's the deal: There ARE coders that claim to not make mistakes, and create bug-free code. Those are known as inexperienced or self-deluded coders, or folks only making one-off projects negotiating exact terms that make it not REALLY programming so much as configuring.
Even just from a simple level as just writing down words, if you've ever written a work longer than a couple of paragraphs, you'll virtually always reach a point where there's some subtle or stupid mistake you make without noticing it. Even VERY experienced journalists and writers need proofreaders on any serious project.
It's not a matter of taking your work seriously, or being unable to face responsibility - you're always going to be blind to the flaws in your own code, and although testing crews ARE expensive - they exist for many, MANY important reasons. They're cheaper than the same churn without a proper quality process. Sure, some of that effort may be being duplicated, or used badly - but few possibilities would be worse than expecting everyone to 'man up' and expect bug count to go down.
In other words - certainly, I can test my own code if you'd like, but I'm a VERY expensive testing staff member, and my perspective is going to cause me to overlook a lot of things - since it already 'makes sense' to me and I won't spot the inconsistencies a percent of the time.
The hard part is the philosophy. Acting/special effects/costumes/lighting/etc. are certainly important - but the key to it actually being a good Twilight Zone is that it's exploring a twist in philosophy.
It's not supposed to be horror, grimdark, author-insert, perspective writing, or anything like that - it's a show about exploring philosophy and implications You can certainly use tropes from other genres to get TO your philosophy, but if you're not exploring and really playing with the concepts, you're not really doing a proper twilight zone.
Jordan Peele is actually farily appropriate in my odd mind - he's got a nice twist to his comedy that might work well. Perhaps not just like Rod Serling or anything - but worth exploring. The Orville ended up being a good exploration of Star Trek concepts, also from a comedy director - so I'll give this a chance!
There's a big problem with 'people' in general - they won't learn any lesson you want to teach them, as a population, no matter how simple, or stupid the thing you're trying to correct.
At a basic psychological level, we sometimes get the urge to correct them at large - a lot of road rage is effectively this, where you try and interfere with a rude driver to 'teach them a lesson'. It virtually never actually works.
You can't fix phone-use deaths by telling people it's bad, or showing them the effects of how distracting it is to functionally driving. If you try and implement technological features that make it annoying to use the phone while driving, most folks will disable this, taking great pains to do so.
It's not even that people think that they're immune to distraction, or even that they don't think it's dangerous - folks just don't like driving, and they like/need their phones, and even with death and huge fines as consequences, they'll do the 'bad thing' on statistically overwhelming scale.
The better fix is to automate driving so that folks can do most anything and not have that be a safety factor.
It's a shell linking audio/video codecs (which still exist) to a simple set of video controls, perhaps with some mostly useless cruft, but it did a decent job.
It definitely wasn't anywhere near the best player - but when you went to a random PC, you could be sure that most common videos would play.
Why would you remove that as a minimal component on PCs? Browsers are OK - but when you're going for a presentation on a random PC, there's all kinds of ways those can crap out in ways that a simple default video player would be fine.
Seems a very dumb thing to remove, if you want PCs to be useful general devices world-wide.
And note - probably less than 2% of your user base is going to go onto the 'Windows Store' to try and get ANYTHING to fix this shortcoming. Attempting to profit from your own manufactured problem is not going to pay off in this case, compared to what it's costing you in terms of basic capability.
Yeah - that's what the frontal lobe DOES, along with giving us the ability to imagine and plan. It largely suppresses the activation of other parts of the brain, so we can have culture and cooperation.
If we didn't hold back, otherwise 'smart' folks would just gather resources, then kill their 'opposing' cohorts. But they don't - because the same things that make them smart also let them imagine the consequences of using their ability to plan fully against others.
The depression that happens usually comes about in circumstances like this - where you're in some place you aren't allowed to leave, but care too much to use your power to harm others, even knowing that idiots will win from you holding back. So, you just stay in a loop, doing nothing with your relatively high potential.
Listen - there's plenty of flaws with the Nobel prizes - historically, lots of prizes that logically should have gone to women were given to their nearest male colleague, and lots of other reflections of the time they lived in. Lots of real heroes forgotten if that's all you go by.
But that's not really a a big deal in the scope of things. Why?
Because, the Nobel prizes are a story. A story about a guy involved in the creation of TNT, who started a big fund that pays folks to recognize the advancement of science.
For most folks, they're basically one of a dozen or so science stories that they'll even see in a year.
They're like the Oscars of popularized science. And like the Oscars, they're mostly a pageant and a hollow spectacle - they're not even the tip of the iceburg as far as science goes - but they're what inspires countless kids to take a peek into a world they would otherwise never imagine.
So, flawed as they are - they're still a small shining light in the darkness. They're fine for what they are.
Lots of these sub-debates on cleanup miss the underlying point:
We're digging up carbon/methane to get our fuels currently, and that's the net cause of the overall warming.
Yes, cows produce CO2/Methane from their gut bacteria. Those same bacteria would still produce those same gasses without cows, just with rotting vegetation. Getting rid of cows wouldn't fix the underlying biological systems, from too much carbon in general floating around, and 'fixing' cows doesn't do much about the whole system that cattle is emblematic of.
The real (environmental) issue with cattle is that we transport everything they eat, and basically everything about them, with vehicles burning fuel dug up from previously sequestered hydrocarbons.
At every stage, we're pushing the planet VERY QUICKLY back in atmospheric time to a more carbon-heavy atmosphere, trapping more energy over time, and essentially recreating several kinds of mass extinction scenarios, like this one:
It's cool that we're finding some ways to staunch the flow of some greehouse effects - but unless we're sequestering the carbon in some way, it's still going to cycle back around and have mostly the same effect over time - and we're going to have to work harder to 'fight' those net effects. In other words, we're fighting the symptoms, not the underlying at-large causes.
The key there is the number of mass-extinction events in our fossil records are directly connected with exactly these same events.
When methane vents open up under the ocean from various gethermal processes, they make this kind of gel (methane clathrate) that builds up at the ocean floor and sediment. There's a LOT of this stuff.
Anyway, when this gel reaches a certain temperature, the methane that was 'frozen' in it gets released relatively quickly. Methane already is like carbon pollution on steroids, and the scale of this release is literally world-changing, compared to say cow gas releases.
Again - this has happened several times already, taking out the large swaths of species of the planet each time. To the point that the ground leftover looks completely different across the entire planet.
If I were writing a science fiction story, I wouldn't include flying cars as an element.
Rather, I'd just make 'travel pods' - comfortable compact living quarters equipped with entertainment/work surfaces, storage, and seats that convert smoothly into beds - all within a strict volume/weight, all in a small geo-stabilized shock mount.
All transportation would take these pods. Cars, helicopters, boats, spacecraft, and essentially everything else. Most of these vehicles would be somewhat crude-looking frameworks compared to our current fashionable vehicles - but few would care, as the method of getting there are just details, and not the important part, very few would put any status into it.
Going from New York to a rural town outside of Hong Kong might involve a few cars, a ferry, an ocean freighter, then a small freight helecopter (large drone-like thing) to get you to the exact house, which the passenger would rarely care about. The cost would be something similar to what we'd consider an Amazon shipping expense, regardless of the number of legs, and time roughly scales with distance.
The biggest concern of folks traveling this way would be time taken and menu selection. All transport units would have a somewhat extensive set of diagnostic tools, with an occasional scandal for any company suspected of skirting the rather heavy regulations put on those, or in any way skirting safety mores. The failure on a redundant pod mounting arm would actually make the news, as would anything even close to death of a passenger.
This is my guess of something closer to the actual future, based on existing trends. Folks desire focus on the things they care about, and transportation isn't as sexy as it was. They want to get there cheap, and not care about the details. Our taste for safety should also go up over time, and the whole thing deserves a bit of a push towards automation and commoditization. .
I certainly wouldn't be sad to see our current commercial car companies/insurance going away, in favor of industrial economy-scale vehicles built to better use every resource.
Lots of stories you could make with that concept too - from Asimov Caves of Steel-style stories with murder sub-plots, to stories of how prisons would work in such a culture.
Any dramatic heating or cooling is going to result in violence weather over time. That's why we even HAVE weather, thanks to sunrise/sunset/summer/winter, all shifting air across a complex landscape.
Greenhouse/albedo effects can and classically DO have a multiplicative impact - but they wouldn't theoretically completely act like counter-thrust to change our trajectory, and also neither is a complete mirror of the other.
Better than nothing if we keep having oil barons and fossil fuel proponents in charge, slashing all other alternatives and research pathways, I suppose.
I'm typing this in Florida right now - about as prepared as I can get, in a nice inland flood-resistant area. Did you know that public scientists here are forbidden from mentioning 'climate change'? That's what modern conservatism is, I suppose - standing strong in opposition to thinking about working together on things the rest of the modern works largely considers minimal common sense logic.
Which yellow pages? I've lived a lot of places, and even the smallest town had more than a few 'yellow pages' directories dropped off at each place I lived each year. And each business I worked for got at least a few contacts on the regular trying to ask for money for special services through those yellow pages.
The name Yellow Pages isn't unique to this particular company in the US at least. In the UK, this 'yell' group has a trademark, as a a distant offshoot of British Telecom, but nowhere else from what I can tell.
This may be the first case of UK-centric IP ownership bias I've seen on slashdot. Not a horrible one - but worthy of minor correction.
It's a partial eclipse - but in this 10-second video, got a really nice image of a reflection of the eclipse at 4k - the sun/moon combo rotates around eachother, as clouds do their dance. Watch full-screen and look at the upper-left, rather than the direct sun image.
It made for a nice cool day in Florida. Definitely looked like late evening, even well outside the totality area.
Captain: "Thiiis is the captain speaking. The crew has told me that several of you have been making quite a commotion, and I've got to say, folks, that it's really such a shame that grown people can act like that. Just to allay your concerns, the crew will be handing out questionnaires where you can write your concerns, and not just shout like mad people."
Captain: "...Alright, we've reviewed your complaints, and I'm pleased to announce, that we will be playing your in-flight movie featuring Pauly Shore, a man I just love to see in a comedy role, and think should allay any of your concerns. We'll be landing in Antarctica in seven hours."
Captain: "Yes, YES, your tickets WERE to go to Wisconsin - and that a reasonable concern, but we had another place we wanted to go, and I hardly think it's in your business to tell me how to run my airplane. Now, you can all calm down, with a lovely movie featuring Yahoo Serious."
Captain: "In an unforseen set of events, we seem to be running short on fuel. I'm going to have to ask that anyone on board who would like us to reach our destination please consider donating to us on paypal or by credit card. And please, no smart asses asking us to change destination - we already discussed this, and agreed on the importance of reaching cool, wonderful Antarctica."
Captain: "I've been told that Antarctica was the location we STARTED FROM, and that it wasn't actually necessary to circle the entire planet to return to there. Also, that donations don't create fuel. Well, listen people, that's thinking inside the BOX - and we need innovative thinking to get us where we need to go. And I'm honestly not finding these aggressive suggestions helpful."
Captain: "I've been told that we've never actually taken off - well see, that's what I'm talking about... why are you people taking me? I BARRED that door for a reason!"
>>Why do you always include your name in your posts? (Just curious...)
What's the point of an automatic signature?
That's like an artist using a stamp instead of writing their name/initials. Not that I'm an artist - but I like a little personal touch if I'm going to bother doing anything.
I also like to remind folks there's a real person there.
Nothing huge - just a little earnestness in an ocean of anonymity. I won't be here forever, and earnestly seems a better way to live life.
Across several million years, yeah the bulk of large civilizations may just fall to entropy of some crucial resource they can't build past....but with sufficient civilization, you'd create artificial intelligences and artificial life.
Those would scale far better over time, and would be far less vulnerable, and across millions of years would be nigh-innevitable.
Even if they're just existing as spores that hop from star-orbit-to-asteroid-to-star-orbit, they'd build up to an enormous mass over time, and be able to try an enormous number of strategies for continuing existence through networking.
The artifacts and legacy of civilization should stand a much greater chance of returning communication over time than just civilization alone.
But perhaps to those creatures, we're the common noise that they have learned to ignore.
I'm kind of surprised this hasn't already built into a more prominent issue over time.
Performance issues I can stomach - there's going to be some unavoidable parsing logic no matter how you go at translating from runtime to storage or network logic - but instead, large swaths of objects just get ignored in major libraries. When using unity, for instance, can't serialize dictionaries, and many other objects in the default serializer - which is a major oversight.
Google actually has provided some rather nice tools to help with this - I tend to use their 'Protocol buffer' libraries for their rather nice serialization options. This doesn't address security on its own - nothing does completely, but designing careful locked signal processing and independent cross-checking steps can help a lot. Well-salted encryption alone won't really save you.
My pet peeve with protocol buffers the need to give everything an index number, with no real auto-numbering for rapid design - I can see the logical need, to be able to rely on that order for processing - it's just an extra babysitting step that gets me sometimes. For what it does, it's still the best I've found to be consistent between diverse projects and still leaving room for decent security.
The study was mostly on the effects of different navigation mechanisms (the "control group" did 3d platforming) - so isn't the lesson here, if you spend lots of time gaming, don't only play one kind of game?
Also, where was the non-videogaming control? Isn't there a general loss of grey matter over time regardless? I'd think tablet/GPS users using virtually NO navigational skills would also see a reduction in hippocampus grey matter over time - and most archived studies wouldn't have taken into account newer commonly used technologies reducing general navigation.
Nice data point - as the paper states and strongly implies, more study is needed, and the conclusions that can be drawn here are quite limited.
Many of our most important shared concepts for mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy came from the open and free encouragement from Islamic cultures in their golden age.
Just like with Christianity, rampant greed in the name of 'protecting' the religion ends up carving smaller and smaller slices of belief - making for a smaller and smaller god each time it happens, each time a mind is closed off to the outside.
This is how even the most dominant religions die, by 'protecting' them to death.
To me, all this says NOT that we should take away the cell phones, but that we should be offering these kids more opportunities like their parents had for meaningful contact with others. The adults are working more, earning less, and making do with cheaper entertainment overall - so they have less time and resources to offer anything to their kids.
That's why the kids in statistical terms will fall back on facebook and videos to fill time, and see little meaning in driving places - there's relatively little out there worth anything for them.
The kids are making the best of what they have - and good for them on that.
Want them to have a better outlook? Give them and their parents free college, a basic income, so they can turn even small opportunities into a good life. Without a stable path like previous generations had, it's not surprising that few see room in their life for kids and the like. Right now, the only ones we're encouraging are the highly wealthy, and it's hard for many of the rest of us to make plans for life.
Modern phones objectively allow folks to do things on the go, that they haven't ever been able to do before. Folks are still learning what NOT to do, but for the most part, they're safe, and much less dangerous than other similar disruptive technologies.
In windows, I've always taken advantage of the 'feature' from Windows 16-bit days, where if you double-click on a program icon (on the left), it closes the window, so whenever I want to close a window, I just find the closest upper corner, and double/single click it.
You could do the same kind of thing simpler, just by having an X-mark box on the right, program icon at the left, and whenever you bring your mouse near the program icon, have it shift over and reveal a minimize/maximize/close button - and the same on the right, just slide out a minimize/maximize option. Of course, add the option to disable animations, and you're good to go - no visual clutter, but can use it wherever the window is.
Voice-to-text wrappers are a nice touch - but they really shouldn't be a 'browser' feature - but a system feature that can be used in ANY application, so you don't have to tweak it separately for every tool you use.
Note taking is also an occasionally neat thing - but not something you want constrained to the browser developers controlling. Browser developers shouldn't have an interest in getting a piece of that pie, or shaping that 'market', even between open source options.
And file sharing tools? That's an odd technology to push into - not too removed from HTTP/FTP (filezilla) logic at times, but very fiddly even for companies that devote their full focus on it. That said, I'd love it if the 'default' tools could smoothly resume arbitrary download after an interruption, integrate multiple downloads from identically hashed sources, and so on... but companies that take such tools on as secondary interests tend to let such tools fall to dust shortly after trumpeting their first launch. Also, something better done through an official plugin, rather than integrating directly.
Honestly though, these should all be officially supported PLUGINS ("add-ons"), not integrated components. Oh, and they should focus on NEVER BREAKING PLUGINS - they've basically killed half the plugins I've liked about their browser over time, due to their allergy to backwards compatibility options.
Want to know what makes for a good base product over time? Become a platform that bigger hits work with smoothly. Support that platform, and make a brand out of the efficiency, stability and reliability of that platform. Don't try and redefine yourself every two weeks. Let the plugins redefine what can be DONE with your platforms instead - best of both worlds.
Don't just slap a new forced coat of paint or end-user feature on, and pretend that you're trendy - you're not a public traded company, you shouldn't have to play that game.
--- >>It's a bit dangerous to create a reliance on large institutions that can easily be turned into the purveyors of fake news themselves. ---
Life is filled with reliance on others - that's not a conflict, but it means that we do owe it to ourselves to put reliable information ahead of commercial interests sometimes. Often, actually.
--- >>You can look at it with only good in mind, perhaps like the BBC and think that they're more good than bad, but you can just as easily get something like RT (Russia Today)... ---
But that's the thing - journalism isn't some unsolvable problem. It's a job that's just been handed to an almost purely commercial market in the US. We see with the BBC that it is POSSIBLE to create a space where actual journalism can be done beyond the scope of what is possible in the commercial space, without being propaganda.
Same story with healthcare - you can compare nations, and the outcomes change based on how they handle things, and sometimes you discover that the marketplace is not a very good place engage in things like medical care or a large portion of journalistic investigation. Sometimes you need to do real work on the basis of what works best, and costs society the least, not on what is profitable at every second.
Education is also important, along with other institutions - but without something standing outside of government to provide objective information, a healthy 'fourth estate', the whole system is much more vulnerable.
Oh, and for folks who insist that education is going down the drain, the Flynn Effect is still in full effect. Google it. The kids in general are still doing fine and are objectively doing better all the time, it's the 'adults' that are unable to manage things.
Slashdot Mirror
Longer version: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
I've been at places where managers get a variation on this lovely idea: Hey, maybe you would be more careful coders if you had to do your own testing. You're all so sloppy!
Oddly enough, this is mostly from non-coders, or folks without technical acumen.
Here's the deal: There ARE coders that claim to not make mistakes, and create bug-free code. Those are known as inexperienced or self-deluded coders, or folks only making one-off projects negotiating exact terms that make it not REALLY programming so much as configuring.
Even just from a simple level as just writing down words, if you've ever written a work longer than a couple of paragraphs, you'll virtually always reach a point where there's some subtle or stupid mistake you make without noticing it. Even VERY experienced journalists and writers need proofreaders on any serious project.
It's not a matter of taking your work seriously, or being unable to face responsibility - you're always going to be blind to the flaws in your own code, and although testing crews ARE expensive - they exist for many, MANY important reasons. They're cheaper than the same churn without a proper quality process. Sure, some of that effort may be being duplicated, or used badly - but few possibilities would be worse than expecting everyone to 'man up' and expect bug count to go down.
In other words - certainly, I can test my own code if you'd like, but I'm a VERY expensive testing staff member, and my perspective is going to cause me to overlook a lot of things - since it already 'makes sense' to me and I won't spot the inconsistencies a percent of the time.
Ryan Fenton
The hard part is the philosophy. Acting/special effects/costumes/lighting/etc. are certainly important - but the key to it actually being a good Twilight Zone is that it's exploring a twist in philosophy.
It's not supposed to be horror, grimdark, author-insert, perspective writing, or anything like that - it's a show about exploring philosophy and implications You can certainly use tropes from other genres to get TO your philosophy, but if you're not exploring and really playing with the concepts, you're not really doing a proper twilight zone.
Jordan Peele is actually farily appropriate in my odd mind - he's got a nice twist to his comedy that might work well. Perhaps not just like Rod Serling or anything - but worth exploring. The Orville ended up being a good exploration of Star Trek concepts, also from a comedy director - so I'll give this a chance!
Ryan Fenton
There's a big problem with 'people' in general - they won't learn any lesson you want to teach them, as a population, no matter how simple, or stupid the thing you're trying to correct.
At a basic psychological level, we sometimes get the urge to correct them at large - a lot of road rage is effectively this, where you try and interfere with a rude driver to 'teach them a lesson'. It virtually never actually works.
You can't fix phone-use deaths by telling people it's bad, or showing them the effects of how distracting it is to functionally driving. If you try and implement technological features that make it annoying to use the phone while driving, most folks will disable this, taking great pains to do so.
It's not even that people think that they're immune to distraction, or even that they don't think it's dangerous - folks just don't like driving, and they like/need their phones, and even with death and huge fines as consequences, they'll do the 'bad thing' on statistically overwhelming scale.
The better fix is to automate driving so that folks can do most anything and not have that be a safety factor.
Ryan Fenton
It's a shell linking audio/video codecs (which still exist) to a simple set of video controls, perhaps with some mostly useless cruft, but it did a decent job.
It definitely wasn't anywhere near the best player - but when you went to a random PC, you could be sure that most common videos would play.
Why would you remove that as a minimal component on PCs? Browsers are OK - but when you're going for a presentation on a random PC, there's all kinds of ways those can crap out in ways that a simple default video player would be fine.
Seems a very dumb thing to remove, if you want PCs to be useful general devices world-wide.
And note - probably less than 2% of your user base is going to go onto the 'Windows Store' to try and get ANYTHING to fix this shortcoming. Attempting to profit from your own manufactured problem is not going to pay off in this case, compared to what it's costing you in terms of basic capability.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah - that's what the frontal lobe DOES, along with giving us the ability to imagine and plan. It largely suppresses the activation of other parts of the brain, so we can have culture and cooperation.
If we didn't hold back, otherwise 'smart' folks would just gather resources, then kill their 'opposing' cohorts. But they don't - because the same things that make them smart also let them imagine the consequences of using their ability to plan fully against others.
The depression that happens usually comes about in circumstances like this - where you're in some place you aren't allowed to leave, but care too much to use your power to harm others, even knowing that idiots will win from you holding back. So, you just stay in a loop, doing nothing with your relatively high potential.
Ryan Fenton
Listen - there's plenty of flaws with the Nobel prizes - historically, lots of prizes that logically should have gone to women were given to their nearest male colleague, and lots of other reflections of the time they lived in. Lots of real heroes forgotten if that's all you go by.
But that's not really a a big deal in the scope of things. Why?
Because, the Nobel prizes are a story. A story about a guy involved in the creation of TNT, who started a big fund that pays folks to recognize the advancement of science.
For most folks, they're basically one of a dozen or so science stories that they'll even see in a year.
They're like the Oscars of popularized science. And like the Oscars, they're mostly a pageant and a hollow spectacle - they're not even the tip of the iceburg as far as science goes - but they're what inspires countless kids to take a peek into a world they would otherwise never imagine.
So, flawed as they are - they're still a small shining light in the darkness. They're fine for what they are.
Ryan Fenton
Never browse without properly community-maintained ad blocking and script blocking.
And if any company complains about not being able to 'serve' you properly as they'd like to... add a request to have that complaint blocked.
Ryan Fenton
Lots of these sub-debates on cleanup miss the underlying point:
We're digging up carbon/methane to get our fuels currently, and that's the net cause of the overall warming.
Yes, cows produce CO2/Methane from their gut bacteria. Those same bacteria would still produce those same gasses without cows, just with rotting vegetation. Getting rid of cows wouldn't fix the underlying biological systems, from too much carbon in general floating around, and 'fixing' cows doesn't do much about the whole system that cattle is emblematic of.
The real (environmental) issue with cattle is that we transport everything they eat, and basically everything about them, with vehicles burning fuel dug up from previously sequestered hydrocarbons.
At every stage, we're pushing the planet VERY QUICKLY back in atmospheric time to a more carbon-heavy atmosphere, trapping more energy over time, and essentially recreating several kinds of mass extinction scenarios, like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's cool that we're finding some ways to staunch the flow of some greehouse effects - but unless we're sequestering the carbon in some way, it's still going to cycle back around and have mostly the same effect over time - and we're going to have to work harder to 'fight' those net effects. In other words, we're fighting the symptoms, not the underlying at-large causes.
Ryan Fenton
Here's the reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The key there is the number of mass-extinction events in our fossil records are directly connected with exactly these same events.
When methane vents open up under the ocean from various gethermal processes, they make this kind of gel (methane clathrate) that builds up at the ocean floor and sediment. There's a LOT of this stuff.
Anyway, when this gel reaches a certain temperature, the methane that was 'frozen' in it gets released relatively quickly. Methane already is like carbon pollution on steroids, and the scale of this release is literally world-changing, compared to say cow gas releases.
Again - this has happened several times already, taking out the large swaths of species of the planet each time. To the point that the ground leftover looks completely different across the entire planet.
It's kind of a big deal.
Ryan Fenton
If I were writing a science fiction story, I wouldn't include flying cars as an element.
Rather, I'd just make 'travel pods' - comfortable compact living quarters equipped with entertainment/work surfaces, storage, and seats that convert smoothly into beds - all within a strict volume/weight, all in a small geo-stabilized shock mount.
All transportation would take these pods. Cars, helicopters, boats, spacecraft, and essentially everything else. Most of these vehicles would be somewhat crude-looking frameworks compared to our current fashionable vehicles - but few would care, as the method of getting there are just details, and not the important part, very few would put any status into it.
Going from New York to a rural town outside of Hong Kong might involve a few cars, a ferry, an ocean freighter, then a small freight helecopter (large drone-like thing) to get you to the exact house, which the passenger would rarely care about. The cost would be something similar to what we'd consider an Amazon shipping expense, regardless of the number of legs, and time roughly scales with distance.
The biggest concern of folks traveling this way would be time taken and menu selection. All transport units would have a somewhat extensive set of diagnostic tools, with an occasional scandal for any company suspected of skirting the rather heavy regulations put on those, or in any way skirting safety mores. The failure on a redundant pod mounting arm would actually make the news, as would anything even close to death of a passenger.
This is my guess of something closer to the actual future, based on existing trends. Folks desire focus on the things they care about, and transportation isn't as sexy as it was. They want to get there cheap, and not care about the details. Our taste for safety should also go up over time, and the whole thing deserves a bit of a push towards automation and commoditization. .
I certainly wouldn't be sad to see our current commercial car companies/insurance going away, in favor of industrial economy-scale vehicles built to better use every resource.
Lots of stories you could make with that concept too - from Asimov Caves of Steel-style stories with murder sub-plots, to stories of how prisons would work in such a culture.
Ryan Fenton
Any dramatic heating or cooling is going to result in violence weather over time. That's why we even HAVE weather, thanks to sunrise/sunset/summer/winter, all shifting air across a complex landscape.
Greenhouse/albedo effects can and classically DO have a multiplicative impact - but they wouldn't theoretically completely act like counter-thrust to change our trajectory, and also neither is a complete mirror of the other.
Better than nothing if we keep having oil barons and fossil fuel proponents in charge, slashing all other alternatives and research pathways, I suppose.
I'm typing this in Florida right now - about as prepared as I can get, in a nice inland flood-resistant area. Did you know that public scientists here are forbidden from mentioning 'climate change'? That's what modern conservatism is, I suppose - standing strong in opposition to thinking about working together on things the rest of the modern works largely considers minimal common sense logic.
Ryan Fenton
Which yellow pages? I've lived a lot of places, and even the smallest town had more than a few 'yellow pages' directories dropped off at each place I lived each year. And each business I worked for got at least a few contacts on the regular trying to ask for money for special services through those yellow pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The name Yellow Pages isn't unique to this particular company in the US at least. In the UK, this 'yell' group has a trademark, as a a distant offshoot of British Telecom, but nowhere else from what I can tell.
This may be the first case of UK-centric IP ownership bias I've seen on slashdot. Not a horrible one - but worthy of minor correction.
Ryan Fenton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's a partial eclipse - but in this 10-second video, got a really nice image of a reflection of the eclipse at 4k - the sun/moon combo rotates around eachother, as clouds do their dance. Watch full-screen and look at the upper-left, rather than the direct sun image.
It made for a nice cool day in Florida. Definitely looked like late evening, even well outside the totality area.
Ryan Fenton
Captain: "Thiiis is the captain speaking. The crew has told me that several of you have been making quite a commotion, and I've got to say, folks, that it's really such a shame that grown people can act like that. Just to allay your concerns, the crew will be handing out questionnaires where you can write your concerns, and not just shout like mad people."
Captain: "...Alright, we've reviewed your complaints, and I'm pleased to announce, that we will be playing your in-flight movie featuring Pauly Shore, a man I just love to see in a comedy role, and think should allay any of your concerns. We'll be landing in Antarctica in seven hours."
Captain: "Yes, YES, your tickets WERE to go to Wisconsin - and that a reasonable concern, but we had another place we wanted to go, and I hardly think it's in your business to tell me how to run my airplane. Now, you can all calm down, with a lovely movie featuring Yahoo Serious."
Captain: "In an unforseen set of events, we seem to be running short on fuel. I'm going to have to ask that anyone on board who would like us to reach our destination please consider donating to us on paypal or by credit card. And please, no smart asses asking us to change destination - we already discussed this, and agreed on the importance of reaching cool, wonderful Antarctica."
Captain: "I've been told that Antarctica was the location we STARTED FROM, and that it wasn't actually necessary to circle the entire planet to return to there. Also, that donations don't create fuel. Well, listen people, that's thinking inside the BOX - and we need innovative thinking to get us where we need to go. And I'm honestly not finding these aggressive suggestions helpful."
Captain: "I've been told that we've never actually taken off - well see, that's what I'm talking about... why are you people taking me? I BARRED that door for a reason!"
Ryan Fenton
>>Why do you always include your name in your posts? (Just curious ...)
What's the point of an automatic signature?
That's like an artist using a stamp instead of writing their name/initials. Not that I'm an artist - but I like a little personal touch if I'm going to bother doing anything.
I also like to remind folks there's a real person there.
Nothing huge - just a little earnestness in an ocean of anonymity. I won't be here forever, and earnestly seems a better way to live life.
Ryan Fenton
Across several million years, yeah the bulk of large civilizations may just fall to entropy of some crucial resource they can't build past. ...but with sufficient civilization, you'd create artificial intelligences and artificial life.
Those would scale far better over time, and would be far less vulnerable, and across millions of years would be nigh-innevitable.
Even if they're just existing as spores that hop from star-orbit-to-asteroid-to-star-orbit, they'd build up to an enormous mass over time, and be able to try an enormous number of strategies for continuing existence through networking.
The artifacts and legacy of civilization should stand a much greater chance of returning communication over time than just civilization alone.
But perhaps to those creatures, we're the common noise that they have learned to ignore.
Ryan Fenton
I'm kind of surprised this hasn't already built into a more prominent issue over time.
Performance issues I can stomach - there's going to be some unavoidable parsing logic no matter how you go at translating from runtime to storage or network logic - but instead, large swaths of objects just get ignored in major libraries. When using unity, for instance, can't serialize dictionaries, and many other objects in the default serializer - which is a major oversight.
Google actually has provided some rather nice tools to help with this - I tend to use their 'Protocol buffer' libraries for their rather nice serialization options. This doesn't address security on its own - nothing does completely, but designing careful locked signal processing and independent cross-checking steps can help a lot. Well-salted encryption alone won't really save you.
My pet peeve with protocol buffers the need to give everything an index number, with no real auto-numbering for rapid design - I can see the logical need, to be able to rely on that order for processing - it's just an extra babysitting step that gets me sometimes. For what it does, it's still the best I've found to be consistent between diverse projects and still leaving room for decent security.
Ryan Fenton
Cool - really like Dr Steven Novella's take on this - I listen to the Skeptics Guide podcast on occasion when I can.
Ryan Fenton
First up, link to the actual study in Nature's Molecular Psychology:
Impact of video games on plasticity of the hippocampus
The study was mostly on the effects of different navigation mechanisms (the "control group" did 3d platforming) - so isn't the lesson here, if you spend lots of time gaming, don't only play one kind of game?
Also, where was the non-videogaming control? Isn't there a general loss of grey matter over time regardless? I'd think tablet/GPS users using virtually NO navigational skills would also see a reduction in hippocampus grey matter over time - and most archived studies wouldn't have taken into account newer commonly used technologies reducing general navigation.
Nice data point - as the paper states and strongly implies, more study is needed, and the conclusions that can be drawn here are quite limited.
Ryan Fenton
Many of our most important shared concepts for mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy came from the open and free encouragement from Islamic cultures in their golden age.
See Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss it's glory and its unfortunate downfall
Just like with Christianity, rampant greed in the name of 'protecting' the religion ends up carving smaller and smaller slices of belief - making for a smaller and smaller god each time it happens, each time a mind is closed off to the outside.
This is how even the most dominant religions die, by 'protecting' them to death.
Ryan Fenton
To me, all this says NOT that we should take away the cell phones, but that we should be offering these kids more opportunities like their parents had for meaningful contact with others. The adults are working more, earning less, and making do with cheaper entertainment overall - so they have less time and resources to offer anything to their kids.
That's why the kids in statistical terms will fall back on facebook and videos to fill time, and see little meaning in driving places - there's relatively little out there worth anything for them.
The kids are making the best of what they have - and good for them on that.
Want them to have a better outlook? Give them and their parents free college, a basic income, so they can turn even small opportunities into a good life. Without a stable path like previous generations had, it's not surprising that few see room in their life for kids and the like. Right now, the only ones we're encouraging are the highly wealthy, and it's hard for many of the rest of us to make plans for life.
Ryan Fenton
Better question: Will any generation not insist their children are going to inevitable ruin for the technology they adopt?
Happens every generation
Modern phones objectively allow folks to do things on the go, that they haven't ever been able to do before. Folks are still learning what NOT to do, but for the most part, they're safe, and much less dangerous than other similar disruptive technologies.
Flamebait article.
Ryan Fenton
In windows, I've always taken advantage of the 'feature' from Windows 16-bit days, where if you double-click on a program icon (on the left), it closes the window, so whenever I want to close a window, I just find the closest upper corner, and double/single click it.
You could do the same kind of thing simpler, just by having an X-mark box on the right, program icon at the left, and whenever you bring your mouse near the program icon, have it shift over and reveal a minimize/maximize/close button - and the same on the right, just slide out a minimize/maximize option. Of course, add the option to disable animations, and you're good to go - no visual clutter, but can use it wherever the window is.
Just an idea.
Ryan Fenton
Voice-to-text wrappers are a nice touch - but they really shouldn't be a 'browser' feature - but a system feature that can be used in ANY application, so you don't have to tweak it separately for every tool you use.
Note taking is also an occasionally neat thing - but not something you want constrained to the browser developers controlling. Browser developers shouldn't have an interest in getting a piece of that pie, or shaping that 'market', even between open source options.
And file sharing tools? That's an odd technology to push into - not too removed from HTTP/FTP (filezilla) logic at times, but very fiddly even for companies that devote their full focus on it. That said, I'd love it if the 'default' tools could smoothly resume arbitrary download after an interruption, integrate multiple downloads from identically hashed sources, and so on... but companies that take such tools on as secondary interests tend to let such tools fall to dust shortly after trumpeting their first launch. Also, something better done through an official plugin, rather than integrating directly.
Honestly though, these should all be officially supported PLUGINS ("add-ons"), not integrated components. Oh, and they should focus on NEVER BREAKING PLUGINS - they've basically killed half the plugins I've liked about their browser over time, due to their allergy to backwards compatibility options.
Want to know what makes for a good base product over time? Become a platform that bigger hits work with smoothly. Support that platform, and make a brand out of the efficiency, stability and reliability of that platform. Don't try and redefine yourself every two weeks. Let the plugins redefine what can be DONE with your platforms instead - best of both worlds.
Don't just slap a new forced coat of paint or end-user feature on, and pretend that you're trendy - you're not a public traded company, you shouldn't have to play that game.
Ryan Fenton
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>>It's a bit dangerous to create a reliance on large institutions that can easily be turned into the purveyors of fake news themselves.
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Life is filled with reliance on others - that's not a conflict, but it means that we do owe it to ourselves to put reliable information ahead of commercial interests sometimes. Often, actually.
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>>You can look at it with only good in mind, perhaps like the BBC and think that they're more good than bad, but you can just as easily get something like RT (Russia Today)...
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But that's the thing - journalism isn't some unsolvable problem. It's a job that's just been handed to an almost purely commercial market in the US. We see with the BBC that it is POSSIBLE to create a space where actual journalism can be done beyond the scope of what is possible in the commercial space, without being propaganda.
Same story with healthcare - you can compare nations, and the outcomes change based on how they handle things, and sometimes you discover that the marketplace is not a very good place engage in things like medical care or a large portion of journalistic investigation. Sometimes you need to do real work on the basis of what works best, and costs society the least, not on what is profitable at every second.
Education is also important, along with other institutions - but without something standing outside of government to provide objective information, a healthy 'fourth estate', the whole system is much more vulnerable.
Oh, and for folks who insist that education is going down the drain, the Flynn Effect is still in full effect. Google it. The kids in general are still doing fine and are objectively doing better all the time, it's the 'adults' that are unable to manage things.
Ryan Fenton