Just goes to show how religious observance in the US has dwindled, even if evangelicals are still a major voting bloc and, bizarrely, were often more pro-Trump than anti-Clinton.
Jason Levine has already noted that Mike "Let's Return to the Middle Ages!" Pence was the Christian-fundamentalist-bait in this election.
Beyond that, many of the Christian-Fundies in the US are either single-issue voters or strongly influenced by a few issues. Among the big ones are abortion and LGBT rights. Trump claimed to be against both (who knows what he really believes; he's a con man with no clear ideological position beyond "more for me!").
The laws of physics are absolute even if we don't know exactly what they are yet.
Assuming a consistent visible[1] universe, physics is "absolute" in this sense, tautologically. Whether some of the various sets of entities that can reasonably be labeled "the laws of physics" share that attribute is a question of philosophy (specifically metaphysical realism), and as such is outside science and untestable.[2]
If they're not then you're essentially saying that anything can happen at any time for any reason
That's a bit too strong; there could be limited-effect inconsistencies. Let's hope there aren't, though, because - contrary to romantic popular beliefs - a predictable world is much nicer than an unpredictable one.[3]
[2] Some might object that the signified of "physics" also isn't the behavior of the natural world, but a body of knowledge that seeks to describe it. Those who prefer that interpretation can substitute the phrase "the thing physics attempts to describe". (Yes, we could regress more or less infinitely here down a rabbit hole of Kantian correlationism - "the thing we believe produces the perceptual effects we believe produce the qualia we believe we interpret in producing the cultural assemblage commonly known as 'physics'" - but I think that's quite enough of that.)
[3] Why? First, note such inconsistencies must be unpredictable - otherwise they'd just be special cases. That means they are in a strict sense random. Partition the configuration space into beneficial and malign outcomes, and you'll find the latter occupy the vast majority of the area, because we're kind of sensitive to the normal behavior of things like electromagnetism and chemistry. Take a random walk through that space and with high probability you end up in a bad partition.
Yeah, or propane. Gasoline engines require some conversion to be used with propane (whereas I understand they typically can run butanol unchanged), but it's easy and cheap. And propane is already a popular vehicle fuel, and we have an established infrastructure for storing, transporting, and dispensing the stuff.
People sometimes talk about using cheap energy (e.g. solar in the Sahara, or decently-designed nuclear) to synthesize gasoline (hexane, octane, and other light liquid-at-standard-conditions hydrocarbons) from waste inputs, but really there's no need to synth anything more complex than propane or, as you say, butanol. Not that hexane is much more complex than propane, but still.
As always, it's a question of economics. Hard to make this economically worthwhile until extracted crude gets more expensive.
Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person.
So... instant messaging, with a more-intrusive and less-efficient user experience, crossed with a feeble simulacrum of actual in-person interaction.
If that's the typical use case for their additive-light augmented-reality tech, then no thanks.
AR proponents have always been keen on pointing out potential applications, in entertainment (who needs more entertainment options?), and education (where I feel it's hugely overrated), and in industry (where there are certainly valid ones, but they're too obvious to be exciting). I've always found them underwhelming, and none of them seem particularly socially transformative, the way the automobile, say, or television were.
And it's not just poor people that buy Android phones, of course. I bought a rather expensive HTC One (m7) Android phone as my first smart phone, and still enjoy using it.
And it's not just expensive phones that relatively wealthy people buy. I could buy a new top-of-the-line phone every month, if I wanted to; but I buy cheap Android phones and keep them for a few years, because I don't see any benefit in the more-expensive models.
My immediate family members and most of my friends have iPhones, but I find the damn things utterly intolerable. I won't say Apple has never made anything I liked - the Apple//e was pretty nice - but I cannot brook their "don't you worry your pretty little head how it works" design philosophy.
And Android offers me an assortment of devices with features I do want, like SD card slots, removable batteries, physical SIMs, physical keyboards, root access and a shell... Yes, there's not a single feature there that a majority of smartphone users want, as far as I can tell. But I do, and I'm not interested in buying a Veblen good from a company that thinks choice is bad for its customers.
Stop introspecting the device within the browser framework
That's my preference, too.
It's interesting to look at the history of this API, particularly early documents for the "System Information API" drafts that the Devices and Sensors WG produced, such as this one, and the discussions on the mailing list leading up to it.
The justification seems to have been, gee, why can't web apps do everything native apps can? Who cares whether there's a use case?
Of course this was in keeping with the historical moment. This stuff originated in 2009 (yes, seven years is a typical invent-implement-despair-deprecate cycle for web standards), when lots of people were cheering on "rich Internet applications" (gah) and there wasn't much research into browser side channel exposure. The earliest reference I found to side-channel attacks on browsers (specifically) was a 2010 Schneier post about a paper by Chen et al.. (Schneier mentions in passing extant research on side-channel attacks on SSL, but it's not clear what he's referring to - whether it's channels exposed by the browser as such or SSL implementation errors like the 2003 Boneh & Brumley timing attacks.) So it might be claimed that browser side channel vulnerabilities weren't widely recognized in the industry before 2010 or so, and so might reasonably not have been on the WG's radar.
However, we still have the basic objection you voiced: many users don't want web apps to have native-app access to the machine. Period.
You think purchasing a room when I arrive in a city late at night, and then selling it on in a day or two, is a good idea?
That's so bafflingly, astoundingly wrongheaded that I doubt it's worth continuing the discussion. However:
First, the "artificially imposed hoops in the process [of] buying and selling real estate" exist for excellent reasons. Of course, everything involved in the transfer of real estate is "artificial"; real-estate sales do not exist in nature. And things like title, proof of insurance, inspections, disclosures, and so on all serve critical roles in protecting the least-powerful parties involved in real-estate ownership. Anyone who doesn't understand that is too ignorant to propose changes to the system (or simply insane). The ownership of real estate was not in some glorious prelapsarian state of ease, convenience, and justice before modern ideas of title, code-compliance, and the like were introduced.
Second, your utopian vision glosses over some rather gaping holes, such as precisely how you'd go about "find[ing] another seller/buyer" on demand and at minimal cost. And the financial structure of "sell[ing] on long terms.. and buy[ing] on short terms" is exactly what we have today for both real estate and automobiles, through the magic of loans. That opportunity already exists, and renters with sufficient financial leverage can engage in a process called "buying a house" if they want out of the rental market.
Third, if the scheme you propose is workable, then why isn't someone doing it? Aside, of course, from the ways in which they are already doing it.
Ah, yes. Apple will kill cash. Just like it killed command-line interfaces, commodity PCs, feature phones, keyboards, and conventional watches. In the alternate universe where Tim Cook lives.
Apple may have had its first loss-making quarter of the century, but it's still at the top of the bullshit sector.
Seriously, of course renting real property is rent; and seeking renters for real property (or trying to acquire real property to rent, etc) is rent-seeking. The problem is that "rent-seeking" has become a favorite insult of a certain type, who then shy away from applying it to activities they approve of.
And renting property is almost certainly indispensable to a modern capitalist economy. It's a way of capturing inefficiencies from property that no one actor wants to use all the time. When I travel, I want to be able to rent a room and a car; I don't want to have to purchase them and then sell them again when I leave. You can envision other structures, such as cooperative ownership, but those either become rent under a flimsy disguise, or new inefficiencies, or both. Renting increases the utilization of goods and thereby increases efficiency.
Of course rent and rent-seeking can be abusive, and Ricardo was working at a time when such abuses were readily apparent, with land ownership extremely concentrated, and landowners using political power to create distortions like the Corn Laws. That's why we need market forces and regulation (I don't believe we can get by with just one or the other) to oppose powerful rent-seekers (who, of course, can be found in both the private and public sectors). But just doing away with rent entirely is a non-starter.
It's not species dying that's the issue. It's the *rate* that they're dying that's the issue.
Well, really, the issue is that species we prefer are dying. We're not in any position to wipe out the biosphere; we're just making it less pleasant for ourselves. We're reducing diversity and reducing the number of species that we find it relatively pleasant to coexist with, and they'll be replaced by ones we aren't so fond of.
Species with longer reproductive cycles and smaller populations take longer to evolve, so when there's a sharp drop in biodiversity, it takes a relatively longer time, in evolutionary timescales, for such species to develop and fill the open niches. And broadly speaking we prefer that sort of organism - complex animals and long-lived plants - in our environment. We like birds and mammals more than insects; we like trees more than fungi and weeds.
Of course some people also attach an ethical imperative to this, which is fine (that is, it's a subjective good); but from a practical human standpoint, the underlying problem isn't that species are dying out in general but that we're making things worse for ourselves in the process. Earth will abide, but the place is going downhill.
If you think you're [sic] shitty 25Mbps connection is going to actually be sufficient in the next 10 years you're in for a shock.
"You're wrong because look how hard I can wave my hands!"
Yes, that's a compelling argument. In ten years, 25 Mb/s service won't be "sufficient" for... I dunno, something that will be super necessary, I promise.
I'm an IT professional who's worked from home or a remote office for more than two decades. I've gradually upgraded from async to a 56 Kb/s line to ISDN to cable, which currently clocks in at around 17 Mb/s (down) in real tests. For all my actual work, I've always gotten by just fine; even today I'd easily be able to work with 10 Mb/s down, and I rarely need that.
My wife likes to stream TV, and that 17 Mb/s service does the job. At our vacation home, the craptastic CenturyLink DSL, which probably manages 8 Mb/s on a good day, also works for Netflix and the like.
What, pray tell, am I going to need an order of magnitude more bandwidth for in ten years? It won't be entertainment - I don't give a rat's ass about HD TV or other so-called "improvements" in video. It won't be personal communications; they've also plateaued. There's no reason to believe I'll need it for work. It won't be for IoT, which I avoid like the plague it is.
In the real world, there's a difference between "eh, we can probably do X" and actually doing the research to show that we can do X. I know, that's a hard concept for J. Random Slashdot Idiot to comprehend.
Eddie Cue can fuck right off, as far as I'm concerned. I'm perfectly happy with how I watch TV, when I happen to do so. None of the "issues" he whines about bother me in the least.
Frankly, if you find watching television so difficult that you need a speech interface and search engine to accomplish it, perhaps television is not for you. You might want to take up recreational drooling.
Indeed. While there are battery-powered angle grinders (which would beat wandering around with a long extension cord, or pulling your compressed-air tank with you on your bicycle-theft expeditions), you can carry a couple of decent-sized pry bars for the same weight and less bulk, so even if you're going after locked bikes there's little reason to use a grinder. And pry bars have many other criminal uses.
Why not tell us how great this lock will be against thieves wielding acetylene torches and thermal lances, while they're at it? "Resists small explosive charges! Difficult for chimpanzees to grip! Combination cannot be set to 1234!"
I think Trump is purposely throwing the election in order to cry foul, spew outrage, and sell his memoirs.
That's been his pattern with most of his business endeavors. I don't see why this one is any different. Look at it from his point of view.
Win: Feed the megalomania, but have to work or find some way out of it (resignation, probably). There's too much media attention to have another caretaker president; that's a thing of the past. Even W, with all his vacations and delegation of responsibility, kept pretty busy. Continued scrutiny of past bad acts, which he finds irritating.
Lose: Outrage of supporters feeds megalomania anyway. Run off with whatever resources he's siphoned from the campaign. Cushy lecture circuit appearances (which again mean more positive attention and money). A comfortable and familiar pattern of behavior.
Dude's a con man, in a classic bullying style. He's just been particularly successful at it. Winning the election wouldn't offer him much that he wants, but keeping it contentious right up to the end and then losing certainly does. Hell, it'd work so well he'll probably run again, if he's not feeling too lazy.
And not all of western Kansas is particularly flat, for that matter. Much of the high plains is rolling. Try driving down, say, US 40 after it splits off from I-70 - it's much less flat than those final miles of I-70 on the western end of Kansas. Nebraska's probably flatter overall than Kansas is, since in the former the rolling plains end further east.
On the other hand, continue west on I-70 into Colorado, and you have maybe a hundred miles of flat flat flat. (Less so to the south - it's pretty hilly around Rocky Ford and La Junta, for example.) But all that figures in the popular imagination is mountains.
But then it's hardly news that US mass culture hasn't been hugely interested in accurate portrayals of most of the country.
back to the time there was no such thing as "top level domain" (the generic.com/.org/etc and the country ones) and e-mail addresses were like username@digital or username@ibm
When was this, exactly? The original TLDs were defined in RFC 920, which was published in 1984. The TCP Internet didn't even exist until 1983.
@-style email addresses are as old as email itself - Ray Tomlinson introduced them in the early '70s - but the @-suffix named a host, not a domain. This was also true for the original SMTP (which is older than DNS). The examples in RFC 821 show qualified forward- and reverse-paths.
An address like "username@ibm" would require either a direct connection to a system named "ibm", using something like the public host files that were circulated prior to the widespread adoption of DNS; or the equivalent of a DNS MX record. DNS itself of course would have used a TLD for MX records, and I don't recall an @-based email addressing system that didn't.
UUCP bang-paths used unqualified hostnames, but again those were hostnames, not some sort of unqualified domain name.
The utility of the old gTLDs (com, org, edu, net, gov, mil) is questionable; in theory, before use of com/org/net became unrestricted, they could provide a small amount of information, and resolve some name collisions, though there are probably more collisions within the historic gTLD namespaces (edu is a good example, as many US universities use conflicting abbreviations like "MSU") than among them.
The new gTLDs are pointless. The vast majority of users won't care about them at all, and most of those who do find them unnecessary and annoying. They're an IANA scam targeting marketers, narcissistic executives, and organizations with an inflated sense of self-importance (hello, Google).
Patently untrue. Some things that will never be possible:
- A complete and consistent formal system
- Solving the Halting Problem for Turing Machines
- An algorithm for computing Chaitin's Omega for a given encoding
- Having both faster-than-light communication (which, obviously, includes travel) and intact causality
- Perpetual motion
- Convincing everyone that "anything is possible" is false
In exchange for any of those, you break the universe. After that, there's no human-meaningful definition of "possible". There won't be any humans, for that matter.
Indeed, if you want to quibble, you could note that we still don't have "humans beings soaring around like birds", under pretty much any reasonable definition. There are a few folks with wearable powered-flight gear, like Yves Rossy, but those are hardly practical.
LTA commercial travel ("dirigible balloons as a means of conveying passengers") was economically feasible for a few years, so he missed out on that one, but it was never a mass transport, and my guess is that it never would have been. The Hindenburg maxed out at 72 passengers, and airships are too subject to the whims of weather. Even if successful HTA travel hadn't been invented, for some unguessable reason, I imagine LTA travel would have remained largely a novelty for the wealthy. It wouldn't be anything like the sort of mass air transit we have today.
And it seems to me that in 1896 it was perfectly reasonable to dismiss, in a private letter, "the expectation of good results from any of the trials [in HTA aircraft] we hear of". The Kitty Hawk flight was still seven years away; it was another five years before the Wrights had anything that could fly with any reliability.
So while Kelvin may have underestimated how soon HTA flight would, er, get off the ground, the verifiable quotations are hardly outrageous. Certainly they don't do anything to support that tired "scientists deny the possibility of FTL travel out of hubris" argument.
Remember back in '92 when Perot got 19% of the popular vote and everything changed?
Indeed. He couldn't even repeat his success (despite having actually formed a party) in '96.
Or when Wallace got a significant number of electoral votes in '68.
In both cases, 1) lots of people were pissed, and 2) there was much talk of a viable third party. There was even some of that talk in 2000 (before the election - after it, all anyone could talk about was who had actually won) of that with the Greens, though in the end Nader & LaDuke only managed a bit less than 3m votes (an order of magnitude less than Perot in '92).
The two-party system is not currently threatened by the little parties, and they know it. The little parties don't even have much of a role as spoilers; they tend to draw too little, and too evenly, to significantly affect the outcome. The Greens might have cost Gore the election in 2000, but that thesis is controversial, and if they did, it's a rare event indeed.
So even if 20% of the popular vote did go to Gary "What's a leppo?" Johnson, it would have to be very disproportionately drawn from one side or the other to make the Big Two take notice. They have more to lose by offending their core donors and constituencies than by ignoring Libertarians.
Sigh. You don't say which airport you're referring to, so let's assume it's the shorter trip. (For the longer one rental is an even worse option, for reasons I shall not go into now.)
Drive to local airport (as that is the only economically feasible option). Park car, at $20-$30 / day. Fly to remote airport. Rent some crap vehicle similar to my car, but much less pleasant, for a week at $400 or so. Drive over a hundred miles to destination. Reverse process for return trip.
Essentially the same amount of time spent in transit, but with the additional benefits of commercial air travel, which these days is only slightly less pleasant than outpatient surgery sans anesthesia. Oh, and the "local" airport with reasonably-priced flights to this particular destination is about 90 miles from home, so I still have 25% of the total driving distance. But it's far more expensive, so there's that.
Slashdot Mirror
Just goes to show how religious observance in the US has dwindled, even if evangelicals are still a major voting bloc and, bizarrely, were often more pro-Trump than anti-Clinton.
Jason Levine has already noted that Mike "Let's Return to the Middle Ages!" Pence was the Christian-fundamentalist-bait in this election.
Beyond that, many of the Christian-Fundies in the US are either single-issue voters or strongly influenced by a few issues. Among the big ones are abortion and LGBT rights. Trump claimed to be against both (who knows what he really believes; he's a con man with no clear ideological position beyond "more for me!").
The laws of physics are absolute even if we don't know exactly what they are yet.
Assuming a consistent visible[1] universe, physics is "absolute" in this sense, tautologically. Whether some of the various sets of entities that can reasonably be labeled "the laws of physics" share that attribute is a question of philosophy (specifically metaphysical realism), and as such is outside science and untestable.[2]
If they're not then you're essentially saying that anything can happen at any time for any reason
That's a bit too strong; there could be limited-effect inconsistencies. Let's hope there aren't, though, because - contrary to romantic popular beliefs - a predictable world is much nicer than an unpredictable one.[3]
So, informally, hopefully, yeah.
[1] Whatever happens outside our Hubble volume stays outside our Hubble volume. Don't know, don't care.
[2] Some might object that the signified of "physics" also isn't the behavior of the natural world, but a body of knowledge that seeks to describe it. Those who prefer that interpretation can substitute the phrase "the thing physics attempts to describe". (Yes, we could regress more or less infinitely here down a rabbit hole of Kantian correlationism - "the thing we believe produces the perceptual effects we believe produce the qualia we believe we interpret in producing the cultural assemblage commonly known as 'physics'" - but I think that's quite enough of that.)
[3] Why? First, note such inconsistencies must be unpredictable - otherwise they'd just be special cases. That means they are in a strict sense random. Partition the configuration space into beneficial and malign outcomes, and you'll find the latter occupy the vast majority of the area, because we're kind of sensitive to the normal behavior of things like electromagnetism and chemistry. Take a random walk through that space and with high probability you end up in a bad partition.
To replace gasoline, use Butanol
Yeah, or propane. Gasoline engines require some conversion to be used with propane (whereas I understand they typically can run butanol unchanged), but it's easy and cheap. And propane is already a popular vehicle fuel, and we have an established infrastructure for storing, transporting, and dispensing the stuff.
People sometimes talk about using cheap energy (e.g. solar in the Sahara, or decently-designed nuclear) to synthesize gasoline (hexane, octane, and other light liquid-at-standard-conditions hydrocarbons) from waste inputs, but really there's no need to synth anything more complex than propane or, as you say, butanol. Not that hexane is much more complex than propane, but still.
As always, it's a question of economics. Hard to make this economically worthwhile until extracted crude gets more expensive.
Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person.
So ... instant messaging, with a more-intrusive and less-efficient user experience, crossed with a feeble simulacrum of actual in-person interaction.
If that's the typical use case for their additive-light augmented-reality tech, then no thanks.
AR proponents have always been keen on pointing out potential applications, in entertainment (who needs more entertainment options?), and education (where I feel it's hugely overrated), and in industry (where there are certainly valid ones, but they're too obvious to be exciting). I've always found them underwhelming, and none of them seem particularly socially transformative, the way the automobile, say, or television were.
And it's not just poor people that buy Android phones, of course. I bought a rather expensive HTC One (m7) Android phone as my first smart phone, and still enjoy using it.
And it's not just expensive phones that relatively wealthy people buy. I could buy a new top-of-the-line phone every month, if I wanted to; but I buy cheap Android phones and keep them for a few years, because I don't see any benefit in the more-expensive models.
My immediate family members and most of my friends have iPhones, but I find the damn things utterly intolerable. I won't say Apple has never made anything I liked - the Apple //e was pretty nice - but I cannot brook their "don't you worry your pretty little head how it works" design philosophy.
And Android offers me an assortment of devices with features I do want, like SD card slots, removable batteries, physical SIMs, physical keyboards, root access and a shell... Yes, there's not a single feature there that a majority of smartphone users want, as far as I can tell. But I do, and I'm not interested in buying a Veblen good from a company that thinks choice is bad for its customers.
Why would that make you sleepy?
Otis Redding said it best:
Stop introspecting the device within the browser framework
That's my preference, too.
It's interesting to look at the history of this API, particularly early documents for the "System Information API" drafts that the Devices and Sensors WG produced, such as this one, and the discussions on the mailing list leading up to it.
The justification seems to have been, gee, why can't web apps do everything native apps can? Who cares whether there's a use case?
Of course this was in keeping with the historical moment. This stuff originated in 2009 (yes, seven years is a typical invent-implement-despair-deprecate cycle for web standards), when lots of people were cheering on "rich Internet applications" (gah) and there wasn't much research into browser side channel exposure. The earliest reference I found to side-channel attacks on browsers (specifically) was a 2010 Schneier post about a paper by Chen et al.. (Schneier mentions in passing extant research on side-channel attacks on SSL, but it's not clear what he's referring to - whether it's channels exposed by the browser as such or SSL implementation errors like the 2003 Boneh & Brumley timing attacks.) So it might be claimed that browser side channel vulnerabilities weren't widely recognized in the industry before 2010 or so, and so might reasonably not have been on the WG's radar.
However, we still have the basic objection you voiced: many users don't want web apps to have native-app access to the machine. Period.
You think purchasing a room when I arrive in a city late at night, and then selling it on in a day or two, is a good idea?
That's so bafflingly, astoundingly wrongheaded that I doubt it's worth continuing the discussion. However:
First, the "artificially imposed hoops in the process [of] buying and selling real estate" exist for excellent reasons. Of course, everything involved in the transfer of real estate is "artificial"; real-estate sales do not exist in nature. And things like title, proof of insurance, inspections, disclosures, and so on all serve critical roles in protecting the least-powerful parties involved in real-estate ownership. Anyone who doesn't understand that is too ignorant to propose changes to the system (or simply insane). The ownership of real estate was not in some glorious prelapsarian state of ease, convenience, and justice before modern ideas of title, code-compliance, and the like were introduced.
Second, your utopian vision glosses over some rather gaping holes, such as precisely how you'd go about "find[ing] another seller/buyer" on demand and at minimal cost. And the financial structure of "sell[ing] on long terms .. and buy[ing] on short terms" is exactly what we have today for both real estate and automobiles, through the magic of loans. That opportunity already exists, and renters with sufficient financial leverage can engage in a process called "buying a house" if they want out of the rental market.
Third, if the scheme you propose is workable, then why isn't someone doing it? Aside, of course, from the ways in which they are already doing it.
Ah, yes. Apple will kill cash. Just like it killed command-line interfaces, commodity PCs, feature phones, keyboards, and conventional watches. In the alternate universe where Tim Cook lives.
Apple may have had its first loss-making quarter of the century, but it's still at the top of the bullshit sector.
You are David Ricardo and I claim my $5.
Seriously, of course renting real property is rent; and seeking renters for real property (or trying to acquire real property to rent, etc) is rent-seeking. The problem is that "rent-seeking" has become a favorite insult of a certain type, who then shy away from applying it to activities they approve of.
And renting property is almost certainly indispensable to a modern capitalist economy. It's a way of capturing inefficiencies from property that no one actor wants to use all the time. When I travel, I want to be able to rent a room and a car; I don't want to have to purchase them and then sell them again when I leave. You can envision other structures, such as cooperative ownership, but those either become rent under a flimsy disguise, or new inefficiencies, or both. Renting increases the utilization of goods and thereby increases efficiency.
Of course rent and rent-seeking can be abusive, and Ricardo was working at a time when such abuses were readily apparent, with land ownership extremely concentrated, and landowners using political power to create distortions like the Corn Laws. That's why we need market forces and regulation (I don't believe we can get by with just one or the other) to oppose powerful rent-seekers (who, of course, can be found in both the private and public sectors). But just doing away with rent entirely is a non-starter.
It's not species dying that's the issue. It's the *rate* that they're dying that's the issue.
Well, really, the issue is that species we prefer are dying. We're not in any position to wipe out the biosphere; we're just making it less pleasant for ourselves. We're reducing diversity and reducing the number of species that we find it relatively pleasant to coexist with, and they'll be replaced by ones we aren't so fond of.
Species with longer reproductive cycles and smaller populations take longer to evolve, so when there's a sharp drop in biodiversity, it takes a relatively longer time, in evolutionary timescales, for such species to develop and fill the open niches. And broadly speaking we prefer that sort of organism - complex animals and long-lived plants - in our environment. We like birds and mammals more than insects; we like trees more than fungi and weeds.
Of course some people also attach an ethical imperative to this, which is fine (that is, it's a subjective good); but from a practical human standpoint, the underlying problem isn't that species are dying out in general but that we're making things worse for ourselves in the process. Earth will abide, but the place is going downhill.
User vigilance has never been a satisfactory solution to any security problem. Why would this be the first?
If you think you're [sic] shitty 25Mbps connection is going to actually be sufficient in the next 10 years you're in for a shock.
"You're wrong because look how hard I can wave my hands!"
Yes, that's a compelling argument. In ten years, 25 Mb/s service won't be "sufficient" for ... I dunno, something that will be super necessary, I promise.
I'm an IT professional who's worked from home or a remote office for more than two decades. I've gradually upgraded from async to a 56 Kb/s line to ISDN to cable, which currently clocks in at around 17 Mb/s (down) in real tests. For all my actual work, I've always gotten by just fine; even today I'd easily be able to work with 10 Mb/s down, and I rarely need that.
My wife likes to stream TV, and that 17 Mb/s service does the job. At our vacation home, the craptastic CenturyLink DSL, which probably manages 8 Mb/s on a good day, also works for Netflix and the like.
What, pray tell, am I going to need an order of magnitude more bandwidth for in ten years? It won't be entertainment - I don't give a rat's ass about HD TV or other so-called "improvements" in video. It won't be personal communications; they've also plateaued. There's no reason to believe I'll need it for work. It won't be for IoT, which I avoid like the plague it is.
Hipster cred value is having a cookoo watch woven into your beard...
Sure, if you're just a Level 1 Hipster. The true masters have a sundial mounted on a south-pointing chariot.
In the real world, there's a difference between "eh, we can probably do X" and actually doing the research to show that we can do X. I know, that's a hard concept for J. Random Slashdot Idiot to comprehend.
Eddie Cue can fuck right off, as far as I'm concerned. I'm perfectly happy with how I watch TV, when I happen to do so. None of the "issues" he whines about bother me in the least.
Frankly, if you find watching television so difficult that you need a speech interface and search engine to accomplish it, perhaps television is not for you. You might want to take up recreational drooling.
Indeed. While there are battery-powered angle grinders (which would beat wandering around with a long extension cord, or pulling your compressed-air tank with you on your bicycle-theft expeditions), you can carry a couple of decent-sized pry bars for the same weight and less bulk, so even if you're going after locked bikes there's little reason to use a grinder. And pry bars have many other criminal uses.
Why not tell us how great this lock will be against thieves wielding acetylene torches and thermal lances, while they're at it? "Resists small explosive charges! Difficult for chimpanzees to grip! Combination cannot be set to 1234!"
I think Trump is purposely throwing the election in order to cry foul, spew outrage, and sell his memoirs.
That's been his pattern with most of his business endeavors. I don't see why this one is any different. Look at it from his point of view.
Win: Feed the megalomania, but have to work or find some way out of it (resignation, probably). There's too much media attention to have another caretaker president; that's a thing of the past. Even W, with all his vacations and delegation of responsibility, kept pretty busy. Continued scrutiny of past bad acts, which he finds irritating.
Lose: Outrage of supporters feeds megalomania anyway. Run off with whatever resources he's siphoned from the campaign. Cushy lecture circuit appearances (which again mean more positive attention and money). A comfortable and familiar pattern of behavior.
Dude's a con man, in a classic bullying style. He's just been particularly successful at it. Winning the election wouldn't offer him much that he wants, but keeping it contentious right up to the end and then losing certainly does. Hell, it'd work so well he'll probably run again, if he's not feeling too lazy.
And not all of western Kansas is particularly flat, for that matter. Much of the high plains is rolling. Try driving down, say, US 40 after it splits off from I-70 - it's much less flat than those final miles of I-70 on the western end of Kansas. Nebraska's probably flatter overall than Kansas is, since in the former the rolling plains end further east.
On the other hand, continue west on I-70 into Colorado, and you have maybe a hundred miles of flat flat flat. (Less so to the south - it's pretty hilly around Rocky Ford and La Junta, for example.) But all that figures in the popular imagination is mountains.
But then it's hardly news that US mass culture hasn't been hugely interested in accurate portrayals of most of the country.
It's either 12 percentage points better than you, or 24% better than you.
Because pedantry makes jokes funnier.
back to the time there was no such thing as "top level domain" (the generic .com/.org/etc and the country ones) and e-mail addresses were like username@digital or username@ibm
When was this, exactly? The original TLDs were defined in RFC 920, which was published in 1984. The TCP Internet didn't even exist until 1983.
@-style email addresses are as old as email itself - Ray Tomlinson introduced them in the early '70s - but the @-suffix named a host, not a domain. This was also true for the original SMTP (which is older than DNS). The examples in RFC 821 show qualified forward- and reverse-paths.
An address like "username@ibm" would require either a direct connection to a system named "ibm", using something like the public host files that were circulated prior to the widespread adoption of DNS; or the equivalent of a DNS MX record. DNS itself of course would have used a TLD for MX records, and I don't recall an @-based email addressing system that didn't.
UUCP bang-paths used unqualified hostnames, but again those were hostnames, not some sort of unqualified domain name.
The utility of the old gTLDs (com, org, edu, net, gov, mil) is questionable; in theory, before use of com/org/net became unrestricted, they could provide a small amount of information, and resolve some name collisions, though there are probably more collisions within the historic gTLD namespaces (edu is a good example, as many US universities use conflicting abbreviations like "MSU") than among them.
The new gTLDs are pointless. The vast majority of users won't care about them at all, and most of those who do find them unnecessary and annoying. They're an IANA scam targeting marketers, narcissistic executives, and organizations with an inflated sense of self-importance (hello, Google).
If we wait long enough, anything is possible.
Patently untrue. Some things that will never be possible:
- A complete and consistent formal system
- Solving the Halting Problem for Turing Machines
- An algorithm for computing Chaitin's Omega for a given encoding
- Having both faster-than-light communication (which, obviously, includes travel) and intact causality
- Perpetual motion
- Convincing everyone that "anything is possible" is false
In exchange for any of those, you break the universe. After that, there's no human-meaningful definition of "possible". There won't be any humans, for that matter.
Indeed, if you want to quibble, you could note that we still don't have "humans beings soaring around like birds", under pretty much any reasonable definition. There are a few folks with wearable powered-flight gear, like Yves Rossy, but those are hardly practical.
LTA commercial travel ("dirigible balloons as a means of conveying passengers") was economically feasible for a few years, so he missed out on that one, but it was never a mass transport, and my guess is that it never would have been. The Hindenburg maxed out at 72 passengers, and airships are too subject to the whims of weather. Even if successful HTA travel hadn't been invented, for some unguessable reason, I imagine LTA travel would have remained largely a novelty for the wealthy. It wouldn't be anything like the sort of mass air transit we have today.
And it seems to me that in 1896 it was perfectly reasonable to dismiss, in a private letter, "the expectation of good results from any of the trials [in HTA aircraft] we hear of". The Kitty Hawk flight was still seven years away; it was another five years before the Wrights had anything that could fly with any reliability.
So while Kelvin may have underestimated how soon HTA flight would, er, get off the ground, the verifiable quotations are hardly outrageous. Certainly they don't do anything to support that tired "scientists deny the possibility of FTL travel out of hubris" argument.
Remember back in '92 when Perot got 19% of the popular vote and everything changed?
Indeed. He couldn't even repeat his success (despite having actually formed a party) in '96.
Or when Wallace got a significant number of electoral votes in '68.
In both cases, 1) lots of people were pissed, and 2) there was much talk of a viable third party. There was even some of that talk in 2000 (before the election - after it, all anyone could talk about was who had actually won) of that with the Greens, though in the end Nader & LaDuke only managed a bit less than 3m votes (an order of magnitude less than Perot in '92).
The two-party system is not currently threatened by the little parties, and they know it. The little parties don't even have much of a role as spoilers; they tend to draw too little, and too evenly, to significantly affect the outcome. The Greens might have cost Gore the election in 2000, but that thesis is controversial, and if they did, it's a rare event indeed.
So even if 20% of the popular vote did go to Gary "What's a leppo?" Johnson, it would have to be very disproportionately drawn from one side or the other to make the Big Two take notice. They have more to lose by offending their core donors and constituencies than by ignoring Libertarians.
Sigh. You don't say which airport you're referring to, so let's assume it's the shorter trip. (For the longer one rental is an even worse option, for reasons I shall not go into now.)
Drive to local airport (as that is the only economically feasible option). Park car, at $20-$30 / day. Fly to remote airport. Rent some crap vehicle similar to my car, but much less pleasant, for a week at $400 or so. Drive over a hundred miles to destination. Reverse process for return trip.
Essentially the same amount of time spent in transit, but with the additional benefits of commercial air travel, which these days is only slightly less pleasant than outpatient surgery sans anesthesia. Oh, and the "local" airport with reasonably-priced flights to this particular destination is about 90 miles from home, so I still have 25% of the total driving distance. But it's far more expensive, so there's that.
Yes, that's so much better. You're a genius.