How did people know they could not actually afford their home when everybody had one and banks were all too eager to tell them otherwise?
You must think people are all some kind of OCD mathematicians that spend their lives meticulously calculating their best course of action. Studies have shown that 80% of people blindly trust recommendations instead of comparing prices or informing themselves about technical specifications with the local computer wizard. And economists, unlike hackers, are not really abundant.
You should read a book called Descartes' error, where a prominent psychiatrist reports the case of a brain damaged man, formerly an intelligent, successful professional, who could not feel emotion anymore, but was perfectly capable of purely rational thought. He could not decide on anything - enter the concept of emotional intelligence, and the fact that people actually decide based on their feelings, and can not decide on anything otherwise. After all, what seems "logic" to you, may not be another man's "logic".
You can argue that being unwise is undesirable, but if you think the fundamental nature of Man can be changed, I'd like to know where I can get some of that delicious kool-aid you've been drinking. If you're a financial wizard, know that the rest of the world is not YOU. Most people have had no contact with math of any kind since high-school, they don't need it and they should not be bothered with it.
If people could somehow become immune to marketing and aggressive salesmen, the whole economy would grind to a halt. The world moves on the backs of stupid people spending lots of money. Two main components of what goes into calculating GDP are domestic consumption and exports.
I'm sure you've never gone to Task Manager and noticed how iexplore.exe is different from explorer.exe and as for being "part" of the operating system, my dear friend, that means there is a DLL for the renderer which is used by two programs. A DLL is not something that "crashes":)
No, it's because some people are under the mistaken assumption that IE is horribly insecure just because it's IE, and that Windows crashes just because it crashed 15 years ago. I use Chrome. It crashes more often than any application I've ever used before. It probably has more to do with the Flash plugin. When I read this article and remembered how tired of Chrome I am, I seriously started thinking of going back to IE for the first time since version 2 or something. Marketing is not about truth, it's about telling people what they need or want to hear, soothing their insecure little souls and getting them to buy the product.
I think Jar Jar should be placed in a prominent role in all SW movies, if not as the protagonist. Luke... I am your father... and Jar Jar is my gay lover.
I love cycling, but Segways are illegal in bicycle lanes, and most european cities where cycling is actually used already have bike lanes. Besides, I've been involved with a local activist group and they're pretty adamant on bike lanes being harmful. In order for bikes to be legitimate vehicles worthy of drivers' respect they must be integrated in the general traffic. And they reduce accidents, by forcing drivers to slow down and actually pay attention to what they're doing.
Well, I'm a factual person, not an emotional one, as such, I'm hardly ever afraid of anything. So let's examine the facts: 1) The rest of the world is not Japan, or the Ring of Fire 2) Germany, in particular, has one of the lowest earthquake hazard rates in the world 3) Hills, where cities were built in the dawn of time, are safe from floods and invaders. Can't go wrong with 100m of solid rock. 4) Any place that's sufficiently inland is safe from a tsunami. The rest of the world is not an island. 5).... 6) Profit!;)
Well, I'm a researcher, one of my colleagues got a PhD grant solely on the merits of his self-published papers, and everyone here has had plenty of stuff rejected after peer-review. That's why any normal person only publishes 2 or 3 times per year after applying to a dozen places. Regardless, one should always be wary of extraordinary claims, such as future cities being built to accomodate the Segway:)
I've always found particle physics fascinating, though I won't claim to understand any of it. I'm disappointed that people are so vehemently against nuclear reactors these days that Germany is shutting some of them down. And, of course, we're not in a hurry to use nuclear weapons either. Radiation therapy has been a good application, but I would like to believe it will eventually be replaced by something less aggressive and more specific. Super-heavy atoms are really cool, but they're always so unstable we can barely measure them. What other practical applications can we hope to achieve? Will fusion be cleaner than fission and more publicly acceptable? Inquiring minds want to know.
Mandrake was what people used to use in 2001. I may have rose-colored glasses, but I can't recall having problems with it, and I'm no bearded unix guru. My then-girlfriend installed it because she liked ksokoban and tux racer. She's not in any kind of IT and we didn't live together back then. Wasn't Mandrake installed in like two clicks or something? My first Linux experience was in 1997 when I went to college, and even thought I didn't have to install it, fvwm was not terribly different from the Win95 GUI either, neither was Netscape 3.0. Shrug.
This will be huge. People all over the world are going to walk around and perpetually stare into their phones to view a projection of reality instead of reality itself. Plato would be proud.
100 gigabit connections will open up the vast unexplored market for molecular biology porn! On a 15 inch monitor, you'd be able to fit enough pixels to make out ribosomes and cell walls, not to mention viruses and bacteria. Pervs all over the world would devote entire discussion forums to their favorite STDs in porn stars.
Eh? I don't mean to troll or anything, but since when has Postgres NOT been dead? It's a bit of a niche. I've worked with more than one database over the course of my 10 year web development career, MS-SQL, Oracle, MySQL, but certainly NOT Postgres. I don't know a single person who has ever used it. There's a reason why they put an M in LAMP, you know:P
What I don't get is why people expect to raise the temperature all the way up to 300C so the ship will burst into flames, when 50C is enough to scald human skin and would likely get an invading army yelling and jumping into the water. Not to mention the brightness of the light would be enough to temporarily blind and disorient them.
The first person to write about this alleged incident was Lucian who merely mentioned *fire* (and since he wrote about it 3-4 hundred years after the fact, it's already not a credible source of information) while the second one, who came another 2-3 hundred years later (Anthemius) was someone who investigated "burning glasses" (lenses) and so he just MIGHT have had a bit of an agenda there.
Your link says they had to be narrow to be fast and as such they could not carry a lot of cargo. Also, the fastest clippers according to that article traveled at 16 knots while another post here claims that modern ships travel at 22 knots.
You can probably get by without fear in a nanny state ruled by the fearful masses, where everything has to be made perfectly safe, but try doing that in the jungles of your ancestors, where danger awaited around every corner...
Zynga was founded in 2007, Facebook was founded in 2004, I ran a virtual currency casino in 2003, and even before that, there were already some standalone slot machines built by Linden Lab itself. WTF?:)
Excuse me, but... What are you talking about? I browsed the web with a 486 DX2-66 for many years, it took a while to load an 80KB HTML page straight off my hard drive - specifically, it was a mIRC scripting guide which had no images. You would also have to wait a while for a JPEG to decode and display. If you were crazy enough to load one of these newfangled 4000x3000 photos kids have these days, your PC would start swapping and become unusable!
But, you need to keep in mind that the early web was entirely made up of text with the odd 16-color GIF for decoration. There was usually no flash or video, and a 24-bit JPEG of a pretty girl in sufficiently high resolution was more like a download than an embedded component of a web page! After all, a mere 50KB file takes 20 seconds to load at 2.5KB/s!
Graphics cards used an ISA slot and had 1 meg of memory! What they did at the time with that memory was store the frame buffer and enable you to display high (SVGA) resolutions!
I do have vague memories of seeing an MPEG-2 accelerator card, maybe it did JPEG, I dunno, but seriously, a web accelerator? When 3D cards finally came along (and you had to have them separately from your 2D card at the time) what they added was highly 3D-specific stuff like mip-mapping and Z-Buffer... not Flash.
Fruit used to be scarce and hand-picked from trees, but Man invented agriculture to control and infinitely replicate it!!! Meat used to be scarce and chased all day long with bows and arrows but Man overcame Beast and herded it!
Nothing should be scarce. We are here to raise the bar of what Life consists of, and modern life consists of hanging out on youtube and being able to play on a whim whatever comes to mind.
It just needs to be taken one step further. There should be an official RIAA-backed repository of all music ever created, easy to use, with all lyrics, videos, whatever!
Why should anyone be "accountable" if there is no such thing as "free will" and it's been clearly demonstrated that the brain makes its own decisions long before they reach your awareness? (source: study cited in malcolm gladwell's books)
One does not conciously choose to have poor impulse control and be verbally or even physically agressive or obese or frivolous in their spending. It is not a moral or character flaw. A simple pill can easily correct it within weeks. It's good to take responsibility away from people, as they are little more than meat automatons, programmed by their genes and the world around them.
That's why societies and companies and groups of people everywhere establish rules, acceptable behaviors and standard procedures. To put what we believe so far, what experience has so far demonstrated, to be the best possible program into you.
I believe you are looking for the standby button. Why do you even turn it off? Ecological reasons? Noise? Even Windows can be up forever these days... and with the dawn of unlimited broadband and large *cough* downloads... most people just leave their computer on all the time.
It was supposedly being done by illustrious gentlemen such as Salvador Dali and H.R. Giger, but ran out of money. It also had a rather weird and political take on Dune...
I would encourage you to study what a black hole actually is, rather than trusting some random sci-fi author's unsubstantiated notion that the layman's term "hole" must mean "magical portal to another dimension". Our present equations yield a value of "infinite" when solved for the conditions believed to exist at the center of a black hole. This is likely to only mean that our equations are buggy and need fixing. It is not the opinion of most scientists that anything special would happen inside a black hole. If you could somehow build an infinitely resilient spaceship that could somehow shield you from the effects of extreme gravity, and assuming we are wrong about the speed of light, and that you could possibly go faster than it, the most you would be able to do with a black hole would be to go in and out of the event horizon unscathed, or perhaps bang into whatever form of extremely compressed matter exists at its center. We have no reason to believe otherwise - wormholes, however prevalent they may be in the realm of science fiction, are just an unlikely hypothesis in the world of real science. For them to exist, strange forms of matter with negative density would have to be discovered, and nobody but the wishful thinkers seriously believes in that. (I am not a physicist, however, and as such I welcome factual corrections and additions to this post)
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How did people know they could not actually afford their home when everybody had one and banks were all too eager to tell them otherwise?
You must think people are all some kind of OCD mathematicians that spend their lives meticulously calculating their best course of action. Studies have shown that 80% of people blindly trust recommendations instead of comparing prices or informing themselves about technical specifications with the local computer wizard. And economists, unlike hackers, are not really abundant.
You should read a book called Descartes' error, where a prominent psychiatrist reports the case of a brain damaged man, formerly an intelligent, successful professional, who could not feel emotion anymore, but was perfectly capable of purely rational thought. He could not decide on anything - enter the concept of emotional intelligence, and the fact that people actually decide based on their feelings, and can not decide on anything otherwise. After all, what seems "logic" to you, may not be another man's "logic".
You can argue that being unwise is undesirable, but if you think the fundamental nature of Man can be changed, I'd like to know where I can get some of that delicious kool-aid you've been drinking. If you're a financial wizard, know that the rest of the world is not YOU. Most people have had no contact with math of any kind since high-school, they don't need it and they should not be bothered with it.
If people could somehow become immune to marketing and aggressive salesmen, the whole economy would grind to a halt. The world moves on the backs of stupid people spending lots of money. Two main components of what goes into calculating GDP are domestic consumption and exports.
Give or take a few mass extinctions.
I'm sure you've never gone to Task Manager and noticed how iexplore.exe is different from explorer.exe and as for being "part" of the operating system, my dear friend, that means there is a DLL for the renderer which is used by two programs. A DLL is not something that "crashes" :)
No, it's because some people are under the mistaken assumption that IE is horribly insecure just because it's IE, and that Windows crashes just because it crashed 15 years ago. I use Chrome. It crashes more often than any application I've ever used before. It probably has more to do with the Flash plugin. When I read this article and remembered how tired of Chrome I am, I seriously started thinking of going back to IE for the first time since version 2 or something.
Marketing is not about truth, it's about telling people what they need or want to hear, soothing their insecure little souls and getting them to buy the product.
I think Jar Jar should be placed in a prominent role in all SW movies, if not as the protagonist.
Luke... I am your father... and Jar Jar is my gay lover.
But we need to consume those things anyway, and biking a few miles per day does not significantly increase your energy needs.
I love cycling, but Segways are illegal in bicycle lanes, and most european cities where cycling is actually used already have bike lanes.
Besides, I've been involved with a local activist group and they're pretty adamant on bike lanes being harmful. In order for bikes to be legitimate vehicles worthy of drivers' respect they must be integrated in the general traffic. And they reduce accidents, by forcing drivers to slow down and actually pay attention to what they're doing.
Well, I'm a factual person, not an emotional one, as such, I'm hardly ever afraid of anything. ;)
So let's examine the facts:
1) The rest of the world is not Japan, or the Ring of Fire
2) Germany, in particular, has one of the lowest earthquake hazard rates in the world
3) Hills, where cities were built in the dawn of time, are safe from floods and invaders. Can't go wrong with 100m of solid rock.
4) Any place that's sufficiently inland is safe from a tsunami. The rest of the world is not an island.
5)....
6) Profit!
Well, I'm a researcher, one of my colleagues got a PhD grant solely on the merits of his self-published papers, and everyone here has had plenty of stuff rejected after peer-review. That's why any normal person only publishes 2 or 3 times per year after applying to a dozen places. Regardless, one should always be wary of extraordinary claims, such as future cities being built to accomodate the Segway :)
I've always found particle physics fascinating, though I won't claim to understand any of it.
I'm disappointed that people are so vehemently against nuclear reactors these days that Germany is shutting some of them down.
And, of course, we're not in a hurry to use nuclear weapons either.
Radiation therapy has been a good application, but I would like to believe it will eventually be replaced by something less aggressive and more specific. Super-heavy atoms are really cool, but they're always so unstable we can barely measure them.
What other practical applications can we hope to achieve?
Will fusion be cleaner than fission and more publicly acceptable?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Mandrake was what people used to use in 2001. I may have rose-colored glasses, but I can't recall having problems with it, and I'm no bearded unix guru.
My then-girlfriend installed it because she liked ksokoban and tux racer. She's not in any kind of IT and we didn't live together back then.
Wasn't Mandrake installed in like two clicks or something?
My first Linux experience was in 1997 when I went to college, and even thought I didn't have to install it, fvwm was not terribly different from the Win95 GUI either, neither was Netscape 3.0. Shrug.
This will be huge. People all over the world are going to walk around and perpetually stare into their phones to view a projection of reality instead of reality itself. Plato would be proud.
As if people didn't lock themselves up into monocultural groupthinking cliques without the internet ;)
100 gigabit connections will open up the vast unexplored market for molecular biology porn!
On a 15 inch monitor, you'd be able to fit enough pixels to make out ribosomes and cell walls, not to mention viruses and bacteria.
Pervs all over the world would devote entire discussion forums to their favorite STDs in porn stars.
Eh? I don't mean to troll or anything, but since when has Postgres NOT been dead? It's a bit of a niche. I've worked with more than one database over the course of my 10 year web development career, MS-SQL, Oracle, MySQL, but certainly NOT Postgres. I don't know a single person who has ever used it. :P
There's a reason why they put an M in LAMP, you know
What I don't get is why people expect to raise the temperature all the way up to 300C so the ship will burst into flames, when 50C is enough to scald human skin and would likely get an invading army yelling and jumping into the water. Not to mention the brightness of the light would be enough to temporarily blind and disorient them.
The first person to write about this alleged incident was Lucian who merely mentioned *fire* (and since he wrote about it 3-4 hundred years after the fact, it's already not a credible source of information) while the second one, who came another 2-3 hundred years later (Anthemius) was someone who investigated "burning glasses" (lenses) and so he just MIGHT have had a bit of an agenda there.
Your link says they had to be narrow to be fast and as such they could not carry a lot of cargo. Also, the fastest clippers according to that article traveled at 16 knots while another post here claims that modern ships travel at 22 knots.
You can probably get by without fear in a nanny state ruled by the fearful masses, where everything has to be made perfectly safe, but try doing that in the jungles of your ancestors, where danger awaited around every corner...
Zynga was founded in 2007, Facebook was founded in 2004, I ran a virtual currency casino in 2003, and even before that, there were already some standalone slot machines built by Linden Lab itself. WTF? :)
Excuse me, but... What are you talking about?
I browsed the web with a 486 DX2-66 for many years, it took a while to load an 80KB HTML page straight off my hard drive - specifically, it was a mIRC scripting guide which had no images.
You would also have to wait a while for a JPEG to decode and display. If you were crazy enough to load one of these newfangled 4000x3000 photos kids have these days, your PC would start swapping and become unusable!
But, you need to keep in mind that the early web was entirely made up of text with the odd 16-color GIF for decoration. There was usually no flash or video, and a 24-bit JPEG of a pretty girl in sufficiently high resolution was more like a download than an embedded component of a web page! After all, a mere 50KB file takes 20 seconds to load at 2.5KB/s!
Graphics cards used an ISA slot and had 1 meg of memory! What they did at the time with that memory was store the frame buffer and enable you to display high (SVGA) resolutions!
I do have vague memories of seeing an MPEG-2 accelerator card, maybe it did JPEG, I dunno, but seriously, a web accelerator? When 3D cards finally came along (and you had to have them separately from your 2D card at the time) what they added was highly 3D-specific stuff like mip-mapping and Z-Buffer... not Flash.
Fruit used to be scarce and hand-picked from trees, but Man invented agriculture to control and infinitely replicate it!!!
Meat used to be scarce and chased all day long with bows and arrows but Man overcame Beast and herded it!
Nothing should be scarce. We are here to raise the bar of what Life consists of, and modern life consists of hanging out on youtube and being able to play on a whim whatever comes to mind.
It just needs to be taken one step further. There should be an official RIAA-backed repository of all music ever created, easy to use, with all lyrics, videos, whatever!
Or the RIAA should die.
Why should anyone be "accountable" if there is no such thing as "free will" and it's been clearly demonstrated that the brain makes its own decisions long before they reach your awareness? (source: study cited in malcolm gladwell's books)
One does not conciously choose to have poor impulse control and be verbally or even physically agressive or obese or frivolous in their spending. It is not a moral or character flaw. A simple pill can easily correct it within weeks. It's good to take responsibility away from people, as they are little more than meat automatons, programmed by their genes and the world around them.
That's why societies and companies and groups of people everywhere establish rules, acceptable behaviors and standard procedures.
To put what we believe so far, what experience has so far demonstrated, to be the best possible program into you.
I believe you are looking for the standby button.
Why do you even turn it off? Ecological reasons? Noise?
Even Windows can be up forever these days... and with the dawn of unlimited broadband and large *cough* downloads... most people just leave their computer on all the time.
Pfft, heres a real nerdy Dune link... the unfinished 1976 movie version:
http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dune.html
It was supposedly being done by illustrious gentlemen such as Salvador Dali and H.R. Giger, but ran out of money. It also had a rather weird and political take on Dune...
I would encourage you to study what a black hole actually is, rather than trusting some random sci-fi author's unsubstantiated notion that the layman's term "hole" must mean "magical portal to another dimension".
Our present equations yield a value of "infinite" when solved for the conditions believed to exist at the center of a black hole. This is likely to only mean that our equations are buggy and need fixing.
It is not the opinion of most scientists that anything special would happen inside a black hole. If you could somehow build an infinitely resilient spaceship that could somehow shield you from the effects of extreme gravity, and assuming we are wrong about the speed of light, and that you could possibly go faster than it, the most you would be able to do with a black hole would be to go in and out of the event horizon unscathed, or perhaps bang into whatever form of extremely compressed matter exists at its center. We have no reason to believe otherwise - wormholes, however prevalent they may be in the realm of science fiction, are just an unlikely hypothesis in the world of real science. For them to exist, strange forms of matter with negative density would have to be discovered, and nobody but the wishful thinkers seriously believes in that.
(I am not a physicist, however, and as such I welcome factual corrections and additions to this post)