It isn't the technology, it is the economics that people are getting opposed to. The fact that the engineer developes self-driving cars is less important that he works for Google who is promoting elitism.
Are you talking about the last movement of Op 18 #6 by Beethoven, the B-Flat String Quartet? I think it is, like the fugue of Op 110, A-Flat Piano Sonata, either a self portrait of Bipolar disorder or an artistic exploration of what that is like, whether or not there is any evidence that Beethoven had the disorder.
One can analyze the form in Op 18 #6 iv, as Adagio, followed by the Allegro with its almost manic joy. Similarly the Adagio in Op 110 is followed by a fugue followed by a return of the Adagio and repeat of the fugue but inverted and then inverted and diminished (Cunterpuntally), followed by a coda. The sadness of the Adagio, I think F-minor, is unmatched, and is somewhat like the Adagio (F# Minor) of Op 106, but the Hammerklavier ends in its fugue without the repeat. The affect of the last two movement of Op 106 is different, more like a ternary form slow movement followed by a separate finale, albeit a fugue. The last movement also has a long introduction, somewhat like the Ritternello of the Ode to Joy movement in the Ninth Symphony, Op 125, and works like the last two movements of Op 132 which is related to the Ninth Symphony in Beethoven's sketch books.
I live in California, where driving seems to be more important than in other parts of the U.S. and in Europe. I live in Silicon Valley where a persistent housing shortage and higher demand for workers means that people who have high paying jobs often have long commutes, 40+ miles one way.
I don't drive, never have, due to poor vision. So, I have arranged my life around either public transit or walking to work. I worked for about 23 years where I was able to walk to work and another 20 years where I had short bus or train rides. Since I have retired, the cost of public transit has more than doubled in absolute currency so I can understand the claim that the price of fuel could be a reason why fewer teenagers drive. The same with insurance rates.
Having been in Europe 30 years ago, I can say with confidence that the public transit there is better than what we have here. It is better integrated.Also the cities and towns still have the human scale of pre-industrial cities. No town in California has been designed, or has evolved, with the idea that everything you need should be within walking distance, although some are nearly so. As someone who has never used a car, I have to be choosy about where I live to take advantage of that fact. One of the reasons higher density living is being developed is because there are fewer places to build and more and more people do not need or want a car. So the layout of urban areas that assume commutes by car might become a thing of the past. But even if urban sprawl is replaced by high density communities, they will be located along rail routes.
Thinking about the Boomerang Effect, where adult children of Baby Boomers have to move in with their parents because they can't afford to live on their own, to the tune of about 17 million, as I recall reading recently. That may say that the reason kids drive less is economic and is a ringing indictment of our economic system that changes in the economy have made it harder for young people to realize what their parents had. All of the reasons given so far, the cost of gas, insurance, social factors, might be true to some extant, but the fact that many in that age group are forced to move back in with their parents after college points to a larger set of factors, economic ones, inbalances in the economy that didn't affect their parents. The quality of jobs ins't there, the investment to create decent jobs isn't there. I would argue that it is tech and the digital revolution and the international labor market it has created that is to blame. That is the dirty little secret that many engineers are loth to admit, that the promises for a better future for all through the use of computers has not been realized. Only a very few have benefited the most, but most people have to do lower-paying less quality jobs because of the misbalanced set of incentives created by the application of computers to work.
Oh, I don't know. California has a serious problem it is ultra conservatives in Southern California and the Central Valley and now in Silicon Valley. Feinstein is far from ideal, but she is better than the nut cases that come from L.A or Orange Counties. I am including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in that list. RR won election to the governor by demagoggery in 1966. He ran against the radicals at U.C. Berkeley and we know what he did as Pres., he turned the country into the Entrapanocracy it is today, but I don't give him the power to do that, he is but an effect, a response to the economic forces that took over after he left office. He was financed by South Western Bankers and Energy people and probably Venture Capitalists who knew that the digital revolution would empower them and take power away from most of the rest of the people leading to the lopsided distribution of income and power we have today. Politicians, but more GOP than Democrats but not by much, are prostitutes. The pimps are financial and business people. They run things, and through their shortsightedness we will all fail.
It is called the Duopoly. Its reality is revealed when the national committees of the two parties publish the list of their biggest donors at election time. For many years it has been the same small group of super wealthy individuals and corporations, the stake holders in the status quo.
I had a good laugh at this thread, people bashing Diane Feinstein, first because she is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then because she is a Democrat from California, all of which is beside the point if these same people use Google, or Facebook, or Twitter or any other social media company. The post to which I replied has the right idea, and I am saying so in more words to amplify the point that although I don't like what NSA is doing, that we have accepted the same thing done by every social media company out there as a fair business activity. That is the irony, and that is what the people who replies above don't get about technology, that people will use it to their advantage because its power is evident. Lots of businesses use similar techniques to find potential customers that NSA uses to develop networks of terror suspects. It isn't Google Analytics, but it is the same idea. So, until all of the people who posted so far agree that Social Media should be outlawed, we are stuck with the temptation NSA has taken. It is the nature of the Big Data we are saving about each other.
So, why haven't we seen any sighs of it at all? I don't believe UFOs are sufficient evidence of E.T.
The answer may be that intelligent species don't last long enough to be in contact, an idea proposed by Enrico Fermi in 1945. They may appear in the universe, even in our galaxy with regularity, but when they get enough power to alter their environment, they exterminate themselves. If Climate change is caused by human technology, we are doing the experiment right now, and it may yield us a species-wide Darwin Award.
Fermi was worried about nuclear weapons as the downfall of mankind. I'd say that greenhouse gasses, which seem far less lethal, are a much more insidious downfall, and I have five major mass extinctions in the past half billion years of megafauna on earth to back me up. These were all nearly yielding the same result, even if the causes were different, they involved a rapid upset of the carbon cycle in earth's biosphere that the megafauna in particular had no time to adapt to. We are among the current megafauna; we have been exterminating the other megafauna by hogging their habitats as we are in the midst of the latest mass extinction, but if we mess up the carbon cycle even more, it will bite us directly as water and food are denied us.
I think this posts misses one essential raw ingredient, not that the rest of it is wrong in any way. That is an astonishing memory for the content of the field, and in fact that is what stops most people, a poor focused memory.
I know a little about musical memory and I am convinced that great composers of music must begin with very good memories, but that most musical people, even if they have good memories, must suppress the linkages between one passage and the next to process the mechanisms in the music to be able to compose new music. I am sure that someone like J.S. Bach must have had a flawless memory, probably recalling every musical work he ever heard, same with Mozart. Beethoven was deaf after about 1808, born 1770, died 1827, and so had to remember what he could no longer hear as he composed the masterworks of his Late period.
I have known a few very smart, possibly genius level people, whose hallmark, starting point, is a flawless memory for the subject. I think that math geniuses need a very good memory of relationships and the steps of proofs. Chess masters have to memorize 40+ moves into a line and all the variations. Writers probably remember conversations they had decades ago. etc. etc.
Ordinary people often project the mental acuity they have on the rest of the world, not being aware that there is wide variation in how people think, and what people remember, Geniuses probably do this as well, but as the article notes, as self-protection. Surely, they most be aware of how unique their mental abilities are.
Anything that can run Windows 7 could run linux.
Anything that can run embedded Windows 7 would have no problem running linux.
Or OpenBSD.
I ran Knoppix 7.2 on a system with 256MB ot ram and Linux Swap areas in a vintage 1999 Celeron processor, no problem. This was tried about two months ago. So may Linuxes will run on systems that are too small for Win 7, even. We aren't even talking about how trim you could make the GUI for a single application. It wasn't too may years ago that you ran SunOS 4.1 on a Sun 3 with only 1 MB of ram, so running Linux on a system the size of your thumbnail isn't that far-fetched.
So, this sounds like hype to kindle interest in a company gone to shit, and losing its reputation as it pimps for social networks and customer leads, biasing its searches as it goes. Google deserves to gag on its own Big Data apatite. My guess is that Google hires kids because they can be manipulated and they believe in market capture instead of doing a quality service, what kid has heard of public service?
I think that the history of financial and organizational change since about 1990 is driven by short-term-thinking, really short-term ROI to investors and funders, and that is driven by efficient micromanagement enabled by the digital revolution, guys with excel spreadsheets able to account on every tiny part of an organization, and the overuse of financialization as a value criterion.
So if you are in tech, are a programmer, and rue the ever present knee-jerk of management, take the blame yourself, you did it, you helped it along, and it is an unintended consequence of your technology.
Most of the other effects of the digital revolution, the internationalization, the down-sizing, the financialization of business are effects that the average person in tech, including myself missed. It led to over zealous use of accounting without a good sanity check for assigning value to assets, picking numbers out of the air,and giving them more authority than they deserve because they are printed on a spread sheet. People can be fooled as they always have been fooled.
The efficiencies are all false, the cost is now shifting elsewhere, and it is a spark for burning the status quo, as a sacrifice of human values will result in great unrest that could destroy the centers of power.
I think by "useful" he means no different from Word 2000. Some people go to great lengths to resist change or the notion that using a different tool might actually improve how they do a task, and there is a cost trade-off there, as well.
I know that I might be in the minority just because when I first encountered operating systems, all we had was CLI, but I am familiar with the *nix command line and I wouldn't give it up for anything. Because of its usefulness I have installed Cygwin on every Windows install I have had to deal with and wouldn't work in a place where Linux or Cygwin was not allowed and supported by the IT department. I use terminal on Mac OS X and on Linux despite the GUI's and I still think that emacs is a better editor than all the editors for GUIs. I often run it inside a terminal with a zoomed font in preference to its GUI. If I were mentoring young people I would insist that they get some exposure to the shell and to things like Limited Regular Expressions, especially if they had any desire to be computer scientists or top-notch programmers.
And IBM would be contributing to market speculation by getting stock traders to use Watson to do programmed trades more "efficiently", meaning that human traders are at an even bigger disadvantage. Next time the financial system fails, the FTC starts a latency period on machine calls to end the speculation and Watson is out of business. And Good!
Knowing the general geologic age, I would assume that the deposits in Sweden are about the same age and type as the Ironstones in the Superior Province of Northern U.S., late Precambrian, about 1.6 BYA. These were sediments deposited with Fe Oxides, Rust, that formed when the oxygen concentrations in the seas caused Fe to percipitate out. We are driving around in the result.
Well, good. If This is the strategy Yahoo! will use, and it is wrong, that should hurt their business in some way. It would be their own fault for not being critical of the pronouncements of one of their people.
In their stumble to differentiate themselves in marketing imagery, they should pay to get it wrong, if it is wrong.
The argument is very sensitive to cost of getting to asteroids, and probably not just ones that cross Earth's orbit. Iron meteorites are rare, but not vanishingly so, and they are the ones that have heavy metals, not just Iron Group, VIIIb, but Cu, Ag, and Au metals. Since Iron Meteorites come from planetessimals that were hot enough to differentiate and have metal cores, ones the size of Ceres or Vesta, finding them might be a matter of getting beyond the vicinity of Earth to main best asteroids and mining those. The economics arguments here must assume that the current cost of getting out of low earth orbit and only a few million miles from Earth constrains the cost of getting to targets. Once you pay that cost, the cost of getting to main belt asteroids isn't much more. The cost of mining could be reduced by developing robots to do the work in microgravity.
It might take only one modest sized asteroid consisting mostly of metal to justify the cost, imagine that the amount of precious metals, Pd, Ir, Pt, Au, minded in total from the Earth's crust, and very like delivered to a solid crust by late bombatdment asteroid impacts, could be doubled or tripled by finding one such body and mining it. Ironically, the price of gold would be negatively affected, since finding an appreciable percentage of the total ever mined from Earth would depress the price. The upside is that finding these elements in abundance would open up new uses, note that Pt has major applications as an industrial catalyst, and maybe the other VIIIb metals, such as Rh and Re, as well as Ir, Pd could find new applications if their prices drop. Ag and Au, if found, have other applications than coinage.
Fe, Co, Ni and maybe even Cu and Zn are likely to be the most abundant metals, and maybe Mn, Cr, Ti, V, as well, even though their value is less, maybe the desired metals would be smelted in space and the robots would refine the ones worth returning to Earth and leave the others in space.
I don't know the detailed chemistry of iron meteorites, but if significant amounts of Rare Earths also exist in them, that would certainly sweeten the pot.
I would go further ans assert that Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and social media in general is a scourge on Mankind! These companies are the perfect example of what happens when "leaders" are only the shit that floats to the top as everybody else is so worried about financials that they ignore what technology actually does to people. This is due to the pervasive damage to leadership done by getting trained at schools of business administration that stress financialization and denigrate public service. We have shitty leaders because this is how we train people for leadership. We don't get leaders, we get guys who are always on a short leash held by investors who are only interested in quarterly ROI and what happens is that so-called leaders spend so much time trying to please analysts on Wall Street, who are rank idiots, and looking over their shoulder at the moment to moment stock price. This is no way to lead and this is why we get the shit in business we have today.
Steve Jobs was probably as sociopathic as the next CEO of a company, but at least when he replaced John Scully, he was able to reform Apple around its products because the company was for a time out of the cross hairs of Wall Street. I worked for a major computer company whose management was paying too much attention to Wall Street and I didn't know it at the time but they were selling larger servers to the companies who created the speculative bubble that burst in the crash of 2008, a problem which has not been fixed, and which is a problem created by technology. I am talking about program trading made possible by fast servers. If I ran the SEC I would get a law passed that every trade must have 30 seconds of latency. The company I worked for got bought out after I left.
If the general public gets wind of what tech was used for, to create the speculative buggle in investment, and a shadow economy, and how it hurts their access to capital and good business plans, tech will be done. It will have lost its exhaulted, overblown, reputation.
I used to think that engineers and scientists were smart, some are, but now I think that we live in a world of unintended consequences driven by short-term profit motive. What I read in this thread is a bunch of guilty people scrambling to justify that their good fortunes haven't come at the detriment of a vast majority of their fellows, after all who has the most to lose from criticisms of the way things are, the people that read this type of forum and who are the makers of the technology that is causing the mess.
I see most of these comments as nitpicks and evasions of the truth that most Americans have seen a loss of spending power as a result of the application of technology in the service of short-term business gain. The problem this raises for tech workers is the Google Bus problem in San Francisco and what that really means to the elites in Silicon Valley. It means that the honeymoon with tech is finally over and what that means is that ordinary people, people who don't write code, people who do not create technology are just now beginning to put two and two together and coming to the conclusion that technology may not work at all to make their lives better, that the same old failings of human nature apply and are amplified by the technology.
I have been attacked by trolls who evidently listen to Fox News mostly, who may be paid for Republican PR contractors to cruise the Internet attacking "Liberals" for daring to criticize Capitalism and the American Way, which is increasingly the Chinese way, by the way And I have no illusions that Hip Silicon Valley has always had an undercurrent of Libertarian extremism, Random Randians. But I sense fear from those quarters that the jig is up, that they know that it is dawning on many more people that the big corporations are doing evil. So, every time a mere user gets pissed off at Google targeting ads at them by reading their e-mail and search strings, or that Facebook is constructed so that they can spy on you and not protect you or your children against other users abusing you, Javascript gets a more sinister reputation, and so does many practitioners of such arcane arts.
One has to get past Python's definition of white space. Just because source loots indented on the page doesn't mean that Python will accept the white space. This is true because of spaces getting mixed up with tab characters, they are not seen as the same and many editors don't help you very well wih this. It is almost as if you must do 'cat -v' to be sure.
I agree that once you get past that, Pythons notion of structure is easier to see than with braket-blocked syntax. It is more compact.
You seem so emotionally worked up so as to not be able to argue and reason effectively. What I said must have really threatened you, Been watching too much Fox News, lately? Come back some other day when you can speak and argue with some more sense and less emotion, either that or you have no practice in thinking., whatsoever.
The divide in our country seems to be sparked by emotive words on people who lack the means to pick propaganda apart and discuss with any civility. You make my case for the manipulation of public opinion by a bunch of Plutocrats who support Right Wing positions who do not want people to have sensible discussions and debates. You seem to have swallowed the bait whole. Wise up and start laying down rational arguments, and get off you ass and reason!
A read through the linked article, not a primary source, said that researchers in France were about to use a technique to measure the density of the magma in the chamber beneath the Yellowstone caldera. A magma chamber has been known and mapped to some extent for some time. The issue with the lower density portion of the melt may mean that gasses are building up in that phase and that their pressure on the rock above could be a precursor to an eruption. I know from other sources that there have been changes in the tilt and overall shape of the land in the caldera which are taken to mean changes in the disposition of the magma below. It is quite hard to correctly identify the signs that an eruption is coming over short time-scales, very much like the problem of predicting earthquakes. Geologists can more readily tell you where such events will come and with great confidence, but when is altogether another matter in a human time scale. Even events such as earthquakes, emission of gasses, and changes in GPS positions don't tell you when such an event would occur. In fact, we may not have the means to mitigate the effects of a supervolcanic eruption even if we knew it was coming anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't the technology, it is the economics that people are getting opposed to. The fact that the engineer developes self-driving cars is less important that he works for Google who is promoting elitism.
No, being a thieving Capitalist is becoming unpopular, when non elites cannot afford to live in the Bay Area.
Are you talking about the last movement of Op 18 #6 by Beethoven, the B-Flat String Quartet? I think it is, like the fugue of Op 110, A-Flat Piano Sonata, either a self portrait of Bipolar disorder or an artistic exploration of what that is like, whether or not there is any evidence that Beethoven had the disorder.
One can analyze the form in Op 18 #6 iv, as Adagio, followed by the Allegro with its almost manic joy. Similarly the Adagio in Op 110 is followed by a fugue followed by a return of the Adagio and repeat of the fugue but inverted and then inverted and diminished (Cunterpuntally), followed by a coda. The sadness of the Adagio, I think F-minor, is unmatched, and is somewhat like the Adagio (F# Minor) of Op 106, but the Hammerklavier ends in its fugue without the repeat. The affect of the last two movement of Op 106 is different, more like a ternary form slow movement followed by a separate finale, albeit a fugue. The last movement also has a long introduction, somewhat like the Ritternello of the Ode to Joy movement in the Ninth Symphony, Op 125, and works like the last two movements of Op 132 which is related to the Ninth Symphony in Beethoven's sketch books.
I live in California, where driving seems to be more important than in other parts of the U.S. and in Europe. I live in Silicon Valley where a persistent housing shortage and higher demand for workers means that people who have high paying jobs often have long commutes, 40+ miles one way.
I don't drive, never have, due to poor vision. So, I have arranged my life around either public transit or walking to work. I worked for about 23 years where I was able to walk to work and another 20 years where I had short bus or train rides. Since I have retired, the cost of public transit has more than doubled in absolute currency so I can understand the claim that the price of fuel could be a reason why fewer teenagers drive. The same with insurance rates.
Having been in Europe 30 years ago, I can say with confidence that the public transit there is better than what we have here. It is better integrated.Also the cities and towns still have the human scale of pre-industrial cities. No town in California has been designed, or has evolved, with the idea that everything you need should be within walking distance, although some are nearly so. As someone who has never used a car, I have to be choosy about where I live to take advantage of that fact. One of the reasons higher density living is being developed is because there are fewer places to build and more and more people do not need or want a car. So the layout of urban areas that assume commutes by car might become a thing of the past. But even if urban sprawl is replaced by high density communities, they will be located along rail routes.
Thinking about the Boomerang Effect, where adult children of Baby Boomers have to move in with their parents because they can't afford to live on their own, to the tune of about 17 million, as I recall reading recently. That may say that the reason kids drive less is economic and is a ringing indictment of our economic system that changes in the economy have made it harder for young people to realize what their parents had. All of the reasons given so far, the cost of gas, insurance, social factors, might be true to some extant, but the fact that many in that age group are forced to move back in with their parents after college points to a larger set of factors, economic ones, inbalances in the economy that didn't affect their parents. The quality of jobs ins't there, the investment to create decent jobs isn't there. I would argue that it is tech and the digital revolution and the international labor market it has created that is to blame. That is the dirty little secret that many engineers are loth to admit, that the promises for a better future for all through the use of computers has not been realized. Only a very few have benefited the most, but most people have to do lower-paying less quality jobs because of the misbalanced set of incentives created by the application of computers to work.
Oh, I don't know. California has a serious problem it is ultra conservatives in Southern California and the Central Valley and now in Silicon Valley. Feinstein is far from ideal, but she is better than the nut cases that come from L.A or Orange Counties. I am including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon in that list. RR won election to the governor by demagoggery in 1966. He ran against the radicals at U.C. Berkeley and we know what he did as Pres., he turned the country into the Entrapanocracy it is today, but I don't give him the power to do that, he is but an effect, a response to the economic forces that took over after he left office. He was financed by South Western Bankers and Energy people and probably Venture Capitalists who knew that the digital revolution would empower them and take power away from most of the rest of the people leading to the lopsided distribution of income and power we have today. Politicians, but more GOP than Democrats but not by much, are prostitutes. The pimps are financial and business people. They run things, and through their shortsightedness we will all fail.
It is called the Duopoly. Its reality is revealed when the national committees of the two parties publish the list of their biggest donors at election time. For many years it has been the same small group of super wealthy individuals and corporations, the stake holders in the status quo.
I had a good laugh at this thread, people bashing Diane Feinstein, first because she is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then because she is a Democrat from California, all of which is beside the point if these same people use Google, or Facebook, or Twitter or any other social media company. The post to which I replied has the right idea, and I am saying so in more words to amplify the point that although I don't like what NSA is doing, that we have accepted the same thing done by every social media company out there as a fair business activity. That is the irony, and that is what the people who replies above don't get about technology, that people will use it to their advantage because its power is evident. Lots of businesses use similar techniques to find potential customers that NSA uses to develop networks of terror suspects. It isn't Google Analytics, but it is the same idea. So, until all of the people who posted so far agree that Social Media should be outlawed, we are stuck with the temptation NSA has taken. It is the nature of the Big Data we are saving about each other.
So, why haven't we seen any sighs of it at all? I don't believe UFOs are sufficient evidence of E.T.
The answer may be that intelligent species don't last long enough to be in contact, an idea proposed by Enrico Fermi in 1945. They may appear in the universe, even in our galaxy with regularity, but when they get enough power to alter their environment, they exterminate themselves. If Climate change is caused by human technology, we are doing the experiment right now, and it may yield us a species-wide Darwin Award.
Fermi was worried about nuclear weapons as the downfall of mankind. I'd say that greenhouse gasses, which seem far less lethal, are a much more insidious downfall, and I have five major mass extinctions in the past half billion years of megafauna on earth to back me up. These were all nearly yielding the same result, even if the causes were different, they involved a rapid upset of the carbon cycle in earth's biosphere that the megafauna in particular had no time to adapt to. We are among the current megafauna; we have been exterminating the other megafauna by hogging their habitats as we are in the midst of the latest mass extinction, but if we mess up the carbon cycle even more, it will bite us directly as water and food are denied us.
I think this posts misses one essential raw ingredient, not that the rest of it is wrong in any way. That is an astonishing memory for the content of the field, and in fact that is what stops most people, a poor focused memory.
I know a little about musical memory and I am convinced that great composers of music must begin with very good memories, but that most musical people, even if they have good memories, must suppress the linkages between one passage and the next to process the mechanisms in the music to be able to compose new music. I am sure that someone like J.S. Bach must have had a flawless memory, probably recalling every musical work he ever heard, same with Mozart. Beethoven was deaf after about 1808, born 1770, died 1827, and so had to remember what he could no longer hear as he composed the masterworks of his Late period.
I have known a few very smart, possibly genius level people, whose hallmark, starting point, is a flawless memory for the subject. I think that math geniuses need a very good memory of relationships and the steps of proofs. Chess masters have to memorize 40+ moves into a line and all the variations. Writers probably remember conversations they had decades ago. etc. etc.
Ordinary people often project the mental acuity they have on the rest of the world, not being aware that there is wide variation in how people think, and what people remember, Geniuses probably do this as well, but as the article notes, as self-protection. Surely, they most be aware of how unique their mental abilities are.
Anything that can run Windows 7 could run linux. Anything that can run embedded Windows 7 would have no problem running linux. Or OpenBSD.
I ran Knoppix 7.2 on a system with 256MB ot ram and Linux Swap areas in a vintage 1999 Celeron processor, no problem. This was tried about two months ago. So may Linuxes will run on systems that are too small for Win 7, even. We aren't even talking about how trim you could make the GUI for a single application. It wasn't too may years ago that you ran SunOS 4.1 on a Sun 3 with only 1 MB of ram, so running Linux on a system the size of your thumbnail isn't that far-fetched.
So, this sounds like hype to kindle interest in a company gone to shit, and losing its reputation as it pimps for social networks and customer leads, biasing its searches as it goes. Google deserves to gag on its own Big Data apatite. My guess is that Google hires kids because they can be manipulated and they believe in market capture instead of doing a quality service, what kid has heard of public service?
forest for the trees.....
I think that the history of financial and organizational change since about 1990 is driven by short-term-thinking, really short-term ROI to investors and funders, and that is driven by efficient micromanagement enabled by the digital revolution, guys with excel spreadsheets able to account on every tiny part of an organization, and the overuse of financialization as a value criterion.
So if you are in tech, are a programmer, and rue the ever present knee-jerk of management, take the blame yourself, you did it, you helped it along, and it is an unintended consequence of your technology.
Most of the other effects of the digital revolution, the internationalization, the down-sizing, the financialization of business are effects that the average person in tech, including myself missed. It led to over zealous use of accounting without a good sanity check for assigning value to assets, picking numbers out of the air,and giving them more authority than they deserve because they are printed on a spread sheet. People can be fooled as they always have been fooled.
The efficiencies are all false, the cost is now shifting elsewhere, and it is a spark for burning the status quo, as a sacrifice of human values will result in great unrest that could destroy the centers of power.
I think by "useful" he means no different from Word 2000. Some people go to great lengths to resist change or the notion that using a different tool might actually improve how they do a task, and there is a cost trade-off there, as well.
I know that I might be in the minority just because when I first encountered operating systems, all we had was CLI, but I am familiar with the *nix command line and I wouldn't give it up for anything. Because of its usefulness I have installed Cygwin on every Windows install I have had to deal with and wouldn't work in a place where Linux or Cygwin was not allowed and supported by the IT department. I use terminal on Mac OS X and on Linux despite the GUI's and I still think that emacs is a better editor than all the editors for GUIs. I often run it inside a terminal with a zoomed font in preference to its GUI. If I were mentoring young people I would insist that they get some exposure to the shell and to things like Limited Regular Expressions, especially if they had any desire to be computer scientists or top-notch programmers.
And IBM would be contributing to market speculation by getting stock traders to use Watson to do programmed trades more "efficiently", meaning that human traders are at an even bigger disadvantage. Next time the financial system fails, the FTC starts a latency period on machine calls to end the speculation and Watson is out of business. And Good!
Ta is not a rare earth. It is a Transition metal like Mo, Zr.
Knowing the general geologic age, I would assume that the deposits in Sweden are about the same age and type as the Ironstones in the Superior Province of Northern U.S., late Precambrian, about 1.6 BYA. These were sediments deposited with Fe Oxides, Rust, that formed when the oxygen concentrations in the seas caused Fe to percipitate out. We are driving around in the result.
Yes, I know all about FORTRAN's longevity, and the stupidity of companies ignoring or short-shifting legacy. The company is out of business, now.
Well, good. If This is the strategy Yahoo! will use, and it is wrong, that should hurt their business in some way. It would be their own fault for not being critical of the pronouncements of one of their people.
In their stumble to differentiate themselves in marketing imagery, they should pay to get it wrong, if it is wrong.
The argument is very sensitive to cost of getting to asteroids, and probably not just ones that cross Earth's orbit. Iron meteorites are rare, but not vanishingly so, and they are the ones that have heavy metals, not just Iron Group, VIIIb, but Cu, Ag, and Au metals. Since Iron Meteorites come from planetessimals that were hot enough to differentiate and have metal cores, ones the size of Ceres or Vesta, finding them might be a matter of getting beyond the vicinity of Earth to main best asteroids and mining those. The economics arguments here must assume that the current cost of getting out of low earth orbit and only a few million miles from Earth constrains the cost of getting to targets. Once you pay that cost, the cost of getting to main belt asteroids isn't much more. The cost of mining could be reduced by developing robots to do the work in microgravity.
It might take only one modest sized asteroid consisting mostly of metal to justify the cost, imagine that the amount of precious metals, Pd, Ir, Pt, Au, minded in total from the Earth's crust, and very like delivered to a solid crust by late bombatdment asteroid impacts, could be doubled or tripled by finding one such body and mining it. Ironically, the price of gold would be negatively affected, since finding an appreciable percentage of the total ever mined from Earth would depress the price. The upside is that finding these elements in abundance would open up new uses, note that Pt has major applications as an industrial catalyst, and maybe the other VIIIb metals, such as Rh and Re, as well as Ir, Pd could find new applications if their prices drop. Ag and Au, if found, have other applications than coinage.
Fe, Co, Ni and maybe even Cu and Zn are likely to be the most abundant metals, and maybe Mn, Cr, Ti, V, as well, even though their value is less, maybe the desired metals would be smelted in space and the robots would refine the ones worth returning to Earth and leave the others in space.
I don't know the detailed chemistry of iron meteorites, but if significant amounts of Rare Earths also exist in them, that would certainly sweeten the pot.
I would go further ans assert that Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and social media in general is a scourge on Mankind! These companies are the perfect example of what happens when "leaders" are only the shit that floats to the top as everybody else is so worried about financials that they ignore what technology actually does to people. This is due to the pervasive damage to leadership done by getting trained at schools of business administration that stress financialization and denigrate public service. We have shitty leaders because this is how we train people for leadership. We don't get leaders, we get guys who are always on a short leash held by investors who are only interested in quarterly ROI and what happens is that so-called leaders spend so much time trying to please analysts on Wall Street, who are rank idiots, and looking over their shoulder at the moment to moment stock price. This is no way to lead and this is why we get the shit in business we have today.
Steve Jobs was probably as sociopathic as the next CEO of a company, but at least when he replaced John Scully, he was able to reform Apple around its products because the company was for a time out of the cross hairs of Wall Street. I worked for a major computer company whose management was paying too much attention to Wall Street and I didn't know it at the time but they were selling larger servers to the companies who created the speculative bubble that burst in the crash of 2008, a problem which has not been fixed, and which is a problem created by technology. I am talking about program trading made possible by fast servers. If I ran the SEC I would get a law passed that every trade must have 30 seconds of latency. The company I worked for got bought out after I left.
If the general public gets wind of what tech was used for, to create the speculative buggle in investment, and a shadow economy, and how it hurts their access to capital and good business plans, tech will be done. It will have lost its exhaulted, overblown, reputation.
I used to think that engineers and scientists were smart, some are, but now I think that we live in a world of unintended consequences driven by short-term profit motive. What I read in this thread is a bunch of guilty people scrambling to justify that their good fortunes haven't come at the detriment of a vast majority of their fellows, after all who has the most to lose from criticisms of the way things are, the people that read this type of forum and who are the makers of the technology that is causing the mess.
I see most of these comments as nitpicks and evasions of the truth that most Americans have seen a loss of spending power as a result of the application of technology in the service of short-term business gain. The problem this raises for tech workers is the Google Bus problem in San Francisco and what that really means to the elites in Silicon Valley. It means that the honeymoon with tech is finally over and what that means is that ordinary people, people who don't write code, people who do not create technology are just now beginning to put two and two together and coming to the conclusion that technology may not work at all to make their lives better, that the same old failings of human nature apply and are amplified by the technology.
I have been attacked by trolls who evidently listen to Fox News mostly, who may be paid for Republican PR contractors to cruise the Internet attacking "Liberals" for daring to criticize Capitalism and the American Way, which is increasingly the Chinese way, by the way And I have no illusions that Hip Silicon Valley has always had an undercurrent of Libertarian extremism, Random Randians. But I sense fear from those quarters that the jig is up, that they know that it is dawning on many more people that the big corporations are doing evil. So, every time a mere user gets pissed off at Google targeting ads at them by reading their e-mail and search strings, or that Facebook is constructed so that they can spy on you and not protect you or your children against other users abusing you, Javascript gets a more sinister reputation, and so does many practitioners of such arcane arts.
One has to get past Python's definition of white space. Just because source loots indented on the page doesn't mean that Python will accept the white space. This is true because of spaces getting mixed up with tab characters, they are not seen as the same and many editors don't help you very well wih this. It is almost as if you must do 'cat -v' to be sure.
I agree that once you get past that, Pythons notion of structure is easier to see than with braket-blocked syntax. It is more compact.
You seem so emotionally worked up so as to not be able to argue and reason effectively. What I said must have really threatened you, Been watching too much Fox News, lately? Come back some other day when you can speak and argue with some more sense and less emotion, either that or you have no practice in thinking., whatsoever.
The divide in our country seems to be sparked by emotive words on people who lack the means to pick propaganda apart and discuss with any civility. You make my case for the manipulation of public opinion by a bunch of Plutocrats who support Right Wing positions who do not want people to have sensible discussions and debates. You seem to have swallowed the bait whole. Wise up and start laying down rational arguments, and get off you ass and reason!
A read through the linked article, not a primary source, said that researchers in France were about to use a technique to measure the density of the magma in the chamber beneath the Yellowstone caldera. A magma chamber has been known and mapped to some extent for some time. The issue with the lower density portion of the melt may mean that gasses are building up in that phase and that their pressure on the rock above could be a precursor to an eruption. I know from other sources that there have been changes in the tilt and overall shape of the land in the caldera which are taken to mean changes in the disposition of the magma below. It is quite hard to correctly identify the signs that an eruption is coming over short time-scales, very much like the problem of predicting earthquakes. Geologists can more readily tell you where such events will come and with great confidence, but when is altogether another matter in a human time scale. Even events such as earthquakes, emission of gasses, and changes in GPS positions don't tell you when such an event would occur. In fact, we may not have the means to mitigate the effects of a supervolcanic eruption even if we knew it was coming anytime soon.