If we did that, then the DEA would make possession of computers a capital offense. But it's not that likely that Andrew Cuomo or Carly Fiorina will be nominated, let alone win.
The largest increases in population are always for countries with a late agrarian economy. You need to pop a large brood of children to help out in the fields and then to provide for you in old age. When a country industrializes, the birthrate always drops sharply. Early in the last century we worried about Japan and its "teeming millions." More recently it was China, but it too is going through the same transition with industrialization.
1. One logical type of location would be adventurous, investor-friendly corners of Europe: Ireland, Iceland, Scotland (which is already promoting a "Silicon Glen").
2. But a better bet might be industrial rust belts like Upper Silesia in Poland, or Birmingham, which like its American namesake is redneck heaven (the term there is "chavs"). These are places which already have dense industrial infrastructure like power and rail service, but it's now underutilized as the heavy industry has moved elsewhere. Tech could be a good replacement.
3. The Paris suburbs and Hauts-du-Seine: People don't realize how tech-friendly France is. It leads the world in applied nuclear and is a close second to the US in aerospace.
4. The Swiss watch country of Jura and Geneva: long experience in precision electrical and mechanical engineering. Rural towns like Lengnau are now looking for a clean industry to succeed it.
If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine. Tablets give you a better page presentation than the hard-to-keep-flat paperbacks real people are used to reading, and with a consistent illumination for the darkened corners where reading is actually done. You can carry as many books as you want on the road without giving up precious luggage space. Because nobody around you knows what you're reading, you can feel free to try works and whole genres you never contemplated before. E-books are still more expensive than they should be, but they are coming down.
So because of Amazon, e-books are here to stay. If Amazon's rules are too odious for authors, new choices will pop up as fast as the market can provide them.
Ballons are already being used, from South Korea. The regime knows that it survives only if the mass of people know nothing about what life is like outside, especially just outside. And yes, video content on thumb drives is a de facto standard there.
Here is how I would do it. First, load up several million thumb drives with movies and TV shows offering a view of life as it is lived today on the outside. Nothing American, just about how the other Koreans live in the free part of the country. The thumb drive is already established as an underground form of communication in NK, but up to now they are being smuggled a few at a time across the Chinese border.
Now drop them into North Korean cities from high-flying, undetectable B-2s. It won't take long for freedom to ring. http://www.wired.com/2015/03/n...
Is this the same Paul Ehrlich who became famous for predicting that overpopulation would kill off humanity long before we would see the 21st Century? Of course environmentalists, in bestowing upon us their latest set of apocalyptic "predictions" would pick someone who has been spectacularly wrong so often in the past.
Do we have any independent way of verifying that DDG is not an NSA honeypot, or is this another case of Internet hipsters declaring their own set of cultural prejudices to be TRVTH because they say it is?
The problems in this article apply to any streaming service. It's what happens when a new technology collides with the writhing mass of overwrought little Hollywood egos that is the entertainment business.
Look at the example of television. Though in the old days we complained about having to sit through commercials, the sponsored broadcast model was one that everyone understood and was able to use nationwide without much thought. When cable came along, you had to pick out service tiers, but it brought TV to all those places where it had never seen seen before.
Enter streaming. For broadcast networks which have always used the sponsored-by-commercials model, this could have been a chance to use the reach of the Internet to provide "infinity" broadcast range to each over-air network. Networks began to make shows available on streaming after each air date, and it looked as though we were on our way to TV utopia. Miss a show and you can see it online; for sponsors, their reach is now vastly expanded both in space (programs becoming visible outside of city antenna range) and time (vacationers are watching your commercials after they get back to town and stream their favorites). As a bonus, Internet streaming gives broadcasters viewer metrics that make the old Neilsen diaries look like cave wall drawings.
But no service model is so simple and beautiful that Hollywood can't screw it up. Some shows can't be streamed because a TV "Adele" considers her ego worth trashing the service model for. Other shows disappear after a few episodes, so if you're away for a month you will never see them at all. Industry middlemen, the medallion cabdrivers of the business, want to flimflam double and triple sets of fees out of users, which is why a lot of over-the-air content hides behind those miserable "verify your cable provider" interfaces online. The result: we, the users, are sticking to our torrents until the mess clears up. If Apple wants to make music as simple and accessible to all by subscription as Netflix DVDs are for the movie business, it will have to strongarm Hollywood in the same way Netflix did, by becoming a default standard means of access that nobody will mess with.
"... HR will throw away your resume if it doesn't say Microsoft Office."
I was lucky enough to have started my career in the late Sixties, when new recruits routinely were first introduced to the technical manager who had initiated the 'req'. He (yes, always a he in those days) would then make sure that HR was kept out of the loop until the hire decision had been made, whereupon HR would be invoked to process the paperwork. I would be walked over to HR on the first day to pick up my parking permit and sign an NDA.
Later, the HR departments of the tech world found a way to save themselves from extinction. They became the local arbiters of gummint regulation, thereby gaining back their lost power.
I knew this discussion was immediately going to decay into a gun thread.
But there is no comparison. Unless you're talking about driving over people, an armored car is a purely defensive technology. If the places where you routinely drive around include urban no-go zones, you might need one.
The problem in both London and Paris is the unvetted, uncontrollable stream of refugees pouring in from across the Mediterranean. These cities have no-go neighborhoods now, just like large American cities.
Europeans used to think of uncontrolled refugee influx as a Pig AmeriKKKa problem that would never happen to them, but we're all Arizonans now. Watch for France to elect a Joe Arpaio of its own.
"Even better, you can run Windows software on your Mac "
In this more enlightened era, most Mac fans no longer consider running Windows on a Mac a stoning offense. You just have to be stoned to want to do it.
We already antagonize them by our very existence. Our objective now is to make them fear us as much as they hate us. There is not much we can - or should - do about the regional hatreds that have required Saddam-style dictatorships just to keep the lid on, but we would like to prevent them from operating internationally.
Becoming totally energy independent would be a major advance. Fracking and oil drilling carry a certain amount of risk, but it's the technical kind we can dealt with before. Independence would make all that worthwhile.
"Why are drones singled out as the big evil in this regard?"
Because unlike our other military approaches in the Middle East, drones are working. Using them is our way of nailing bad guys without having our troops picked off a few at a time by IEDs and snipers. This makes the terrorists and their defenders in Western societies hopping mad, which is why their magazines and websites are full of handwavey speculation about huge amounts of collateral damage drones are supposedly causing.
Whether AGI by computational means is possible depends on how successful the atheist view of humanity is. If that view proves true, at least as explaining human origins and development, it follows that everything that humans are will at some point be reproducible by machine. The computational elements that realize this model may be as far beyond today's as ours are beyond the steam engine (quantum processes, etc.) but they will be nonetheless computational.
Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
Slashdot Mirror
"FDA bans frowns and criticism..."
If we did that, then the DEA would make possession of computers a capital offense. But it's not that likely that Andrew Cuomo or Carly Fiorina will be nominated, let alone win.
It's even worse than that, I'm afraid. I'm American.
The largest increases in population are always for countries with a late agrarian economy. You need to pop a large brood of children to help out in the fields and then to provide for you in old age. When a country industrializes, the birthrate always drops sharply. Early in the last century we worried about Japan and its "teeming millions." More recently it was China, but it too is going through the same transition with industrialization.
1. One logical type of location would be adventurous, investor-friendly corners of Europe: Ireland, Iceland, Scotland (which is already promoting a "Silicon Glen").
2. But a better bet might be industrial rust belts like Upper Silesia in Poland, or Birmingham, which like its American namesake is redneck heaven (the term there is "chavs"). These are places which already have dense industrial infrastructure like power and rail service, but it's now underutilized as the heavy industry has moved elsewhere. Tech could be a good replacement.
3. The Paris suburbs and Hauts-du-Seine: People don't realize how tech-friendly France is. It leads the world in applied nuclear and is a close second to the US in aerospace.
4. The Swiss watch country of Jura and Geneva: long experience in precision electrical and mechanical engineering. Rural towns like Lengnau are now looking for a clean industry to succeed it.
If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine. Tablets give you a better page presentation than the hard-to-keep-flat paperbacks real people are used to reading, and with a consistent illumination for the darkened corners where reading is actually done. You can carry as many books as you want on the road without giving up precious luggage space. Because nobody around you knows what you're reading, you can feel free to try works and whole genres you never contemplated before. E-books are still more expensive than they should be, but they are coming down.
So because of Amazon, e-books are here to stay. If Amazon's rules are too odious for authors, new choices will pop up as fast as the market can provide them.
Ballons are already being used, from South Korea. The regime knows that it survives only if the mass of people know nothing about what life is like outside, especially just outside. And yes, video content on thumb drives is a de facto standard there.
Here is how I would do it. First, load up several million thumb drives with movies and TV shows offering a view of life as it is lived today on the outside. Nothing American, just about how the other Koreans live in the free part of the country. The thumb drive is already established as an underground form of communication in NK, but up to now they are being smuggled a few at a time across the Chinese border.
Now drop them into North Korean cities from high-flying, undetectable B-2s. It won't take long for freedom to ring.
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/n...
One test would be to enter a number of DDG searches using trigger words that might catch the NSA's interest. If you get "swatted," my point is proven.
Nobody would actually want to try that, though.
Is this the same Paul Ehrlich who became famous for predicting that overpopulation would kill off humanity long before we would see the 21st Century? Of course environmentalists, in bestowing upon us their latest set of apocalyptic "predictions" would pick someone who has been spectacularly wrong so often in the past.
Do we have any independent way of verifying that DDG is not an NSA honeypot, or is this another case of Internet hipsters declaring their own set of cultural prejudices to be TRVTH because they say it is?
The problems in this article apply to any streaming service. It's what happens when a new technology collides with the writhing mass of overwrought little Hollywood egos that is the entertainment business.
Look at the example of television. Though in the old days we complained about having to sit through commercials, the sponsored broadcast model was one that everyone understood and was able to use nationwide without much thought. When cable came along, you had to pick out service tiers, but it brought TV to all those places where it had never seen seen before.
Enter streaming. For broadcast networks which have always used the sponsored-by-commercials model, this could have been a chance to use the reach of the Internet to provide "infinity" broadcast range to each over-air network. Networks began to make shows available on streaming after each air date, and it looked as though we were on our way to TV utopia. Miss a show and you can see it online; for sponsors, their reach is now vastly expanded both in space (programs becoming visible outside of city antenna range) and time (vacationers are watching your commercials after they get back to town and stream their favorites). As a bonus, Internet streaming gives broadcasters viewer metrics that make the old Neilsen diaries look like cave wall drawings.
But no service model is so simple and beautiful that Hollywood can't screw it up. Some shows can't be streamed because a TV "Adele" considers her ego worth trashing the service model for. Other shows disappear after a few episodes, so if you're away for a month you will never see them at all. Industry middlemen, the medallion cabdrivers of the business, want to flimflam double and triple sets of fees out of users, which is why a lot of over-the-air content hides behind those miserable "verify your cable provider" interfaces online. The result: we, the users, are sticking to our torrents until the mess clears up. If Apple wants to make music as simple and accessible to all by subscription as Netflix DVDs are for the movie business, it will have to strongarm Hollywood in the same way Netflix did, by becoming a default standard means of access that nobody will mess with.
"... HR will throw away your resume if it doesn't say Microsoft Office."
I was lucky enough to have started my career in the late Sixties, when new recruits routinely were first introduced to the technical manager who had initiated the 'req'. He (yes, always a he in those days) would then make sure that HR was kept out of the loop until the hire decision had been made, whereupon HR would be invoked to process the paperwork. I would be walked over to HR on the first day to pick up my parking permit and sign an NDA.
Later, the HR departments of the tech world found a way to save themselves from extinction. They became the local arbiters of gummint regulation, thereby gaining back their lost power.
"Random updates (downgrades) to the UI don't get you more readers (or clicks)."
Especially when we still don't have that post-edit button that every other comment site in the twenty-first century has.
In this very thread, we will have to start calling it "Large-screen movie chain that keeps closing down in location after location."
Reviews are one specific and long-standing example of fair use, so I would say that Ars has immunity here.
I knew this discussion was immediately going to decay into a gun thread.
But there is no comparison. Unless you're talking about driving over people, an armored car is a purely defensive technology. If the places where you routinely drive around include urban no-go zones, you might need one.
The problem in both London and Paris is the unvetted, uncontrollable stream of refugees pouring in from across the Mediterranean. These cities have no-go neighborhoods now, just like large American cities.
Europeans used to think of uncontrolled refugee influx as a Pig AmeriKKKa problem that would never happen to them, but we're all Arizonans now. Watch for France to elect a Joe Arpaio of its own.
If you want to order in restaurants, a working knowledge of Turkish is helpful. Polish is for tradesmen, such as the cable guy.
"Even better, you can run Windows software on your Mac "
In this more enlightened era, most Mac fans no longer consider running Windows on a Mac a stoning offense. You just have to be stoned to want to do it.
You must have one of those Windows systems that's so slow, even the malware crashes.
We already antagonize them by our very existence. Our objective now is to make them fear us as much as they hate us. There is not much we can - or should - do about the regional hatreds that have required Saddam-style dictatorships just to keep the lid on, but we would like to prevent them from operating internationally.
Becoming totally energy independent would be a major advance. Fracking and oil drilling carry a certain amount of risk, but it's the technical kind we can dealt with before. Independence would make all that worthwhile.
"Why are drones singled out as the big evil in this regard?"
Because unlike our other military approaches in the Middle East, drones are working. Using them is our way of nailing bad guys without having our troops picked off a few at a time by IEDs and snipers. This makes the terrorists and their defenders in Western societies hopping mad, which is why their magazines and websites are full of handwavey speculation about huge amounts of collateral damage drones are supposedly causing.
Whether AGI by computational means is possible depends on how successful the atheist view of humanity is. If that view proves true, at least as explaining human origins and development, it follows that everything that humans are will at some point be reproducible by machine. The computational elements that realize this model may be as far beyond today's as ours are beyond the steam engine (quantum processes, etc.) but they will be nonetheless computational.
Thoreau is not the villain here. He was a trustafarian who openly indulged in a short-term experiment in simplified living. By residing within a short walk of town, he was able to retain normal social contacts while writing up his experience. In all, a life nothing like the angry Unabomber wannabees who act in his name.
Ding! Ding! We have a believer in one of those back-of-the-magazine "alternative" physics models. Now tell us all about the chemtrails, buddy.