I envy those people I know who are capable of insanity and irrationality.
So far my brain just won't break.
But alzheimers or dementia are probably in my late 70s.
It's a problem because the rational person sees a lot of the bad in the world and can't really alleviate their own suffering other than by taking mind altering substances or temporarily distracting activities.
I know! I keep driving past the local mental institution and thinking to myself, "man, THOSE people have the life!" I mean, I really wish I could have my own free dormitory where I never had to have any of life's responsibilities. Sure, there are violent outbursts from other patients, harsh discipline, and crippling suicidal depression to contend with, but free room and board and no responsibilities balances that out.
Oh wait, you mean you wish you were sociopathic? God, you're a weirdo.
At first I was actually hoping the headline was describing this:
A game player pays to unlock something gameplay affecting in a game. Player now goes into match making to start an instance of the game. Match making system does its best to match the player who paid for in-game items with (or against, in competitive games) other players who paid for in-game items to keep interest groups together and keep playing fields a bit more fair for all.
As someone who finds the entire concept of pay to win/pay to advance predatory and exploitative in exactly the same way as casinos, I would have lauded an idea like this.
But, of course, what they're actually proposing is this:
A game player pays to unlock something gameplay affecting in a game. Player now goes into match making to start an instance of the game. Match making system does its best to match the player who paid for in-game items with to situations where the player is likely to excel because of the purchase they made. If this is done at the expense of players who did not make a purchase, who cares?
I'm honestly wondering at what point these freemium/pay to win/pay to advance games will finally fall afoul of gambling laws and experience backlash that's been a long time coming as a result of their business model.
It's worth noting that not everyone lives in places with a glut of talented IT professionals to draw from. I live in a small city. It's easier for a small organization here to have one person manage servers from a console and backup data manually locally than it is to have that same person do the same thing plus physically manage servers. Plus, outsourcing to data centers sometimes becomes such a contract headache with slow turn-around time that cloud hosting becomes much more attractive.
However, yes, do be *extremely* wary of anyone who claims that the cloud will cure all your ills and that everyone should switch to it no matter what. It's a trade-off, and you'd better be ok with the down sides before you even think of using it.
I tend to like this solution the best, but my problem lies with games that allow players to report cheaters. I don't cheat in games, but have been reported for cheating in a few games (old Counterstrike servers, Smite, HotS) because I would occasionally do something that someone decided was suspicious (or they were just plain angry at losing and wanted someone else to blame). In games like that, I don't want to be lumped in with actual botters and cheaters just because some jackass decided there is no way I could possibly hit him the very instant that he appeared in a certain spot unless I was cheating. Never mind that his teammate had been going straight to that spot 20 times in a row each time after dying and that was who I was actually waiting for...
I've only read one book by Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash. It's certainly not a bad book, but I did not find it particularly enjoyable outside of the novel concepts that would appear throughout the book. The rat-things, for example, were cool to think about but so incredibly impractical that I couldn't suspend disbelief, even for a science fiction novel. I also got a little lost in the beginning of the novel figuring out which parts were happening in the real world and which were in the metaverse because his transitions weren't great.
I will say that having only read Snow Crash by Stephenson and Neuromancer by Gibson, I would much rather read more books by Stephenson than Gibson. Gibson's writing style really irks me. Specifically how he explains at length things I, as a reader, don't care about while sparsely explaining things I do care about. There is also something about his penchant for choosing odd names for characters and entities that makes it difficult for me to follow the plot of his stories smoothly.
For anyone else who may have been confused by the wording in "(the app) opposed an order in September from Spain's Constitutional Court to suspend the referendum while it determined its legality," the legality in question is in regards to the referendum, not the app. The fight over the app is just an extension over the fight in Spain over whether Catalonia is legally allowed to have a referendum for a vote of independence from Spain.
Well, I'd be ok with that kind of travel. But, then again, I'm the kind of person who doesn't really care what their vehicle looks like as long as it's reliable, relatively safe in a crash, economical, and gets me from A to B without discomfort. I'm aware I must be in a minority, because I am totally mystified by why anyone would show any interest in a car commercial. And yet those commercials continue to exist, which, I assume, must mean that there are enough people who care about how a car looks and how you feel about owning it for it to be worth the cost to advertise those as features.
As much as I like the idea of that kind of publicly available cheap transportation, I think there is a big enough segment of the population that will never give up their personal chariots that you can't write a science fiction story showing nobody using private transportation in the future and expect me to suspend disbelief.
Things that have contributed to eroding my trust of the Internet to some degree:
Proliferation of fake news (by which I mean ideological propaganda specifically designed to look like news but with incitement as its goal rather than information) Government (pick whichever one you want) sponsored spying Dodgy business practices by large, well-known, IT-focused companies Data breaches and other hacks Viruses Spam Advertisers trying to disguise their ads as if they were a natural part of the parent page Advertising by looking at metadata
Things that have definitely not contributed to eroding my trust of the internet:
I thought the rule was that you use it after a dependent clause that starts a sentence. Or after an appositive or introductory adverb. Those are the only uses for introductory commas I was aware of that might apply in this case, but if you can point out the style guide rule this breaks then I will consider modifying my grammar.
do you really want your house to roll out the welcome matt to every jackass with the means to play an aac file within hearing of your home?
I would hope that Matt would realize they aren't supposed to be in the house. Then again, his main job is welcoming people that Siri/Alexa tell him to welcome, so how smart can he really be?
I definitely experience the same thing - my creativity is best triggered by high energy music
I kind of wonder whether the real takeaway from the study is supposed to be "listening to music you like helps with creativity." I've certainly found that to be the case when I listen to punk metal (my current musical flavor of choice). And sludge metal helps me when I need to just focus on rote tasks and get into a trance "zone". But I'm sure others would find their creativity or productivity impeded by listening to those genres, so I would never suggest anyone else listen to them to help with tasks unless I know their musical preferences.
Considering that they had people listen to sad, anxious, and calm (or anxious and calm at the same time somehow? Damnit New Scientist, this is why people use Oxford commas!) classical music, I'm not sure you can draw conclusions outside that genre. This seems to be more about "happy classical music" having a positive effect on a greater portion of the population than other emotive flavors of classical music. But even that may not hold true for everyone. Maybe it's just that more people have a positive reaction to "happy classical music" than other kinds of classical music, but that the effect is reversed for some percentage of people.
In short, I find the study interesting, but as usual the magazine article takes the conclusions and runs with them beyond the scope of the actual study.
Ok, so it's a universal truth. That makes the state every bit as capable of corruption and tyranny as the federal government.
People are closer to state governments and are better able to change it so any tyranny will be short lived as the people vote it out.
That's the theory I keep hearing. But I also keep hearing that workers controlling the means of production solves a lot of problems too. I've yet to see either work as advertised in the real world.
The federal government on the other hand, by it's nature represents a diverse set of ideas and politics and compromise is very hard.
Doesn't that mean that compromise there is all the more important when it happens?
That means federal tyranny is harder to undo.
Why? You can vote a president out every 4 years, senators out every 6, or house members out every 2. Why is it any easier to overthrow state tyranny than federal tyranny if the federal government is not allowed to intervene? If the federal government cannot interfere with the state, what is so fundamentally different about the state that stops them from being able to do what you're afraid of the federal government doing or allows you to undo their changes any easier? Are you even talking about federal vs state any more or are you talking about executive vs legislative?
In addition, the role of the federal government should only deal with matters that deal with the states as a whole not the individual citizens.
How is immigration not a matter of the states as a whole? Should Arizona be allowed to say that anyone crossing its borders without documentation is considered a felon while Texas is allowed to say that anyone crossing its borders without documentation is a US citizen? You act as though there is always a clear line between "state problem" and "federal problem."
However, the state government will be closer to the citizens so should handle the more direct laws affecting the citizens.
Closer == less corrupt and tyrannical? So the Jim Crow laws were justified because they were closer to the people they affected? And they would have gone away without federal intervention because the people in the southern states would have overthrown the tyranny on their own? It's very easy to find historical precedent showing that your statement is not necessarily true.
How was anything you said not an attempt to explain that "federal == bad && state == good"? I keep hearing this theory that the states are less tyrannical than the federal government, but it seems to me that they *can't* be tyrannical because the federal government can overrule them if they try. So everyone makes the incorrect assumption that because the state governments currently aren't tyrannical, they are the ones that the power should be delegated to.
I think the biggest intrinsic problem nuclear power has is the same problem air travel has had for decades: the scale of failures.
Air travel today is exceptionally safe. If you have a choice between car, train, and plane then you should, without a doubt, choose the plane if you want the highest chance of getting to your destination safely. But there are still people who drive every day who are deathly afraid of flying. Those people usually don't have any problems with trains or as passengers in taxis or buses, so it isn't always that they can't stand not being in control of the vehicle. The problem with air travel is that an accident *feels* like it would be such a horrific experience if it were to occur that our psychology gives it more weight, making even a minuscule likelihood be too much for some people to be willing to risk.
Nuclear power has the same problem. Sure, the chances of an accident are way lower and the overall efficiencies are better, but when an accident could potentially cause devastation for miles and for many people for decades, many people will weigh it as a less desirable option. Unfortunately, it's something you just can't get around because of the nature of what nuclear power is, which, I suspect, is why many studies that include wind and solar power exclude nuclear as an option. Nobody wants a psychological link to nuclear power because of the scale of its failure potential.
The authors of the article don't understand that "whisky" (from Scotland) is not the same as "whiskey" (from anywhere else.)
Isn't that why Scotch exists as a word used to describe a specific kind of alcoholic beverage? Also, did you even read the article? Ok, this is Slashdot, that was a silly question to ask. Anyway, here's an excerpt from the introduction stating that they are well aware of the differences in guaiacol content:
Guaiacol is a small and mostly hydrophobic molecule that is able to interact with polar solvents via hydrogen-bonding and polar-aromatic interactions. Higher concentrations of guaiacol have been found in Scottish whiskies than in American and Irish ones. The concentration of guaiacol was found by GC/MS to be 3.7–4.1mgL1, or about 3.2105M in two undisclosed Scottish whiskies5. It is likely that the concentration of guaiacol in Isley whiskies is even higher.
And, more specifically, they point out in their conclusions that dilution with water is only helpful to cask-strength whiskey to bring out its flavor:
Dilution of cask-strength whisky improves its taste by increasing the propensity of taste compounds at the liquid-air interface......It is therefore reasonable to assume that the taste of guaiacol (and other amphipathic, semi-volatile compounds) is less pronounced at high alcohol concentrations, which explains why dilution of cask-strength whiskies results in a change in the sensory effects of the whisky.
So diluting some off-the-shelf Jack Daniel's likely won't enhance its whiskey flavor. But adding a little water to some Scotch or cask strength Maker's Mark will enhance it.
A much better article than the attention-grabbing headline originally left me to suspect. The most important piece of the article to me:
Masked protesters smashed store windows during multiday demonstrations following Trump’s election. In early April, antifa activists threw smoke bombs into a “Rally for Trump and Freedom” in the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington. A local paper said the ensuing melee resembled a mosh pit.
When antifascists forced the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, Trump supporters responded with a “March for Free Speech.” Among those who attended was Jeremy Christian, a burly ex-con draped in an American flag, who uttered racial slurs and made Nazi salutes. A few weeks later, on May 25, a man believed to be Christian was filmed calling antifa “a bunch of punk bitches.”
The next day, Christian boarded a light-rail train and began yelling that “colored people” were ruining the city. He fixed his attention on two teenage girls, one African American and the other wearing a hijab, and told them “to go back to Saudi Arabia” or “kill themselves.” As the girls retreated to the back of the train, three men interposed themselves between Christian and his targets. “Please,” one said, “get off this train.” Christian stabbed all three. One bled to death on the train. One was declared dead at a local hospital. One survived.
The cycle continued.
There are no clean hands here. Those claiming this is all (or mostly) the fault of "the other side" are a part of the problem, regardless of which side they claim to represent.
No. The moment you limit any speech, you jeopardize all speech.
Wait... Then you're cool with someone doxxing you? You just said there can't be *any* limits on speech. So I guess swatting is cool too? Libel and slander are protected now?
This is why it's not wise to take an all-or-nothing stance on a controversial issue.
The equipment costs part I definitely agree with. It's just too expensive right now to find anything but a niche market. But I did want to speak to the idea of AAA developer support.
Personally, I can't imagine AAA gaming studios ever being leaders in defining VR gaming experiences. As you mentioned, it's just too risky to invest in. In many cases, these are studios who offer the same game for consoles and PCs but dumb down the PC inputs so that it can just be a port of the console experience with graphics customized to the machine. Studios taking that tack will never be willing to see VR as anything but an afterthought because to do a VR gaming experience in a compelling way means designing the interaction for the game *around* the fact that it's in VR.
I feel like the indie studios making mediocre games with an occasional gem is actually the way I'd expect this technology to play out. I don't expect VR to become a proven game development option that most gaming studios are even willing to consider (except as a gimmicky version of a game that doesn't need VR in the first place) until some previously-unknown studio figures out how to build a truly enjoyable way to interact with a VR world and has the ability and passion to execute on their vision in a way that resonates with gamers. I don't see that day coming any time soon, so if I were a career game developer I wouldn't be too worried about making sure I can list VR skills on my resume just yet.
Huh. I usually prefer a looser fit for running shorts for the increased air circulation (which is what causes the wild swinging), but maybe cargo shorts with a tighter fit but breathable fabric are worth a shot. Thanks for the link at least!
Assuming this data is accurate, Twitter's user base seems to have hit market saturation sometime around the start of 2015. The service has remained pretty much the same since they began it, so why would anyone expect that there are suddenly more people who aren't using Twitter that have decided that they want to use it? There was a significant uptick in the first quarter of this year (possibly attributable to Twitter being Trump's medium of choice), but anyone who thought that was sustainable growth was crazy.
How do you manage it? My jogging shorts only have side pockets and they're either so deep that my gait causes the phone to start swinging wildly because of its weight (which annoys me to no end, and it's only an S5) or they're so shallow that I worry about the phone falling out when I step up from crosswalk to curb.
That's exactly the point, I last had an mp3 player a decade ago before I had a phone that could play music. Why carry a second device to do the same thing?
Have you ever tried jogging with a Samsung Note in your pocket? Or even a regular sized smart phone as opposed to something the size of an iPod nano or shuffle? There are reasons to have a small, dedicated MP3 player, even if they don't apply to everyone. It just doesn't have to cost so much and has no new features to try to sell, which is why I suspect they would prefer to discontinue it. Fortunately, they aren't the only provider for that kind of device.
Loud music is also proven to cause hearing loss. People know this, and choose to go to clubs and concerts - or to not go. But nobody seems to cry for a ban of loud music, or use arguments like "I should not be required to increase my risk of hearing loss to go to a club, simple as that".
If a CS degree leads to even an "entry level job" then it sounds like job training to me.
What I meant was that if you've already got experience with firmware development and are being told by prospective employers that you need more programming experience, I'm not sure a 4 year degree is your best option. A 2 year degree is often cheaper, more focused, and much more applicable for "experience" requirements. But maybe you were talking about 2 year degrees as well. That may have been my misunderstanding.
From what I've seen in my experiences as a software developer, your first job will look at your degree. After you've been doing the work professionally for a couple of years or more, experience is king and your education is a side note at best (assuming your experience was with things that your next employer needs you to know). Flags may be raised if you don't have the degree people are looking for, but if you already have the experience they need, most employers are willing to just ask the applicant some basic questions to figure out why they didn't go the traditional route.
I've interviewed and worked with new grads from both the computer science and computer engineering tracks and I haven't found a significant difference in them as entry level workers. They both have lots of gaps in knowledge they're going to need and lots of things they're going to have to unlearn or have to re-evaluate the importance of things they learned in classes.
But if you're dead set on that college and one track that focuses on hands-on work more than the other, definitely go for that track.
Seasonally adjusted? Why should unemployment numbers be adjusted *at all*?
Because it would be extremely easy to mislead the public about employment trends and economic stability when a bunch of summer tourism jobs suddenly disappear from the statistics leading up to November elections? Also because seasonal work is, by definition, not permanent employment?
However, I will say that the unadjusted numbers should be provided as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I envy those people I know who are capable of insanity and irrationality.
So far my brain just won't break.
But alzheimers or dementia are probably in my late 70s.
It's a problem because the rational person sees a lot of the bad in the world and can't really alleviate their own suffering other than by taking mind altering substances or temporarily distracting activities.
I know! I keep driving past the local mental institution and thinking to myself, "man, THOSE people have the life!" I mean, I really wish I could have my own free dormitory where I never had to have any of life's responsibilities. Sure, there are violent outbursts from other patients, harsh discipline, and crippling suicidal depression to contend with, but free room and board and no responsibilities balances that out.
Oh wait, you mean you wish you were sociopathic? God, you're a weirdo.
At first I was actually hoping the headline was describing this:
A game player pays to unlock something gameplay affecting in a game.
Player now goes into match making to start an instance of the game.
Match making system does its best to match the player who paid for in-game items with (or against, in competitive games) other players who paid for in-game items to keep interest groups together and keep playing fields a bit more fair for all.
As someone who finds the entire concept of pay to win/pay to advance predatory and exploitative in exactly the same way as casinos, I would have lauded an idea like this.
But, of course, what they're actually proposing is this:
A game player pays to unlock something gameplay affecting in a game.
Player now goes into match making to start an instance of the game.
Match making system does its best to match the player who paid for in-game items with to situations where the player is likely to excel because of the purchase they made. If this is done at the expense of players who did not make a purchase, who cares?
I'm honestly wondering at what point these freemium/pay to win/pay to advance games will finally fall afoul of gambling laws and experience backlash that's been a long time coming as a result of their business model.
It's worth noting that not everyone lives in places with a glut of talented IT professionals to draw from. I live in a small city. It's easier for a small organization here to have one person manage servers from a console and backup data manually locally than it is to have that same person do the same thing plus physically manage servers. Plus, outsourcing to data centers sometimes becomes such a contract headache with slow turn-around time that cloud hosting becomes much more attractive.
However, yes, do be *extremely* wary of anyone who claims that the cloud will cure all your ills and that everyone should switch to it no matter what. It's a trade-off, and you'd better be ok with the down sides before you even think of using it.
I tend to like this solution the best, but my problem lies with games that allow players to report cheaters. I don't cheat in games, but have been reported for cheating in a few games (old Counterstrike servers, Smite, HotS) because I would occasionally do something that someone decided was suspicious (or they were just plain angry at losing and wanted someone else to blame). In games like that, I don't want to be lumped in with actual botters and cheaters just because some jackass decided there is no way I could possibly hit him the very instant that he appeared in a certain spot unless I was cheating. Never mind that his teammate had been going straight to that spot 20 times in a row each time after dying and that was who I was actually waiting for...
I've only read one book by Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash. It's certainly not a bad book, but I did not find it particularly enjoyable outside of the novel concepts that would appear throughout the book. The rat-things, for example, were cool to think about but so incredibly impractical that I couldn't suspend disbelief, even for a science fiction novel. I also got a little lost in the beginning of the novel figuring out which parts were happening in the real world and which were in the metaverse because his transitions weren't great.
I will say that having only read Snow Crash by Stephenson and Neuromancer by Gibson, I would much rather read more books by Stephenson than Gibson. Gibson's writing style really irks me. Specifically how he explains at length things I, as a reader, don't care about while sparsely explaining things I do care about. There is also something about his penchant for choosing odd names for characters and entities that makes it difficult for me to follow the plot of his stories smoothly.
For anyone else who may have been confused by the wording in "(the app) opposed an order in September from Spain's Constitutional Court to suspend the referendum while it determined its legality," the legality in question is in regards to the referendum, not the app. The fight over the app is just an extension over the fight in Spain over whether Catalonia is legally allowed to have a referendum for a vote of independence from Spain.
Well, I'd be ok with that kind of travel. But, then again, I'm the kind of person who doesn't really care what their vehicle looks like as long as it's reliable, relatively safe in a crash, economical, and gets me from A to B without discomfort. I'm aware I must be in a minority, because I am totally mystified by why anyone would show any interest in a car commercial. And yet those commercials continue to exist, which, I assume, must mean that there are enough people who care about how a car looks and how you feel about owning it for it to be worth the cost to advertise those as features.
As much as I like the idea of that kind of publicly available cheap transportation, I think there is a big enough segment of the population that will never give up their personal chariots that you can't write a science fiction story showing nobody using private transportation in the future and expect me to suspend disbelief.
Things that have contributed to eroding my trust of the Internet to some degree:
Proliferation of fake news (by which I mean ideological propaganda specifically designed to look like news but with incitement as its goal rather than information)
Government (pick whichever one you want) sponsored spying
Dodgy business practices by large, well-known, IT-focused companies
Data breaches and other hacks
Viruses
Spam
Advertisers trying to disguise their ads as if they were a natural part of the parent page
Advertising by looking at metadata
Things that have definitely not contributed to eroding my trust of the internet:
Cyber bullying
I thought the rule was that you use it after a dependent clause that starts a sentence. Or after an appositive or introductory adverb. Those are the only uses for introductory commas I was aware of that might apply in this case, but if you can point out the style guide rule this breaks then I will consider modifying my grammar.
do you really want your house to roll out the welcome matt to every jackass with the means to play an aac file within hearing of your home?
I would hope that Matt would realize they aren't supposed to be in the house. Then again, his main job is welcoming people that Siri/Alexa tell him to welcome, so how smart can he really be?
I definitely experience the same thing - my creativity is best triggered by high energy music
I kind of wonder whether the real takeaway from the study is supposed to be "listening to music you like helps with creativity." I've certainly found that to be the case when I listen to punk metal (my current musical flavor of choice). And sludge metal helps me when I need to just focus on rote tasks and get into a trance "zone". But I'm sure others would find their creativity or productivity impeded by listening to those genres, so I would never suggest anyone else listen to them to help with tasks unless I know their musical preferences.
Considering that they had people listen to sad, anxious, and calm (or anxious and calm at the same time somehow? Damnit New Scientist, this is why people use Oxford commas!) classical music, I'm not sure you can draw conclusions outside that genre. This seems to be more about "happy classical music" having a positive effect on a greater portion of the population than other emotive flavors of classical music. But even that may not hold true for everyone. Maybe it's just that more people have a positive reaction to "happy classical music" than other kinds of classical music, but that the effect is reversed for some percentage of people.
In short, I find the study interesting, but as usual the magazine article takes the conclusions and runs with them beyond the scope of the actual study.
power corrupts which causes tyranny
Ok, so it's a universal truth. That makes the state every bit as capable of corruption and tyranny as the federal government.
People are closer to state governments and are better able to change it so any tyranny will be short lived as the people vote it out.
That's the theory I keep hearing. But I also keep hearing that workers controlling the means of production solves a lot of problems too. I've yet to see either work as advertised in the real world.
The federal government on the other hand, by it's nature represents a diverse set of ideas and politics and compromise is very hard.
Doesn't that mean that compromise there is all the more important when it happens?
That means federal tyranny is harder to undo.
Why? You can vote a president out every 4 years, senators out every 6, or house members out every 2. Why is it any easier to overthrow state tyranny than federal tyranny if the federal government is not allowed to intervene? If the federal government cannot interfere with the state, what is so fundamentally different about the state that stops them from being able to do what you're afraid of the federal government doing or allows you to undo their changes any easier? Are you even talking about federal vs state any more or are you talking about executive vs legislative?
In addition, the role of the federal government should only deal with matters that deal with the states as a whole not the individual citizens.
How is immigration not a matter of the states as a whole? Should Arizona be allowed to say that anyone crossing its borders without documentation is considered a felon while Texas is allowed to say that anyone crossing its borders without documentation is a US citizen? You act as though there is always a clear line between "state problem" and "federal problem."
However, the state government will be closer to the citizens so should handle the more direct laws affecting the citizens.
Closer == less corrupt and tyrannical? So the Jim Crow laws were justified because they were closer to the people they affected? And they would have gone away without federal intervention because the people in the southern states would have overthrown the tyranny on their own? It's very easy to find historical precedent showing that your statement is not necessarily true.
How was anything you said not an attempt to explain that "federal == bad && state == good"? I keep hearing this theory that the states are less tyrannical than the federal government, but it seems to me that they *can't* be tyrannical because the federal government can overrule them if they try. So everyone makes the incorrect assumption that because the state governments currently aren't tyrannical, they are the ones that the power should be delegated to.
I think the biggest intrinsic problem nuclear power has is the same problem air travel has had for decades: the scale of failures.
Air travel today is exceptionally safe. If you have a choice between car, train, and plane then you should, without a doubt, choose the plane if you want the highest chance of getting to your destination safely. But there are still people who drive every day who are deathly afraid of flying. Those people usually don't have any problems with trains or as passengers in taxis or buses, so it isn't always that they can't stand not being in control of the vehicle. The problem with air travel is that an accident *feels* like it would be such a horrific experience if it were to occur that our psychology gives it more weight, making even a minuscule likelihood be too much for some people to be willing to risk.
Nuclear power has the same problem. Sure, the chances of an accident are way lower and the overall efficiencies are better, but when an accident could potentially cause devastation for miles and for many people for decades, many people will weigh it as a less desirable option. Unfortunately, it's something you just can't get around because of the nature of what nuclear power is, which, I suspect, is why many studies that include wind and solar power exclude nuclear as an option. Nobody wants a psychological link to nuclear power because of the scale of its failure potential.
The authors of the article don't understand that "whisky" (from Scotland) is not the same as "whiskey" (from anywhere else.)
Isn't that why Scotch exists as a word used to describe a specific kind of alcoholic beverage? Also, did you even read the article? Ok, this is Slashdot, that was a silly question to ask. Anyway, here's an excerpt from the introduction stating that they are well aware of the differences in guaiacol content:
Guaiacol is a small and mostly hydrophobic molecule that is able to interact with polar solvents via hydrogen-bonding and polar-aromatic interactions. Higher concentrations of guaiacol have been found in Scottish whiskies than in American and Irish ones. The concentration of guaiacol was found by GC/MS to be 3.7–4.1mgL1, or about 3.2105M in two undisclosed Scottish whiskies5. It is likely that the concentration of guaiacol in Isley whiskies is even higher.
And, more specifically, they point out in their conclusions that dilution with water is only helpful to cask-strength whiskey to bring out its flavor:
Dilution of cask-strength whisky improves its taste by increasing the propensity of taste compounds at the liquid-air interface... ...It is therefore reasonable to assume that the taste of guaiacol (and other amphipathic, semi-volatile compounds) is less pronounced at high alcohol concentrations, which explains why dilution of cask-strength whiskies results in a change in the sensory effects of the whisky.
So diluting some off-the-shelf Jack Daniel's likely won't enhance its whiskey flavor. But adding a little water to some Scotch or cask strength Maker's Mark will enhance it.
A much better article than the attention-grabbing headline originally left me to suspect. The most important piece of the article to me:
Masked protesters smashed store windows during multiday demonstrations following Trump’s election. In early April, antifa activists threw smoke bombs into a “Rally for Trump and Freedom” in the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington. A local paper said the ensuing melee resembled a mosh pit.
When antifascists forced the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, Trump supporters responded with a “March for Free Speech.” Among those who attended was Jeremy Christian, a burly ex-con draped in an American flag, who uttered racial slurs and made Nazi salutes. A few weeks later, on May 25, a man believed to be Christian was filmed calling antifa “a bunch of punk bitches.”
The next day, Christian boarded a light-rail train and began yelling that “colored people” were ruining the city. He fixed his attention on two teenage girls, one African American and the other wearing a hijab, and told them “to go back to Saudi Arabia” or “kill themselves.” As the girls retreated to the back of the train, three men interposed themselves between Christian and his targets. “Please,” one said, “get off this train.” Christian stabbed all three. One bled to death on the train. One was declared dead at a local hospital. One survived.
The cycle continued.
There are no clean hands here. Those claiming this is all (or mostly) the fault of "the other side" are a part of the problem, regardless of which side they claim to represent.
can we agree that that "free speech" has limits?
No. The moment you limit any speech, you jeopardize all speech.
Wait... Then you're cool with someone doxxing you? You just said there can't be *any* limits on speech. So I guess swatting is cool too? Libel and slander are protected now?
This is why it's not wise to take an all-or-nothing stance on a controversial issue.
The equipment costs part I definitely agree with. It's just too expensive right now to find anything but a niche market. But I did want to speak to the idea of AAA developer support.
Personally, I can't imagine AAA gaming studios ever being leaders in defining VR gaming experiences. As you mentioned, it's just too risky to invest in. In many cases, these are studios who offer the same game for consoles and PCs but dumb down the PC inputs so that it can just be a port of the console experience with graphics customized to the machine. Studios taking that tack will never be willing to see VR as anything but an afterthought because to do a VR gaming experience in a compelling way means designing the interaction for the game *around* the fact that it's in VR.
I feel like the indie studios making mediocre games with an occasional gem is actually the way I'd expect this technology to play out. I don't expect VR to become a proven game development option that most gaming studios are even willing to consider (except as a gimmicky version of a game that doesn't need VR in the first place) until some previously-unknown studio figures out how to build a truly enjoyable way to interact with a VR world and has the ability and passion to execute on their vision in a way that resonates with gamers. I don't see that day coming any time soon, so if I were a career game developer I wouldn't be too worried about making sure I can list VR skills on my resume just yet.
Huh. I usually prefer a looser fit for running shorts for the increased air circulation (which is what causes the wild swinging), but maybe cargo shorts with a tighter fit but breathable fabric are worth a shot. Thanks for the link at least!
Assuming this data is accurate, Twitter's user base seems to have hit market saturation sometime around the start of 2015. The service has remained pretty much the same since they began it, so why would anyone expect that there are suddenly more people who aren't using Twitter that have decided that they want to use it? There was a significant uptick in the first quarter of this year (possibly attributable to Twitter being Trump's medium of choice), but anyone who thought that was sustainable growth was crazy.
How do you manage it? My jogging shorts only have side pockets and they're either so deep that my gait causes the phone to start swinging wildly because of its weight (which annoys me to no end, and it's only an S5) or they're so shallow that I worry about the phone falling out when I step up from crosswalk to curb.
That's exactly the point, I last had an mp3 player a decade ago before I had a phone that could play music. Why carry a second device to do the same thing?
Have you ever tried jogging with a Samsung Note in your pocket? Or even a regular sized smart phone as opposed to something the size of an iPod nano or shuffle? There are reasons to have a small, dedicated MP3 player, even if they don't apply to everyone. It just doesn't have to cost so much and has no new features to try to sell, which is why I suspect they would prefer to discontinue it. Fortunately, they aren't the only provider for that kind of device.
Ok. I amend my statement to "On the other hand, hearing loss has a statistically negligible chance of killing me."
Loud music is also proven to cause hearing loss. People know this, and choose to go to clubs and concerts - or to not go. But nobody seems to cry for a ban of loud music, or use arguments like "I should not be required to increase my risk of hearing loss to go to a club, simple as that".
On the other hand, hearing loss won't kill me...
If a CS degree leads to even an "entry level job" then it sounds like job training to me.
What I meant was that if you've already got experience with firmware development and are being told by prospective employers that you need more programming experience, I'm not sure a 4 year degree is your best option. A 2 year degree is often cheaper, more focused, and much more applicable for "experience" requirements. But maybe you were talking about 2 year degrees as well. That may have been my misunderstanding.
From what I've seen in my experiences as a software developer, your first job will look at your degree. After you've been doing the work professionally for a couple of years or more, experience is king and your education is a side note at best (assuming your experience was with things that your next employer needs you to know). Flags may be raised if you don't have the degree people are looking for, but if you already have the experience they need, most employers are willing to just ask the applicant some basic questions to figure out why they didn't go the traditional route.
I've interviewed and worked with new grads from both the computer science and computer engineering tracks and I haven't found a significant difference in them as entry level workers. They both have lots of gaps in knowledge they're going to need and lots of things they're going to have to unlearn or have to re-evaluate the importance of things they learned in classes.
But if you're dead set on that college and one track that focuses on hands-on work more than the other, definitely go for that track.
Seasonally adjusted? Why should unemployment numbers be adjusted *at all*?
Because it would be extremely easy to mislead the public about employment trends and economic stability when a bunch of summer tourism jobs suddenly disappear from the statistics leading up to November elections? Also because seasonal work is, by definition, not permanent employment?
However, I will say that the unadjusted numbers should be provided as well.