Perhaps I'm getting snowed, but I really do see more here than a graphic equalizer
You're not getting snowed, and I can see how my earlier comment could have been misleading. Yes, there is more to them than equalization, but the equalization function is primary. The noise cancellation, which works moderately well, is useful but not essential, at least in my case.
My hearing aids have two programs, one general and one with forward-focusing and better noise cancelation. In environments where the second program is useful, the difference is a tiny increment on the first, whereas the difference between them being on and off is huge--I was starting to lose the thread in business meetings because I couldn't catch everything, and while like most people with progressive hearing loss I can read lips somewhat you can't always see people's faces.
So I'll correct myself: there is more than equalization going on, but the equalization function is by far the most important. Don't pay a lot more for fancy programming because it makes a marginal difference.
I'm not an acoustic physicist, but I have friends who are. The ear is a very complex organ that interacts with the sound-shadowing and resonance effects of the head and shoulders to provide us with a remarkable thee-dimensional sound environment based on only two receptors, which is pretty damned cool when you think about it.
I'm glad we have a study now which suggests this is how students are using this resource.
So am I, but I'm also waiting for studies that show college students eat, sleep, and worry about money and love just like the rest of us.
The premise of the article is sad: that out default assumption should be that anyone who deviates from white-bread middle-aged middle-American in any respect should be treated as if they were irresponsible, dishonest, or stupid.
I live in a university town, my company has offices on campus, I'm a technical mentor on a program where most of the other mentors are university students, and I'm always surprised when I'm reminded that the students are a couple of decades younger than me, because there just isn't that much difference between us.
the hospital forces him to use the robot even on cases that would be much better done hands-on
No one is "forcing" him to do anything. He just doesn't have the guts to do the right thing and say no to his bureaucratic overlords. He is willing to do harm--in his own estimation--to other innocent human beings who have put their deepest trust in him, for the sake of his own comfort and security.
Your friend is a coward, and the most appalling thing is that you apparently see nothing wrong with that.
When people say, "For evil to triumph it is merely necessary for good people to do nothing", this is exactly the kind of behaviour they mean.
And we know with a far higher degree of certainty than any of the bogus stats in the article that that means they have mediocre technology but great marketing.
Being "market leader" in a cutting edge (as it were) field is in my experience almost always an indication that the tech is poor to middling but the company is brilliant at marketing. I'm not just talking about Microsoft here, although they are a prominent example of the phenomenon. In the areas I've worked in professionally (which includes image-guided surgery) the best technology has never been close to the market leader.
Personally, I don't want a surgeon using a machine from the market leader on me until the technology is mature, which doesn't happen for decades.
The sanest way to do it would be year-month-day, because then you could increase the precision of the time string to whatever you needed just by adding units to the right
ISO standard date format is YYYY-MM-DD. Everything else is non-standard's compliant gibberish of the kind that under most circumstances/.'ers would be violently opposed to (especially if Microsoft did it.)
ISO 8601 is the full standard, which includes times in the form:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (the letter "T" is often replaced with a space for human-readable but non-standard date/time presentation).
I have no idea if the standard has accommodation for the archaic AM/PM system of representation.
There is really no excuse for not using ISO 8601 standard date/times, other than cultural prejudice, insularity and parochialism. And no one will ever again have to ask, "What does 10/11/12 mean?"
If you disagree with me, please tell me what I mean by 10/11/12. Since this date format is so much superior to all others in the eyes of some they should have no trouble at all telling me exactly what that date means, as opposed to:
The only part that is unique is the ear plug part that are form fitted to your uniquely shaped ear so as to stop the escape of sound which can contribute to annoying feedback.
Dunno about the rest of your post, which seems kinda weird, but this is not true, at least in my case. Fairly high-end hearing aids with no custom fitting. Soft plastic is all.
My advice - go to a country with a real healthcare somewhere in EU or Canada or Asia and get some hearing aids there. It will come out cheaper even with a plane ticket.
Sorry, does not help (much). I'm a Canadian with hearing aids (Seimens, very nice) that ran me $2500 total. The good news is that the province kicks in $500 per ear every three years. The bad news is that the aids themselves cost $1200 each plus roughly another $750 in ancillary costs.
On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them.
That alone should be a red flag, for several reasons.
1) They are an engine technology company, not a manufacturer. How much experience to they have in mass production, supply-chain management, etc? Not a small learning curve.
2) Tooling costs are high, increasing their capital needs, which is a convenient way of pulling more money out of their investors and therefore creating more opportunities to skim.
3) By manufacturing themselves they don't have to reveal the "secret secret", just the "secret". Any attempt to independently verify their claims will be made vastly more difficult by not having a full and public disclosure of their trade secrets in patent documents or under NDA to a licensed manufacture. So this approach puts off the day of reckoning for a good long while, and during that time company insiders can happily pay themselves big fat bonuses. It will also be much harder to prove they were lying about the technology's potential when the house of cards falls.
An engine technology company that's going to manufacture rather than license? Sounds too good to be true. Because it probably is.
This is strictly a usability issue, and if you carefully and realistically consider user needs you'll see that l/100 km is better. Consider a car-buying couple:
"Hey, this one gets 10 mpg!"
"But this one gets 20 mpg! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 30 mpg, that's even better!"
"Yeah, that's as big a difference as between 10 and 20. Let's go for that one!"
Or:
"This one gets 10 l/100 km!"
"The one gets 5 l/100 km! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 3.3 l/100km, that's even better!"
"Hmm... that's not such a big improvement. Maybe the best value is at 5!"
The ratios are the same in the two cases, but the sad fact is that most people can't deal with ratios, and l/100km produces differences that reflect the relative magnitude of improvement, whereas the inverse scaling does not.
100 km is also a nice convenient unit for driving distance, and produces numbers for typical vehicles that can be adequately represented as small integers. But the specific choice of 100 km is less important than having a linear rather than an inverse scale (scaling as x rather than 1/x with fixed driving distance, which is the realistic constraint.)
Having multicolored kernels is a trait, not a disease or infection.
But you're ignoring the amazing capacity for people who know nothing about biology to abuse biological concepts to the point where they are meaningless. I've seen people argue that babies are "parasitic" on the mother, for example, which is wrong on so many levels and speaks to such a profound ignorance of where concepts like "parasite" come from in the first place that one hardly knows where to start.
The basic mistake that people like this make is reifying some concept and treating instances of it as "real" individuals, and treating everything else as some kind of assemblage or accident. Philosophers have been making this kind of error since the Greeks, at least, and there is no indication that they are going to stop any time soon.
can't wait for a government health care system run like that.
Like what? As others have pointed out above, with actual emprical data rather than ideological cant, single-payer/public/non-profit systems have lower overheads than the US private system. Even Medicare in the US has lower overheads than private American insurers.
Overhead is a primary measure of efficiency. Lower overhead means more efficient.
There are no actual facts supporting any claim of superiority for the US private health care system: people in countries with public systems live longer and spend less than Americans do.
This does not mean Obamacare is a good idea: it isn't, because too many ignorant ideologues have prevented Obama from setting up a genuine public system of the kind found the world over, from Canada to Sweden to Australia, where in all cases average outcomes are better, lives are longer, and costs are lower than in the American system.
Not from everything, antiiron could only react with iron, for example.
Nope.
Anti-iron would contain anti-protons and anti-neutrons made of anti-quarks and its lepton orbitals would be filled with positrons.
In the presense of any normal matter--an oxygen atom, say--the electrons in the normal matter would be attracted to the positrons in the anti-matter and they would anihilate, emitting gamma ray photons, leaving the nuclei more-or-less bare. The positively changed matter nucleus would attract the negatively charged anti-matter nucleus, and the various quark/anti-quark pairs would likewise annihilate, producing more photons.
The thing is, a quark has no clue what kind of nucleus it happens to be in, so the quarks in anti-iron would happily get together with their complements in normal oxygen (or whatever). Annihilation takes place at the elementary particle level, not the baryon (proton/neutron) level.
So while there would be bits of the anti-iron nucleus left over after it encountered an oxygen nucleus, they would be scattered around and running into other stuff...
Why do people think climate scientists are any different,
Because they work in a field that is extremely messy and fraught with uncertainty and yet promote the results of their unphysical computational models as being virtually certain, and they lead their arguments with fearmongering language about the risk of dire consequences rather than the science.
If anyone believes that climate models are an adequate basis for public policy, then they also necessarily believe we ought to immediately implement global free trade, because economic models are of far higher quality than climate models, and the underlying processes are far better understood, and all economic models show that global free trade would be of vast economic benefit, to the extent of saving millions of human lives per year.
So give that you are assuming that climate models are a sufficient basis for public policy, am I correct in assuming you are also absolutely in favour of global free trade? Can you point to any impassioned articles you have written on this subject, and the millions of lives that are lost each year as a result of not adopting this policy? You are clearly deeply concerned with things that will better humanity's future, so surely you must have written such things.
One might as well say, "Nature seeks extinction", as far more species have become extinct due to entirely natural processes than currently exist.
The Earth has become uninhabitable at least once already, with the build-up of a highly toxic gas that was the result of the natural metabolism of natural organisms, sometime between 1 billion and 500 million years ago. This entirely natural process killed off very nearly every living thing, driving a vast range of single-celled species to extinction. It also happened to open the door to complex multi-cellular life, which evolved from the few survivors, but that was an incidental side-effect.
It is the nature of life to use all resources to the maximum extent possible, and evolution is a locally optimizing "greedy" algorithm, at least to first order. The only kind of "equilibrium" nature produces is that of a stalemated war, and that only temporarily.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying all this is true,
Good, because it's all false. Hunter-gatherer societies can in rare cases have more free time for social interaction, but everything we've seen of hunter-gatherer societies in the modern world gives the lie to every other aspect of your speculation.
Hunter-gatherer societies are in general hierachical, war-like, mysogynstic, and rigidly bound by social mores that would make the Victorians look like libertines.
Look at pre-contact Polynesian societies, for example: women weren't allowed in canoes, which is more extreme than even modern Saudi Arabia, where women are at least allowed to be passengers in the primary mode of transportation.
Studies of non-agricultural North American native societies suggest that war-like violence was the primary cause of death amongst young men.
Existing "stone age" Amazonian peoples have used gang rape as a means of social control in the past century (see the book "Anxious Pleasures" for an interesting ethnography of an Amazonian tribe, focused on sexual mores.)
And so on. There is a wealth of detailed empirical data putting the lie to the whole "noble savage" "golden age" myth: modern, liberal, democratic, technological, market-oriented societies are the most peaceful, caring, inclusive, egalitarian, ecologically friendly cultures that have ever existed.
We have problems because we still have people who are heirs to the sociopathic psychology of earlier times, both hunter-gatherer and agricultural, and we are so enormously successful that our very numbers have created problems that other peoples could only dream of.
But don't kid yourself: this is the golden age, and if you're posting on./ you're one of the "noble citizens" that future generations will look back on with envy and wonder. Kinda sad, ain't it?
Anti-skateboarding is just anit-youth in another guise. A couple of years ago I used roller-blades as my primary means of transport, and was never hastled by the cops (I'm in my forties) while at the same time I regularly saw kids on skateboards being ticketed.
In the most extreme case a cop was ticketing a kid while I was sitting on the curb just down the block taking my skates off, being completely ignored by the cop. The kid and I shared a look, shrugged. We both saw the contradition, both knew what the score was, and knew that there wasn't a damned thing either of us could do about it.
Even the cop was probably aware of what was going on: they have their priorities handed too them by the folks above, and for the most part try to do the best they can despite that.
It sounds like what he's talking about is semantic parsing of data.
And since data has no semantics, we're probably all safe, until of course the men in black come charging through the door and kill us all because we said something like, "I'm getting so pissed off at guys who hire Chinese kids to go put in game time for them and build their gold reserves. Non-farmers need to get together and see if we can't find some good old fashion organic fertilizer to throw at those bastards."
Thinking in commercial terms is hardly limited. Thinking in terms of the deadweight loss industry is vastly more limiting, in every respect.
I really don't understand why people get so excited about the deadweight loss industry. Anyone who understands anything about economics knows how utterly irrational it is. I guess the world will always be full of emotionally-driven, unstable, irrational people who think that deadweight loss spending is a good idea. Fortunately some of us are more rational than that, and capable of focussing on things that are actually productive, useful and life-enhancing.
Ken just wanted to make a point of the correct style of opening braces and he came up with a language that does not allow you to do any different!
"Correct" generally means that there is an objective, measureable advantage of doing it that way. Even people who use debatable concepts like "correct English" can fall back on the claim that some level of agreement on usage is and objective, measureable requirement for communication.
What is the objective, measurable effect of brace style?
Show me the data! The notion that anyone can arbitrarily impose a "correct" way of doing something simply because they have power, influence and authority went out with the Victorians. Those of us living in the Age of Empricism require objective, measureable effects to distinguish the (usually mulitple) correct way(s) of doing something from the multitude of incorrect ways.
And "I prefer it that way" or "I can imagine a scenario in which that way is optimal" count as "data" in the relevant sense. Such statements are data about you, and make as much sense in this context as "I am six feet tall. Therefore this style of braces is better."
For all we know, the sun could punch us with an event two or three times stronger than previously recorded scenarios and we'd never see it coming, much less have designed equipment to survive those parameters.
Apparently you don't understand what circuit breakers do. The larger the event, the more likely they are to trip. Not all of them will, because hardware fails sometimes, but the comparison with the 2003 overload is apt. The hysteria we're seeing here is being generated by the assumption that long power lines will continue to be connected to transformers while everything overloads, despite the known placement of devices specifically designed to prevent such overloading.
And you're saying, "Yeah, but what about an even BIGGER overload than the one in 2003 that is known to have tripped the breakers correctly!" Well, like I said, to first order: the bigger the overload, the more likely the breakers will trip.
You were walking the user through the process, and you never asked them what's on the screen?
Users are not reliable sources of information. Anyone who has ever worked in support will tell you that asking a user what is on the screen is an almost pointless activity.
About 30% of the time they will tell you the truth in terms that are meaningful, like "There is a dialog that says xyz".
50% of the time they will tell you something, but it will be couched in terms that are meaningless or misleading. Users have a different conceptual universe than developers, and often give reports that are honest in their own terms but so figurative and metaphorical as to be useless for practical debugging.
The remaining 20% of the time users will tell you something that is flat-out false, claiming there is no error dialog on the screen when there is, or reading off an error string that does not exist (or is clearly marked as from a different application!) and so on. They will claim the application will not start when it does, or tell you it is still running after it has crashed.
So asking users what is on the screen is something support people always do, but they never expect to get accurate information back because much of the time they don't. In the case at hand, certain types of error dialog rapidly become invisible to users, and they will deny ever having seen them despite log files that clearly show they clicked on the OK button.
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Exactly how is waterboarding worse than remote control assassination of anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby a US target at the wrong time?
Remarkably enough, something doesn't have to be worse than assassination to me morally wrong.
In fact, many things that aren't even as bad as assassination--waterboarding and other forms of torture amongst them--are morally wrong.
Perhaps I'm getting snowed, but I really do see more here than a graphic equalizer
You're not getting snowed, and I can see how my earlier comment could have been misleading. Yes, there is more to them than equalization, but the equalization function is primary. The noise cancellation, which works moderately well, is useful but not essential, at least in my case.
My hearing aids have two programs, one general and one with forward-focusing and better noise cancelation. In environments where the second program is useful, the difference is a tiny increment on the first, whereas the difference between them being on and off is huge--I was starting to lose the thread in business meetings because I couldn't catch everything, and while like most people with progressive hearing loss I can read lips somewhat you can't always see people's faces.
So I'll correct myself: there is more than equalization going on, but the equalization function is by far the most important. Don't pay a lot more for fancy programming because it makes a marginal difference.
I'm not an acoustic physicist, but I have friends who are. The ear is a very complex organ that interacts with the sound-shadowing and resonance effects of the head and shoulders to provide us with a remarkable thee-dimensional sound environment based on only two receptors, which is pretty damned cool when you think about it.
I'm glad we have a study now which suggests this is how students are using this resource.
So am I, but I'm also waiting for studies that show college students eat, sleep, and worry about money and love just like the rest of us.
The premise of the article is sad: that out default assumption should be that anyone who deviates from white-bread middle-aged middle-American in any respect should be treated as if they were irresponsible, dishonest, or stupid.
I live in a university town, my company has offices on campus, I'm a technical mentor on a program where most of the other mentors are university students, and I'm always surprised when I'm reminded that the students are a couple of decades younger than me, because there just isn't that much difference between us.
the hospital forces him to use the robot even on cases that would be much better done hands-on
No one is "forcing" him to do anything. He just doesn't have the guts to do the right thing and say no to his bureaucratic overlords. He is willing to do harm--in his own estimation--to other innocent human beings who have put their deepest trust in him, for the sake of his own comfort and security.
Your friend is a coward, and the most appalling thing is that you apparently see nothing wrong with that.
When people say, "For evil to triumph it is merely necessary for good people to do nothing", this is exactly the kind of behaviour they mean.
Okay, so DaVinci is by far the market leader
And we know with a far higher degree of certainty than any of the bogus stats in the article that that means they have mediocre technology but great marketing.
Being "market leader" in a cutting edge (as it were) field is in my experience almost always an indication that the tech is poor to middling but the company is brilliant at marketing. I'm not just talking about Microsoft here, although they are a prominent example of the phenomenon. In the areas I've worked in professionally (which includes image-guided surgery) the best technology has never been close to the market leader.
Personally, I don't want a surgeon using a machine from the market leader on me until the technology is mature, which doesn't happen for decades.
1:1 motion mapping really made it feel like an extension of my body.
Now if we only had a word to distinguish a system such as you describe from a robot...
The sanest way to do it would be year-month-day, because then you could increase the precision of the time string to whatever you needed just by adding units to the right
ISO standard date format is YYYY-MM-DD. Everything else is non-standard's compliant gibberish of the kind that under most circumstances /.'ers would be violently opposed to (especially if Microsoft did it.)
ISO 8601 is the full standard, which includes times in the form:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (the letter "T" is often replaced with a space for human-readable but non-standard date/time presentation).
I have no idea if the standard has accommodation for the archaic AM/PM system of representation.
There is really no excuse for not using ISO 8601 standard date/times, other than cultural prejudice, insularity and parochialism. And no one will ever again have to ask, "What does 10/11/12 mean?"
If you disagree with me, please tell me what I mean by 10/11/12. Since this date format is so much superior to all others in the eyes of some they should have no trouble at all telling me exactly what that date means, as opposed to:
2010-11-12
2010-12-11
2011-10-12
2011-12-10
2012-10-11
2012-11-10
none of which can be easily confused with the others.
Anyone in favour of standardized anything ought to be in favour of standardized date/time formats.
I don't know the physics, but I suspect it's far more advanced than a simple equalizer.
Having recently been fitted for digital hearing aids, I can assure you (as a physicist) it is a simple equalizer.
The only part that is unique is the ear plug part that are form fitted to your uniquely shaped ear so as to stop the escape of sound which can contribute to annoying feedback.
Dunno about the rest of your post, which seems kinda weird, but this is not true, at least in my case. Fairly high-end hearing aids with no custom fitting. Soft plastic is all.
My advice - go to a country with a real healthcare somewhere in EU or Canada or Asia and get some hearing aids there. It will come out cheaper even with a plane ticket.
Sorry, does not help (much). I'm a Canadian with hearing aids (Seimens, very nice) that ran me $2500 total. The good news is that the province kicks in $500 per ear every three years. The bad news is that the aids themselves cost $1200 each plus roughly another $750 in ancillary costs.
On top of that, it looks like they're not looking to license this technology to these companies but instead build a plant to manufacture them.
That alone should be a red flag, for several reasons.
1) They are an engine technology company, not a manufacturer. How much experience to they have in mass production, supply-chain management, etc? Not a small learning curve.
2) Tooling costs are high, increasing their capital needs, which is a convenient way of pulling more money out of their investors and therefore creating more opportunities to skim.
3) By manufacturing themselves they don't have to reveal the "secret secret", just the "secret". Any attempt to independently verify their claims will be made vastly more difficult by not having a full and public disclosure of their trade secrets in patent documents or under NDA to a licensed manufacture. So this approach puts off the day of reckoning for a good long while, and during that time company insiders can happily pay themselves big fat bonuses. It will also be much harder to prove they were lying about the technology's potential when the house of cards falls.
An engine technology company that's going to manufacture rather than license? Sounds too good to be true. Because it probably is.
Why not use km/l?
This is strictly a usability issue, and if you carefully and realistically consider user needs you'll see that l/100 km is better. Consider a car-buying couple:
"Hey, this one gets 10 mpg!"
"But this one gets 20 mpg! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 30 mpg, that's even better!"
"Yeah, that's as big a difference as between 10 and 20. Let's go for that one!"
Or:
"This one gets 10 l/100 km!"
"The one gets 5 l/100 km! It's twice as good."
"This one gets 3.3 l/100km, that's even better!"
"Hmm... that's not such a big improvement. Maybe the best value is at 5!"
The ratios are the same in the two cases, but the sad fact is that most people can't deal with ratios, and l/100km produces differences that reflect the relative magnitude of improvement, whereas the inverse scaling does not.
100 km is also a nice convenient unit for driving distance, and produces numbers for typical vehicles that can be adequately represented as small integers. But the specific choice of 100 km is less important than having a linear rather than an inverse scale (scaling as x rather than 1/x with fixed driving distance, which is the realistic constraint.)
Having multicolored kernels is a trait, not a disease or infection.
But you're ignoring the amazing capacity for people who know nothing about biology to abuse biological concepts to the point where they are meaningless. I've seen people argue that babies are "parasitic" on the mother, for example, which is wrong on so many levels and speaks to such a profound ignorance of where concepts like "parasite" come from in the first place that one hardly knows where to start.
The basic mistake that people like this make is reifying some concept and treating instances of it as "real" individuals, and treating everything else as some kind of assemblage or accident. Philosophers have been making this kind of error since the Greeks, at least, and there is no indication that they are going to stop any time soon.
can't wait for a government health care system run like that.
Like what? As others have pointed out above, with actual emprical data rather than ideological cant, single-payer/public/non-profit systems have lower overheads than the US private system. Even Medicare in the US has lower overheads than private American insurers.
Overhead is a primary measure of efficiency. Lower overhead means more efficient.
There are no actual facts supporting any claim of superiority for the US private health care system: people in countries with public systems live longer and spend less than Americans do.
This does not mean Obamacare is a good idea: it isn't, because too many ignorant ideologues have prevented Obama from setting up a genuine public system of the kind found the world over, from Canada to Sweden to Australia, where in all cases average outcomes are better, lives are longer, and costs are lower than in the American system.
Not from everything, antiiron could only react with iron, for example.
Nope.
Anti-iron would contain anti-protons and anti-neutrons made of anti-quarks and its lepton orbitals would be filled with positrons.
In the presense of any normal matter--an oxygen atom, say--the electrons in the normal matter would be attracted to the positrons in the anti-matter and they would anihilate, emitting gamma ray photons, leaving the nuclei more-or-less bare. The positively changed matter nucleus would attract the negatively charged anti-matter nucleus, and the various quark/anti-quark pairs would likewise annihilate, producing more photons.
The thing is, a quark has no clue what kind of nucleus it happens to be in, so the quarks in anti-iron would happily get together with their complements in normal oxygen (or whatever). Annihilation takes place at the elementary particle level, not the baryon (proton/neutron) level.
So while there would be bits of the anti-iron nucleus left over after it encountered an oxygen nucleus, they would be scattered around and running into other stuff...
Why do people think climate scientists are any different,
Because they work in a field that is extremely messy and fraught with uncertainty and yet promote the results of their unphysical computational models as being virtually certain, and they lead their arguments with fearmongering language about the risk of dire consequences rather than the science.
If anyone believes that climate models are an adequate basis for public policy, then they also necessarily believe we ought to immediately implement global free trade, because economic models are of far higher quality than climate models, and the underlying processes are far better understood, and all economic models show that global free trade would be of vast economic benefit, to the extent of saving millions of human lives per year.
So give that you are assuming that climate models are a sufficient basis for public policy, am I correct in assuming you are also absolutely in favour of global free trade? Can you point to any impassioned articles you have written on this subject, and the millions of lives that are lost each year as a result of not adopting this policy? You are clearly deeply concerned with things that will better humanity's future, so surely you must have written such things.
If not, why not?
Nature seeks states of equilibrium.
One might as well say, "Nature seeks extinction", as far more species have become extinct due to entirely natural processes than currently exist.
The Earth has become uninhabitable at least once already, with the build-up of a highly toxic gas that was the result of the natural metabolism of natural organisms, sometime between 1 billion and 500 million years ago. This entirely natural process killed off very nearly every living thing, driving a vast range of single-celled species to extinction. It also happened to open the door to complex multi-cellular life, which evolved from the few survivors, but that was an incidental side-effect.
It is the nature of life to use all resources to the maximum extent possible, and evolution is a locally optimizing "greedy" algorithm, at least to first order. The only kind of "equilibrium" nature produces is that of a stalemated war, and that only temporarily.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying all this is true,
Good, because it's all false. Hunter-gatherer societies can in rare cases have more free time for social interaction, but everything we've seen of hunter-gatherer societies in the modern world gives the lie to every other aspect of your speculation.
Hunter-gatherer societies are in general hierachical, war-like, mysogynstic, and rigidly bound by social mores that would make the Victorians look like libertines.
Look at pre-contact Polynesian societies, for example: women weren't allowed in canoes, which is more extreme than even modern Saudi Arabia, where women are at least allowed to be passengers in the primary mode of transportation.
Studies of non-agricultural North American native societies suggest that war-like violence was the primary cause of death amongst young men.
Existing "stone age" Amazonian peoples have used gang rape as a means of social control in the past century (see the book "Anxious Pleasures" for an interesting ethnography of an Amazonian tribe, focused on sexual mores.)
And so on. There is a wealth of detailed empirical data putting the lie to the whole "noble savage" "golden age" myth: modern, liberal, democratic, technological, market-oriented societies are the most peaceful, caring, inclusive, egalitarian, ecologically friendly cultures that have ever existed.
We have problems because we still have people who are heirs to the sociopathic psychology of earlier times, both hunter-gatherer and agricultural, and we are so enormously successful that our very numbers have created problems that other peoples could only dream of.
But don't kid yourself: this is the golden age, and if you're posting on ./ you're one of the "noble citizens" that future generations will look back on with envy and wonder. Kinda sad, ain't it?
And anti-skateboarding
Anti-skateboarding is just anit-youth in another guise. A couple of years ago I used roller-blades as my primary means of transport, and was never hastled by the cops (I'm in my forties) while at the same time I regularly saw kids on skateboards being ticketed.
In the most extreme case a cop was ticketing a kid while I was sitting on the curb just down the block taking my skates off, being completely ignored by the cop. The kid and I shared a look, shrugged. We both saw the contradition, both knew what the score was, and knew that there wasn't a damned thing either of us could do about it.
Even the cop was probably aware of what was going on: they have their priorities handed too them by the folks above, and for the most part try to do the best they can despite that.
It sounds like what he's talking about is semantic parsing of data.
And since data has no semantics, we're probably all safe, until of course the men in black come charging through the door and kill us all because we said something like, "I'm getting so pissed off at guys who hire Chinese kids to go put in game time for them and build their gold reserves. Non-farmers need to get together and see if we can't find some good old fashion organic fertilizer to throw at those bastards."
You people think in such limited terms.
Thinking in commercial terms is hardly limited. Thinking in terms of the deadweight loss industry is vastly more limiting, in every respect.
I really don't understand why people get so excited about the deadweight loss industry. Anyone who understands anything about economics knows how utterly irrational it is. I guess the world will always be full of emotionally-driven, unstable, irrational people who think that deadweight loss spending is a good idea. Fortunately some of us are more rational than that, and capable of focussing on things that are actually productive, useful and life-enhancing.
The article was a bit poor.
The article was dreadful. The link you provide actually makes sense. Thanks.
Ken just wanted to make a point of the correct style of opening braces and he came up with a language that does not allow you to do any different!
"Correct" generally means that there is an objective, measureable advantage of doing it that way. Even people who use debatable concepts like "correct English" can fall back on the claim that some level of agreement on usage is and objective, measureable requirement for communication.
What is the objective, measurable effect of brace style?
Show me the data! The notion that anyone can arbitrarily impose a "correct" way of doing something simply because they have power, influence and authority went out with the Victorians. Those of us living in the Age of Empricism require objective, measureable effects to distinguish the (usually mulitple) correct way(s) of doing something from the multitude of incorrect ways.
And "I prefer it that way" or "I can imagine a scenario in which that way is optimal" count as "data" in the relevant sense. Such statements are data about you, and make as much sense in this context as "I am six feet tall. Therefore this style of braces is better."
For all we know, the sun could punch us with an event two or three times stronger than previously recorded scenarios and we'd never see it coming, much less have designed equipment to survive those parameters.
Apparently you don't understand what circuit breakers do. The larger the event, the more likely they are to trip. Not all of them will, because hardware fails sometimes, but the comparison with the 2003 overload is apt. The hysteria we're seeing here is being generated by the assumption that long power lines will continue to be connected to transformers while everything overloads, despite the known placement of devices specifically designed to prevent such overloading.
And you're saying, "Yeah, but what about an even BIGGER overload than the one in 2003 that is known to have tripped the breakers correctly!" Well, like I said, to first order: the bigger the overload, the more likely the breakers will trip.
You were walking the user through the process, and you never asked them what's on the screen?
Users are not reliable sources of information. Anyone who has ever worked in support will tell you that asking a user what is on the screen is an almost pointless activity.
About 30% of the time they will tell you the truth in terms that are meaningful, like "There is a dialog that says xyz".
50% of the time they will tell you something, but it will be couched in terms that are meaningless or misleading. Users have a different conceptual universe than developers, and often give reports that are honest in their own terms but so figurative and metaphorical as to be useless for practical debugging.
The remaining 20% of the time users will tell you something that is flat-out false, claiming there is no error dialog on the screen when there is, or reading off an error string that does not exist (or is clearly marked as from a different application!) and so on. They will claim the application will not start when it does, or tell you it is still running after it has crashed.
So asking users what is on the screen is something support people always do, but they never expect to get accurate information back because much of the time they don't. In the case at hand, certain types of error dialog rapidly become invisible to users, and they will deny ever having seen them despite log files that clearly show they clicked on the OK button.