I made up my mind a long time ago, in 1989. At the time, I barely spoke any English, but half my textbooks were in it. I had two professors who pronounced GIF differently. I just went with the pronunciation of the guy whom I liked more. Namely, hard G.
As an aside, most of the people whom I've met since pronounce it with a hard G, and know, just as well as I do, that the inventor recommends a soft sound.
It does not matter to me. I have yet to meet someone who insists on the soft G, and is not a pretentious wanker. I have never met someone who insists on the hard G. I would guess he would be a pretentious, ignorant wanker. The rest of us use the one we prefer, and know perfectly well what the people who use the other one mean.
Seriously, correcting people on their pronunciation? Do men do that to each other? My girlfriends used to do it, now my wife and my daughter are the only ones who offer unsolicited advice... yeah, my three year old daughter gives me crap about sometimes messing up the TH sound. She can't pronounce the R in three, but she can tell I can't get the TH right.:-)
In the end, who we absolutely know screwed up here is Tufts: They hat IT security bad enough that they could be hacked and grades could be changed.
Back in the early 90s, I was at MIT. Athena (the MIT network) was getting hacked so freaking often that the IT staff and the Student Information Board were playing catch up all the time.
Fake login screens, packet sniffing, brute force attacks on the cache, man in the middle attacks, attacks on the backups and then forced restores, including through physical damage, and of course, stealing Kerberos credentials... That's just what I have personally witnessed.
There was a way of submitting assignments 23h 59mn 59s late, and getting the time stamp within the allowed range, and that stayed around for months. There were people who would not think anything of using telnet from their dorm room, despite most of the equipment in said dorm being completely open for everyone with physical access. Hell, every single workstation in the public clusters had the same root password, and it was 'mrroot'. You could sit down after someone, and try your luck with whatever that was still on the hard drive. And of course, there were all these 'very busy' students who disabled their screensavers' passwords to save a few precious seconds... And there was a 'fancy' screensaver that was logging password, and that stayed around for months as well.
Man, it was the Wild West. So many things that today we take for granted, we were then just learning.
You can learn some things for free. Others, like being a veterinarian? No only is there a significant amount of hands-on experience, but you also have to know whether you are physiologically capable of working with hurt animals.
Speaking for myself... in the Army, I was once attached to Engineering Battalion for a while. After an industrial accident (80s, Communist country) I had to help in containing and suppressing a serious fire, and getting some hurt people to a field hospital (to this day I suspect it was a field hospital only because they wanted to keep the extent of the casualties secret)
Guess what. I was fine fighting the fires, I was fine looking at cremated bodies and smelling cooked human, and I was fine carrying and driving badly hurt people. But when they asked me to help during cleaning the wounds, by the second patient, the nurse told me to get lost before I puked on his patients. I went away, I sat down, and I must have passed out, because I lost a quarter hour.
You do not want to waste months studying, and then realize that you lose your composure working deep in someone or something's body. I also I doubt you can practice medicine, even veterinary medicine without a degree.
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Also, speaking as someone who in College has busted cheaters and got them expelled: cheaters often work in groups. We once caught someone who had made his girlfriend attend an early exam, take her copy of the final out, and give it to him, so he would have an advantage for the later exam that used the same questions.
The girl was good looking enough so that we, the TAs, noticed that we had not seen her before, wondered whose section she was in, and counted the exams. Three people got expelled - the cheater, his girlfriend, and the friend who worked on the quiz. Yes, they were stupid enough to try to turn the copy she had taken from the first exam... not realizing that every quiz had its unique binary id on each page, spelled with dots and spaces.
So my guess?
If the university is secure enough to kick her out her without fearing a lawsuit, they figured out that someone was doing it for her, which is why she has such solid alibis, and she refused to rat him out. These things are not handled lightly.
"Oriental" is offensive because it literally means "eastern," and as such implies that Europe is the "default"/center of the world, and people from Asia are therefore the Other.
Geography does not seem to be your strong subject, and neither does Linguistics.
Have you heard the term "occidental"? If Europe is the Center of the World, why would Europeans be refereed to as Occidentals?
Yes, it used to be the formal (basically Latin) way of saying Western.
The words are not offensive due to their meaning, but due to their historical usage. I think the whole thing is mildly silly, but I only use such words when I deliberately want to be an asshole.
It's like "cis". It should not be an insult, but it is usually used as one. I have chosen to take offense and throw someone out of a party for using it. But it was a pretext, I was not particularly offended, I just disliked the screeching moron who was using it.
I installed Midori on my father's laptop, which is one of those tiny cheap things that can barely run the OS, and which require an IT professional in order to perform an update successfully. (I wish I were exaggerating)
He is fine with it. I've tried it. It's plain, not ugly. I would use it again, and I would definitely recommend it for those who do not tinker too much with their browser.
I guess I am too old to seek or even appreciate beauty in a browser.
I run Windows 7 on my gaming computer, and it looks like Windows NT. I also use Emacs whenever I can get away with it, i.e for anything but toy language programming. Not that Emacs does not do toy languages, it's just I do not like knowing that the crap stays there unless I remember to get rid of it.
> German "wie" is pronounced roughly like English "we".
In what region of which German speaking country?
I've heard it many times, on the East side of the Rhine river, and in Vienna (the Wien in Wiener, by the way)
In both places, the 'Wie' is pronounced as a straight 'Vee'. There is no hint of anything like a rounded vowel, such as in the English 'we' or French 'oui'.
The wife name matching a terrorist name, and having to spend hours in a detention room in a Canadian airport happened to me. My wife's first name name is Alison, she goes by Allie, and I assume she matched an Ali from a former USSR republic (my last name is Slavic)
She is a redhead, out one year daughter was with us, and we were told the name of the list was male. It still took them hours to clear us.
You health insurers, your employers, and everyone who wants your money, your labor, or your vote, without necessarily having anything else to offer. Basically, everyone. Not everyone can afford it, yet.
Are we at the point where you will get charged an extra 10% because you have shown enthusiasm for a product, or paid a bad price before, or live in a wealthy area?
Are we at the point where your dentist will use your posts to see how much discomfort you are in, so that he can inflate the treatment?
Are you going to get a bad life insurance because you enjoy jetskying?
Are your kids going to have trouble getting into a specific talent school because they got into a fight when they were 10?
Is your coworker going to forward to your boss a statement you made on the clock, or a statement about some quality the boss has, or just something random the boss may dislike?
Is your work/school laptop/phone configured to spy on you on demand, and is the security going to be porous enough to let everyone and his grandmother join in?
Etc, etc, etc.
Most of the above has happened. The rest will, soon enough.
And that's without errors. With errors, your wife name will match that on a known (male!) terrorist, and you will spend three ours in a detention room abroad, or your house will match the location of a stolen item, you will be placed at the scene of a crime in the next state, and what not. Bounty hunters have already broken into the wrong person's house...
All of these can happen without the technology we accept into our houses and pockets. But with the technology, every idiot can get on the game. And with enough monkeys on the branch, any branch will break.
Exactly. Helium is a noble gas, it does not easily react with anything, and if I remember my high school chemistry, this made it hard for physicists to place elements on the table, as they had no compounds (acids/oxides) to work with. Actually I just realized that I lack the vocabulary to talk about Chemistry in English.
Anyway, I have not looked at the table yet, but I will be surprised to find any noble gases on it. Actually, I am being stupid, of course they won't be there, the ones after helium were discovered around the turn of the century.
You must be joking. No dead physicists, I understand, but no equations? An electro-magnetic wave is created by oscillating fields, no moving charges needed. How the Hell do you expect people to describe fields, by waving their hands?
In any case, it's like asking me to explain to you how I know the weight of a bucketfull of sand, measured in empty beer bottles, but not use any numbers.
Google would be able to change YouTube's code a lot faster than Microsoft could push out updates for Edge.
And Microsoft is well aware of this. Why? Because that's exactly how they were conducting their "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy when they were the big bully on the block.
Do you notice that it's an intern complaining, and not an official Microsoft statement? I guess that they are ashamed, or unwilling to remind those of us who remember of all the hoops we had to jump to keep stuff IE (was it 6) compliant. Client side VisualBasic, not-quite JavaScript, non-compliance to standards, etc.
Google has read Microsoft's "Book of Evulz", and is following it to the letter.
Oh, but I do have something to go on. I speak both French and Bullshit fluently, and thus am able to translate what Macron said. Yes, from the English summary, why do you ask?
" would have liked to be able to do it as early as 2025, as provided for by the Energy Transition Law," Macron added, "but it turned out, after pragmatic expertise, that this figure brandished as a political totem was in fact unattainable. We therefore decided to maintain this 50% cap, but by postponing the deadline to 2035."
My translation:
We will close the coal plants. We will start building wind and solar, realize that it is not enough to cover the coal plants' output, and quietly 'reschedule' the closing of any nuclear plants. The next government will probably revoke the totally random 50% cap, continue closing old reactors, and replacing them with newer, safer, more powerful ones, as we have been doing for ages.
But fear not! I am green, I am looking to the future, I am relevant!
I find it quite surprising, as well. It's easier to secure backups than it is to secure an Internet facing server... as the host learned, incidentally.
I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.
No, intelligence is not a prerequisite for 'world class art'.
Google the artist Pierre Brassau. His paintings were exhibited at art shows, and were as a rule appreciated more than the ones by other artists on display. He got praised for lack of pretense, for his long, uninterrupted strokes, for his expert use of color, etc.
As an aside, he chose his colors by a simple rule - the ones that tasted good, he ate; the rest he used in his paintings. He was an young chimpanzee from the local zoo.
The fact remains, his paintings were subjectively better than those of many artists working in the same field. There are people fond of avant-garde art and expressionism, and they did appreciate his art. His paintings did not become worthless just because he was revealed as an ape. Who the hell knows what makes art appeal to a specific person, at a specific time?
So, it is trivially true that A.I. can produce art. Especially if it uses a 'monkeys with a typewriter' approach primed with 'successful art', whatever that is.
And now time for an old guy digression.
When I was in high school, I had a drawing on my room's wall. It was a color plot of rather complex mathematical function, that looked a bit like a spiral, and a bit like a sunburst. I had printed it when installing a color plotter in a manufacturing plant in Sopot, Bulgaria (In the 80s, color plotters were a bit deal behind the Iron Curtain, and being able to read the manual AND finding the 'ANY' key at the same time was a valuable combination of skills)
I went back home a few years back, and I still enjoyed the drawing. It has color, it has movement, it brings memories back. Is it art? Fuck if I know. But I like it, and it did not take an A.I. to create it. I tried to make a color wheel, I unwittingly left a variable uninitialized, and then liked the effect, introduced a variation in the radius, and ended up with something I have now hanging in my office. People have asked me where I got it/who the artist is.
An algorithm could create things like this all day long. It would not be A.I, but frankly, neither is 90% of what journalists tout as such.
Well, if the laser is red, you can hardly blame the aliens for 'red light district' being an universal concept. And if it is not, then we should not risk advertising our present with other hues, either.
Basic prudence dictates that we do not attract attention to ourselves before knowing what that attention will bring along.
I am sure that you are correct that lives are lost from the switching back and forth. I do think that it is kind of stupid adjusting the time twice an year.
But, as someone who enjoys the time after work more than the time before work, I far prefer being on Daylight Saving Time. So, as far as I am concerned, we should just do away with high noon at 12pm. I am perfectly fine with the Sun's zenith being at 1:30pm, as it is during the Summer where I live.
Are Apple and Microsoft competing to see who can be the most incompetent?
What are you talking about?
Microsoft definitely messed up. One of the purposes of their OS is to manage your files. It clearly failed at that.
Apple barely did anything wrong. The main purpose of the Apple watch seems be ostentatiously displaying the Apple Logo. According to the article, that's what the affected devices do. Mission accomplished!
Every few years, I find the time, and play some of the games. Usually I try to do it before the votes are tallied, but sometimes I really do not have the time, and just play the winners.
There has not been an year where I haven't really enjoyed at least one of the games. Sometimes, enjoyed is not the right word... some of those games are less interactive, but tell a story that makes you think, or that stays with you because it throws quite the curve ball.
If you have the time, give it a try. Some ideas are better made into a text adventure than expanded into a novel...
I came to the US in 1992. My landlord in college thought that Clinton was the worst president ever, and could not shut up about 'his ugly daughter'.
And then there was Bush the Junior (Worst President Ever!) and Obama (Who Destroyed the Country!) and now Trump (The End of Democracy!)
Eh. There's still no country is which I'd rather live, and I still think that things in general are getting better every day. Or at least, I feel much better thinking that way. Lah-Lah-Lah, can't hear you!
Now, one may make the argument that it's just the presidents that are getting worse with each iteration. Hard to explain all of them getting second terms, but what do I know.
"All the sudden" and "all of the sudden" are popular enough to have become just as 'cromulent' as "all of a sudden".
Yeah, I also was taught, back in the mists of time, that the last one was correct, and the other two an abomination under the Lord, but languages are living constructs, and all idioms were once novel.
You are free to use the correct form, but pointing out the inferiority of the newer, sloppier ones does not make you look particularly good, even to those who know where you're coming from.
My wife and I played quite a few Telltale games together and even enjoyed a few of them, like The Wolf Among Us and the one based on Borderlands. But we firmly decided to never replay them, because it was clear that nothing you do really matters, and having it rubbed in our faces on a second run would diminish the memories.
Compare that to the Witcher 2, where the last two acts can be unrecognizable, depending on your choices in the previous acts. And that game came half a dozen years ago. The Witcher 2 developers decided that no one seeing more than 80% of the game's content in one play-through was worth the sense of accomplishment.
Hell, the first time we finished that game, we killed a major character whom we had already met and whom I liked a lot... without even realizing we were doing it. And that did not happen off screen, either. At the end, we agonized over decisions, and saw our choices changing the political map. Before continuing with the Witcher 3, we had an argument on which character we should continue with, and came close to going back to the second installment, to see whether we could combine two major outcomes. We did not, because we decided that they were mutually exclusive (although later we learned they were not, as someone would get saved by a character whose motivations we had not quite understood)
Telltale chose to make their games so that choices seldom mattered.
Ironically, the museum had just secured funding for one from BNDES (Brazilian Development Bank).
Anecdotally and not quite related, when I was in the Army, in the 80s, my unit was quartered near the National Historical Museum of Bulgaria. We were briefed twice an year on our part in a theoretical emergency at the museum, once we took part in a training exercise simulating a fire. The conclusion of the exercise was that too many people had been mobilized and we were getting in each other way, and instead of actually reducing the numbers, the instructions were changed so that more people were relegated to cordoning off the site... and the perimeter was enlarged.
Heh. I just checked, and the Bulgarian museum has been looking into updating its fire detecting installation since April of this year. Detection, not suppression. The fire suppression systems are room specific, there is no general system, probably because they are worried about damaging the artifacts.
Of course, it helps that the Bulgarian museum is a big honking slab of fireproof stone.//// Except that it is not. What I remember is the old location, in the heart of the capital. Since 2000, it has been moved to a different building. The number of visits has nose dived, which is not surprising as the new location is the old presidential palace, which is outside of the beltway, in a location that was originally chosen for being out of the way, and easy to secure. And the entrance fee is more about 6 Euros, more than 1% of the average monthly salary.
I guess the Commies thought history was to be used as propaganda for the People, while the new masters of Bulgaria think that it is a luxury good for tourists. And so turns the wheel of history.
There is no demand, but some people think that there is need.
You know, my three year old would only eat fruit bars and drink fruit juice if given the choice, but my wife and I insist that she eats actual fruits, yogurt, vegetables, and meat, once in a while.
Am I saying that European politicians look at their constituents the way adults look at toddlers? Maybe.
Do I want someone regulating what I watch? No.
Do I think that making content providers waste resources on something that their customers don't want will make their profit margins lower? Yes.
Do I think that the content created because of law prescribed quota will be any good? Not really.
Do I have a plan on how to balance appealing to the lowest human drives and elevating the human spirit? If I did, I would probably run for office.
But I don't... so I will stick to writing code, tsk-tsking at EU's legislation, and wondering whether I will live to see which of Idiocracy, Elisyum, Terminator or Metro 2033 will end up being prophetic.
Slashdot Mirror
I made up my mind a long time ago, in 1989. At the time, I barely spoke any English, but half my textbooks were in it. I had two professors who pronounced GIF differently. I just went with the pronunciation of the guy whom I liked more. Namely, hard G.
As an aside, most of the people whom I've met since pronounce it with a hard G, and know, just as well as I do, that the inventor recommends a soft sound.
It does not matter to me. I have yet to meet someone who insists on the soft G, and is not a pretentious wanker. I have never met someone who insists on the hard G. I would guess he would be a pretentious, ignorant wanker. The rest of us use the one we prefer, and know perfectly well what the people who use the other one mean.
Seriously, correcting people on their pronunciation? Do men do that to each other? My girlfriends used to do it, now my wife and my daughter are the only ones who offer unsolicited advice... yeah, my three year old daughter gives me crap about sometimes messing up the TH sound. She can't pronounce the R in three, but she can tell I can't get the TH right. :-)
In the end, who we absolutely know screwed up here is Tufts: They hat IT security bad enough that they could be hacked and grades could be changed.
Back in the early 90s, I was at MIT. Athena (the MIT network) was getting hacked so freaking often that the IT staff and the Student Information Board were playing catch up all the time.
Fake login screens, packet sniffing, brute force attacks on the cache, man in the middle attacks, attacks on the backups and then forced restores, including through physical damage, and of course, stealing Kerberos credentials... That's just what I have personally witnessed.
There was a way of submitting assignments 23h 59mn 59s late, and getting the time stamp within the allowed range, and that stayed around for months. There were people who would not think anything of using telnet from their dorm room, despite most of the equipment in said dorm being completely open for everyone with physical access. Hell, every single workstation in the public clusters had the same root password, and it was 'mrroot'. You could sit down after someone, and try your luck with whatever that was still on the hard drive. And of course, there were all these 'very busy' students who disabled their screensavers' passwords to save a few precious seconds... And there was a 'fancy' screensaver that was logging password, and that stayed around for months as well.
Man, it was the Wild West. So many things that today we take for granted, we were then just learning.
You can learn some things for free. Others, like being a veterinarian? No only is there a significant amount of hands-on experience, but you also have to know whether you are physiologically capable of working with hurt animals.
Speaking for myself... in the Army, I was once attached to Engineering Battalion for a while. After an industrial accident (80s, Communist country) I had to help in containing and suppressing a serious fire, and getting some hurt people to a field hospital (to this day I suspect it was a field hospital only because they wanted to keep the extent of the casualties secret)
Guess what. I was fine fighting the fires, I was fine looking at cremated bodies and smelling cooked human, and I was fine carrying and driving badly hurt people. But when they asked me to help during cleaning the wounds, by the second patient, the nurse told me to get lost before I puked on his patients. I went away, I sat down, and I must have passed out, because I lost a quarter hour.
You do not want to waste months studying, and then realize that you lose your composure working deep in someone or something's body. I also I doubt you can practice medicine, even veterinary medicine without a degree.
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Also, speaking as someone who in College has busted cheaters and got them expelled: cheaters often work in groups. We once caught someone who had made his girlfriend attend an early exam, take her copy of the final out, and give it to him, so he would have an advantage for the later exam that used the same questions.
The girl was good looking enough so that we, the TAs, noticed that we had not seen her before, wondered whose section she was in, and counted the exams. Three people got expelled - the cheater, his girlfriend, and the friend who worked on the quiz. Yes, they were stupid enough to try to turn the copy she had taken from the first exam... not realizing that every quiz had its unique binary id on each page, spelled with dots and spaces.
So my guess?
If the university is secure enough to kick her out her without fearing a lawsuit, they figured out that someone was doing it for her, which is why she has such solid alibis, and she refused to rat him out. These things are not handled lightly.
"Oriental" is offensive because it literally means "eastern," and as such implies that Europe is the "default"/center of the world, and people from Asia are therefore the Other.
Geography does not seem to be your strong subject, and neither does Linguistics.
Have you heard the term "occidental"? If Europe is the Center of the World, why would Europeans be refereed to as Occidentals?
Yes, it used to be the formal (basically Latin) way of saying Western.
The words are not offensive due to their meaning, but due to their historical usage. I think the whole thing is mildly silly, but I only use such words when I deliberately want to be an asshole.
It's like "cis". It should not be an insult, but it is usually used as one. I have chosen to take offense and throw someone out of a party for using it. But it was a pretext, I was not particularly offended, I just disliked the screeching moron who was using it.
The $20 is for removal. You, or rather Kansas residents, will have to pay for the filter in the first place, and phoning home is not free, either.
I installed Midori on my father's laptop, which is one of those tiny cheap things that can barely run the OS, and which require an IT professional in order to perform an update successfully. (I wish I were exaggerating)
He is fine with it. I've tried it. It's plain, not ugly. I would use it again, and I would definitely recommend it for those who do not tinker too much with their browser.
I guess I am too old to seek or even appreciate beauty in a browser.
I run Windows 7 on my gaming computer, and it looks like Windows NT. I also use Emacs whenever I can get away with it, i.e for anything but toy language programming. Not that Emacs does not do toy languages, it's just I do not like knowing that the crap stays there unless I remember to get rid of it.
> German "wie" is pronounced roughly like English "we".
In what region of which German speaking country?
I've heard it many times, on the East side of the Rhine river, and in Vienna (the Wien in Wiener, by the way)
In both places, the 'Wie' is pronounced as a straight 'Vee'. There is no hint of anything like a rounded vowel, such as in the English 'we' or French 'oui'.
The wife name matching a terrorist name, and having to spend hours in a detention room in a Canadian airport happened to me. My wife's first name name is Alison, she goes by Allie, and I assume she matched an Ali from a former USSR republic (my last name is Slavic)
She is a redhead, out one year daughter was with us, and we were told the name of the list was male. It still took them hours to clear us.
Of course, you do not have to believe me.
You health insurers, your employers, and everyone who wants your money, your labor, or your vote, without necessarily having anything else to offer. Basically, everyone. Not everyone can afford it, yet.
Are we at the point where you will get charged an extra 10% because you have shown enthusiasm for a product, or paid a bad price before, or live in a wealthy area?
Are we at the point where your dentist will use your posts to see how much discomfort you are in, so that he can inflate the treatment?
Are you going to get a bad life insurance because you enjoy jetskying?
Are your kids going to have trouble getting into a specific talent school because they got into a fight when they were 10?
Is your coworker going to forward to your boss a statement you made on the clock, or a statement about some quality the boss has, or just something random the boss may dislike?
Is your work/school laptop/phone configured to spy on you on demand, and is the security going to be porous enough to let everyone and his grandmother join in?
Etc, etc, etc.
Most of the above has happened. The rest will, soon enough.
And that's without errors. With errors, your wife name will match that on a known (male!) terrorist, and you will spend three ours in a detention room abroad, or your house will match the location of a stolen item, you will be placed at the scene of a crime in the next state, and what not. Bounty hunters have already broken into the wrong person's house...
All of these can happen without the technology we accept into our houses and pockets. But with the technology, every idiot can get on the game. And with enough monkeys on the branch, any branch will break.
Exactly. Helium is a noble gas, it does not easily react with anything, and if I remember my high school chemistry, this made it hard for physicists to place elements on the table, as they had no compounds (acids/oxides) to work with. Actually I just realized that I lack the vocabulary to talk about Chemistry in English.
Anyway, I have not looked at the table yet, but I will be surprised to find any noble gases on it. Actually, I am being stupid, of course they won't be there, the ones after helium were discovered around the turn of the century.
You must be joking. No dead physicists, I understand, but no equations? An electro-magnetic wave is created by oscillating fields, no moving charges needed. How the Hell do you expect people to describe fields, by waving their hands?
In any case, it's like asking me to explain to you how I know the weight of a bucketfull of sand, measured in empty beer bottles, but not use any numbers.
And Microsoft is well aware of this. Why? Because that's exactly how they were conducting their "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy when they were the big bully on the block.
Do you notice that it's an intern complaining, and not an official Microsoft statement? I guess that they are ashamed, or unwilling to remind those of us who remember of all the hoops we had to jump to keep stuff IE (was it 6) compliant. Client side VisualBasic, not-quite JavaScript, non-compliance to standards, etc.
Google has read Microsoft's "Book of Evulz", and is following it to the letter.
Oh, but I do have something to go on. I speak both French and Bullshit fluently, and thus am able to translate what Macron said. Yes, from the English summary, why do you ask?
" would have liked to be able to do it as early as 2025, as provided for by the Energy Transition Law," Macron added, "but it turned out, after pragmatic expertise, that this figure brandished as a political totem was in fact unattainable. We therefore decided to maintain this 50% cap, but by postponing the deadline to 2035."
My translation:
We will close the coal plants. We will start building wind and solar, realize that it is not enough to cover the coal plants' output, and quietly 'reschedule' the closing of any nuclear plants. The next government will probably revoke the totally random 50% cap, continue closing old reactors, and replacing them with newer, safer, more powerful ones, as we have been doing for ages.
But fear not! I am green, I am looking to the future, I am relevant!
Vive la France!
By design.
I find it quite surprising, as well. It's easier to secure backups than it is to secure an Internet facing server... as the host learned, incidentally.
I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.
No, intelligence is not a prerequisite for 'world class art'.
Google the artist Pierre Brassau. His paintings were exhibited at art shows, and were as a rule appreciated more than the ones by other artists on display. He got praised for lack of pretense, for his long, uninterrupted strokes, for his expert use of color, etc.
As an aside, he chose his colors by a simple rule - the ones that tasted good, he ate; the rest he used in his paintings. He was an young chimpanzee from the local zoo.
The fact remains, his paintings were subjectively better than those of many artists working in the same field. There are people fond of avant-garde art and expressionism, and they did appreciate his art. His paintings did not become worthless just because he was revealed as an ape. Who the hell knows what makes art appeal to a specific person, at a specific time?
So, it is trivially true that A.I. can produce art. Especially if it uses a 'monkeys with a typewriter' approach primed with 'successful art', whatever that is.
And now time for an old guy digression.
When I was in high school, I had a drawing on my room's wall. It was a color plot of rather complex mathematical function, that looked a bit like a spiral, and a bit like a sunburst. I had printed it when installing a color plotter in a manufacturing plant in Sopot, Bulgaria (In the 80s, color plotters were a bit deal behind the Iron Curtain, and being able to read the manual AND finding the 'ANY' key at the same time was a valuable combination of skills)
I went back home a few years back, and I still enjoyed the drawing. It has color, it has movement, it brings memories back. Is it art? Fuck if I know. But I like it, and it did not take an A.I. to create it. I tried to make a color wheel, I unwittingly left a variable uninitialized, and then liked the effect, introduced a variation in the radius, and ended up with something I have now hanging in my office. People have asked me where I got it/who the artist is.
An algorithm could create things like this all day long. It would not be A.I, but frankly, neither is 90% of what journalists tout as such.
Well, if the laser is red, you can hardly blame the aliens for 'red light district' being an universal concept. And if it is not, then we should not risk advertising our present with other hues, either.
Basic prudence dictates that we do not attract attention to ourselves before knowing what that attention will bring along.
I am sure that you are correct that lives are lost from the switching back and forth. I do think that it is kind of stupid adjusting the time twice an year.
But, as someone who enjoys the time after work more than the time before work, I far prefer being on Daylight Saving Time. So, as far as I am concerned, we should just do away with high noon at 12pm. I am perfectly fine with the Sun's zenith being at 1:30pm, as it is during the Summer where I live.
Are Apple and Microsoft competing to see who can be the most incompetent?
What are you talking about?
Microsoft definitely messed up. One of the purposes of their OS is to manage your files. It clearly failed at that.
Apple barely did anything wrong. The main purpose of the Apple watch seems be ostentatiously displaying the Apple Logo. According to the article, that's what the affected devices do. Mission accomplished!
Your gym has shopping carts?
You are looking at it the wrong way. This is not for those who have access to gyms.
Walmart is providing health signs diagnostics to the homeless. A commendable effort.
Every few years, I find the time, and play some of the games. Usually I try to do it before the votes are tallied, but sometimes I really do not have the time, and just play the winners.
There has not been an year where I haven't really enjoyed at least one of the games. Sometimes, enjoyed is not the right word... some of those games are less interactive, but tell a story that makes you think, or that stays with you because it throws quite the curve ball.
If you have the time, give it a try. Some ideas are better made into a text adventure than expanded into a novel...
I came to the US in 1992. My landlord in college thought that Clinton was the worst president ever, and could not shut up about 'his ugly daughter'.
And then there was Bush the Junior (Worst President Ever!) and Obama (Who Destroyed the Country!) and now Trump (The End of Democracy!)
Eh. There's still no country is which I'd rather live, and I still think that things in general are getting better every day. Or at least, I feel much better thinking that way. Lah-Lah-Lah, can't hear you!
Now, one may make the argument that it's just the presidents that are getting worse with each iteration. Hard to explain all of them getting second terms, but what do I know.
I just hope that life does not imitate the art of Transmetropolitan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan).
Because if we got the Beast now, we are getting the Smiler next.
That ship has sailed.
"All the sudden" and "all of the sudden" are popular enough to have become just as 'cromulent' as "all of a sudden".
Yeah, I also was taught, back in the mists of time, that the last one was correct, and the other two an abomination under the Lord, but languages are living constructs, and all idioms were once novel.
You are free to use the correct form, but pointing out the inferiority of the newer, sloppier ones does not make you look particularly good, even to those who know where you're coming from.
Impossibly expensive? Yeah right.
My wife and I played quite a few Telltale games together and even enjoyed a few of them, like The Wolf Among Us and the one based on Borderlands. But we firmly decided to never replay them, because it was clear that nothing you do really matters, and having it rubbed in our faces on a second run would diminish the memories.
Compare that to the Witcher 2, where the last two acts can be unrecognizable, depending on your choices in the previous acts. And that game came half a dozen years ago. The Witcher 2 developers decided that no one seeing more than 80% of the game's content in one play-through was worth the sense of accomplishment.
Hell, the first time we finished that game, we killed a major character whom we had already met and whom I liked a lot... without even realizing we were doing it. And that did not happen off screen, either. At the end, we agonized over decisions, and saw our choices changing the political map. Before continuing with the Witcher 3, we had an argument on which character we should continue with, and came close to going back to the second installment, to see whether we could combine two major outcomes. We did not, because we decided that they were mutually exclusive (although later we learned they were not, as someone would get saved by a character whose motivations we had not quite understood)
Telltale chose to make their games so that choices seldom mattered.
Ironically, the museum had just secured funding for one from BNDES (Brazilian Development Bank).
Anecdotally and not quite related, when I was in the Army, in the 80s, my unit was quartered near the National Historical Museum of Bulgaria. We were briefed twice an year on our part in a theoretical emergency at the museum, once we took part in a training exercise simulating a fire. The conclusion of the exercise was that too many people had been mobilized and we were getting in each other way, and instead of actually reducing the numbers, the instructions were changed so that more people were relegated to cordoning off the site... and the perimeter was enlarged.
Heh. I just checked, and the Bulgarian museum has been looking into updating its fire detecting installation since April of this year. Detection, not suppression. The fire suppression systems are room specific, there is no general system, probably because they are worried about damaging the artifacts.
Of course, it helps that the Bulgarian museum is a big honking slab of fireproof stone. //// Except that it is not. What I remember is the old location, in the heart of the capital. Since 2000, it has been moved to a different building. The number of visits has nose dived, which is not surprising as the new location is the old presidential palace, which is outside of the beltway, in a location that was originally chosen for being out of the way, and easy to secure. And the entrance fee is more about 6 Euros, more than 1% of the average monthly salary.
I guess the Commies thought history was to be used as propaganda for the People, while the new masters of Bulgaria think that it is a luxury good for tourists. And so turns the wheel of history.
There is no demand, but some people think that there is need.
You know, my three year old would only eat fruit bars and drink fruit juice if given the choice, but my wife and I insist that she eats actual fruits, yogurt, vegetables, and meat, once in a while.
Am I saying that European politicians look at their constituents the way adults look at toddlers? Maybe.
Do I want someone regulating what I watch? No.
Do I think that making content providers waste resources on something that their customers don't want will make their profit margins lower? Yes.
Do I think that the content created because of law prescribed quota will be any good? Not really.
Do I have a plan on how to balance appealing to the lowest human drives and elevating the human spirit? If I did, I would probably run for office.
But I don't... so I will stick to writing code, tsk-tsking at EU's legislation, and wondering whether I will live to see which of Idiocracy, Elisyum, Terminator or Metro 2033 will end up being prophetic.