we use more paper, more space devoted to growing trees become available... REALLY
Yes - obviously. If people want coffee, land will be used to grow coffee. If people want marijuana, land will be used to grow marijuana. Same with trees. The trees used for pulp and paper are a crop like any other.
and not instead deforest 3rd world countries cheaply to profit fast ?
Well... again this is a key point. A corporation doesn't "profit fast" by pulping jungle, because that isn't a terribly profitable thing to do. If you could make big money this way, the situation would be very different. But it isn't. Pulp just isn't worth enough for that to work. Again, that's why the farmers and ranchers who clear this land end up using most of the wood (other than the few valuable hardwoods and what not) as firewood. They would always sell the wood for pulp if that was a very profitable thing to do.
Instead, the way a corporation profits off logging is by intensively cycling forest on the same land over and over again. I think I've been clear that I don't think that process is sunshine and roses (it's like any other intensive farming, and it has significant environmental costs), but it's not the cause of deforestation. If you want to argue that corporations will be bad land stewards, and that they'll deplete soil over the next 100 years, use a lot of energy or pollute water or reduce biodiversity or something... then fine. You'd be right about all those things. But if they want to make real money off pulp they'll do so by planting trees and harvesting them.
Deforestation is probably the most urgent, important environmental issue there is right now and it's very misunderstood. The actual amounts of money involved here are honestly very small; the people involved are doing tremendous damage for very little, very temporary value. With better policies and understanding, this is a problem that could be made significantly smaller without that many resources.
the fact that major industries cutting forests are paper, furniture, construction (mainly in america tho - other countries dont use wood in 21st century large scale construction), and real estate
You're lumping all this together in a way that makes it very clear you don't understand the dynamics in play. You can't just say: here's what they make out of wood, and here's how much wood gets cut down. Your dangerously wrong assumptions are a significant part of the problem. It's naively intuitive to think the way you're thinking, and that's a large reason why so little has been accomplished in solving the problem.
Deforestation is mostly a problem of land use, not of wood products at all. "Tree poaching" for valuable wood can create a slippery slope for deforestation (by making territory more accessible), but these people are not cutting trees to have pulp. A tree that's clear cut from, say, a Brazillian rainforest is much more likely to be used as firewood than pulped. When you make pulp, you want consistency - you want farmed trees, and that's how you make a profit in the industry. To the extent that Brazil is becoming a larger player in paper, it's on the back of farmed, reasonably managed trees. In any pulp production, the bulk of your product is coming either from recycled paper (which has been happening for a longer time than you might think) or as byproduct of another wood product (like lumber). You don't just clear an acre of jungle and put all that stuff in the chipper.
Anyways, for the Brazilians (for example) doing the deforesting, what they want isn't - to a large extent at least - the trees at all, it's the land. They use it for subsistence agriculture, and for growing grass for ranching. And they need more and more of it, because the deforested land is not sustainable. It's a land use problem first, and a valuable-wood problem second. Pulp wood pretty much doesn't enter into it. To the extent that they are doing forestry for producing paper, it's actually stopping deforestation because that land use is now sustainable, and they're producing something without having to clear an ever-increasing swath of land.
If you make a profit by selling the trees off land for pulp, there's good motivation to plant more trees. If you just want pulp, trees grow very, very fast. It's a crop mostly like any other. The problem, again (and you can read about this yourself, anywhere, on any serious environmentalist or industry site alike) is that they aren't making the money off the clear cut trees. They're burning them because they aren't worth money - and then using the land in a way that isn't working (and the result is land that used to be forest and is now garbage).
your proposition that there is no relevance in between recycling and keeping forests safe is not rational. decreasing factors contributing to deforestation will decrease deforestation.
I'll go back to my original analogy: if farmers quit killing pigs, would there be more pigs? I guess that sounds rational, if you don't understand the relationship between pigs and farmers.
If the world uses more paper, then that will mean it has more space - not less - devoted to growing trees. Again, I'm not saying that switching off paper is not a good idea or that farming trees doesn't have environmental impact (as does all the other steps of making paper). I'm just saying the relationship between "amount of paper used" and "amount of forests there are" doesn't go the way you think it does.
This graph looks about right to me. And the 3% for "logging" is going to be almost entirely about harvesting valuable woods. Because, again, you don't make money pulping jungle.
thats canada and the u.s. are you aware that there are 190+ countries in addition to those two ?
I know that. Look at deforestation in, for example, Brazil. This is people burning forest for subsistence agriculture and to sell timber as wood, not the insatiable needs of the paper industry. That was my point... I mean, uh, read my post. And I think you understood my point, probably found a lot of confirmation for it when you Googled, but for some reason felt like you had to defend your honor to the zero people reading these posts on Slashdot.
and, even in that, you are wrong :
Wrong about what, that the US and Canada are large paper consumers or that they've had the same levels of forest for 100 years? Because both those things are true. And I imagine you confirmed both of those facts for yourself while frantically Google wanking.
And during your digging, the best you found was "the US imports a lot of paper"? I'm surprised you didn't find something better - I mean, there probably is somewhere where they're clear cutting sensitive forest for pulp (or something), and that would have been a point actually supporting your argument in a substantive way.
Anyways, what you say is clearly true; the US imports paper. It's also true Canada exports a lot of paper. They're probably the top paper exporter. I notice you didn't put anything about that in your post. I'm sure you - again - came across that fact. Why pretend you didn't? Were you hoping to somehow "win" this sad little argument, despite discovering for yourself facts that had to make you at least question your original position?
Look; I reacted to your initial post because it's a common misunderstanding. People think that by buying recycled paper Christmas cards they're going to save the rainforest. There's just not an important connection between those things. That doesn't mean that switching off paper isn't an environmental win or a good idea. Again, my point was only that paper production isn't a leading cause of deforestation - and that focusing on paper conservation is not an effective strategy in dealing with a very real, very serious problem.
Blaming the paper industry for deforestation is like blaming the pork industry for the lack of pigs. Deforestation is happening in places, obviously, but it has little or nothing to do with cutting down trees to make paper. Canada and the US are both large consumers of paper (and have been for a long time). They've had the pretty much the same levels of forest for 100 years.
You don't cut down expensive old wood in sensitive places to make paper. Maybe you don't think farmed forests are environmentally sound, but they definitely produce oxygen.
There is no such thing as artificial price fixing.
If there's a limited number of suppliers in a market, they can (and do, often) collude to keep prices at a certain level. It's perfectly natural to call that "artificial price fixing". In a perfect market, they would be replaced by a competitor whose price was closer to the marginal cost of production - but that's not how actually economies work.
I suppose to an extent, your interpretation IS what's taught in Econ 101 (assuming Econ 101 is "General Microeconomics" at your school, and focuses on theory), but that isn't the end truth or something. Price fixing is a concern in real market economies - and often it's shortages like this that effectively give cover for companies to try it (you see this all the time with oil/gasoline prices).
OK, that's fine - but that's still pretty much the opposite of the general hygiene hypothesis. Unless you were specifically trolling for the response you got, surely you could have made yourself clearer if you actually understand this stuff.
To be clear: I understand that there's further mechanisms that can be triggered by natural infections that aren't triggered by vaccinations... but it's still a very uphill argument to suggest that at least many of these diseases aren't more detrimental than whatever immunological benefit they give. If you had phrased this in the context of avoiding auto-immune disorders, I don't think 90 people would have jumped on.
I think his point was that your idea was backwards. If you get attenuated vaccines (which I assume most of these are), you're effectively exposing yourself to several extra things - not less things. If the idea was priming immune systems through exposure, then attenuated vaccines would almost certainly be a positive. If these vaccines didn't do that, then they wouldn't work. And they do.
healthy from an evolutionary standpoint
I assume you're not suggesting that we should let people die (or be sterilized, as by mumps) by exposure to serious illness - thus to improve humans through evolutionary processes? I'm guessing you mean (and are saying in a roundabout way) something like "humans evolved with viruses around, so it's natural for people to get sick sometimes and something, something" (ie. you're making a general health argument, and you're couching it on some vague "evolutionary status quo" thing).
But, again, I'd say exactly the opposite: for most of primate history, we didn't have nearly the varied social contact and mobility that humans have now. All the mechanics of epidemiology have changed in a nano-second of evolutionary time. If we think of "priming the pump through exposure to a variety of viruses", I'd say that - vaccinations and hygiene or not - we are exposed to way more different strains than our ancestors would have been (because our social groups are vastly larger, more interconnected, and varied).
Yes, Facebook makes mistakes with features. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Yes, Apple makes mistakes with hardware and software features. Sometimes they burn a developer by not approving an app. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Having worked at places that make software, I bring you the bad news it's normal for most software projects to fail.
Wow - you worked at a place that makes software! Maybe you should do some kind of ask/tell thing?
I manage software R+D at a large company. Sure I've seen failed projects. But our clients don't see many of them. We do our pissing around behind closed doors, and when we launch something we support it. We're saddled with a number of legacy projects that we lose money on and our developers hate, but we don't burn them because that would burn our reputation. And when we pick software tools, we look at precisely this kind of thing - how can we know this vendor is committed to the product.
So some developers wasted their life on a failed project's API, you think that situation is new or only applicable to google?
No, it's applicable to a number of companies. Most of them are small, and nobody pays any attention to them when they launch something until it's proven successful. This makes their job a lot harder. They have a chicken/egg problem with everything they do, no matter how good their stuff is. Does Google want to be in that boat?
And, clearly, this new product dilemma is something that Microsoft is constantly fighting with, simply because of the space they're in. But they've learned to be careful with it. Google is not being careful with it. They benefit hugely from the reputation with developers, but that's really starting to sour.
And it's getting soured by stuff that shouldn't matter - they're letting their reputation be sunk by stuff that was never that compelling, and didn't have anywhere near the launch effort they should have got. If you let developers have time (which they do), they'll make all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it'll be diamonds. But sometimes it's coal, and you need to have enough control (and ego-management) to say "No, we're not releasing this outside."
Yes, what they have now makes money. But their new products keep failing to. That isn't a winning long term strategy.
Their failures are largely because they don't build out and commit to platforms. Every time they have a high profile product or service that gets launched too early, fails to grow, doesn't get supported, and then gets cancelled, they lose credibility with developers. Why be an early adopter for a new Google platform if they aren't going to put some time into making it work and grow? Why make your app work with a Google API that won't last through your product's lifetime? It isn't all about costs and benefits right now, it's about building relationships with people.
How many developers will swarm to any new thing from Apple or Facebook? Tons - and those companies are reaping huge benefits by supporting and growing their platforms.
Google? They're still well respected, obviously - but this kind of thing is hurting Google+, and it will hurt every new platform they launch.
Looking at every pancake every time would involve O(N^2) looks. That's polynomial in "looks" (N^2 is not exponential). And it's still linear in "flips".
And this is a completely separate from problem than computing an optimal pattern for minimum number of flips (which, again, I don't know - the naive computation there would be exponential).
Well, there's two problems here: calculating an optimal number of flips (which I'm not sure about) and "sorting the stack with a polynomial number of flips" which is what I think is trivial (and which the summary seemed to suggest was difficult). I was just trying to clarify that this second problem is not hard (but my post itself wasn't clear).
To further clarify, the naive algorithm for this second problem is simple and polynomial (in number of flips per pancake). Start at the bottom. If the largest pancake is not on the bottom, flip the stack starting at the largest pancake (so that the largest pancake is at the top). Now flip the whole stack. Now imagine the bottom pancake is part of the table and repeat the process. You'll flip at most twice for each pancake.
Clarification from the article, the actual problem statement is:
The question to be answered in both cases is, if the stack has n pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips needed as a function of n, i.e. f(n)?
With regards to actual doing this for a specific stack, it's fairly trivial to order the pancakes in a polynomial number of flips (any n log n sort algorithm would be fine - with the actual flipping taking at most 2 flips per pancake).
Whenever I hear about a Christian trying to prove the Bible or God's existence I know immediately they are simply using the Bible as a weapon
Meh? The Bible is fairly clear that reasoning about their hope and faith is a Christian's responsibility:
Peter 3:15: But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
The tradition of Christians defending their faith through reason goes back to the apostles (at least), most notably Paul's speech on Mars hill.
Obviously some people are going to be arguing in the wrong spirit - but reasoning in "good faith" is condoned and encouraged by the Bible. Someone attempting to prove the Bible is following a noble tradition of Christian apologetics that, again, goes back to the apostles.
instead of relying on sensors that are orders of magnitude more sensitive or precise than the human hand
The hand isn't a sensor at all in this context; rather, the manipulations of the hand are picked up by distinctly non-hand sensors. It's clear the current limit on this system is those sensors, computers, and software - all of which could improve quickly if this moved beyond research.
extremely low resolution hands
My hands have, uh... pretty high resolution. Are your hands kind of blocky? Do they show aliasing when you turn them? More to the point, humans are extremely adept at doing fine manipulation with their hands and these manipulations are extremely intuitive. If they could make this work very well, I see no reason it couldn't be used for a bunch of things: teaching and demonstrating, as an intuitive UI for controlling robots (that might actually be acting on smaller or larger or toxic or distant objects in real life), or for experimenting with possible approaches or designs.
It doesn't take much imagination to come up with possible applications for this.
That said, probably it will never come to anything (at least not in a similar form) or not for a while. But if you disapprove because you fail to see practical applications now, I think you're both wrong (in this case) and misguided (in the general case). I think it's cool MS is doing research that they probably can't exploit immediately. It shows foresight to be thinking about interface methods before they're really practical. Nintendo (or whoever they bought tech from) probably had some very crappy Wii-like peripherals in research long before they worked well enough to sell. It might take 100 ideas and prototypes like this to find 1 that is the next big thing. But that's how we get cool new stuff.
Disregarding all that, even if it was completely pointless (and I don't think it is) I think it's fun that we can see it and discuss it on a site that is about interesting technology.
I mean short of being a toy, what is the point?
Do you mean "beyond being a toy"? If so, you said the exact opposite thing. Or do you not think this would fall short of working as a toy? Because it seems to me like it works as a toy right now.
I think you've really misunderstood what he was after. I don't think he cared much about the poster, and calling his boss to quietly whine about it would be really pathetic. Rather, what he wanted was to call a bunch of attention to a really sad, stupid move by the security people.
Whatever he did seems to have worked.
Oh, and you don't fire your theater professor for being a little theatrical:)
So this is a new thing, it's optional, and it will probably bring the Internet to a reasonable number of disadvantaged children who currently don't have it.
That seems like a good thing.
Now I understand they are doing this as part of a previous deal, and that they could have done more, and that they still have horrible service or whatever. But this is still quite good news. I think this will really help some people - possibly really change some lives for the better - and it will help more people if the news gets around well.
No - the figurative sense of ossified is correct and common. Petrified is usually used figuratively to mean something like "scared stiff". Ossified, in common figurative use, means that something has become stiff and inflexible (often through disuse or rot) - like tissue that has become bone.
Variants of FTP are used widely in business to business transfers - sometimes secured with SSL, but often just by plaintext passwords, obscurity and/or IP whitelists. FTP is consistent between a large variety of platforms and lots of sysadmins like the simplicity of scripting, for example, a nightly FTP file transfer.
Is there better solutions? Of course. But FTP is still very common - and lots of businesses still employ much more arcane tech than it. For a lot of businesses, terminal servers were a real boon, because now they could all connect to a single old desktop (which in turn has a much more arcane connection to some mainframe in a basement that everyone's scared of).
As for being original, many of the best Hollywood movies have been original, not derived from books or other places (like video games....).
Yes, there's many original screenplays that have done well - but I stand by what I said before: most great movies are adaptations. Look through any list of great films, I think you'll find I'm right (I tried this, and the list I picked was around 75% adaptations).
It really isn't that easy to translate a book to a movie; the formats are far too different,
Nor is it easy to write something original. In any case, there's plenty of book-to-movie transitions that have come out great - including, again, the bulk of the best movies of all time. The nice part about books is there's so many to choose from, and you can see which stories work and resonate with people before you start.
Hollywood doesn't care about making good movies; they only care about a return on their investment.
That's true to an extent, but perhaps more than any media movie success is tied to reviews - meaning even the business people are targetting quality. Of course there are exceptions (and there are other dollar drivers that are potent in different genres, like toys in kids movies) but almost everyone in film is setting out to make something they think people will like. Even creators in what was once the most cynical genre - again, kids movies - have discovered that doing quality is more lucrative than aiming low and hoping for toy sales. It's hard to look at "UP" or "Wall-E" and say they weren't risks - they defied most of the "kids movie" rules, focused on quality, and were successful.
there's a lot less great movies than there used to be
What decade had more strong movies than the 2000s? I strongly doubt you could make a case that any decade had a significantly better selection. This is an easy mistake to make - and I hear it all the time in the context of movies, video games, books, etc... but when you consider things fairly it's almost never true.
And, if anything, filmmakers take way more risks than they used to. You can find way more experimental film now because it's actually possible to shoot a quality, truly-low-budget film.
Conversely, if you want to find "low risk" crap, look at the neverending piles of crap from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Sequels like crazy, ripoffs, movies whose design started by making a poster and a title (or a star coupling and a vague genre idea). When movies were that expensive, studios had to bank more heavily than they do now on poster appeal, known stars, and non-threatening plot. Slow information travel meant they could get away with much worse films. And nostalgia makes old movies seem better than they were (as you'd expect - the pioneering techniques of the best directors, actors, and technicians have all been passed around and are now standard fare, so filmmakers have a huge wealth of ideas to pull from).
Just as an exercise, start looking through lists of the best films in each decade (or even year). You're going to see some depressingly short lists as you go further back. Of course there's exceptional times and years, but overall it's a strong upward trend in the number of good movies.
You just described pretty much every superhero movie.
I think he described pretty much every movie. Most of everything is crap.
The fact that there's actually been decent superhero movies in a genre with so few total films suggests that it's probably at or above average in terms of "percentage of films in genre that are worthwhile". I mean, if "will you remember it in five years" is the criteria, what percentage of romantic comedies are worthwhile films? What percentage of action movies in general? As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's easy to say "Hollywood, make good movies", but it's not like anyone is trying to do something else (well... maybe a few are). Certainly there may be genres you personally prefer, but that's not a reflector of general value - and certain niches like crowd friendly action are going to get filled by something.
And you're in pretty choppy water if you want to pick good movies based on general story ideas (like, having a superhero). I mean, if you look at the surface plot and setting, is there really much daylight between "Easy Virtue" and "The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)"? Heck, they even both have Colin Firth. And yet one is painful, unwatchable garbage and the other was a pleasant, funny gem. You have to take the good with the bad in any genre or setting.
Similarly, do you really want to disqualify "The Watchmen" (which was close to being very good) because "Spiderman III" was garbage? How many horrible space action movies are there to balance out "Empire Strikes Back"? How many crappy Crime Noir type films are there to balance out "Maltese Falcon"? Maybe there hasn't been a great superhero movie yet (I didn't think "Dark Knight" was great), but there's been several that have been perfectly fine.
There will be good and bad movies. Personally, I'm happier with comic book movies being the "normal summer fare" than some of the crap they replaced (think "Armageddon").
I think the exact opposite complaint has more merit - most good movies are based on published books, history, plays, previous movies, or something. Sure there are exceptions (and clearly some very big ones), but I'd say that in general Hollywood does better when it isn't "coming up with something original".
And if it's comic books you have a problem with, I'll partially agree with you... but also largely disagree. Sure there's been some bad ones, but if we restrict ourselves to action movies, I'd say the comic book films probably average out to "above average action movies". I'd certainly take "X-Men: First Class" over "Congo" (based on a book, with real chapters!) or "The Fast and the Furious" (which was "Hollywood doing something original"). And even outside of "action", I'd rather rub gravel into my forehead than watch, say, "Random Hearts" (based on a critically acclaimed novel by Warren Adler, I see) - one of the worst films I've ever tried to watch.
Sure I'd be happy to replace "Green Lantern" with another "The Seventh Seal" - but that's effectively saying "why doesn't Hollywood stop making bad movies and just make good ones". That is just not a helpful thing to say. Hollywood makes all kinds of movies, usually bad but sometimes good in all genres and niches. In general, I'd say there's more quality movies per year pretty much every year - and movies in most genres are getting continuously better (look at, say, kid's animated films and compare the "best list" between the 1980s and the 2000s).
And, yes, comic book movies too have stretched into "good movie" territory. "Dark Knight" was pretty watchable, and I thought "The Watchmen" (while panned in many quarters) was visually interesting and had a lot of redeeming qualities. And suppose they did quit comic book movies, what would they do for mass market summer movies? You miss "original" stuff like "Armageddon"? Sure, I'd love another "Raiders of the Lost Ark" too - but, again, it's not helpful to say you want good movies. Most people in Hollywood want to make good movies too - but whether they do so is a function of talent, effort and luck, not genre.
Most people aren't willing to drop five, or even three, bucks on a game that they've never heard of or never played.
Every XBL Indie Games release has to have a free demo (and they give you help in the platform API to manage locked features/time-limiting/etc.. they did have some good ideas with this platform). You never have to buy a game sight unseen.
But you're right anyways.
Why? Because after a while, people aren't just unwilling to pay for a game. If the games are bad enough - and XBL Indie Games is a perfect platform for displaying how bad games can be - people will become unwilling to even browse titles. So, yes, any metric that could be used to filter out ridiculous chaff would be very helpful to the platform.
And the marketplace has a new games section too...
Yes - I'm sure they had a few minutes in the sun before they got pushed off by "XBox Massage Master" and "Avatar Tic-Tac-Toe: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS chapter 1 by PandaStar Studio in co-operation with JohnnyFyre".
Has anyone here actually bothered looking at all or is everyone just assuming?
Yes. Most everyone with an XBox and non-infinite time (at least among people I know) has given up even scrolling over to the Indie Games new releases. Anytime I've heard Indie Games discussed among developers, it has been in the context of "How can I get out of the Indie Games ghetto and into the regular Arcade games where someone might give the game a try?"
Unless people are just so lazy or uninformed that nobody bothers to check out the Indie games on Xbox.
You don't have to be lazy or uninformed to get tired of checking Indie Games. I have regretted it every time I've bothered to download something. A game has to be pretty bad before I resent the 5 minutes it took to check it out... and they've been consistently that bad.
Slashdot Mirror
we use more paper, more space devoted to growing trees become available ... REALLY
Yes - obviously. If people want coffee, land will be used to grow coffee. If people want marijuana, land will be used to grow marijuana. Same with trees. The trees used for pulp and paper are a crop like any other.
and not instead deforest 3rd world countries cheaply to profit fast ?
Well... again this is a key point. A corporation doesn't "profit fast" by pulping jungle, because that isn't a terribly profitable thing to do. If you could make big money this way, the situation would be very different. But it isn't. Pulp just isn't worth enough for that to work. Again, that's why the farmers and ranchers who clear this land end up using most of the wood (other than the few valuable hardwoods and what not) as firewood. They would always sell the wood for pulp if that was a very profitable thing to do.
Instead, the way a corporation profits off logging is by intensively cycling forest on the same land over and over again. I think I've been clear that I don't think that process is sunshine and roses (it's like any other intensive farming, and it has significant environmental costs), but it's not the cause of deforestation. If you want to argue that corporations will be bad land stewards, and that they'll deplete soil over the next 100 years, use a lot of energy or pollute water or reduce biodiversity or something... then fine. You'd be right about all those things. But if they want to make real money off pulp they'll do so by planting trees and harvesting them.
Deforestation is probably the most urgent, important environmental issue there is right now and it's very misunderstood. The actual amounts of money involved here are honestly very small; the people involved are doing tremendous damage for very little, very temporary value. With better policies and understanding, this is a problem that could be made significantly smaller without that many resources.
the fact that major industries cutting forests are paper, furniture, construction (mainly in america tho - other countries dont use wood in 21st century large scale construction), and real estate
You're lumping all this together in a way that makes it very clear you don't understand the dynamics in play. You can't just say: here's what they make out of wood, and here's how much wood gets cut down. Your dangerously wrong assumptions are a significant part of the problem. It's naively intuitive to think the way you're thinking, and that's a large reason why so little has been accomplished in solving the problem.
Deforestation is mostly a problem of land use, not of wood products at all. "Tree poaching" for valuable wood can create a slippery slope for deforestation (by making territory more accessible), but these people are not cutting trees to have pulp. A tree that's clear cut from, say, a Brazillian rainforest is much more likely to be used as firewood than pulped. When you make pulp, you want consistency - you want farmed trees, and that's how you make a profit in the industry. To the extent that Brazil is becoming a larger player in paper, it's on the back of farmed, reasonably managed trees. In any pulp production, the bulk of your product is coming either from recycled paper (which has been happening for a longer time than you might think) or as byproduct of another wood product (like lumber). You don't just clear an acre of jungle and put all that stuff in the chipper.
Anyways, for the Brazilians (for example) doing the deforesting, what they want isn't - to a large extent at least - the trees at all, it's the land. They use it for subsistence agriculture, and for growing grass for ranching. And they need more and more of it, because the deforested land is not sustainable. It's a land use problem first, and a valuable-wood problem second. Pulp wood pretty much doesn't enter into it. To the extent that they are doing forestry for producing paper, it's actually stopping deforestation because that land use is now sustainable, and they're producing something without having to clear an ever-increasing swath of land.
If you make a profit by selling the trees off land for pulp, there's good motivation to plant more trees. If you just want pulp, trees grow very, very fast. It's a crop mostly like any other. The problem, again (and you can read about this yourself, anywhere, on any serious environmentalist or industry site alike) is that they aren't making the money off the clear cut trees. They're burning them because they aren't worth money - and then using the land in a way that isn't working (and the result is land that used to be forest and is now garbage).
your proposition that there is no relevance in between recycling and keeping forests safe is not rational. decreasing factors contributing to deforestation will decrease deforestation.
I'll go back to my original analogy: if farmers quit killing pigs, would there be more pigs? I guess that sounds rational, if you don't understand the relationship between pigs and farmers.
If the world uses more paper, then that will mean it has more space - not less - devoted to growing trees. Again, I'm not saying that switching off paper is not a good idea or that farming trees doesn't have environmental impact (as does all the other steps of making paper). I'm just saying the relationship between "amount of paper used" and "amount of forests there are" doesn't go the way you think it does.
This graph looks about right to me. And the 3% for "logging" is going to be almost entirely about harvesting valuable woods. Because, again, you don't make money pulping jungle.
thats canada and the u.s. are you aware that there are 190+ countries in addition to those two ?
I know that. Look at deforestation in, for example, Brazil. This is people burning forest for subsistence agriculture and to sell timber as wood, not the insatiable needs of the paper industry. That was my point... I mean, uh, read my post. And I think you understood my point, probably found a lot of confirmation for it when you Googled, but for some reason felt like you had to defend your honor to the zero people reading these posts on Slashdot.
and, even in that, you are wrong :
Wrong about what, that the US and Canada are large paper consumers or that they've had the same levels of forest for 100 years? Because both those things are true. And I imagine you confirmed both of those facts for yourself while frantically Google wanking.
And during your digging, the best you found was "the US imports a lot of paper"? I'm surprised you didn't find something better - I mean, there probably is somewhere where they're clear cutting sensitive forest for pulp (or something), and that would have been a point actually supporting your argument in a substantive way.
Anyways, what you say is clearly true; the US imports paper. It's also true Canada exports a lot of paper. They're probably the top paper exporter. I notice you didn't put anything about that in your post. I'm sure you - again - came across that fact. Why pretend you didn't? Were you hoping to somehow "win" this sad little argument, despite discovering for yourself facts that had to make you at least question your original position?
Look; I reacted to your initial post because it's a common misunderstanding. People think that by buying recycled paper Christmas cards they're going to save the rainforest. There's just not an important connection between those things. That doesn't mean that switching off paper isn't an environmental win or a good idea. Again, my point was only that paper production isn't a leading cause of deforestation - and that focusing on paper conservation is not an effective strategy in dealing with a very real, very serious problem.
Blaming the paper industry for deforestation is like blaming the pork industry for the lack of pigs. Deforestation is happening in places, obviously, but it has little or nothing to do with cutting down trees to make paper. Canada and the US are both large consumers of paper (and have been for a long time). They've had the pretty much the same levels of forest for 100 years.
You don't cut down expensive old wood in sensitive places to make paper. Maybe you don't think farmed forests are environmentally sound, but they definitely produce oxygen.
There is no such thing as artificial price fixing.
If there's a limited number of suppliers in a market, they can (and do, often) collude to keep prices at a certain level. It's perfectly natural to call that "artificial price fixing". In a perfect market, they would be replaced by a competitor whose price was closer to the marginal cost of production - but that's not how actually economies work.
I suppose to an extent, your interpretation IS what's taught in Econ 101 (assuming Econ 101 is "General Microeconomics" at your school, and focuses on theory), but that isn't the end truth or something. Price fixing is a concern in real market economies - and often it's shortages like this that effectively give cover for companies to try it (you see this all the time with oil/gasoline prices).
OK, that's fine - but that's still pretty much the opposite of the general hygiene hypothesis. Unless you were specifically trolling for the response you got, surely you could have made yourself clearer if you actually understand this stuff.
To be clear: I understand that there's further mechanisms that can be triggered by natural infections that aren't triggered by vaccinations... but it's still a very uphill argument to suggest that at least many of these diseases aren't more detrimental than whatever immunological benefit they give. If you had phrased this in the context of avoiding auto-immune disorders, I don't think 90 people would have jumped on.
I think his point was that your idea was backwards. If you get attenuated vaccines (which I assume most of these are), you're effectively exposing yourself to several extra things - not less things. If the idea was priming immune systems through exposure, then attenuated vaccines would almost certainly be a positive. If these vaccines didn't do that, then they wouldn't work. And they do.
healthy from an evolutionary standpoint
I assume you're not suggesting that we should let people die (or be sterilized, as by mumps) by exposure to serious illness - thus to improve humans through evolutionary processes? I'm guessing you mean (and are saying in a roundabout way) something like "humans evolved with viruses around, so it's natural for people to get sick sometimes and something, something" (ie. you're making a general health argument, and you're couching it on some vague "evolutionary status quo" thing).
But, again, I'd say exactly the opposite: for most of primate history, we didn't have nearly the varied social contact and mobility that humans have now. All the mechanics of epidemiology have changed in a nano-second of evolutionary time. If we think of "priming the pump through exposure to a variety of viruses", I'd say that - vaccinations and hygiene or not - we are exposed to way more different strains than our ancestors would have been (because our social groups are vastly larger, more interconnected, and varied).
Yes, Facebook makes mistakes with features. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Yes, Apple makes mistakes with hardware and software features. Sometimes they burn a developer by not approving an app. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?
Having worked at places that make software, I bring you the bad news it's normal for most software projects to fail.
Wow - you worked at a place that makes software! Maybe you should do some kind of ask/tell thing?
I manage software R+D at a large company. Sure I've seen failed projects. But our clients don't see many of them. We do our pissing around behind closed doors, and when we launch something we support it. We're saddled with a number of legacy projects that we lose money on and our developers hate, but we don't burn them because that would burn our reputation. And when we pick software tools, we look at precisely this kind of thing - how can we know this vendor is committed to the product.
So some developers wasted their life on a failed project's API, you think that situation is new or only applicable to google?
No, it's applicable to a number of companies. Most of them are small, and nobody pays any attention to them when they launch something until it's proven successful. This makes their job a lot harder. They have a chicken/egg problem with everything they do, no matter how good their stuff is. Does Google want to be in that boat?
And, clearly, this new product dilemma is something that Microsoft is constantly fighting with, simply because of the space they're in. But they've learned to be careful with it. Google is not being careful with it. They benefit hugely from the reputation with developers, but that's really starting to sour.
And it's getting soured by stuff that shouldn't matter - they're letting their reputation be sunk by stuff that was never that compelling, and didn't have anywhere near the launch effort they should have got. If you let developers have time (which they do), they'll make all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it'll be diamonds. But sometimes it's coal, and you need to have enough control (and ego-management) to say "No, we're not releasing this outside."
Yes, what they have now makes money. But their new products keep failing to. That isn't a winning long term strategy.
Their failures are largely because they don't build out and commit to platforms. Every time they have a high profile product or service that gets launched too early, fails to grow, doesn't get supported, and then gets cancelled, they lose credibility with developers. Why be an early adopter for a new Google platform if they aren't going to put some time into making it work and grow? Why make your app work with a Google API that won't last through your product's lifetime? It isn't all about costs and benefits right now, it's about building relationships with people.
How many developers will swarm to any new thing from Apple or Facebook? Tons - and those companies are reaping huge benefits by supporting and growing their platforms.
Google? They're still well respected, obviously - but this kind of thing is hurting Google+, and it will hurt every new platform they launch.
No, uh... I'm right. There's a simple algorithm to sort them in an polynomial number of flips.
The hard part is computing an optimal set of flips (ie. not just a polynomial one, but a minimum count).
This is exactly the distinction I was trying to make in my initial post. Solving the problem is easy. Solving the problem optimally is hard.
Looking at every pancake every time would involve O(N^2) looks. That's polynomial in "looks" (N^2 is not exponential). And it's still linear in "flips".
And this is a completely separate from problem than computing an optimal pattern for minimum number of flips (which, again, I don't know - the naive computation there would be exponential).
Well, there's two problems here: calculating an optimal number of flips (which I'm not sure about) and "sorting the stack with a polynomial number of flips" which is what I think is trivial (and which the summary seemed to suggest was difficult). I was just trying to clarify that this second problem is not hard (but my post itself wasn't clear).
To further clarify, the naive algorithm for this second problem is simple and polynomial (in number of flips per pancake). Start at the bottom. If the largest pancake is not on the bottom, flip the stack starting at the largest pancake (so that the largest pancake is at the top). Now flip the whole stack. Now imagine the bottom pancake is part of the table and repeat the process. You'll flip at most twice for each pancake.
Clarification from the article, the actual problem statement is:
The question to be answered in both cases is, if the stack has n pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips needed as a function of n, i.e. f(n)?
With regards to actual doing this for a specific stack, it's fairly trivial to order the pancakes in a polynomial number of flips (any n log n sort algorithm would be fine - with the actual flipping taking at most 2 flips per pancake).
Whenever I hear about a Christian trying to prove the Bible or God's existence I know immediately they are simply using the Bible as a weapon
Meh? The Bible is fairly clear that reasoning about their hope and faith is a Christian's responsibility:
Peter 3:15: But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
The tradition of Christians defending their faith through reason goes back to the apostles (at least), most notably Paul's speech on Mars hill.
Obviously some people are going to be arguing in the wrong spirit - but reasoning in "good faith" is condoned and encouraged by the Bible. Someone attempting to prove the Bible is following a noble tradition of Christian apologetics that, again, goes back to the apostles.
instead of relying on sensors that are orders of magnitude more sensitive or precise than the human hand
The hand isn't a sensor at all in this context; rather, the manipulations of the hand are picked up by distinctly non-hand sensors. It's clear the current limit on this system is those sensors, computers, and software - all of which could improve quickly if this moved beyond research.
extremely low resolution hands
My hands have, uh... pretty high resolution. Are your hands kind of blocky? Do they show aliasing when you turn them? More to the point, humans are extremely adept at doing fine manipulation with their hands and these manipulations are extremely intuitive. If they could make this work very well, I see no reason it couldn't be used for a bunch of things: teaching and demonstrating, as an intuitive UI for controlling robots (that might actually be acting on smaller or larger or toxic or distant objects in real life), or for experimenting with possible approaches or designs.
It doesn't take much imagination to come up with possible applications for this.
That said, probably it will never come to anything (at least not in a similar form) or not for a while. But if you disapprove because you fail to see practical applications now, I think you're both wrong (in this case) and misguided (in the general case). I think it's cool MS is doing research that they probably can't exploit immediately. It shows foresight to be thinking about interface methods before they're really practical. Nintendo (or whoever they bought tech from) probably had some very crappy Wii-like peripherals in research long before they worked well enough to sell. It might take 100 ideas and prototypes like this to find 1 that is the next big thing. But that's how we get cool new stuff.
Disregarding all that, even if it was completely pointless (and I don't think it is) I think it's fun that we can see it and discuss it on a site that is about interesting technology.
I mean short of being a toy, what is the point?
Do you mean "beyond being a toy"? If so, you said the exact opposite thing. Or do you not think this would fall short of working as a toy? Because it seems to me like it works as a toy right now.
I think you've really misunderstood what he was after. I don't think he cared much about the poster, and calling his boss to quietly whine about it would be really pathetic. Rather, what he wanted was to call a bunch of attention to a really sad, stupid move by the security people.
Whatever he did seems to have worked.
Oh, and you don't fire your theater professor for being a little theatrical :)
So this is a new thing, it's optional, and it will probably bring the Internet to a reasonable number of disadvantaged children who currently don't have it.
That seems like a good thing.
Now I understand they are doing this as part of a previous deal, and that they could have done more, and that they still have horrible service or whatever. But this is still quite good news. I think this will really help some people - possibly really change some lives for the better - and it will help more people if the news gets around well.
Yeah, cool. I'll tell clients and unrelated businesses what software they "can" use.
I was reporting on the situation. Sure there's better options, but that doesn't stop "FTP is very common" from being reality.
No - the figurative sense of ossified is correct and common. Petrified is usually used figuratively to mean something like "scared stiff". Ossified, in common figurative use, means that something has become stiff and inflexible (often through disuse or rot) - like tissue that has become bone.
If you check a reasonable dictionary (eg. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/ossify_1?q=ossified) you'll find this definition.
Variants of FTP are used widely in business to business transfers - sometimes secured with SSL, but often just by plaintext passwords, obscurity and/or IP whitelists. FTP is consistent between a large variety of platforms and lots of sysadmins like the simplicity of scripting, for example, a nightly FTP file transfer.
Is there better solutions? Of course. But FTP is still very common - and lots of businesses still employ much more arcane tech than it. For a lot of businesses, terminal servers were a real boon, because now they could all connect to a single old desktop (which in turn has a much more arcane connection to some mainframe in a basement that everyone's scared of).
It'll be a long time before FTP dies.
As for being original, many of the best Hollywood movies have been original, not derived from books or other places (like video games....).
Yes, there's many original screenplays that have done well - but I stand by what I said before: most great movies are adaptations. Look through any list of great films, I think you'll find I'm right (I tried this, and the list I picked was around 75% adaptations).
It really isn't that easy to translate a book to a movie; the formats are far too different,
Nor is it easy to write something original. In any case, there's plenty of book-to-movie transitions that have come out great - including, again, the bulk of the best movies of all time. The nice part about books is there's so many to choose from, and you can see which stories work and resonate with people before you start.
Hollywood doesn't care about making good movies; they only care about a return on their investment.
That's true to an extent, but perhaps more than any media movie success is tied to reviews - meaning even the business people are targetting quality. Of course there are exceptions (and there are other dollar drivers that are potent in different genres, like toys in kids movies) but almost everyone in film is setting out to make something they think people will like. Even creators in what was once the most cynical genre - again, kids movies - have discovered that doing quality is more lucrative than aiming low and hoping for toy sales. It's hard to look at "UP" or "Wall-E" and say they weren't risks - they defied most of the "kids movie" rules, focused on quality, and were successful.
there's a lot less great movies than there used to be
What decade had more strong movies than the 2000s? I strongly doubt you could make a case that any decade had a significantly better selection. This is an easy mistake to make - and I hear it all the time in the context of movies, video games, books, etc... but when you consider things fairly it's almost never true.
And, if anything, filmmakers take way more risks than they used to. You can find way more experimental film now because it's actually possible to shoot a quality, truly-low-budget film.
Conversely, if you want to find "low risk" crap, look at the neverending piles of crap from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Sequels like crazy, ripoffs, movies whose design started by making a poster and a title (or a star coupling and a vague genre idea). When movies were that expensive, studios had to bank more heavily than they do now on poster appeal, known stars, and non-threatening plot. Slow information travel meant they could get away with much worse films. And nostalgia makes old movies seem better than they were (as you'd expect - the pioneering techniques of the best directors, actors, and technicians have all been passed around and are now standard fare, so filmmakers have a huge wealth of ideas to pull from).
Just as an exercise, start looking through lists of the best films in each decade (or even year). You're going to see some depressingly short lists as you go further back. Of course there's exceptional times and years, but overall it's a strong upward trend in the number of good movies.
You just described pretty much every superhero movie.
I think he described pretty much every movie. Most of everything is crap.
The fact that there's actually been decent superhero movies in a genre with so few total films suggests that it's probably at or above average in terms of "percentage of films in genre that are worthwhile". I mean, if "will you remember it in five years" is the criteria, what percentage of romantic comedies are worthwhile films? What percentage of action movies in general? As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's easy to say "Hollywood, make good movies", but it's not like anyone is trying to do something else (well... maybe a few are). Certainly there may be genres you personally prefer, but that's not a reflector of general value - and certain niches like crowd friendly action are going to get filled by something.
And you're in pretty choppy water if you want to pick good movies based on general story ideas (like, having a superhero). I mean, if you look at the surface plot and setting, is there really much daylight between "Easy Virtue" and "The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)"? Heck, they even both have Colin Firth. And yet one is painful, unwatchable garbage and the other was a pleasant, funny gem. You have to take the good with the bad in any genre or setting.
Similarly, do you really want to disqualify "The Watchmen" (which was close to being very good) because "Spiderman III" was garbage? How many horrible space action movies are there to balance out "Empire Strikes Back"? How many crappy Crime Noir type films are there to balance out "Maltese Falcon"? Maybe there hasn't been a great superhero movie yet (I didn't think "Dark Knight" was great), but there's been several that have been perfectly fine.
There will be good and bad movies. Personally, I'm happier with comic book movies being the "normal summer fare" than some of the crap they replaced (think "Armageddon").
I think the exact opposite complaint has more merit - most good movies are based on published books, history, plays, previous movies, or something. Sure there are exceptions (and clearly some very big ones), but I'd say that in general Hollywood does better when it isn't "coming up with something original".
And if it's comic books you have a problem with, I'll partially agree with you... but also largely disagree. Sure there's been some bad ones, but if we restrict ourselves to action movies, I'd say the comic book films probably average out to "above average action movies". I'd certainly take "X-Men: First Class" over "Congo" (based on a book, with real chapters!) or "The Fast and the Furious" (which was "Hollywood doing something original"). And even outside of "action", I'd rather rub gravel into my forehead than watch, say, "Random Hearts" (based on a critically acclaimed novel by Warren Adler, I see) - one of the worst films I've ever tried to watch.
Sure I'd be happy to replace "Green Lantern" with another "The Seventh Seal" - but that's effectively saying "why doesn't Hollywood stop making bad movies and just make good ones". That is just not a helpful thing to say. Hollywood makes all kinds of movies, usually bad but sometimes good in all genres and niches. In general, I'd say there's more quality movies per year pretty much every year - and movies in most genres are getting continuously better (look at, say, kid's animated films and compare the "best list" between the 1980s and the 2000s).
And, yes, comic book movies too have stretched into "good movie" territory. "Dark Knight" was pretty watchable, and I thought "The Watchmen" (while panned in many quarters) was visually interesting and had a lot of redeeming qualities. And suppose they did quit comic book movies, what would they do for mass market summer movies? You miss "original" stuff like "Armageddon"? Sure, I'd love another "Raiders of the Lost Ark" too - but, again, it's not helpful to say you want good movies. Most people in Hollywood want to make good movies too - but whether they do so is a function of talent, effort and luck, not genre.
Most people aren't willing to drop five, or even three, bucks on a game that they've never heard of or never played.
Every XBL Indie Games release has to have a free demo (and they give you help in the platform API to manage locked features/time-limiting/etc.. they did have some good ideas with this platform). You never have to buy a game sight unseen.
But you're right anyways.
Why? Because after a while, people aren't just unwilling to pay for a game. If the games are bad enough - and XBL Indie Games is a perfect platform for displaying how bad games can be - people will become unwilling to even browse titles. So, yes, any metric that could be used to filter out ridiculous chaff would be very helpful to the platform.
And the marketplace has a new games section too...
Yes - I'm sure they had a few minutes in the sun before they got pushed off by "XBox Massage Master" and "Avatar Tic-Tac-Toe: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS chapter 1 by PandaStar Studio in co-operation with JohnnyFyre".
Has anyone here actually bothered looking at all or is everyone just assuming?
Yes. Most everyone with an XBox and non-infinite time (at least among people I know) has given up even scrolling over to the Indie Games new releases. Anytime I've heard Indie Games discussed among developers, it has been in the context of "How can I get out of the Indie Games ghetto and into the regular Arcade games where someone might give the game a try?"
Unless people are just so lazy or uninformed that nobody bothers to check out the Indie games on Xbox.
You don't have to be lazy or uninformed to get tired of checking Indie Games. I have regretted it every time I've bothered to download something. A game has to be pretty bad before I resent the 5 minutes it took to check it out... and they've been consistently that bad.