Remember that crazy German dude who made a machete-launching slingshot?
Somehow, I think that would be fatal too if pointed at someone.
There is nothing fundamentally new about 3d-printed guns. 3d-printers won't have to be banned, just as high-powered elastics and machetes won't have to be banned. You could make a deadly weapon before, and you can make a deadly weapon today.
Sometimes, it may be sensible to ban use of such homemade weapons. Sometimes it may be sensible to ban the sale of them. Sometimes, even the manufacture and possession. But that depends more on the reasons the weapon is usually made, than on the qualities of the weapon.
The rich can perfectly well be out of touch with reality. The most important requirement to make money is to have money.
The bits of reality that knowledge of could help you make money, are also not the only bits of reality that matter.
If you're going to swindle someone (say in a traditional way, for simplity), you can't be entirely out of touch with how they think. But you can be out of touch with their condition, what their lives are like - in fact, if you have a conscience it probably helps being out of touch with that.
It's not because they are rich that you should listen to Google. It's because they have a lot of data, and (unlike many other rich entities) are demonstrably smart about using it in many areas.
Good job hijacking my comment for a pro-greed screed. To return your favor: Mod parent down, flamebait.
I'm sure Larry Page would love for Google to be strong enough to shrug off such pettiness. In many areas it is. But against Microsoft/Skype on videoconferencing, no, it isn't.
In today's world economy, you could be doing business with a French speaker today, a Spanish speaker tomorrow, a Hindii speaker next week and a Russian speaker the week after.
Have you actually tried that? Even if there are no language problems, cultural differences are going to be a wellspring of headaches for a long time to come. The world isn't nearly as small as some people believe.
2010 called, they want their post back. Google+ is second only to Facebook in active users, it's not moribound by any stretch of the imagination. Though you could be forgiven for thinking that if you're not using it (as unlike e.g. Twitter and YouTube, it's not so visible from the outside, by design).
They don't want to force people to Google+. They want to prevent skype from using the google talk address book without offering its own in return.
Hangouts. And yes, it would be forgotten pretty quickly if you could call your hangouts contacts on skype, but not your skype contacts on hangouts. Which is exactly how Microsoft used Google's XMPP support.
Re:Talk/Hangouts/Gmail vs. Lync/Skype/Outlook
on
Google Drops XMPP Support
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· Score: 5, Informative
This was it. I remember from the I/O keynote, complaints about Microsoft exploiting some open standard to establish one-way compatibility, but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks. This comment ought to be at the top, it's most likely the reason XMPP support was dropped.
Did you watch the keynote? Page made a big point out of how lucky he was - how a parent was an early computer scientist, how they convinced arrangers to let him attend a robotics conference even though he was underage etc. and how he wants kids to get the chances he got.
He may come across as a bit naive, yes. But I'm sure he knows that, and it's probably somewhat deliberate (I mean, a QA session? When you've just admitted on Google+ that you're pathologically soft-spoken?)
It's a quantum computer all right, just not a universal quantum computer.
As I understand it, there is a procedure (although an impractical one) to transform any problem into an adiabatic one. So, it's a universal computer, at least.
To use the GPS satellites to determine the poles, presumably there are other ways than actually standing on the pole and getting GPS signals.
Also, we lump it together and call it GPS, but in fact there are several systems, and as I recall GLONASS (the Soviet/Russian one) is a lot more accurate in polar areas.
"Health issues vegan" doesn't really exist. If it was for health reasons, why avoid even a drop of honey, or leather in your boots? Yet if you don't avoid that, you're by definition not vegan.
The entire term vegan was invented specifically to distinguish ethical vegetarians from people who merely didn't eat animals or animal products. It means ethical vegetarian, basically.
All crop development prior to Mendel or Darwin, for example, was essentially cargo cult
No, that's not cargo cult. Cargo cult is when you imitate the actions of someone for whom those actions have meaning, without understanding their meaning yourself (or totally misunderstanding their meaning). Crop development was haphazardly experimental, not cargo cult.
Or can you explain why "gift" means poison in German?
According to the etymological sources I've found, euphemism is the most common explanation for the shift in meaning. In Protogermanic the word most like gift does mean gift.
Any statistical model is going to have trouble with semantic changes like that.
Wait... So, God allegedly says "Let there be light", and it's Satan that makes the Sun?
No, before you launch into a long post... to late I guess.
"Lucifer" is an old name for the morning star (Venus). When Isaiah speaks of how Lucifer has fallen from heaven, he referred to a Babylonian king who was nicknamed or identified with the morning star. Although it etymologically can be read as light-bringer, the conflation with the myth of Prometheus is a much, much later invention.
Just because people will criticize you no matter what you do, still it may be the case that the criticism is valid. In the article, Shuttleworth does nothing to defend Mir - he calls it convenient and effective for them, but that wasn't the issue. The issue was why Wayland would NOT be convenient and effective for them.
Wayland isn't primarily a library, it's a protocol, and the big challenge for a protocol is getting people and companies (like NVidia!) on board, not that work has to be duplicated. Realistically, some will choose to go with one and not the other, and that means more wasted effort, whoever "wins" in the end.
The sociobiology of the 80s is not the sociobiology of today, and even Gould (d. 2002) eventually had nice words for some sociobiology. But that there was a problem with people providing bombastic explanations based on plausibility rather than rigor, Wilson's statements is a good reminder of.
Don't delude yourself: This is anti-intellectualism. Sociobiology has issues, but that's not because it's got "socio" in the name.
It's because evolutionary explanations have extremely high status, meaning they are often reflexively believed, even when they can't be backed up. It has become (has always been, really) a refuge for the kind of people who would rather make "bold statements" than work incrementally to increase our understanding. Wilson's statements sums it up all too accurately: make the statements now, leave to others to test it mathematically later.
On the contrary, social sciences have extremely LOW status, as your prejudicial comment sums up. Have you heard about the Cochrane collaboration, evidence-based medicine? You probably have. Why did it take so long to appear? Because medicine and molecular biology has high status, whereas the "social" population studies of epidemiologists had low status. So if the high-status people said, "from our understanding of molecular biology, this should work", for a long time that would be tried, even though from a 10.000 feet view it would have been obvious it did NOT work.
You need both kinds. You need people who take the bottom-up approach, building bricks of what we know, and assemble it into bigger things. Then you need to have people who take the top-down approach, because no matter how well the pieces fit, it's no good if the larger building can't actually stand. In some fields, like physics, these are closely intertwined. In others, they are tragically separated. For that to change, the white-coat status prejudices of people like you need to be broken down.
Very cool, but your inner ear is going to break the illusion - just as your retinal muscles are going to remind you that it isn't quite depth you're seeing with that stereoscopic headset.
Progress of technology - new ways of getting motion sickness!
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that crazy German dude who made a machete-launching slingshot?
Somehow, I think that would be fatal too if pointed at someone.
There is nothing fundamentally new about 3d-printed guns. 3d-printers won't have to be banned, just as high-powered elastics and machetes won't have to be banned. You could make a deadly weapon before, and you can make a deadly weapon today.
Sometimes, it may be sensible to ban use of such homemade weapons. Sometimes it may be sensible to ban the sale of them. Sometimes, even the manufacture and possession. But that depends more on the reasons the weapon is usually made, than on the qualities of the weapon.
The rich can perfectly well be out of touch with reality. The most important requirement to make money is to have money.
The bits of reality that knowledge of could help you make money, are also not the only bits of reality that matter.
If you're going to swindle someone (say in a traditional way, for simplity), you can't be entirely out of touch with how they think. But you can be out of touch with their condition, what their lives are like - in fact, if you have a conscience it probably helps being out of touch with that.
It's not because they are rich that you should listen to Google. It's because they have a lot of data, and (unlike many other rich entities) are demonstrably smart about using it in many areas.
Good job hijacking my comment for a pro-greed screed. To return your favor: Mod parent down, flamebait.
I'm sure Larry Page would love for Google to be strong enough to shrug off such pettiness. In many areas it is. But against Microsoft/Skype on videoconferencing, no, it isn't.
Have you actually tried that? Even if there are no language problems, cultural differences are going to be a wellspring of headaches for a long time to come. The world isn't nearly as small as some people believe.
2010 called, they want their post back. Google+ is second only to Facebook in active users, it's not moribound by any stretch of the imagination. Though you could be forgiven for thinking that if you're not using it (as unlike e.g. Twitter and YouTube, it's not so visible from the outside, by design).
They don't want to force people to Google+. They want to prevent skype from using the google talk address book without offering its own in return.
Hangouts. And yes, it would be forgotten pretty quickly if you could call your hangouts contacts on skype, but not your skype contacts on hangouts. Which is exactly how Microsoft used Google's XMPP support.
This was it. I remember from the I/O keynote, complaints about Microsoft exploiting some open standard to establish one-way compatibility, but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks. This comment ought to be at the top, it's most likely the reason XMPP support was dropped.
Makes you think... if they have all the data, and they seem out of touch with reality, maybe it's really us who are out of touch with reality?
Did you watch the keynote? Page made a big point out of how lucky he was - how a parent was an early computer scientist, how they convinced arrangers to let him attend a robotics conference even though he was underage etc. and how he wants kids to get the chances he got.
He may come across as a bit naive, yes. But I'm sure he knows that, and it's probably somewhat deliberate (I mean, a QA session? When you've just admitted on Google+ that you're pathologically soft-spoken?)
No risk of Larry Page sounding harsh, with those partially paralyzed vocal cords of his.
As I understand it, there is a procedure (although an impractical one) to transform any problem into an adiabatic one. So, it's a universal computer, at least.
To use the GPS satellites to determine the poles, presumably there are other ways than actually standing on the pole and getting GPS signals.
Also, we lump it together and call it GPS, but in fact there are several systems, and as I recall GLONASS (the Soviet/Russian one) is a lot more accurate in polar areas.
I'm afraid your sarcasm is going to go straight over the heads of slashdot's resident climate denialists.
It may have been reasonable to believe that if you had no information whatsoever about e.g temperature and rainfall or solar output.
It's unlikely that your meat is grazed at all, let alone that it came from a wild population in an overgrazed area.
"Health issues vegan" doesn't really exist. If it was for health reasons, why avoid even a drop of honey, or leather in your boots? Yet if you don't avoid that, you're by definition not vegan.
The entire term vegan was invented specifically to distinguish ethical vegetarians from people who merely didn't eat animals or animal products. It means ethical vegetarian, basically.
No, that's not cargo cult. Cargo cult is when you imitate the actions of someone for whom those actions have meaning, without understanding their meaning yourself (or totally misunderstanding their meaning). Crop development was haphazardly experimental, not cargo cult.
http://xkcd.com/793/
According to the etymological sources I've found, euphemism is the most common explanation for the shift in meaning. In Protogermanic the word most like gift does mean gift.
Any statistical model is going to have trouble with semantic changes like that.
Growing plants isn't always trivial. Especially a plant that you've messed with, so that it fools itself into acting as if it's day because it glows.
Wait... So, God allegedly says "Let there be light", and it's Satan that makes the Sun?
No, before you launch into a long post... to late I guess.
"Lucifer" is an old name for the morning star (Venus). When Isaiah speaks of how Lucifer has fallen from heaven, he referred to a Babylonian king who was nicknamed or identified with the morning star. Although it etymologically can be read as light-bringer, the conflation with the myth of Prometheus is a much, much later invention.
Just because people will criticize you no matter what you do, still it may be the case that the criticism is valid. In the article, Shuttleworth does nothing to defend Mir - he calls it convenient and effective for them, but that wasn't the issue. The issue was why Wayland would NOT be convenient and effective for them.
Wayland isn't primarily a library, it's a protocol, and the big challenge for a protocol is getting people and companies (like NVidia!) on board, not that work has to be duplicated. Realistically, some will choose to go with one and not the other, and that means more wasted effort, whoever "wins" in the end.
The sociobiology of the 80s is not the sociobiology of today, and even Gould (d. 2002) eventually had nice words for some sociobiology. But that there was a problem with people providing bombastic explanations based on plausibility rather than rigor, Wilson's statements is a good reminder of.
Don't delude yourself: This is anti-intellectualism. Sociobiology has issues, but that's not because it's got "socio" in the name.
It's because evolutionary explanations have extremely high status, meaning they are often reflexively believed, even when they can't be backed up. It has become (has always been, really) a refuge for the kind of people who would rather make "bold statements" than work incrementally to increase our understanding. Wilson's statements sums it up all too accurately: make the statements now, leave to others to test it mathematically later.
On the contrary, social sciences have extremely LOW status, as your prejudicial comment sums up. Have you heard about the Cochrane collaboration, evidence-based medicine? You probably have. Why did it take so long to appear? Because medicine and molecular biology has high status, whereas the "social" population studies of epidemiologists had low status. So if the high-status people said, "from our understanding of molecular biology, this should work", for a long time that would be tried, even though from a 10.000 feet view it would have been obvious it did NOT work.
You need both kinds. You need people who take the bottom-up approach, building bricks of what we know, and assemble it into bigger things. Then you need to have people who take the top-down approach, because no matter how well the pieces fit, it's no good if the larger building can't actually stand. In some fields, like physics, these are closely intertwined. In others, they are tragically separated. For that to change, the white-coat status prejudices of people like you need to be broken down.
Very cool, but your inner ear is going to break the illusion - just as your retinal muscles are going to remind you that it isn't quite depth you're seeing with that stereoscopic headset.
Progress of technology - new ways of getting motion sickness!