Concrete also causes us to use less wood. While on the one hand that's a good thing since even older forests are a great carbon sink, on the other hand it wooden houses are a really great way of removing carbon from the biosphere for quite a long time; the average wooden house stores the equivalent of 20 tonnes of CO2. Building 400 million wooden houses would compensate for the entire CO2 surplus in the biosphere (or at least in the atmosphere). In theory;)
Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
While I can readily believe it might be a hostile place to newbies, if it is experienced as a hostile place by "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" I guess that has nothing to do with Stack Overflow and everything with these people. Why do I believe that? Because gender and skin color are usually not obvious or even visible. Therefore they cannot influence how people treat members of these groups. Some people do use their real names, but due to the international character of Stack Overflow, even for many of these, it is not clear whether they're names for boys or girls.
Also, I can imagine the culture on Stack Overflow to be heavily influenced by Software Engineers - people that are used to giving and receiving no-nonsense feedback by the shipload; you cannot do code reviews if you're going to make a politically correct story out of them. Others may find this direct to-the-point approach to be "hostile". They just cannot handle the truth. Now I happen to be Dutch and apparently we're the most direct people in the world and I feel quite at home on Stack Overflow. I do NOT feel at home with people and cultures where "you are wrong" is considered an insult when in fact it is just a fact. Deal with it, people. It's efficient. Stack Overflow is meant to help your neocortex, not to comfort your cerebellum.
Now that I've RTFA, apparently that's exactly what's going on.
The problem is that it is plain stupid to consider things people are born with "immoral". It is unfair, irrational and discrminatory and it's therefore a good indication of being totally incompetent in leading people that do science, which is all about rationality.
These satellites will orbit relatively close to earth at 1000-1300km. That's 4ms for a photon, or a 8ms round tripe time. The latency is reported to be about 25ms, but it has the potential to be much lower than that. Furthermore, since these satellites are expected to communicate with each other, this is not just a last-mile solution, but a fully fledged alternative Internet that could even be faster than traditional cables that need to twist and turn and therefore never follow the shortest path. This will be a game changer no matter what.
That legal text only says what the pedestrian is supposed to do. It says absolutely nothing about what vehicles may or may not do.
Most civilized countries also have laws stating that when driving a vehicle, you should not hit people. Because, you know, there are - for example - those tiny people that might not have read that piece of legal text just yet. Or people that are temporarily unable to think clear. Or people that made a mistake.The fact that they should follow the law does not mean that it is therefore fine to just drive over them if they happen not to.
I doubt they'd manage recognizing who it is in the picture.
I think they can; after only a few seconds, they can probably obtain tens of usable images from various viewpoints. And they can probably factor in many other data they have about people such as where they live as well as recent other recognitions in the area. Perhaps it's even easier if they just track everybody always everywhere... and if they use spy satellites and autonomous imaging drones over their major cities, they can probably track everybody that can be seen from above, making all this so much easier.
I don't think there's a reliable way to teach programmers best practices. Programming is like composing music: you can teach all the rules and be a technically perfect musician but in the end the real difference between a good programmer and a bad one is elusive. The trick is not to teach programmers, the trick is to find them.
IPCC has declared specific "scientific" meaning for such terms when used in their reports. You may want to align your use of them to that. See https://www.theglobeandmail.co... for an overview.
Apple. Isn't that that company run by that dead guy that said "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."?
Apple still behaves like the post-mortem vehicle of Steve Jobs' hatred. Towards Google but also towards everybody getting in its way, including their own employees. Apple is a patent troll that makes some of the most closed systems on the planet, heavily censors everything and routinely uses lawsuits to indirectly bother non-Apple consumers. Everything built on Apple is eventually lost to society, locked in Apple walled gardens, written in Apple languages and dialects, built on Apple API's and accessible only with access to very recent keys only Apple can provide. Apple wants to control you. They want everybody to lock the fruits of their labor in their Apple jail, only for other people in the Apple jail to use. Forever. Everything they do seems to be specifically tailored to that purpose.
I'm not going to deny Apple has the best user experience, the best integration and the best hardware. But I feel that's not what it's about to Apple; they see their superior user experience as a means to lock their users into their products. Its secondary to their primary goal: controlling everything.
As a musician and a photographer, but especially as a developer, I actively avoid their products. I feel I should not contribute to their apparently dystopian ideal future. Not as a consumer and not as a contributor to their ecosystem. And in 20 years, when I'm using my own ugly software and remixing my own crappy music or browsing through my own badly processed photos without having had to buy the latest Apple products to do so, I'm going to be fucking happy I kept my independence.
Oh. And they're liars. They especially like to lie about their open sourciness. I think the developers of OpenDarwin and KHTML can say a thing or two about that. Apple likes to use open source in their marketing. And then it releases unmergable forks, unrecognizable derivates or uncompilable dumps. Or they release something that works flawlessly and then completely wipes the fruits of the original developers off the face of the earth, like they did to KHTML with Webkit. They are absolutely not interested in giving back but they are very interested in creating the impression of giving back. They're not just an open source leech (which I think would be just fine!); they are a leech that acts like it isn't a leech. They are dishonest assholes and I - as a developer - will never trust them.
I suggest not to explain this in terms of exposure etc. because that will simply trigger a discussion on (early) photography technology development being racist.
It's much simpler than that: the darker something is, the less light it reflects, the less information is present in it's appearance, the harder it is to recognize. This will always be the case and developments in photography technology will never solve it, they will alleviate the problem at best. If it is a problem, that is, because I think facial recognition will turn out to be a much bigger problem than badly exposed photographs.
Sounds like a plan... if they were actually capable of detecting abuse in a reliable manner. They have clearly shown they are not; they are are continuously flagging educational and/or scientific content, frustrating content creators and driving them elsewhere. I think the success of platforms like Patreon and brilliant.org is to a large part fueled by Youtube's inability to protect valuable content creators from their incompetent bots. This will be the end of Youtube as the de facto video platform. It will take a while, but content creators will simply flee elsewhere as popularity and/or revenue-streams of other platform increases while Youtube keeps harassing them.
I don't think that's going to work either. A gross revenue tax would put companies with a relatively low margin at a major disadvantage; wholesale companies can close their doors immediately while Apple wouldn't give a shit. And a consumption tax is effectively just a tax on consumers so that's not really helpful either.
My solution (which is just as hypothetical as yours;)) would be to stop taxing profit (and property) while starting to tax any use of natural resources including using the environment to dump shit like CO2. And then we turn on the money presses to create some inflation; inflation is an awesome alternative to profit taxes. While we're at it, we might just as well introduce some helicopter money because why not?:)
While that sounds logical, it isn't. In general, road capacity does increase as the speed increases up to about 70 km/h. Above 70km/h, the increased distance to maintain a safe stopping distance becomes a bigger factor and the capacity decreases. Therefore, this plan can work. In fact it does; it is standard practice where I live (the Netherlands) and it really does work (to some extent; road capacity still has its limits...). However, it must be said that that's after a very intensive campaign educating the general public on how to merge.
That's what you get when you anticipate predictions mostly based on things we know for sure. Most new things we learn make it worse, not better. Our estimates are not estimates, they're the lowers bounds.
So what apps do you use that do not rely on a central server anyway because the primary goal of such apps is to do stuff together with others (chat, social network, managing data) or to offer computationally intensive features (voice recognition, route planning with many realtime variables etc.). It all requires a central server anyway.
Nevertheless, where we can, we should avoid such centrally managed services in favor of distributed alternatives. So the problem is not progressive web apps per se, it's centralized monopolisation of stuff that could and should have been distributed. However, once stuff has become distributed, the problem you describe goes away too. So, dependence on 3rd parties is not a reason to avoid progressive webapps. It is, however, a reason to avoid centrally managed services. But that requires alternatives, which are mostly non-existens...
When I recently got CPR training, I was told to do what I felt was right when encountering such a tattoo. However, I was also told that trained medical personnel should definitely honor such signs as they are legally binding in the Netherlands. We also have official badges specifically for this purpose.
This should not be an ethical dilemma in developed countries. It should not even be a legal dilemma....
Breaking up doesn't help as long as there's no alternative. The problem is not Facebook or Google, the problem is that the lack of an open standardized decentral alternative. There's DIASPORA* and perhaps that can become a real solution, but for now it lacks traction and openness. But especially, it lacks the generality and neutrality of real established Internet protocols. Eventually an open solution will pop up, it always will, but it's going to take a lot time and patience.
It's not that. We have dish washers and the few things that can't go in there are washed in no time. Folding the laundry, that's what we want automated.
(...) American books that were well over 100 years old and still retained some of the across the pond ways of doing things (...)
If I'm not mistaken, it is the British that changed the most, not the Americans. American English is a lot closer to what the Brits used to speak than British English is.
There's that. And then there's the simple fact that effectively there's just one version of Windows. And one version of Office. We get LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Gnumeric, Abiword and what else there is. We get to choose from a huge list of distributions, each with their own unique set of flaws and their own way of configuring stuff and handling package management. Their own unique combinations of libraries.
And all this choice isn't a problem at all until you factor in all the plumbing we need to deal with to get it all working together in all kinds of varying environments. It's ridiculous. And as long as we're spending our time on managing this chaos instead of Just Fixing It, I'm not convinced that it's Microsoft flooding the market that's holding us back. The real problem might very well be us flooding our own market with noise.
The world is small. And Facebook knows many of its connections. It probably mostly suggests friends based on your connections, favoring people that are connected to you through multiple paths, not just through friends of friends but also through communities and events. Often, such connections are not that easy to find due to blocked friend lists and you not wanting to scan through 200x200 peoples lists of friends, but Facebook can easily find such paths. I don't believe it does anything more spooky than that. They could do super spooky stuff, but they don't because it would probably scare people away.
What it might do, though, is suggest you friends based on what those people looked at, your profile for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Concrete also causes us to use less wood. While on the one hand that's a good thing since even older forests are a great carbon sink, on the other hand it wooden houses are a really great way of removing carbon from the biosphere for quite a long time; the average wooden house stores the equivalent of 20 tonnes of CO2. Building 400 million wooden houses would compensate for the entire CO2 surplus in the biosphere (or at least in the atmosphere). In theory ;)
It itsn't. Steel is. And we can build really high with wood these days as mentioned by a comment above.
Too many people experience Stack Overflow as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.
While I can readily believe it might be a hostile place to newbies, if it is experienced as a hostile place by "women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" I guess that has nothing to do with Stack Overflow and everything with these people. Why do I believe that? Because gender and skin color are usually not obvious or even visible. Therefore they cannot influence how people treat members of these groups. Some people do use their real names, but due to the international character of Stack Overflow, even for many of these, it is not clear whether they're names for boys or girls.
Also, I can imagine the culture on Stack Overflow to be heavily influenced by Software Engineers - people that are used to giving and receiving no-nonsense feedback by the shipload; you cannot do code reviews if you're going to make a politically correct story out of them. Others may find this direct to-the-point approach to be "hostile". They just cannot handle the truth. Now I happen to be Dutch and apparently we're the most direct people in the world and I feel quite at home on Stack Overflow. I do NOT feel at home with people and cultures where "you are wrong" is considered an insult when in fact it is just a fact. Deal with it, people. It's efficient. Stack Overflow is meant to help your neocortex, not to comfort your cerebellum.
Now that I've RTFA, apparently that's exactly what's going on.
The problem is that it is plain stupid to consider things people are born with "immoral". It is unfair, irrational and discrminatory and it's therefore a good indication of being totally incompetent in leading people that do science, which is all about rationality.
These satellites will orbit relatively close to earth at 1000-1300km. That's 4ms for a photon, or a 8ms round tripe time. The latency is reported to be about 25ms, but it has the potential to be much lower than that. Furthermore, since these satellites are expected to communicate with each other, this is not just a last-mile solution, but a fully fledged alternative Internet that could even be faster than traditional cables that need to twist and turn and therefore never follow the shortest path. This will be a game changer no matter what.
That legal text only says what the pedestrian is supposed to do. It says absolutely nothing about what vehicles may or may not do.
Most civilized countries also have laws stating that when driving a vehicle, you should not hit people. Because, you know, there are - for example - those tiny people that might not have read that piece of legal text just yet. Or people that are temporarily unable to think clear. Or people that made a mistake.The fact that they should follow the law does not mean that it is therefore fine to just drive over them if they happen not to.
I doubt they'd manage recognizing who it is in the picture.
I think they can; after only a few seconds, they can probably obtain tens of usable images from various viewpoints. And they can probably factor in many other data they have about people such as where they live as well as recent other recognitions in the area. Perhaps it's even easier if they just track everybody always everywhere... and if they use spy satellites and autonomous imaging drones over their major cities, they can probably track everybody that can be seen from above, making all this so much easier.
I don't see how a passive computer could heat your house. I'd suggest using an active computer.
(...) as a digital system assessed the situation (...)
Who knew those analog steam powered ddos protection engines would go of fashion this fast.
I don't think there's a reliable way to teach programmers best practices. Programming is like composing music: you can teach all the rules and be a technically perfect musician but in the end the real difference between a good programmer and a bad one is elusive. The trick is not to teach programmers, the trick is to find them.
IPCC has declared specific "scientific" meaning for such terms when used in their reports. You may want to align your use of them to that. See https://www.theglobeandmail.co... for an overview.
Apple. Isn't that that company run by that dead guy that said "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."?
Apple still behaves like the post-mortem vehicle of Steve Jobs' hatred. Towards Google but also towards everybody getting in its way, including their own employees. Apple is a patent troll that makes some of the most closed systems on the planet, heavily censors everything and routinely uses lawsuits to indirectly bother non-Apple consumers. Everything built on Apple is eventually lost to society, locked in Apple walled gardens, written in Apple languages and dialects, built on Apple API's and accessible only with access to very recent keys only Apple can provide. Apple wants to control you. They want everybody to lock the fruits of their labor in their Apple jail, only for other people in the Apple jail to use. Forever. Everything they do seems to be specifically tailored to that purpose.
I'm not going to deny Apple has the best user experience, the best integration and the best hardware. But I feel that's not what it's about to Apple; they see their superior user experience as a means to lock their users into their products. Its secondary to their primary goal: controlling everything.
As a musician and a photographer, but especially as a developer, I actively avoid their products. I feel I should not contribute to their apparently dystopian ideal future. Not as a consumer and not as a contributor to their ecosystem. And in 20 years, when I'm using my own ugly software and remixing my own crappy music or browsing through my own badly processed photos without having had to buy the latest Apple products to do so, I'm going to be fucking happy I kept my independence.
Oh. And they're liars. They especially like to lie about their open sourciness. I think the developers of OpenDarwin and KHTML can say a thing or two about that. Apple likes to use open source in their marketing. And then it releases unmergable forks, unrecognizable derivates or uncompilable dumps. Or they release something that works flawlessly and then completely wipes the fruits of the original developers off the face of the earth, like they did to KHTML with Webkit. They are absolutely not interested in giving back but they are very interested in creating the impression of giving back. They're not just an open source leech (which I think would be just fine!); they are a leech that acts like it isn't a leech. They are dishonest assholes and I - as a developer - will never trust them.
I suggest not to explain this in terms of exposure etc. because that will simply trigger a discussion on (early) photography technology development being racist.
It's much simpler than that: the darker something is, the less light it reflects, the less information is present in it's appearance, the harder it is to recognize. This will always be the case and developments in photography technology will never solve it, they will alleviate the problem at best. If it is a problem, that is, because I think facial recognition will turn out to be a much bigger problem than badly exposed photographs.
Sounds like a plan... if they were actually capable of detecting abuse in a reliable manner. They have clearly shown they are not; they are are continuously flagging educational and/or scientific content, frustrating content creators and driving them elsewhere. I think the success of platforms like Patreon and brilliant.org is to a large part fueled by Youtube's inability to protect valuable content creators from their incompetent bots. This will be the end of Youtube as the de facto video platform. It will take a while, but content creators will simply flee elsewhere as popularity and/or revenue-streams of other platform increases while Youtube keeps harassing them.
I don't think that's going to work either. A gross revenue tax would put companies with a relatively low margin at a major disadvantage; wholesale companies can close their doors immediately while Apple wouldn't give a shit. And a consumption tax is effectively just a tax on consumers so that's not really helpful either.
My solution (which is just as hypothetical as yours ;)) would be to stop taxing profit (and property) while starting to tax any use of natural resources including using the environment to dump shit like CO2. And then we turn on the money presses to create some inflation; inflation is an awesome alternative to profit taxes. While we're at it, we might just as well introduce some helicopter money because why not? :)
While that sounds logical, it isn't. In general, road capacity does increase as the speed increases up to about 70 km/h. Above 70km/h, the increased distance to maintain a safe stopping distance becomes a bigger factor and the capacity decreases. Therefore, this plan can work. In fact it does; it is standard practice where I live (the Netherlands) and it really does work (to some extent; road capacity still has its limits...). However, it must be said that that's after a very intensive campaign educating the general public on how to merge.
That's what you get when you anticipate predictions mostly based on things we know for sure. Most new things we learn make it worse, not better. Our estimates are not estimates, they're the lowers bounds.
So what apps do you use that do not rely on a central server anyway because the primary goal of such apps is to do stuff together with others (chat, social network, managing data) or to offer computationally intensive features (voice recognition, route planning with many realtime variables etc.). It all requires a central server anyway.
Nevertheless, where we can, we should avoid such centrally managed services in favor of distributed alternatives. So the problem is not progressive web apps per se, it's centralized monopolisation of stuff that could and should have been distributed. However, once stuff has become distributed, the problem you describe goes away too. So, dependence on 3rd parties is not a reason to avoid progressive webapps. It is, however, a reason to avoid centrally managed services. But that requires alternatives, which are mostly non-existens...
When I recently got CPR training, I was told to do what I felt was right when encountering such a tattoo. However, I was also told that trained medical personnel should definitely honor such signs as they are legally binding in the Netherlands. We also have official badges specifically for this purpose.
This should not be an ethical dilemma in developed countries. It should not even be a legal dilemma....
Breaking up doesn't help as long as there's no alternative. The problem is not Facebook or Google, the problem is that the lack of an open standardized decentral alternative. There's DIASPORA* and perhaps that can become a real solution, but for now it lacks traction and openness. But especially, it lacks the generality and neutrality of real established Internet protocols. Eventually an open solution will pop up, it always will, but it's going to take a lot time and patience.
Isn't one of the most defining characteristics of Satoshi Nakamoto that he says that he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto? :p
It's not that. We have dish washers and the few things that can't go in there are washed in no time. Folding the laundry, that's what we want automated.
(...) American books that were well over 100 years old and still retained some of the across the pond ways of doing things (...)
If I'm not mistaken, it is the British that changed the most, not the Americans. American English is a lot closer to what the Brits used to speak than British English is.
https://www.becomeenglishteach...
There's that. And then there's the simple fact that effectively there's just one version of Windows. And one version of Office. We get LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Gnumeric, Abiword and what else there is. We get to choose from a huge list of distributions, each with their own unique set of flaws and their own way of configuring stuff and handling package management. Their own unique combinations of libraries.
And all this choice isn't a problem at all until you factor in all the plumbing we need to deal with to get it all working together in all kinds of varying environments. It's ridiculous. And as long as we're spending our time on managing this chaos instead of Just Fixing It, I'm not convinced that it's Microsoft flooding the market that's holding us back. The real problem might very well be us flooding our own market with noise.
The world is small. And Facebook knows many of its connections. It probably mostly suggests friends based on your connections, favoring people that are connected to you through multiple paths, not just through friends of friends but also through communities and events. Often, such connections are not that easy to find due to blocked friend lists and you not wanting to scan through 200x200 peoples lists of friends, but Facebook can easily find such paths. I don't believe it does anything more spooky than that. They could do super spooky stuff, but they don't because it would probably scare people away.
What it might do, though, is suggest you friends based on what those people looked at, your profile for example.