LOL! The author obviously knows nothing about Oregon. Oregon is not a Democratic state. Portland is a city with a high population density of lefties surrounded by a sparsely populated state of Teabaggers.
Stinky poo.... was news for nerds.
If a state government trolled out a web site for c.40 people to the tune of 300 million dollars something is astoundingly wrong. Do the math against the population of Oregon in 2013, approximately 3,899,353.
Some that read News for Nerds recall the bubble where Dot/Bomb companies left an economic wasteland behind them. I cannot convince myself that these funds were spent in Oregon and I cannot convince myself that Oregon has not been assaulted by financial thugs...
Yeah, thats what I thought too... $ 300 million? Seriously?? This report must be an exaggeration or a misrepresentation of some sort, either that or there was an astounding amount of corruption involved. How the hell can anybody manage to spend $300 million on a website? Just to put this into perspective, in Iowa they are building a 14 floor, 480,000 square foot university children's hospital and are renovating 56.000 square feet of existing space as well. It is projected to cost just under $300 million when completed.
Google uses automatic systems to try to detect "abusive" queries. When the system is triggered, you get the message "Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later.".
...and the fun really starts when that system misfires.
Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price.
It didn't. The scientific output of Apollo was quite remarkable. And there's two simple reasons why. First, they had the best machines of the day, people (which incidentally are still the best machines of the day) gathering samples and running experiments on the surface.
And second, they returned 380 kg of lunar material to be studied for the past few decades. Do you really think a 60s vintage lunar rover is going to get better data on lunar material on location than generations of Earth-based scientists do with a sample return?
No I don't but then that's not what I was trying to point out. I said the Soviets did a whole lot of invaluable pioneer work in the field of unmanned space probes and that Lunokhod pointed the way to the future. Or do you really think thtat the future of deep space exporation is in grandiose Apollo program like manned missions to remote corners of the solar system? What has been the focus of space exploration since Apollo? Wait... let me think... Oh yes it's been unmanned probes, even NASA acknowledges that. It will _always_ be more cost effective to send robot probes and that includes sample return missions. That writing has been on the wall since Apollo and it has only become more true as we have gotten better at AI and robotics.
Hmm. Apparently capitalist governments are even more effective at sinking funds into projects like that, because its widely recognized that US beat the Soviets in the early space race.
Dunno about that. IMHO the Soviets did every bit as much good pioneering work with the Lunokhod program and Mir as the US did with the entire Apollo program and the space shuttle program. Apollo was a spectacular propaganda Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price. Lunokhod set the pattern for the way space exploration is done today and Mir yielded a mountain of data on the problems of really long term missions in space. In my book it is rather uninteresting who gets there first, what counts is the scientific work you do once you get there and the what technologies you pioneer in the process. I also respect anybody who turns a profit in the space industry, especially people who manage that without any government subsidies in any form (direct or indirect) since that's not an easy thing to do by any means.
These guys are amateurs compared to the Mexican scrappers who sold hospital equipment containing 6,000 pellets of cobalt-60 for scrap. The machinery was then processed into rebar which was in turn was used in god knows how many homes in Mexico and the USA as well as metal furniture that ended ups as far away as Canada. The Mexicans even found pellets of cobalt-60 embedded into the asphalt surface of roads in Sinaloa and 109 houses had to be torn down and disposed of as radioactive waste. All in all some 5000 metric tons of steel were contaminated... as far as is known. According to a documentary I watched about this incident there is a good possibility that there are still contaminated houses and furniture out there. The incident only came to light when a truck with a load of contaminated rebar drove past a Los Alamos laboratories radiation checkpoint and set of a whole bunch of alarms. One person died of bone cancer, another 4 were injured and least 10 individuals received significant exposures and some scrapyard workers became sterile. There is also a good chance that many more people either will, or already have, developed cancer since it took about a year to discover this snafu and even longer to track down all the contaminated material already in use. This story made me think about how US Homeland security worries about 'dirty bombs'. The only thing that still amazes me about that particular contingency is that it hasn't happened yet because highly radioactive material is apparently very easy to come by. The Juarez incident caused radiation sensors to be installed at all major border crossings but one wonders if this has been extended to every single crossing along the US/Mexican border. Either way, I'd be worried.
> (Grizzly Bear and Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500) who are on the record as saying that Spotify streaming only earns them a handful of dollars for tens of thousands of streaming plays?
So why don't you pull your songs from Spotify? Why not put them where you'll make bags of money? Wait you probably can't as you don't own the rights/distribution rights to your music?
Seriously you'd thin by now, and by that I mean ( its not 1997 and the technology has been there for years) the artists as a collective would have created their own distribution service and raked in the dough.
I'm no music industry insider but you have made me curious and since you dispense that advice so freely and with such unshakable authority you must know... Where can people put their music and make bags of money without being ripped off by middle men and gate keepers like Spotify? I have a couple of indie musician friends who do own the distribution rights to their music and who'd be thrilled to know how to easily make bags of money without having to deal with parasites.
No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that. It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen.
I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do. However, e-books can be searched which is a huge bonus and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS. The biggest plus with e-books IMHO is portability. I have been converting my printed library to digital by a combination of buying ebooks versions of paper books that I own and scanning my old out-of-print paper books or downloading scanned books from projects like Gutenberg. Recently I put a stack of these paper books on a bathroom scale and measured the real-world weight of the library I keep on my iPad, it was well over 20kg. Basically I would not want to be without paper books but grabbing the iPad and knowing that you are carrying the contents of an entire 2m high bookshelf in your hand is undeniably cool and very convenient.
If these bozos are forced to show that documentary chalk up a win for environmenalism because the film may make a few more people think abut climate change, if they put up a fight chalk up an even bigger win for environmentalims because the publicity raises awareness about global warming. If we get really lucky Fox News will contribute to that publicity by reporting on this before they realize they may actually have caused a few of their viewers to watch the film to see what all the hullablaloo is about (irony, irony...).
How exactly does one hide a hunting rifle in a coat? (but your point stands, it's ridiculous)
A carbine? There are also numerous folding hunting rifles freely available that can be concealed under a coat. Needless to say they are very popular with poachers and have been for at least the last two centuries.
Does that figure count the DoD spending on being Uncle Sam's Security Services in assorted oleaginous-but-deeply-unsafe hellholes, or is that extra?
Well, if we count invading Iraq, to open it up for exploitation by American oil companies, as a subsidy to 'Big Oil' you can add at least $1 trillion in direct costs and lord only knows how much in indirect and delayed costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war in Iraq would eventually cost $1.9 trillion (according to Wikipedia that's $6,300 per U.S. citizen) and I'm pretty sure that figure will be revised and such revisions are normally not downward ones.
If it were so easy to just automate extreme failures, websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon would go down a lot less often. Unfortunately despite thousands of employees with extreme technical skill, there are still mistakes that bring them down from time-to-time. If we didn't have human SREs or System Administrators, things would be a lot worse. A computer doesn't have the analytics skill of a pilot and never will unless we end up with a singularity.
We don't have strong AI yet and pilots will never just "sit down with a programmer". Automation has to be tested thousands of times across thousands of scenarios in different aircraft and conditions for decades. Even then, there's always the chance that some snippet of code is waiting to kill a plane full of people because it got the wrong set of sensor inputs.
Which is why I will never get on a plane unless there is a pilot to switch off the AI if it goes haywire and fly the aircraft old-school. Furthermore I will never trust my well being to an AI driven car. With a plane at least there are a couple of minutes to react if the AI goes ape-shit before you run out of sky, with a AI driven car it's perhaps 10 seconds if you are lucky before you get T-boned by a truck and become a slimy red coating on the inside of a car wreck. I am still on the fence about AI driven trains.
Automation fails from time to time, and when it does, pilots are the failsafe. But to be able to do that, they need to stay in practice, and that's the problem being highlighted here: they're getting so little time in control that they're getting out of shape.
Right, build or contract a small fleet of trainers (perhaps twin turboprops or two seaters trainers like PC.7s or Tucanos or even set aside an old 737 or something in that class) and make these people fly their ass off once in a while. I'm sure simulators are great learning tools but there is no substitute for taking a plane up and actually practicing things like: engine restarts, flying on one engine, simulating an emergency descent after a rapid decompression or just boning up on basic aerobatics (the value of practical experience is one of a number of reasons the military hasn't replaced exercises like Maple Flag with simulater-only LAN partys). That should take care of any 'bureaucratification' problems your pilots are suffering from.
Hate to break it to you but there are lots of nomadic hunter gather populations that engage in war, rape and absolutely slavery. In fact the European and american slave trade was initially started by the nomadic berbers who basically ran the slave trade in north africa. Slavery always makes sense, there is always tedios or dangerous work that warrants slaves regardless of how primative. If you think nomadic people dont engage in slavery you clearly don't know anything about nomadic people, past or present.
Aggressiveness tends to be a function of population density rather than technological sophistication. Until the neolithic or thereabouts as populations grew enough to finally strain the available resources there is hardly any evidence at all of tribe-on-tribe warfare. Among the very little amount of evidence of something you could call warfare before c.a. 15.000 years ago was cannibalism and that was probably driven more by extreme famines than any conflict over resources or some (hypothetical) genetically predetermined human lust for looting, raping, killing and conquering. And even then cannibalism may have been a ritual practice rather than the result of famine driven warfare. This relative lack of inter-tribal conflict during pre-neolithic times was, as he pointed out, probably due to the low population density which meant that there when you ran into other human groups you could usually find yourself an unsettled place where you were not likely to step on that other tribe's toes and interaction largely consisted of relatively peaceful activities like trading, cooperating on big game hunts and exchanging tribal members through marriage. Primitive tribal societies that engage in warfare today, in places like Papua and in Africa usually have high population densities and the conflicts are usually over limited resources.
Wait a moment, did sub-Sahara Africans interbreed with something? No? Then they _are_ pure humans. And the others (me including) are different species, or sub-species at least. Unless we change the definition of pure human to some complex mix with archaic "animals".:) BTW, it depends how we look at it, probably they were in fact more advanced.
Second, about the distance, research I've seen last year showed that if we feed clustering software with different genetic material then it first separates blacks and whites, then asians. I don't know where did you get that Asians are more diverse group then the rest of the population. More over Africans themselves are more diverse group as whites ancestors were only a small group which left somewhere 100-70k years ago. But it was genetically (near)isolated for much longer. Remember at that time there was no UN, no continent wide trading, no railroads. Everyone was sitting within their tribe land.
The definition of species and subspecies has been fluid, and to some extent still seems to be a subject of debate. Google defines them like this:
species [ sp sheez ] taxonomic group: a subdivision of a genus considered as a basic biological classification and containing individuals that resemble one another and may interbreed organisms in species: the organisms belonging to a species humankind: human beings or the human race Synonyms: group, class, type, kind, genus, sort, variety, order
subspecies [ súb spsheez ] plant or animal category: a category used to classify plants and animals whose populations are distinct, e.g. in distribution, appearance, or feeding habits, but can still interbreed Synonyms: category, strain, genus, sort, class
Subspecies can interbreed and produce viable offspring. That means that modern human 'races' vaguely qualify as subspecies at best. Furthermore, according to this definition can be argued that Neanderthals were a human subspecies if we define 'human' as species Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals differed mildly in appearance, feeding habits and for a time, distribution but could still indisputably interbreed with modern humans and produce viable offspring (since some modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA). Now H. Neanderthalensis arrived in Europe 400.000 years before modern humans emerged in Africa about 200.000 years ago. Does that make Neanderthals more _pure_ humans than modern humans? Did Europeans and Asians become _purer_ humans than Africans by interbreeding with H. Neanderthalensis? IMHO the answer is no, it's more the case that the whole concept of some group of people being _pure_ humans is a steaming pile of BS.
Caveats: It is still debated whether H. Neanderthalis was a subspecies of Homo Sapiens or a species of the genus Homo, i.e whether it we should call it H. Sapiens Neanderthalis or H. Neanderthalis. Secondly recent discoveries have completely blown apart our previous picture of the entire genus Homo.
There is a diverse range of companies. Alternatives include Microsoft or Yahoo.
Yeah I'm sticking to Google too. Nothing prevents the alternatives from being worse.
Actually Google has pretty fierce competition these days from Bing, the caliber of Bings competitiveness is simply not acknowledged on Slashdot for religions reasons. While several recent studies have refuted Microsoft's BingItOn claim of two thirds of users preferring Bing results. Interestingly enough blind studies also suggest that that Bing actually delivers superior results to Google 41% of the time and 6% of the time they tied. Furthermore a lot of Bing's inferiority is largely perceived (i.e a 'halo' effect of the Google brand), people actually pick Bing results over Google results much of the time when you swap the brands on the search results. Myself I prefer Bing image results to Googles much of the time, the image search results from Bing often contain less noise.
That last link seems pretty negative at first but it also concludes:
There are two potential, contradictory reactions to the Ayers study:
It either conclusively or largely disproves the Bing preference claims;
* Putting aside the Bing advertising claims, the search engine performed relatively well vs. Google.
* Google won 53 percent of the time and Bing won 41 percent of the query tests, with a tie in 6 percent of instances. That suggests that Bing has the capacity to gain much more market share than it currently has (67 percent vs. 18 percent).
Ayers points out that the more assertive "prefer Bing 2:1 claim has been replaced on the Bing It On website with the more limited claim that "people prefer Bing."
I remember when Bing's market share was far down in the sub 10% range not that long ago.
How can you be a monoculture within your own product line? Apple has fierce competition on the PC market, the smartphone market and the tablet market. Now sod off to Starbucks or something and try really hard to come up with a better troll.
I'm still really upset that Google hacked my browser...
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of the work "hacked". Google did no such thing.
Google harvested data on peoples web surfing habits against the express wishes of their customers and they did it by quite deliberately circumventing browser settings. I don't care what you name you choose to call this behaviour, the fine should have been at least one order of magnitude higher. A penalty of $17 million is a pitiful amount.
Technically it is nice. It works great for games. But Apple is not really a game company so I am thinking how they would use it.
This could be, next to really innovative uses that are outside my limited imagination:
- gesture control for TV (Apple TV or upcoming TV)
- gesture controle of home automation (considering that they also bought a home automation firm), perhaps the sensor could be in the upcoming iwatch
- gesture control, next to the current input methods for osx and IOS - but I am not yet sure about the extra value.
- turn an iphone into a 3D scanner by for example tracing the outline of an object with one corner of the device.
So, I can imagine some use cases outside gaming, but somehow what I can come up with seem rahter nice to haves than killer apps. Any other ideas?
I don't know how small you can make these scanners, but assuming the can be made to fit into a mobile device I can think of one more feature: Face recognition. That might spare Apple embarrassing moments like Google had with it's face recognition login feature. People laugh about CCC hacking Apples fingerprint button, but at least that hack takes more than 20 seconds.
What they say it will be used for: sniffing for bomb materials
What it will be used for: sniffing for illegal drugs
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
You know, this brave new world is a lot less Brave New World than we thought it would be...
Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this? I remember watching a documentary about US American narco cops less than a year ago and one of the things they showed was police officers cooperating with environmental inspectors systematically sampling sewer water to track down meth-labs. It's just a logical progression of what environmental agencies are already doing on a regular basis to monitor pollution and to track down businesses trying to cut costs by pouring toxic chemicals down the sewers. Nobody blew up in a firestorm of outrage over EPAs monitoring pollution levels, even wing nuts on the far right hand fringe of politics like to have unpolluted drinking water (well... at least here in Europe they do).
A site not carrying ads is being actively hostile towards Google's business model, thus they have an incentive to harm that site. It should be up to Google to provide the evidence of harm, otherwise everyone should conclude that Google is acting in bad faith and gaming the system. The same applies to Twitter. How is this any different from someone claiming that the restaurant down the street has rats as a means of hurting a business?
I put it down to bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice. It stills shows how powerful Google has become. If they wrongly flag your side as harmful and nobody at Google support gives enough of a shit to help you sort it out, your site is pretty much dead because of Google's dominant market share. The only traffic you will get is from Bing/Yahoo users. Other than that you will get some traffic from places like Russia (Yandex) and China (Baidu) where Google has not managed to monopolize the market but traffic from those sources may not be what you want if your site is primarily interesting to people in countries where Google has the search market cornered for whatever reason.
Slashdot Mirror
...Oregon is a Democratic state...
LOL! The author obviously knows nothing about Oregon. Oregon is not a Democratic state. Portland is a city with a high population density of lefties surrounded by a sparsely populated state of Teabaggers.
Stinky poo.... was news for nerds.
If a state government trolled out a web site for c.40 people to the
tune of 300 million dollars something is astoundingly wrong.
Do the math against the population of Oregon in 2013, approximately 3,899,353.
Some that read News for Nerds recall the bubble where Dot/Bomb companies
left an economic wasteland behind them. I cannot convince myself that these funds
were spent in Oregon and I cannot convince myself that Oregon has not been
assaulted by financial thugs...
Yeah, thats what I thought too... $ 300 million? Seriously?? This report must be an exaggeration or a misrepresentation of some sort, either that or there was an astounding amount of corruption involved. How the hell can anybody manage to spend $300 million on a website? Just to put this into perspective, in Iowa they are building a 14 floor, 480,000 square foot university children's hospital and are renovating 56.000 square feet of existing space as well. It is projected to cost just under $300 million when completed.
http://www.uichildrens.org/buildingupdate/
Google uses automatic systems to try to detect "abusive" queries. When the system is triggered, you get the message "Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later.".
...and the fun really starts when that system misfires.
Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price.
It didn't. The scientific output of Apollo was quite remarkable. And there's two simple reasons why. First, they had the best machines of the day, people (which incidentally are still the best machines of the day) gathering samples and running experiments on the surface.
And second, they returned 380 kg of lunar material to be studied for the past few decades. Do you really think a 60s vintage lunar rover is going to get better data on lunar material on location than generations of Earth-based scientists do with a sample return?
No I don't but then that's not what I was trying to point out. I said the Soviets did a whole lot of invaluable pioneer work in the field of unmanned space probes and that Lunokhod pointed the way to the future. Or do you really think thtat the future of deep space exporation is in grandiose Apollo program like manned missions to remote corners of the solar system? What has been the focus of space exploration since Apollo? Wait... let me think... Oh yes it's been unmanned probes, even NASA acknowledges that. It will _always_ be more cost effective to send robot probes and that includes sample return missions. That writing has been on the wall since Apollo and it has only become more true as we have gotten better at AI and robotics.
Hmm. Apparently capitalist governments are even more effective at sinking funds into projects like that, because its widely recognized that US beat the Soviets in the early space race.
Dunno about that. IMHO the Soviets did every bit as much good pioneering work with the Lunokhod program and Mir as the US did with the entire Apollo program and the space shuttle program. Apollo was a spectacular propaganda Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price. Lunokhod set the pattern for the way space exploration is done today and Mir yielded a mountain of data on the problems of really long term missions in space. In my book it is rather uninteresting who gets there first, what counts is the scientific work you do once you get there and the what technologies you pioneer in the process. I also respect anybody who turns a profit in the space industry, especially people who manage that without any government subsidies in any form (direct or indirect) since that's not an easy thing to do by any means.
At least you don't fee like an Oracle error.
That's still better than being a Windows error because they don't even know who they are.
I nominate these guys for the Darwin award!
These guys are amateurs compared to the Mexican scrappers who sold hospital equipment containing 6,000 pellets of cobalt-60 for scrap. The machinery was then processed into rebar which was in turn was used in god knows how many homes in Mexico and the USA as well as metal furniture that ended ups as far away as Canada. The Mexicans even found pellets of cobalt-60 embedded into the asphalt surface of roads in Sinaloa and 109 houses had to be torn down and disposed of as radioactive waste. All in all some 5000 metric tons of steel were contaminated ... as far as is known. According to a documentary I watched about this incident there is a good possibility that there are still contaminated houses and furniture out there. The incident only came to light when a truck with a load of contaminated rebar drove past a Los Alamos laboratories radiation checkpoint and set of a whole bunch of alarms. One person died of bone cancer, another 4 were injured and least 10 individuals received significant exposures and some scrapyard workers became sterile. There is also a good chance that many more people either will, or already have, developed cancer since it took about a year to discover this snafu and even longer to track down all the contaminated material already in use. This story made me think about how US Homeland security worries about 'dirty bombs'. The only thing that still amazes me about that particular contingency is that it hasn't happened yet because highly radioactive material is apparently very easy to come by. The Juarez incident caused radiation sensors to be installed at all major border crossings but one wonders if this has been extended to every single crossing along the US/Mexican border. Either way, I'd be worried.
...and report the bullets as stolen.
... just remember that you have to empty a at least one 10 round pistol clip into the guy before you've hosed off five dollars worth of ammo.
> (Grizzly Bear and Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500) who are on the record as saying that Spotify streaming only earns them a handful of dollars for tens of thousands of streaming plays?
So why don't you pull your songs from Spotify? Why not put them where you'll make bags of money? Wait you probably can't as you don't own the rights/distribution rights to your music?
Seriously you'd thin by now, and by that I mean ( its not 1997 and the technology has been there for years) the artists as a collective would have created their own distribution service and raked in the dough.
I'm no music industry insider but you have made me curious and since you dispense that advice so freely and with such unshakable authority you must know ... Where can people put their music and make bags of money without being ripped off by middle men and gate keepers like Spotify? I have a couple of indie musician friends who do own the distribution rights to their music and who'd be thrilled to know how to easily make bags of money without having to deal with parasites.
No, it's not only about price. It's about the fact that the book can be read anywhere, without needing a battery charge or anything. Even many kids think about that. It's also less stressful for the eyes than looking at a screen.
I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do. However, e-books can be searched which is a huge bonus and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS. The biggest plus with e-books IMHO is portability. I have been converting my printed library to digital by a combination of buying ebooks versions of paper books that I own and scanning my old out-of-print paper books or downloading scanned books from projects like Gutenberg. Recently I put a stack of these paper books on a bathroom scale and measured the real-world weight of the library I keep on my iPad, it was well over 20kg. Basically I would not want to be without paper books but grabbing the iPad and knowing that you are carrying the contents of an entire 2m high bookshelf in your hand is undeniably cool and very convenient.
If these bozos are forced to show that documentary chalk up a win for environmenalism because the film may make a few more people think abut climate change, if they put up a fight chalk up an even bigger win for environmentalims because the publicity raises awareness about global warming. If we get really lucky Fox News will contribute to that publicity by reporting on this before they realize they may actually have caused a few of their viewers to watch the film to see what all the hullablaloo is about (irony, irony...).
How exactly does one hide a hunting rifle in a coat? (but your point stands, it's ridiculous)
A carbine? There are also numerous folding hunting rifles freely available that can be concealed under a coat. Needless to say they are very popular with poachers and have been for at least the last two centuries.
everything is suspicious now :((((
All data should be encrypted from now on.
Does that figure count the DoD spending on being Uncle Sam's Security Services in assorted oleaginous-but-deeply-unsafe hellholes, or is that extra?
Well, if we count invading Iraq, to open it up for exploitation by American oil companies, as a subsidy to 'Big Oil' you can add at least $1 trillion in direct costs and lord only knows how much in indirect and delayed costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war in Iraq would eventually cost $1.9 trillion (according to Wikipedia that's $6,300 per U.S. citizen) and I'm pretty sure that figure will be revised and such revisions are normally not downward ones.
If it were so easy to just automate extreme failures, websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon would go down a lot less often. Unfortunately despite thousands of employees with extreme technical skill, there are still mistakes that bring them down from time-to-time. If we didn't have human SREs or System Administrators, things would be a lot worse. A computer doesn't have the analytics skill of a pilot and never will unless we end up with a singularity.
We don't have strong AI yet and pilots will never just "sit down with a programmer". Automation has to be tested thousands of times across thousands of scenarios in different aircraft and conditions for decades. Even then, there's always the chance that some snippet of code is waiting to kill a plane full of people because it got the wrong set of sensor inputs.
Which is why I will never get on a plane unless there is a pilot to switch off the AI if it goes haywire and fly the aircraft old-school. Furthermore I will never trust my well being to an AI driven car. With a plane at least there are a couple of minutes to react if the AI goes ape-shit before you run out of sky, with a AI driven car it's perhaps 10 seconds if you are lucky before you get T-boned by a truck and become a slimy red coating on the inside of a car wreck. I am still on the fence about AI driven trains.
Automation fails from time to time, and when it does, pilots are the failsafe. But to be able to do that, they need to stay in practice, and that's the problem being highlighted here: they're getting so little time in control that they're getting out of shape.
Right, build or contract a small fleet of trainers (perhaps twin turboprops or two seaters trainers like PC.7s or Tucanos or even set aside an old 737 or something in that class) and make these people fly their ass off once in a while. I'm sure simulators are great learning tools but there is no substitute for taking a plane up and actually practicing things like: engine restarts, flying on one engine, simulating an emergency descent after a rapid decompression or just boning up on basic aerobatics (the value of practical experience is one of a number of reasons the military hasn't replaced exercises like Maple Flag with simulater-only LAN partys). That should take care of any 'bureaucratification' problems your pilots are suffering from.
Hate to break it to you but there are lots of nomadic hunter gather populations that engage in war, rape and absolutely slavery. In fact the European and american slave trade was initially started by the nomadic berbers who basically ran the slave trade in north africa. Slavery always makes sense, there is always tedios or dangerous work that warrants slaves regardless of how primative. If you think nomadic people dont engage in slavery you clearly don't know anything about nomadic people, past or present.
Aggressiveness tends to be a function of population density rather than technological sophistication. Until the neolithic or thereabouts as populations grew enough to finally strain the available resources there is hardly any evidence at all of tribe-on-tribe warfare. Among the very little amount of evidence of something you could call warfare before c.a. 15.000 years ago was cannibalism and that was probably driven more by extreme famines than any conflict over resources or some (hypothetical) genetically predetermined human lust for looting, raping, killing and conquering. And even then cannibalism may have been a ritual practice rather than the result of famine driven warfare. This relative lack of inter-tribal conflict during pre-neolithic times was, as he pointed out, probably due to the low population density which meant that there when you ran into other human groups you could usually find yourself an unsettled place where you were not likely to step on that other tribe's toes and interaction largely consisted of relatively peaceful activities like trading, cooperating on big game hunts and exchanging tribal members through marriage. Primitive tribal societies that engage in warfare today, in places like Papua and in Africa usually have high population densities and the conflicts are usually over limited resources.
Wait a moment, did sub-Sahara Africans interbreed with something? No? Then they _are_ pure humans. And the others (me including) are different species, or sub-species at least. Unless we change the definition of pure human to some complex mix with archaic "animals". :) BTW, it depends how we look at it, probably they were in fact more advanced.
Second, about the distance, research I've seen last year showed that if we feed clustering software with different genetic material then it first separates blacks and whites, then asians. I don't know where did you get that Asians are more diverse group then the rest of the population. More over Africans themselves are more diverse group as whites ancestors were only a small group which left somewhere 100-70k years ago. But it was genetically (near)isolated for much longer. Remember at that time there was no UN, no continent wide trading, no railroads. Everyone was sitting within their tribe land.
The definition of species and subspecies has been fluid, and to some extent still seems to be a subject of debate. Google defines them like this:
species [ sp sheez ]
taxonomic group: a subdivision of a genus considered as a basic biological classification and containing individuals that resemble one another and may interbreed
organisms in species: the organisms belonging to a species
humankind: human beings or the human race
Synonyms: group, class, type, kind, genus, sort, variety, order
subspecies [ súb spsheez ]
plant or animal category: a category used to classify plants and animals whose populations are distinct, e.g. in distribution, appearance, or feeding habits, but can still interbreed
Synonyms: category, strain, genus, sort, class
Subspecies can interbreed and produce viable offspring. That means that modern human 'races' vaguely qualify as subspecies at best. Furthermore, according to this definition can be argued that Neanderthals were a human subspecies if we define 'human' as species Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals differed mildly in appearance, feeding habits and for a time, distribution but could still indisputably interbreed with modern humans and produce viable offspring (since some modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA). Now H. Neanderthalensis arrived in Europe 400.000 years before modern humans emerged in Africa about 200.000 years ago. Does that make Neanderthals more _pure_ humans than modern humans? Did Europeans and Asians become _purer_ humans than Africans by interbreeding with H. Neanderthalensis? IMHO the answer is no, it's more the case that the whole concept of some group of people being _pure_ humans is a steaming pile of BS.
Caveats: It is still debated whether H. Neanderthalis was a subspecies of Homo Sapiens or a species of the genus Homo, i.e whether it we should call it H. Sapiens Neanderthalis or H. Neanderthalis. Secondly recent discoveries have completely blown apart our previous picture of the entire genus Homo.
There is a diverse range of companies. Alternatives include Microsoft or Yahoo.
Yeah I'm sticking to Google too. Nothing prevents the alternatives from being worse.
Actually Google has pretty fierce competition these days from Bing, the caliber of Bings competitiveness is simply not acknowledged on Slashdot for religions reasons. While several recent studies have refuted Microsoft's BingItOn claim of two thirds of users preferring Bing results. Interestingly enough blind studies also suggest that that Bing actually delivers superior results to Google 41% of the time and 6% of the time they tied. Furthermore a lot of Bing's inferiority is largely perceived (i.e a 'halo' effect of the Google brand), people actually pick Bing results over Google results much of the time when you swap the brands on the search results. Myself I prefer Bing image results to Googles much of the time, the image search results from Bing often contain less noise.
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That last link seems pretty negative at first but it also concludes:
There are two potential, contradictory reactions to the Ayers study:
It either conclusively or largely disproves the Bing preference claims;
* Putting aside the Bing advertising claims, the search engine performed relatively well vs. Google.
* Google won 53 percent of the time and Bing won 41 percent of the query tests, with a tie in 6 percent of instances. That suggests that Bing has the capacity to gain much more market share than it currently has (67 percent vs. 18 percent).
Ayers points out that the more assertive "prefer Bing 2:1 claim has been replaced on the Bing It On website with the more limited claim that "people prefer Bing."
I remember when Bing's market share was far down in the sub 10% range not that long ago.
What the monoculture like Apple?
How can you be a monoculture within your own product line? Apple has fierce competition on the PC market, the smartphone market and the tablet market. Now sod off to Starbucks or something and try really hard to come up with a better troll.
I'm still really upset that Google hacked my browser...
You seem to misunderstand the meaning of the work "hacked". Google did no such thing.
Google harvested data on peoples web surfing habits against the express wishes of their customers and they did it by quite deliberately circumventing browser settings. I don't care what you name you choose to call this behaviour, the fine should have been at least one order of magnitude higher. A penalty of $17 million is a pitiful amount.
Technically it is nice. It works great for games. But Apple is not really a game company so I am thinking how they would use it.
This could be, next to really innovative uses that are outside my limited imagination:
- gesture control for TV (Apple TV or upcoming TV)
- gesture controle of home automation (considering that they also bought a home automation firm), perhaps the sensor could be in the upcoming iwatch
- gesture control, next to the current input methods for osx and IOS - but I am not yet sure about the extra value.
- turn an iphone into a 3D scanner by for example tracing the outline of an object with one corner of the device.
So, I can imagine some use cases outside gaming, but somehow what I can come up with seem rahter nice to haves than killer apps. Any other ideas?
I don't know how small you can make these scanners, but assuming the can be made to fit into a mobile device I can think of one more feature: Face recognition. That might spare Apple embarrassing moments like Google had with it's face recognition login feature. People laugh about CCC hacking Apples fingerprint button, but at least that hack takes more than 20 seconds.
Seems like a good way to get some patents to use against Microsoft.
Microsoft? Try, a good way to keep them out of the hands of Google/Samsung et al.
All the best programmers I know AREN'T ON SOCIAL MEDIA AT ALL. So I don't see this working very well, unless it's for sales droids.
Shhhhh.... you are running the slashvertisment.
What they say it will be used for: sniffing for bomb materials
What it will be used for: sniffing for illegal drugs
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
You know, this brave new world is a lot less Brave New World than we thought it would be...
Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this? I remember watching a documentary about US American narco cops less than a year ago and one of the things they showed was police officers cooperating with environmental inspectors systematically sampling sewer water to track down meth-labs. It's just a logical progression of what environmental agencies are already doing on a regular basis to monitor pollution and to track down businesses trying to cut costs by pouring toxic chemicals down the sewers. Nobody blew up in a firestorm of outrage over EPAs monitoring pollution levels, even wing nuts on the far right hand fringe of politics like to have unpolluted drinking water (well... at least here in Europe they do).
A site not carrying ads is being actively hostile towards Google's business model, thus they have an incentive to harm that site. It should be up to Google to provide the evidence of harm, otherwise everyone should conclude that Google is acting in bad faith and gaming the system. The same applies to Twitter. How is this any different from someone claiming that the restaurant down the street has rats as a means of hurting a business?
I put it down to bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice. It stills shows how powerful Google has become. If they wrongly flag your side as harmful and nobody at Google support gives enough of a shit to help you sort it out, your site is pretty much dead because of Google's dominant market share. The only traffic you will get is from Bing/Yahoo users. Other than that you will get some traffic from places like Russia (Yandex) and China (Baidu) where Google has not managed to monopolize the market but traffic from those sources may not be what you want if your site is primarily interesting to people in countries where Google has the search market cornered for whatever reason.