You mean you dont trust a neocon "physicians" group?
Be that what it may; but if we should be worried about the health of Ms Clinton because of these relatively common ailments, why was it not disqualifying that Reagan kept getting skin cancer? And if I remember correctly, he also, allegedly, suffered from Alzheimers. I think at some level we all know why: the people that attack Clinton, don't really care about the truth of their attacks, they just hope that if they make enough noise, then people will think there is a real problem. There is something deeply obscene about the way these people behave - whether they call themselves 'Alt-right' or whatever. I just hope the huge majority of decent and good people in America don't passivley allow themselves to be taken hostage.
To look at it from a practical angle, we will need a way to make it quick, safe and easy to acquire the necessary permissions, if this is going to be an issue, I think. I can't think what form that would take, though - there is potential for enormous amounts of confusion and general mess here. On one hand, it seems clear that articles and illustrations that are part of publically funded research, should be quotable with only proper attribution in a well defined format as a restriction. On the other hand, material that has been produced for commercial purposes, should probably require an explicit licence in some form - maybe there needs to be a well defined format, including, but not limited to things like attribution, explicit statement of permission etc. But how about the big, grey area of material that was not origially produced for either of these purposes?
Somehow I feel it ought to be a crime for a company to create an environment in which crime is highly likely to happen; whether it is through lack of leadership or incompetence. Creating false accounts for profit is clearly fraud, in my view, and the scale of the problem indicates that the company leadership have been appallingly incompetent, at the very least, and they should be banned from running a business - I don't know if this is possible in the US, but it certainly is in UK.
Perhaps you should get out more? If you do, you'll see people staring at little portable computers.
Absolutely - one cannot get too much fresh air. However, you could also put more effort into reading what I wrote - I did specify something about relevance. However many cores the CPU on your tablet/phone has, it just isn't the sort of device you would run major server applications on. Or for that matter, office suites - you probably could, but why? You would have to add a proper keyboard and mouse, a screen and perhaps even an external disk - it would be pointless, IMO.
...it's hard to believe that it's a legitimate scientific facility, but I guess it's not impossible.
Why would there be an opposition between genuine, legitimate science, and military/commercial interests? Most science has always been in response to commercial and/or military interests, and arguably, most military action has been for what could roughly be called commercial reasons. I'd say, of course China's intentions include both commercial and military interests, same as so many America and European research projects. I also think this is really exciting in many ways; we know less about the abyss than we know about the Andromeda galaxy (maybe not factually true, but a good sound-bite, and it highlights the fact that we know embarrasingly little about what happens in our oceans). Not sure I'd like to live under two miles of water - you'd be under a lot of pressure.
I know, the header is needlessly gloomy, but haven't we, some time ago, reached the point where advances in HW are no longer all that interesting? There were major excitements when we went from 8 to 16 bit, 32 bits 64 bits; and with the introduction of protected memory (which made pre-emptive multitasking workable) and virtualisation. It's been long since I thought a new CPU feature would be worth upgrading for - it would be great to have more cores and RAM, but it can wait. And while quantum computing, graphene and carbon nanotubes are promising technologies that may boost the speed to incredible heights, I probably wouldn't even notice the difference between a response time of a millisecond and a nanosecond. Yeah, some things would be snappier, but as a consumer, it won't matter enough for me to really care.
The same goes for SW - I haven't seen anything for almost a decade, that I thought I must have. I have all the tools I need and more: editors, compilers, databases engines galore, office packages, several classes of graphics editors (bitmap, vector, ray tracing,..), I can design fonts that stretch all the way to the far end of Unicode and so on. Of course, because I use Linux, I have all of these things on any HW I am ever likely to encounter (and where they are relevant; I don't at the moment foresee a need for running Oracle or Glassfish on a mobile).
I guess the big question here is - from a consumer's point of view, have we reached the point where a computer is just a computer; an appliance, like a toaster, where they may look different and you may choose one look over another, but actually they just do the same basic thing?
To quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT):
... DDT is a persistent organic pollutant... Because of its lipophilic properties, DDT can bioaccumulate, especially in predatory birds.[53] DDT, DDE and DDD magnify through the food chain...
DDT is an endocrine disruptor....
DDT may not kill vertebrates as swiftly as it kills insects, but it hangs around in the environment, and because it is lipophilic, it accumulates in body fat rather than being excreted with the urine. Those at the top of the food chain like birds of prey and humans tend to accumulate more, because we eat many animals that each have accumulated some. The words "endocrine disruptor" is bad news in that context.
LED lightbulbs should last 25 years and at end of life would be running the equivalent of Windows 3.1
Windows running a lightbulb? Yeah, that should work well. I imagine something slightly more appropriate, perhaps, with only the functionality that is relevant. And - what kind software support do you expect will be necessary for a lightbulb? Is it going to be a full media hub or something?
Your"find me a parking spot" app will be doomed as soon as it becomes popular. You'll be racing against everyone else looking for a parking space in the same area.
Sure - my off-the-cuff idea isn't very good, perhaps, but maybe with some work it could be. The point, though, is to start thinking about the things an IoT could actually be useful for, rather than everybody just saying "not good enough" about every silly idea that comes along. I am old enough to remember a time when the internet was widely regarded as "the biggest timewaster ever". It still is that, no doubt, but look where that's got it.
I think, on principle, we have eradicated enough species already without thinking, or thinking no further than our own, short term comfort. Like when we eradicate a top predator, because it occasionally takes a few of our cattle, and then we get overrun by billions of whatever used to be its main prey species - and they generally turn out to be a much, much bigger problem. We don't need to rush headlong into doing these things - we are clever animals, we can find better solutions than killing without thinking. We don't actually have much knowledge about whether these mosquitoes have an important role to play in their environment; a lot of mosquitoes are important pollinators, and just remember the ongoing furore about the honey bees.
When you're poor you can only afford low-quality goods that break all of the time and if you're on welfare you need to be sure to use it all before the end of each month. That is why they and especially their kids get into this habit of acting as if money is a perishable good that needs to be spent ASAP.
That is a really good point, actually. Living in England, perhaps it is more visible, if you know where to look. There are rich people - seriously rich people - who maybe buy a pair of hideously expensive shoes, or a coat that looks very plain, but is very expensive, and then they never buy another for years, because the quality is really good, so in the end they spend less money on clothes and shoes than those who have to buy cheap rubbish that they can use for a few months at best.
I think the basic income could potentially be a very good idea. There will of course be some that just spend it all stupidly - but they already do this. The advantage of doing it this way is that you can probably make some significant savings on administration. In most of the current welfare systems, there is a big, heavy bureaucracy that means test and try to make sure that nobody cheats - it doesn't work, basically, and it makes everything very expensive and so slow, that it actually punishes the large majority that the system should really help. It might also help those people with their self-esteem, if they didn't have to go through onerous and meaningless chores and instead were free to go out and improve their situation with a bit of extra income or education.
"Tor hasn't changed, it's the world that's changed," says Aaron Johnson, the lead researcher on a 2013 paper which reported that 80% of Tor users could be de-anonymized within six months, and that today's users may want protection from different threats.
I think this is it: most people are simply not all that worried about anonymity or privacy. Perhaps they are stupid, but on the other hand, it could be that it is just bit too paranoid to go to enormous lengths to protect one's privacy. I can see why - with smartphones and smart tvs and all the other silly gadgets, as well as credit cards that we use all over the place, we leave an enormous trail everywhere we go, and we allow companies access to our privacy almost without limitations; so how much is it actually worth that we encrypt emails and use Tor?
Oh, and before you hit the button and mod me down because you are miffed that I have an opinion you don't like - how about thinking up a really good reply that will cut me right down to size? It ought to be easy, if I'm such an idiot;-)
- tends to obscure the usefulness of the technology, as usual. The socalled IoT has a lot of very promising uses, none of which have anything to do with spying on people. Just think of finding parking spaces - a very mundane task, and something that can make a visit to a cuty centre daunting. There will usually be a legal parking space somewhere, but how do you find it? If all spaces had an IP address and a number plate recognition camera, you could book you space in advance, and be sure that anybody who parked in you space would be fined. I would give my left arm for that - or somebody's left arm at least.
I listened to a programme recently about energy and how to use the production capacity optimally. The problem now is that we have to have enough capacity to cover surges in demand; like when everybody goes to put the electric kettle on when there is a break in the TV programmes. With a bit (well, quite a bit) of clever, automatic management, if certain equipments were on the IoT, they could be told to hold back on their energy needs just while there is a short surge in demand. These equipments could be small (but numerous) things fridges and freezers, or big things like the bitumen heaters in a factory that produces asphalt coatings for roads. They don't actually needs to be active at set intervals - they could certainly wait 15 minutes without problems. Apparently this alone could help us stretch our energy capacity a lot.
Regrettably, all you see headlines about is nonsense like this, about how bloody cool it would be to have a camera inside you fridge or whatever. Even at best, this is no more than a mildly amusing gimmick that comes along for the ride and tries to steal the show from the actual, serious importance of the IoT.
...Kaby Lake will not run on anything older than Windows 10,...
Surely the CPU doesn't run on the OS? And a CPU, being a HW device to run a wide range of SW on, will by necessity have an instruction set that will support any OS, if somebody can be bothered to port it.
With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.
If this was all we had to go on, certainly. However, we do have a fairly good outline of ideas about how life arose from chemistry on this planet, and it doesn't look like there was anything very unusual about Earth; in fact, it looks a lot like life is something that is almost inevitable, when the conditions are not too hostile. Finding very early fossils fit into this - they don't prove that we are right, but it does seem that life on Earth arose as soon as the conditions had barely settled down. Of course, most of us would love for life to be abundant all across the universe, so it doesn't take much to persuade us - that's something to keep in mind.
How can you possible think that? C++ is just class slapped on C. The fact that you need to define your private fields and methods publicly in the header file makes C++ just a cripple as an object oriented language. The rest is just good to obfuscate your code, i.e. op-overloading and templates.
I suppose it is a matter of taste what you consider good, and I have no problem accepting that other people don't have the same likings as I do, but I will try to explain. Firstly, I think your description of C++ is wrong; a huge amount of very careful considerations have gone into the design of C++ from the very beginning. Bjarne Stroustrup, for all that he's a Dane (like me), is actually a clever guy. Your reasons for not liking the result should not include the assumption that it is "just class slapped on C", I think, since it is grossly inaccurate.
Next, there is no need to define private fields and methods in a publically available header file; just like Java has its interface classes that are meant to protect the public from viewing the horrors that lie within, in C++ you achieve the same by creating a class with only pure, virtual methods, and then inheriting that from your implementation. This of course forces you to define getters and setters, which many don't like, but that is at least one way to do it.
Overloading is an obvious idea, at least if you have some background that involves mathematics; all languages I know, except for assembler and possibly COBOL, have operator overloading in some limited fashion: integers and floating point numbers are different data types, but for both, we want to be able to use arithmetic operators. And it is not that much of a stretch to imagine other cases where you might want to do the same - strings being one example. But as we know from pascal vs C, there are more ways than one to implement strings, so although the concept of how '+' and '==' should work is obvious, the details are not. Without expanding too much, I think the rationale behind overloading is very reasonable; but of course, it also opens up for stupid misuse cases - there is nothing to stop people from changing '+' to mean something like 'division', except for common sense.
Templates is "macros with syntax check", in a way; it is an incredibly strong tool, and I find it hard to imagine how one would implement design patterns without templates, but just like all other power tools, you need to know what you are doing - and in most cases you should choose a smaller tool.
Finally, the reason I like C++ is the same reason I like C: C is a very clean language - the syntax is a very good compromise between the minimal and the practical, and it is what I, perhaps incorrectly, call 'logically complete'. Somebody (K&R, probably) very carefully designed the language, so that the only limitations are the ones set by the external parameters (like available RAM), not by arbitrary design decisions. The same is true about C++, but when you add things like multiple inheritance, overloading and all the other stuff to C, things will necessarily get much more complicated. However, the added complexity is only the minimal, logical consequence of the extra syntax. The upside of this is that although it is more complex, it is so in a natural manner, and that makes it relatively easy to see what the correct syntax is. And that is, in essence why I like C++ and think it is the best implementation of OOP.
A simple example: In mathematics, a vector space is a set of objects for which linear combinations are defined: a*V+b*U, where U, V are your 'vectors' and a, b are 'scalars' (and I'm being deliberately vague on what scalars could be). The interesting thing about vector spaces is that no matter what the actual vectors are, they all follow the same, basic rules. Operator overloading would enable me to define what '*' and '+' might mean; just as in maths, a vector could represent geometric objects ('directed line segments'), functions whose values can be added and multiplied (c
I think your reasoning is too simplistic - throughout history we have seen many times, how increased automation means job-losses for the people whose skills are being automated; I can't see how anybody can explain that away. Automation quite often also leads to loss of variation - products become more uniform, because a machine always makes it in the same way, and is able to produce in huge quantities; some would argue that this is another downside. However, it is true that over time the increased productivity often leads to better outcomes for society as a whole, once the people that lost their livelyhoods have gone away in one way or another.
Another part of reasoning you haven't addressed is the fact that companies do this to drive down cost per unit produced; very often this means employing low-skilled, cheap workers instead of the more expensive, highly skilled ones. So, more employment for unskilled workers, which is good for them, of course, but since there will be less employment for the skilled workers, who lost out, there is less incentive for anyone to get an education in that particular skill. That, in turn, will lead to a situation where that skill becomes higly specialilsed; and if the skill is one that is still going to be of critical importance, then those few specialists will become very valuable, and thus expensive. And of course, the fewer there are of these experts, the closer you get to have a single point of failure, where companies can't find the critical staff they need. There's a bit of a cyclical argument going on here, but I think I have demonstrated that it isn't quite as simple as you suggest.
I don't know C#, other than it is a sort of almost C++, but not quite. Oh, and it runs in a kind of JVM, but not quite. Obviously I can't comment on the merits or otherwise of the language, but having long experience with both Microsoft and Oracle, I feel I come out in favour of Oracle - perhaps not on how nice they are (they are both businesses - ie callous, greedy and only trustworthy if it is profitable), but to an engineer what matters is not 'how gentle their smile, how sweet their countenance', but the quality of their product, the documentation and their willingness to engage in support. Oracle's documentation in particular is astoundingly good - not a lot of colour pictures, I'll grant, but just have a look at their SQL manual, or the Messages and Codes; the amount of detail is exquisite, in my view. Not beginner friendly, but most of us don't stay beginners forever.
The other thing in favour of Java over C# is that Java is supported on nearly enything that is a computer - from mobile to mainframe; mainframes even come with dedicated Java processors, in effect. That is the real reason for anybody to use Java; in itself it isn't an incredibly good language - I think C++ is a better object oriented language, and C is better for ad hoc coding, but Java, with it's huge set of standards for nearly everything, is probably the most portable language there is.
So the EU can just come down and tell it's member countries who they are and aren't allowed to give tax breaks to. This would be an interesting ruling though as ANY tax breaks would become illegal in the EU and thus there would be no viable way for companies to keep their business in the richer EU countries.
Ireland joined the EU, voluntarily, because saw it as advantageous. In joining, you agree to follow the rules that govern membership; breaking the rules amounts to breach of contract, essentially. I can't imagine that anybody would be happy, if they made an agreement with somebody, fulfilled their part of it, and then found out that the other party didn't do their bit. So yes, of course the EU can tell the member states that they cannot enjoy the benefits, unless they also fulfill their obligations.
Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?
It probably isn't, come to that. C has many obvious advantages - it is easy to learn, it is low-level, so programs tend to be fast, the system calls of most OSes are directly accessible from C. The downside is that because it is so easy to learn, it also invites the inexperienced programmer to commit dangerous errors, that can sometimes be hard to pin down. Many of the better class of new languages try to address these problems, although I am not convinced that the solutions are always worth the cost. The best, new feature, in my view, is the introduction of exception handling in Java, C++, Python and other languages.
It is hard to compare C to Java, I think; although they are syntactically similar, they address different classes of problems. Where C is a free-styling sort of "assembler++" (I mean that in a good way), Java has moved to the other end of the spectrum: the compiled byte-code run in a VM on any platform for which a JVM has been implemented, and Java probably has more industrial standards associated with it than any other language; this makes it rather hard to learn to work with, but it also means that there is well-designed, standard way of doing almost every important thing you might want to do with software, and it makes it much likely that your programs are going to be compatible with other Java programs.
So this super rare find didn't die from something usual, old age, disease, got eaten, but happened to die doing something it was very good at and probably killed 1/10000 of their kind.
Modern humans still climb trees; I have seen several programmes on the BBC, for example; one about the Baka people in Cameroun, who climb some 30 meters up in the canopy to gather honey from wild bees - another about a tribe in New Guinea, who build their homes in tall trees. The fact that we have found 1 fossil that probably died from a fall out of a tree doesn't mean that these people necessarily lived in trees or did things we don't do now-a-days.
Imagine the disappointment when they decode the signal, and it turns out to be an extra-terrestrial version of Eastenders or X-factor. So much for superior intelligence.
:-) No-one's perfect, but I think Einstein's particular genius was to somehow produce a theory, that is at once mindblowing and so incredibly simple (apart from the tensor gymnastics of differential geometry); and which has turned out to be nearly perfectly bullet-proof. The other great theory, QM, is unbelievably complex and frankly unconvincing in comparison, were it not for the small matter of its astonishing success in practical terms. GR is very interesting, not least because in a sense, where SR threw away the old ideas about the ether, GR reintroduced it as space itself. It is also remarkable that GR takes a scalar field, gravitation, and turns it into the metric tensor; seeing how the electro-magnetic field is so similar, I feel sure that somewhere along the line, we will find a way to include it into a generalised metric tensor - I look forward to that.
1: Called the cosmological constant 'his greatest blunder' but it turned out he was right all along
I think we are going to see a lot of twists and turns in that end of the story - there has been a tendency to explain away everything as fields and then looking for particles that act as vector bosons; I don't think it explains much, really. All these fields are really just placeholders, and hopefully we can find a way to put them into geometry or something better.
2: Refused to accept QE calling it 'Spooky action at a distance'
To be fair, this is really where QM and GR clash in a big way. It is very difficult to imagine how entaglement could be possible if information cannot travel faster the the speed of light, although maybe that particular limitation is due the the fact that we choose to discount the idea, that information can be exchanged without exchanging energy. I'm not up to date on entanglement, so I don't know if entanglement has been seen to involve a transfer of energy between the entangled particles.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean you dont trust a neocon "physicians" group?
Be that what it may; but if we should be worried about the health of Ms Clinton because of these relatively common ailments, why was it not disqualifying that Reagan kept getting skin cancer? And if I remember correctly, he also, allegedly, suffered from Alzheimers. I think at some level we all know why: the people that attack Clinton, don't really care about the truth of their attacks, they just hope that if they make enough noise, then people will think there is a real problem. There is something deeply obscene about the way these people behave - whether they call themselves 'Alt-right' or whatever. I just hope the huge majority of decent and good people in America don't passivley allow themselves to be taken hostage.
To look at it from a practical angle, we will need a way to make it quick, safe and easy to acquire the necessary permissions, if this is going to be an issue, I think. I can't think what form that would take, though - there is potential for enormous amounts of confusion and general mess here. On one hand, it seems clear that articles and illustrations that are part of publically funded research, should be quotable with only proper attribution in a well defined format as a restriction. On the other hand, material that has been produced for commercial purposes, should probably require an explicit licence in some form - maybe there needs to be a well defined format, including, but not limited to things like attribution, explicit statement of permission etc. But how about the big, grey area of material that was not origially produced for either of these purposes?
Somehow I feel it ought to be a crime for a company to create an environment in which crime is highly likely to happen; whether it is through lack of leadership or incompetence. Creating false accounts for profit is clearly fraud, in my view, and the scale of the problem indicates that the company leadership have been appallingly incompetent, at the very least, and they should be banned from running a business - I don't know if this is possible in the US, but it certainly is in UK.
Perhaps you should get out more? If you do, you'll see people staring at little portable computers.
Absolutely - one cannot get too much fresh air. However, you could also put more effort into reading what I wrote - I did specify something about relevance. However many cores the CPU on your tablet/phone has, it just isn't the sort of device you would run major server applications on. Or for that matter, office suites - you probably could, but why? You would have to add a proper keyboard and mouse, a screen and perhaps even an external disk - it would be pointless, IMO.
...it's hard to believe that it's a legitimate scientific facility, but I guess it's not impossible.
Why would there be an opposition between genuine, legitimate science, and military/commercial interests? Most science has always been in response to commercial and/or military interests, and arguably, most military action has been for what could roughly be called commercial reasons. I'd say, of course China's intentions include both commercial and military interests, same as so many America and European research projects. I also think this is really exciting in many ways; we know less about the abyss than we know about the Andromeda galaxy (maybe not factually true, but a good sound-bite, and it highlights the fact that we know embarrasingly little about what happens in our oceans). Not sure I'd like to live under two miles of water - you'd be under a lot of pressure.
I know, the header is needlessly gloomy, but haven't we, some time ago, reached the point where advances in HW are no longer all that interesting? There were major excitements when we went from 8 to 16 bit, 32 bits 64 bits; and with the introduction of protected memory (which made pre-emptive multitasking workable) and virtualisation. It's been long since I thought a new CPU feature would be worth upgrading for - it would be great to have more cores and RAM, but it can wait. And while quantum computing, graphene and carbon nanotubes are promising technologies that may boost the speed to incredible heights, I probably wouldn't even notice the difference between a response time of a millisecond and a nanosecond. Yeah, some things would be snappier, but as a consumer, it won't matter enough for me to really care.
The same goes for SW - I haven't seen anything for almost a decade, that I thought I must have. I have all the tools I need and more: editors, compilers, databases engines galore, office packages, several classes of graphics editors (bitmap, vector, ray tracing, ..), I can design fonts that stretch all the way to the far end of Unicode and so on. Of course, because I use Linux, I have all of these things on any HW I am ever likely to encounter (and where they are relevant; I don't at the moment foresee a need for running Oracle or Glassfish on a mobile).
I guess the big question here is - from a consumer's point of view, have we reached the point where a computer is just a computer; an appliance, like a toaster, where they may look different and you may choose one look over another, but actually they just do the same basic thing?
To quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT):
... ... Because of its lipophilic properties, DDT can bioaccumulate, especially in predatory birds.[53] DDT, DDE and DDD magnify through the food chain...
DDT is a persistent organic pollutant
DDT is an endocrine disruptor....
DDT may not kill vertebrates as swiftly as it kills insects, but it hangs around in the environment, and because it is lipophilic, it accumulates in body fat rather than being excreted with the urine. Those at the top of the food chain like birds of prey and humans tend to accumulate more, because we eat many animals that each have accumulated some. The words "endocrine disruptor" is bad news in that context.
LED lightbulbs should last 25 years and at end of life would be running the equivalent of Windows 3.1
Windows running a lightbulb? Yeah, that should work well. I imagine something slightly more appropriate, perhaps, with only the functionality that is relevant. And - what kind software support do you expect will be necessary for a lightbulb? Is it going to be a full media hub or something?
Your"find me a parking spot" app will be doomed as soon as it becomes popular. You'll be racing against everyone else looking for a parking space in the same area.
Sure - my off-the-cuff idea isn't very good, perhaps, but maybe with some work it could be. The point, though, is to start thinking about the things an IoT could actually be useful for, rather than everybody just saying "not good enough" about every silly idea that comes along. I am old enough to remember a time when the internet was widely regarded as "the biggest timewaster ever". It still is that, no doubt, but look where that's got it.
I think, on principle, we have eradicated enough species already without thinking, or thinking no further than our own, short term comfort. Like when we eradicate a top predator, because it occasionally takes a few of our cattle, and then we get overrun by billions of whatever used to be its main prey species - and they generally turn out to be a much, much bigger problem. We don't need to rush headlong into doing these things - we are clever animals, we can find better solutions than killing without thinking. We don't actually have much knowledge about whether these mosquitoes have an important role to play in their environment; a lot of mosquitoes are important pollinators, and just remember the ongoing furore about the honey bees.
... the chair -- because, that's an easy fish for the FBI to fry. (Hmm... is that where that expression came from?)
Not sure. Is he a Pisces?
When you're poor you can only afford low-quality goods that break all of the time and if you're on welfare you need to be sure to use it all before the end of each month. That is why they and especially their kids get into this habit of acting as if money is a perishable good that needs to be spent ASAP.
That is a really good point, actually. Living in England, perhaps it is more visible, if you know where to look. There are rich people - seriously rich people - who maybe buy a pair of hideously expensive shoes, or a coat that looks very plain, but is very expensive, and then they never buy another for years, because the quality is really good, so in the end they spend less money on clothes and shoes than those who have to buy cheap rubbish that they can use for a few months at best.
I think the basic income could potentially be a very good idea. There will of course be some that just spend it all stupidly - but they already do this. The advantage of doing it this way is that you can probably make some significant savings on administration. In most of the current welfare systems, there is a big, heavy bureaucracy that means test and try to make sure that nobody cheats - it doesn't work, basically, and it makes everything very expensive and so slow, that it actually punishes the large majority that the system should really help. It might also help those people with their self-esteem, if they didn't have to go through onerous and meaningless chores and instead were free to go out and improve their situation with a bit of extra income or education.
"Tor hasn't changed, it's the world that's changed," says Aaron Johnson, the lead researcher on a 2013 paper which reported that 80% of Tor users could be de-anonymized within six months, and that today's users may want protection from different threats.
I think this is it: most people are simply not all that worried about anonymity or privacy. Perhaps they are stupid, but on the other hand, it could be that it is just bit too paranoid to go to enormous lengths to protect one's privacy. I can see why - with smartphones and smart tvs and all the other silly gadgets, as well as credit cards that we use all over the place, we leave an enormous trail everywhere we go, and we allow companies access to our privacy almost without limitations; so how much is it actually worth that we encrypt emails and use Tor?
Oh, and before you hit the button and mod me down because you are miffed that I have an opinion you don't like - how about thinking up a really good reply that will cut me right down to size? It ought to be easy, if I'm such an idiot ;-)
- tends to obscure the usefulness of the technology, as usual. The socalled IoT has a lot of very promising uses, none of which have anything to do with spying on people. Just think of finding parking spaces - a very mundane task, and something that can make a visit to a cuty centre daunting. There will usually be a legal parking space somewhere, but how do you find it? If all spaces had an IP address and a number plate recognition camera, you could book you space in advance, and be sure that anybody who parked in you space would be fined. I would give my left arm for that - or somebody's left arm at least.
I listened to a programme recently about energy and how to use the production capacity optimally. The problem now is that we have to have enough capacity to cover surges in demand; like when everybody goes to put the electric kettle on when there is a break in the TV programmes. With a bit (well, quite a bit) of clever, automatic management, if certain equipments were on the IoT, they could be told to hold back on their energy needs just while there is a short surge in demand. These equipments could be small (but numerous) things fridges and freezers, or big things like the bitumen heaters in a factory that produces asphalt coatings for roads. They don't actually needs to be active at set intervals - they could certainly wait 15 minutes without problems. Apparently this alone could help us stretch our energy capacity a lot.
Regrettably, all you see headlines about is nonsense like this, about how bloody cool it would be to have a camera inside you fridge or whatever. Even at best, this is no more than a mildly amusing gimmick that comes along for the ride and tries to steal the show from the actual, serious importance of the IoT.
The EU is dying
So is my wife, now that her hair begins to gray. What do they use, do you know?
- but this announcement makes no sense to me.
...Kaby Lake will not run on anything older than Windows 10, ...
Surely the CPU doesn't run on the OS? And a CPU, being a HW device to run a wide range of SW on, will by necessity have an instruction set that will support any OS, if somebody can be bothered to port it.
With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.
If this was all we had to go on, certainly. However, we do have a fairly good outline of ideas about how life arose from chemistry on this planet, and it doesn't look like there was anything very unusual about Earth; in fact, it looks a lot like life is something that is almost inevitable, when the conditions are not too hostile. Finding very early fossils fit into this - they don't prove that we are right, but it does seem that life on Earth arose as soon as the conditions had barely settled down. Of course, most of us would love for life to be abundant all across the universe, so it doesn't take much to persuade us - that's something to keep in mind.
How can you possible think that? C++ is just class slapped on C. The fact that you need to define your private fields and methods publicly in the header file makes C++ just a cripple as an object oriented language. The rest is just good to obfuscate your code, i.e. op-overloading and templates.
I suppose it is a matter of taste what you consider good, and I have no problem accepting that other people don't have the same likings as I do, but I will try to explain. Firstly, I think your description of C++ is wrong; a huge amount of very careful considerations have gone into the design of C++ from the very beginning. Bjarne Stroustrup, for all that he's a Dane (like me), is actually a clever guy. Your reasons for not liking the result should not include the assumption that it is "just class slapped on C", I think, since it is grossly inaccurate.
Next, there is no need to define private fields and methods in a publically available header file; just like Java has its interface classes that are meant to protect the public from viewing the horrors that lie within, in C++ you achieve the same by creating a class with only pure, virtual methods, and then inheriting that from your implementation. This of course forces you to define getters and setters, which many don't like, but that is at least one way to do it.
Overloading is an obvious idea, at least if you have some background that involves mathematics; all languages I know, except for assembler and possibly COBOL, have operator overloading in some limited fashion: integers and floating point numbers are different data types, but for both, we want to be able to use arithmetic operators. And it is not that much of a stretch to imagine other cases where you might want to do the same - strings being one example. But as we know from pascal vs C, there are more ways than one to implement strings, so although the concept of how '+' and '==' should work is obvious, the details are not. Without expanding too much, I think the rationale behind overloading is very reasonable; but of course, it also opens up for stupid misuse cases - there is nothing to stop people from changing '+' to mean something like 'division', except for common sense.
Templates is "macros with syntax check", in a way; it is an incredibly strong tool, and I find it hard to imagine how one would implement design patterns without templates, but just like all other power tools, you need to know what you are doing - and in most cases you should choose a smaller tool.
Finally, the reason I like C++ is the same reason I like C: C is a very clean language - the syntax is a very good compromise between the minimal and the practical, and it is what I, perhaps incorrectly, call 'logically complete'. Somebody (K&R, probably) very carefully designed the language, so that the only limitations are the ones set by the external parameters (like available RAM), not by arbitrary design decisions. The same is true about C++, but when you add things like multiple inheritance, overloading and all the other stuff to C, things will necessarily get much more complicated. However, the added complexity is only the minimal, logical consequence of the extra syntax. The upside of this is that although it is more complex, it is so in a natural manner, and that makes it relatively easy to see what the correct syntax is. And that is, in essence why I like C++ and think it is the best implementation of OOP.
A simple example: In mathematics, a vector space is a set of objects for which linear combinations are defined: a*V+b*U, where U, V are your 'vectors' and a, b are 'scalars' (and I'm being deliberately vague on what scalars could be). The interesting thing about vector spaces is that no matter what the actual vectors are, they all follow the same, basic rules. Operator overloading would enable me to define what '*' and '+' might mean; just as in maths, a vector could represent geometric objects ('directed line segments'), functions whose values can be added and multiplied (c
If your brain is too dysfunctional ...
I think your reasoning is too simplistic - throughout history we have seen many times, how increased automation means job-losses for the people whose skills are being automated; I can't see how anybody can explain that away. Automation quite often also leads to loss of variation - products become more uniform, because a machine always makes it in the same way, and is able to produce in huge quantities; some would argue that this is another downside. However, it is true that over time the increased productivity often leads to better outcomes for society as a whole, once the people that lost their livelyhoods have gone away in one way or another.
Another part of reasoning you haven't addressed is the fact that companies do this to drive down cost per unit produced; very often this means employing low-skilled, cheap workers instead of the more expensive, highly skilled ones. So, more employment for unskilled workers, which is good for them, of course, but since there will be less employment for the skilled workers, who lost out, there is less incentive for anyone to get an education in that particular skill. That, in turn, will lead to a situation where that skill becomes higly specialilsed; and if the skill is one that is still going to be of critical importance, then those few specialists will become very valuable, and thus expensive. And of course, the fewer there are of these experts, the closer you get to have a single point of failure, where companies can't find the critical staff they need. There's a bit of a cyclical argument going on here, but I think I have demonstrated that it isn't quite as simple as you suggest.
I don't know C#, other than it is a sort of almost C++, but not quite. Oh, and it runs in a kind of JVM, but not quite. Obviously I can't comment on the merits or otherwise of the language, but having long experience with both Microsoft and Oracle, I feel I come out in favour of Oracle - perhaps not on how nice they are (they are both businesses - ie callous, greedy and only trustworthy if it is profitable), but to an engineer what matters is not 'how gentle their smile, how sweet their countenance', but the quality of their product, the documentation and their willingness to engage in support. Oracle's documentation in particular is astoundingly good - not a lot of colour pictures, I'll grant, but just have a look at their SQL manual, or the Messages and Codes; the amount of detail is exquisite, in my view. Not beginner friendly, but most of us don't stay beginners forever.
The other thing in favour of Java over C# is that Java is supported on nearly enything that is a computer - from mobile to mainframe; mainframes even come with dedicated Java processors, in effect. That is the real reason for anybody to use Java; in itself it isn't an incredibly good language - I think C++ is a better object oriented language, and C is better for ad hoc coding, but Java, with it's huge set of standards for nearly everything, is probably the most portable language there is.
So the EU can just come down and tell it's member countries who they are and aren't allowed to give tax breaks to. This would be an interesting ruling though as ANY tax breaks would become illegal in the EU and thus there would be no viable way for companies to keep their business in the richer EU countries.
Ireland joined the EU, voluntarily, because saw it as advantageous. In joining, you agree to follow the rules that govern membership; breaking the rules amounts to breach of contract, essentially. I can't imagine that anybody would be happy, if they made an agreement with somebody, fulfilled their part of it, and then found out that the other party didn't do their bit. So yes, of course the EU can tell the member states that they cannot enjoy the benefits, unless they also fulfill their obligations.
C doesn't have a corporate sponsor.
Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?
It probably isn't, come to that. C has many obvious advantages - it is easy to learn, it is low-level, so programs tend to be fast, the system calls of most OSes are directly accessible from C. The downside is that because it is so easy to learn, it also invites the inexperienced programmer to commit dangerous errors, that can sometimes be hard to pin down. Many of the better class of new languages try to address these problems, although I am not convinced that the solutions are always worth the cost. The best, new feature, in my view, is the introduction of exception handling in Java, C++, Python and other languages.
It is hard to compare C to Java, I think; although they are syntactically similar, they address different classes of problems. Where C is a free-styling sort of "assembler++" (I mean that in a good way), Java has moved to the other end of the spectrum: the compiled byte-code run in a VM on any platform for which a JVM has been implemented, and Java probably has more industrial standards associated with it than any other language; this makes it rather hard to learn to work with, but it also means that there is well-designed, standard way of doing almost every important thing you might want to do with software, and it makes it much likely that your programs are going to be compatible with other Java programs.
So this super rare find didn't die from something usual, old age, disease, got eaten, but happened to die doing something it was very good at and probably killed 1/10000 of their kind.
Modern humans still climb trees; I have seen several programmes on the BBC, for example; one about the Baka people in Cameroun, who climb some 30 meters up in the canopy to gather honey from wild bees - another about a tribe in New Guinea, who build their homes in tall trees. The fact that we have found 1 fossil that probably died from a fall out of a tree doesn't mean that these people necessarily lived in trees or did things we don't do now-a-days.
....It seems like not all are that impressed...
Imagine the disappointment when they decode the signal, and it turns out to be an extra-terrestrial version of Eastenders or X-factor. So much for superior intelligence.
:-) No-one's perfect, but I think Einstein's particular genius was to somehow produce a theory, that is at once mindblowing and so incredibly simple (apart from the tensor gymnastics of differential geometry); and which has turned out to be nearly perfectly bullet-proof. The other great theory, QM, is unbelievably complex and frankly unconvincing in comparison, were it not for the small matter of its astonishing success in practical terms. GR is very interesting, not least because in a sense, where SR threw away the old ideas about the ether, GR reintroduced it as space itself. It is also remarkable that GR takes a scalar field, gravitation, and turns it into the metric tensor; seeing how the electro-magnetic field is so similar, I feel sure that somewhere along the line, we will find a way to include it into a generalised metric tensor - I look forward to that.
1: Called the cosmological constant 'his greatest blunder' but it turned out he was right all along
I think we are going to see a lot of twists and turns in that end of the story - there has been a tendency to explain away everything as fields and then looking for particles that act as vector bosons; I don't think it explains much, really. All these fields are really just placeholders, and hopefully we can find a way to put them into geometry or something better.
2: Refused to accept QE calling it 'Spooky action at a distance'
To be fair, this is really where QM and GR clash in a big way. It is very difficult to imagine how entaglement could be possible if information cannot travel faster the the speed of light, although maybe that particular limitation is due the the fact that we choose to discount the idea, that information can be exchanged without exchanging energy. I'm not up to date on entanglement, so I don't know if entanglement has been seen to involve a transfer of energy between the entangled particles.