You can only downcycle plastic. Eventually you still end up with a mountain of plastic garbage. A more interesting idea is to replace petroleum based plastic packaging with something biodegradable. The dilemma is that with petroleum based plastics you sequester the carbon in the packaging but you are stuck with mountains of plastic garbage clogging up your landfills and your oceans, bio plastics degrade but that means they release, methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas. However, if we could come up with a packaging material that could actually be composted into soil with no harmful residue and bring it into universal use you might actually have a situation where you could make money off of disposing of the stuff in a sustainable way and you would skip the problem you currently have when recycling petroleum based plastics of washing and sorting the plastic before you can downcycle it. With bio degradable plastic you just pile your used food wrappers and other packaging into a composer, let bacteria do the work and harvest the methane. There are already Bio-plastics whose environmental footprint ranges from 0 percent less to 42 percent less than petroleum based plastics depending on the material. However, even if the environmental footprint of a bio plastic was the same as that of a petroleum based plastic, the fact that the bio plastic bio degrades means that with the bio plastics at least you don't clog up the oceans with garbage that takes it takes natural processes millennia to break down. Also, if there is a way to make a profit off of disposing of bio plastic there is an economic incentive to collect and dispose of it. If you compost the bio plastic and capture the methane you can at least burn the methane, turn it into less harmful greenhouse gasses and do something with the compost. Either way, there is no way around the fact that we need to seriously rethink our laws and regulations regarding product packaging starting with how much of it we even need and what materials we are going to have to banish because petroleum based plastic packaging will have to be eliminated sooner or later and I'd rather see it happen sooner. Why does a package of cookies have to consist of a cardboard box, with a plastic bag inside it that is full of smaller plastic bags each containing one or two cookies?... and I don't remember Coca Cola tasting any worse when it came in mutli use bottles (who can be made from plastic) or that a Mars bar tasted worse when it came wrapped in paper.
You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.
After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.
A wave or two after that, there will be no humans who can do anything a machine can't do better and cheaper. Not engineers. Not artists. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Not you, either.
Nobody. Period.
"Jobs" are going to be OVER soon. Concentrating on putting people in different jobs ignores the main problem.
We better fucking come up with a better way to run things and a way to make the transition, or we're fucked.
To take a real world example, you may not be able to turn a coal miner into a robotics expert but you can re-train the coal miner to be a solar panel installer or wind turbine installer. The real urgency is to bring the coal miner's kids to a level of education that allows them to become robot repairmen. However, what the US is currently doing is promising the coal miners that the 19th century will come back, that the nation will go back to coal and oil, (cue flags, xenophobic rhetoric and patriotic music) which is stupid because wind and solar have been cheaper than coal for a while now and they are becoming cheaper than oil and gas which means solar and wind are in effect better choices for pure business reasons. Meanwhile Betsy DeVos is busy tearing the guts out of the public educations system in the name of libertarianism, objectivist philosophy and the private education industry so that public education can be replaced with a private system that leaves you with a worthless business degree, the mountain of debt you piled up to pay for it and fat bottom lines for the private education providers that sold it to you. The result will be generations of young people with huge student loan debts that can be milked for money by Wall Street, no markatable knowledge or skill and who would have been better off going to a community college and getting a degree in something useful (even if it isn't a spiffy business degree from some private college or big name Ivy League institution) and that's assuming there are any such community colleges left that haven't yet been eradicated by the likes of Betsy DeVos or some variation on Sam Brownback's 'Kansas Experiment'.
Most consumers will never notice, most of the pancake syrups in the supermarket are just manufactured sugar with some coloring.
That's why I use High Fructose Bee Vomit.
Same problem, manufactured sugar with some coloring.
I've not seen honey for sale, labeled as such, that wasn't honey when you look at the ingredient list. Are they lying/being fooled by suppliers?
Somebody finds my comment funny, but it wasn't meant to be. Counterfeit honey is a real problem and detecting it using sophisticated scientific methods is a growing business since the counterfeiters are getting extremely sophisticated at beating the quality assurance tests. A lot of cheap counterfeit honey comes from China and it is bankrupting natural honey producers around the globe in large numbers. There is a new documentary series on Netflix Called 'Rotten' that contains an excellent episode on the honey industry and the problem with fake honey.
Don't expect one company's walled garden to allow tools to help you detect other company's walled gardens. These walled gardens are becoming more like the hedge maze at the Overlook Hotel.
Or maybe one of Apples App reviewers is just a die hard Trumpkin and an enthusiastic Ajit Pai fan? It would explain the"objectionable content" and "has no direct benefits to the user." labels.
Stop that. Please. Apple injected a hidden function that slows down iPhones little by little, over time. To the point the user wonders: that thing is barely usable, maybe it's time to purchase the next newer model. That could have been a "feature" if users were made aware of it, and were able to disable it ; the slowness had side effects (the GPS became less accurate for instance) and the user might have chosen to utilize their device at full speed for a day, rather than a crippled phone for two ; also, people, if they'd know, could have chosen to replace the battery ; since the function was hidden, users didn't even know they could just buy a new battery to basically get a new phone. That's definitely not a feature ; this is an intentional hack to make people think their phone is "too old and needs to be replaced with a new one".
Oh, users were made aware of 'the 'feature' all right. The power management feature was introduced in one of those Apple keynote events and every user got a splash screen with 'new features in macOS ' so there is little justification to complain about a power management feature in a mobile device being 'hidden' with some kind of malicious intent. Furthermore it is entirely predictable that while you don't notice it on newer phones in normal use when CPU performance is degraded by the energy saver algorithm to extend battery life, you will notice it on older phones who are getting close to barely being able to run the latest OS smoothly even with a new battery and no PM algorithm active. You have a point about being able to switch the PM algorithm off though. I carry a spare battery and a 5 cm lightning cable with me and I don't really care about a slightly shorter batter life, I'd rather have the performance as long as the phone charge lasts me a day (which it usually does and if it stops doing that I'll take it in for a battery replacement). Furthermore, Apple have now removed the ability to see the battery cycle count which is pretty annoying.
This analysis was based on median income (not mean or per capita income or GDP) to address concerns about wealth inequality, and takes into account social services, taxation, and cost-of-living. A glance at the second chart, the one adjusted for regional price parity, shows that adjusted median income in Louisiana—the poorest of the U.S. states—is higher than that in France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, half of the OECD member states of Western Europe (as defined by the CIA), and also higher than the median incomes in Spain and Portugal, the two OECD countries in Southwestern Europe. The exceptions are Belgium (5.1% by population), Luxembourg (0.2%), and the Netherlands (7.6%).
In other words, 87% of the population of the OECD countries of Western and Southwestern Europe live in a country with a lower median income (including tax-funded social services) than the poorest U.S. state, after adjusting for cost-of-living.
Based on the above statistics, I feel that the GP was actually quite generous in comparing the wealth of most Western European countries to Mississippi or Alabama.
I don't quite agree with his figures though. Some 33 US states are at or below the US annual income per household per capita and another 4 are no more than $1000 above the US median and that includes wealthy California. It sounds to me as if Germany, Sweden and California are about on the same level in terms of per capita income and all are competitive high tech modern economies with a highly educated population. Also, if you are comparing Germany with Alabama you are comparing a country of 82 million people that has a fairly high average standard of living with a state that has a population of 4.8 million, that is a net recipient of federal aid money and has some of the worst poverty levels in the US. Comparing Germany and Sweden to California would be a better comparison.
According to him:
EU Average - $35632
Which sounds about right if we are talking about median income per capita per annum.
However, according to this: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/in... I get the following average incomes per household per capita:
US: $29,865.60
Germany: $31,136.72
US states (according to the 2010-2014 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income
The 2016 figures are from here: http://www.deptofnumbers.com/i...
Highs:
1) District of Columbia: $45,877 (2016: $45,545)
2) Connecticut: $39,373 (2016: $41,087)
3) New Jersey: $37,288 (2016: $38,911)
Around median:
15) California $30,441 (2016: $33,389)
16) Illinois $30,417(2016: $32,849)
17) Hawaiii: $29,736 (2016: $32,634)
Absolute lows:
49) West Virginia: $22,714 (2016: $24,769)
50) Mississippi: $21,036 (2016:$22,694 )
*) Puerto Rico: $11,241
Where I live all the kids are listening to the same autotuned R&B cr@p either with some mysogynistic neanderthal with his pants down by his knees rapping out some teenage wannabe bullshit or else some wailing woman in her knickers putting it out there.
Heh, the original question was: Is Pop Music Becoming Louder, Simpler and More Repetitive? Apparently you think it is, in fact the only thing missing from your statement is: NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!!.
Here's another question: How do you know when you are have begun the process of morphing into a grumpy old gaffer?
Answer: When young people's music begins to sound like noise pollution (a.k.a. Louder, Simpler and More Repetitive).
There is nothing you can do about getting older, but you can keep an open mind to new kinds of music and morphing into a grumpy old gaffer is optional, not mandatory.
Remove fossil oil, and relation between nations change. Saudis will be obvious loosers.
The Arabs are actually sitting on, or rather under, another massive energy resource which is solar. They can produce solar energy very efficiently, without interruption and at low prices. If they start using their sovereign wealth funds to begin prepping now and if they can get that energy to market somehow they do stand a chance of transitioning relatively smoothly.
I wonder if Russia's economy is diverse enough to avoid collapse.
Ummm.... No.
And without oil, US interest for middle east vanish, will US Israel support too?
No, not as long as pandering to the Christian community in the US is key to wining elections in the US so unless there is a sudden rift between US Christians and the Israelis and the Zionist movement I don't see that happening.
I'm wondering what's going to happen when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east? Saudi Arabia is just now trying to figure out how to modernize their country when the price of oil collapses. They're desperately trying to get women into the economy because their current social system isn't compatible with the kinds of two income families countries want/need to maintain the growth/profit margins they're used to.
Well, the Gulf and Arabia i general is one of the cheapest and most efficient places to generate solar energy. They have lots of space for solar plants and very few people complaining about solar panels ruining their view and offending their sense of aesthetic harmony. Some of the smaller countries in the region are already stating to realise this so my theory on what will happen when oil starts to decline is that if they can figure out a way to export the energy or switch to high energy manufacturing they and start doing that before the bottom falls out of the oil market completely (which will still take a while) they should be relatively OK. If they don't do any of this, what will happen is massive social unrest and probably war.
I remember all the stupid jokes from my fellow nerd buddies. They didn't get it.
The MB Air was the first full powered portable work PC that you could carry around without breaking your back. 1.5 kg, 6 hours of battery time, sometimes more if you dimed the backlight and turned off wifi. I still have mine and it still is usable and useful. Although it does boot rather sluggish with macOS Sierra.
I hope they continue the line and make cheaper mac laptops again. 1500 Euros for a regular MB pro is just too much,
Bought the 12 inch MacBook instead of the MacBook Pro, I can't say I miss the Pro model's processing power all that often and I don't miss the extra weight either. The really fun part is discussing my preference for super compact laptops (even at the expense of CPU power) with some of my co-workers who still have a PC gray-box standing in a little shrine in their apartment, Nvidia display card, 32 GB of RAM Latest Intel processor, Windows,... 'How can you live with only 8 GB of RAM?!?!?'... It's like a debate between Republicans and Democrats, i.e. total disconnect.
Thanks, Tesla ! Without you, those feet-dragger's would have never done this.
Well, if you ever wondered what the world would look like if it was run by the 'ain't broke don't fix it" crowd go to a Ford dealership, a world full of the utterly mediocre and uninspiring. The problem isn't that Ford and the rest of that ilk can't innovate with cutting edge tech if they want to, the problem is that they don't want to innovate with cutting edge tech unless forced to.
Well Maryland is mentioned in the Wapo article you linked to so you must be complaining about the Slashdot summary which is about North Carolina's congressional map being ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered so I'm not particularly surprised that Maryland is not mentioned since it is not a party to that lawsuit (Fun fact: The article the Slashdot summary links to actually mentions Maryland and the republican's complaints about that state's election map). Complaining that Maryland is not mentioned in the summary of an article whose primary topic of discussion is gerrymandering in North Carolina is like complaining that the summary of an article about rotten apples does not spend half of it's column space talking about rotten oranges.... (hint: it's because the article was about rotten apples).
So which is it? Are minimum wage employees the bedrock of our economy or a completely superfluous bunch of kids and seniors. They can't be both.
It is absolutely both. If younger people cannot gain work experience, if older people cannot supplement social security, the whole system is devastated - the earrings potential alone that is lost to the younger generation is staggering.
But beyond that you are ignoring the cost increases that have to pass through businesses always running close to margin - namely restaurants. Any increase will almost always get passed along which means poor people are the worst screwed by the whole thing - they lose jobs they could have worked for some money, but then they cannot even afford to eat. I'm pretty sure you don't mean to screw poor people over, right? You'd be against that I assume?
The thing is that wages have stagnated in the US for 30-40 years. Wages cannot stagnate forever while prices increase, low skilled jobs are progressively eliminated, for profit schools are allowed to cheat people out of massive mounts of money in return for a degree that is basically crap and 90% of the nation's wealth rests in the offshore bank accounts of the richest 10% who into the bargain have now been largely exempted from paying taxes on what revenues they didn't already dodge taxes on courtesy of the collection of mad clowns that call itself: 'Congress'.
If Congress makes the law... all the better. The FCC does NOT have this power at this time.
I'm a100% liberal and Im in favour of rational NN as well. The internet should be a place where even small players are able to grow into big players because they don't have to pay protection money to telcos just like a small trucking outfit should be able to grow into a big one because they don't have to pay protection money for access to 'fast lanes' on the nation's highways. All that charging for access to 'fast lanes' does is stifle competition because the big guys can afford to pay but the small startups cannot. It's nice that in an age of trench warfare we can still agree on something.
Funny, the group of white nationalists which usually echos those sentiments seems to think skin colour and gender is an excellent attribute to justify not hiring people
Because white nationalists are as bigoted as progressives. Identity politics is cancer, from both sides.
Then why are you quoting from their playbook?
You know, a wise man once said:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Maybe one day we'll be rid of Identity Politics.
Noble sentiment, and I hope it will some day be realised. However, as long as conservative white males, the most privileged group of people on the planet, can feel themselves persecuted, discriminated against and trodden upon by people whose prospects of getting work and being as well paid for it as white males are is limited simply because of their gender and/or the colour of their skin then I'm not going to be to holding my breath. In the mean time, I'm going to have limited sympathy for any fellow white male because he objects to diversity in a company whose business model it is to not give a hoot about the skin colour, gender, religion or any other personal trait of their customers.
... he did nothing wrong at all. Google got bad press because they force everyone into "diversity training" and then don't like it when people don't think "skin color" or "gender" is a good attribute to base hirings on...
Funny, the group of white nationalists which usually echos those sentiments seems to think skin colour and gender is an excellent attribute to justify not hiring people, casting doubt on their intelligence, and in the case of skin colour generally doubting that they deserve to be citizens of their country or in some cases that they deserve more than... how did that angry white nationalist in Charlottesville put it?... ah yes, be thrown into an oven. White male conservatives are not being discriminated against, white male conservatives are the most privileged group of people on this planet except maybe for Saudi Arab princelings. White male conservatives should quite frankly stop feeling sorry for themselves and stop acting like a bunch of whiny little bitches. Putting on the cry baby act every time something does not go their way is not doing white male conservatives any favours. Google is a company that is trying to appeal to the widest possible customer base and as such has the right to fire people it feels those people are impeding their efforts to appeal to the vast majority of potential customers on this planet who aren't whiny white male conservatives with a victim complex (which, by the way, is a quite small minority of white male conservatives to begin with).
Would You Use a Smartphone-Style Laptop With a Three-Day Battery Life?
Just reading that headline made me think of a tiny smartphone sized laptop, but on further inspection they seem to be talking about a regular old 13.3 inch laptop with a built in mobile network chip, lots of batteries and 360 degree hinges so you can use it as tablet. I will never say no to more battery capacity and I like the idea of a mobile network chip built straight into the laptop. My dad had a similar device from ASUS and quite frankly I was not impressed with their service or the robustness of the hinge system and Asus' battery life claims were extremely optimistic. The thing also died after a few months of light use and had to be replaced, but I am going to assume that is not the rule with Asus devices since I have not used enough of their gadgets to judge. Finally, I would probably want to run something other than Windows but that is a personal preference.
So, are these what they call the Clovis or "pre-Clovis" people or are we talking way before them? We visited a Clovis site in New Mexico this summer, and they were a fascinating culture who hunted mammoths. If I remember correctly, they also died out, so are considered a "dead end".
Judging by the date these are a hitherto unknown group of 'Clovis' people but Clovis is more of a cultural and temporal designation than a genetic one. Clovis (oversimplifying here) is currently a label that is stuck on any group inhabiting the Americas between ~15.000-11.000 years ago and that used a particular style of cultural artefacts and (mostly) their stone tools (because stone tools and garbage piles is usually all we ever find). Thus Clovis is a cultural grouping that does not map directly to a distinct genetic population any more than all modern humans who use claw hammers, wrenches, files, soldering irons,... etc belong to the same genetically distinct population since humans readily adopt new cultures and abandon old ones if they see an advantage in it. Walk the streets of Tokyo or Shanghai, and you won't see many people in Edo or Qing dynasty period clothes. The locals have all abandoned their traditional clothing culture for European/American style clothing culture for the most part while we here in America/Europe have supplemented much of our food culture with Oriental food culture.
The majority of the early Native Americans were of Asian descent while a smaller group among them may have come from a population in Siberia with some genetic affinity to populations that settled Europe but that population has died out in Asia and was swamped by later immigration waves in Europe. If I'm understanding this correctly the early settlers of N-America split into two populations with one group staying in Beringia while the rest migrated into N-America where that group then split once again into the distinct northern and southern branches of Native-Americans. The Beringians were then later swamped or absorbed by immigration waves coming back up into Canada and Alaska from the south out of North America. What is interesting about these results is firstly that they indicate a single settlement wave that gave rise to all modern Native American populations and that the DNA seems to indicate immigration into the northern most parts of North America began over 20.000 years ago. This can either mean those people were pre-Clovis if they used that tool culture or alternatively that Clovis can be pushed back to over 20.000 years ago just like 'Ötsi' the ice mummy found in the Alps some years ago pushed back the beginning of the copper age in Europe by about a thousand years.
I can think of no possible way this could be abused as political censorship
While I detect a certain sarcastic tone I think you might actually be correct, not because they would not abuse it but simply because censoring the web does not work regardless of reason. Any affected website will just move to another country. This will apply both to real fake news sites as well as those targeted for political reasons. The can make it illegal in France but not Canada, the US or any other country with strong free speech laws.
If one actually goes and RTFA it becomes clear that this is less Macron and the evil gubbermint coming to take away your sacred freedom of speech and more of a mixed bag of measures like increasing transparency in political advertising, introducing a spending cap on political adverting and providing what amounts to a fast-track legal mechanism to file libel suits in order to then take down malicious content or block abusive sites. It seems to be aimed at putting an end to the tactic of spewing large amounts of boldfaced lies and then rely on the fact that by the time the legal system finally reacts and issues take down notices, the election is over your guy has been elected and the shell organisations who spread the propaganda have been dissolved or declared bankrupt so,... who cares? Mission accomplished. However, if Macron actually goes ahead and does this the process had also better be affordable to grassroots organisations to use and it had better have a mechanism to prevent it begin spammed and clogged up with large amounts of pointless lawsuits. Whatever you think of this idea, I think it is pretty clear that something has to be done to prevent the situation from becoming the norm where the guy with the most money and the ability to spew the most lie and slander saturated sewage into the news cycle from winning elections because the judicial system moves at a snails pace. We are all used to being showered with bullshit during the lead up to elections but the 2016 US election took that to a new low and IMHO that is too low to be tolerated.
Trump won 30 of the 51 Presidential Elections in 2016. Why would you think Clinton should have the office when she won less than half of the elections?
Because she won the popular vote meaning that a majority of the people of the United States wanted her to be president (hint: that's how a functioning democracy should work, majority wins, and this even in a North American republic with representative democracy) When one person has data proving to a mathematical certainty that the majority of the people chose X but you are arguing that is unimportant because the mangled gerrymandered hopelessly antiquated and bribe ridden system spat out Y because Y won a few swing counties in a few swing state that have decided almost every election since WWII and therefore Y is the indisputable choice of the people (and somebody please flush that annoying popular vote down the toilet) you are not arguing a very strong case. The USA needs is a return to a place where the popular vote is represented in the mixture of people that end up in congress and in the person that occupies the White House, and at the moment you do not have that kind of representation in the US, not by a long shot. If you had true representation you'd have a bunch of senators and house members working tirelessly to resurrect the economies of the rust belt states by spending public money on education and modern infrastructure there instead of spending it on giving already super wealthy people even more massive tax breaks. If you had true representation your congress persons would be trying to alleviate poverty in the south and the misery of your urban poor by doing things like raising the minimum wage which incidentally would be more likely to stimulate your consumption driven economy than making the American oligarch class tax free.
Elon must have missed that lecture in Marketing 101
I think Elon also missed the entire series of lectures on logistics as well. I know of two car dealers in my neck of the woods who placed fairly large orders with Tesla for (a combined total) about a hundred Teslas but Tesla was completely unable to keep their delivery schedule. After pouring a sizeable amount to money into infrastructure, marketing and sales to sign up customers for those cars they went bankrupt when the customers lost their patience cancelled their orders due to the excessive delivery delays. The Tesla brand now has a very bad reputation around here, and not for making bad cars mind you, but rather for making promises they can't keep (the cars are pretty nice, if you can afford them).
Why would you publicly defame current or former employers?
Ooh, I don't know, would you appreciate being informed by a former employee that the restaurant you are about to eat at scrapes the rice out of the bowls and off the dishes that come off the cleared tables, washes the stuff in a sieve, makes fried rice out of it and sells it back to the next customer? Or that they take any meat left over on the dishes, dice it up, store it in the fridge and cook a stew out of it once a week? Daily special, our own spicy stew recipe (extra spicy to mask the old meat taste)... YUMMY! Or maybe you'd appreciate knowing that there are roaches in the kitchen? Because a surprising number of restaurants do these things, and quite a few of them are regularly reprimanded for recurring roach infestations due to lacking hygiene, which is why I normally only eat at places where I can see the food being prepared. The interesting thing is that this kind of behaviour is not necessarily most common in budget restaurants. When I was working my way through college I saw this sort of thing going on to varying degrees of outrageousness in a couple of pretty high priced establishments while some of the cheaper places were models of cleanliness and professionalism.
Nothing was done because law enforcement doesn't take SWATing seriously. It's just a "prank".
Local police won't do anything, if they even can. The FBI just dumps your SWATing complains into the nearest dumpster - they're far more concerned with credit card fraud.
Maybe now that someone has died, police will realize this is a thing, that it is dangerous, and that the perpetrators need to have their asses kicked HARD.
I don't think it works like that. Crimes like this are reported to and investigated by local police. The FBI only becomes involved if the crime involves activities that cross state lines or if local police requests their involvements or use of FBI resources. It's only in movies where the FBI shows up, takes over an investigation and sidelines local police. Usually relations between the FBI and local police are quite cooperative in nature. If swatting reports get dumped in the trash by anybody it's local police and that certainly might earn them the interest of state police or even the FBI which would lead to questions being asked. This often boils down to that old American obsession with sates rights and the autonomy of states. In most other countries local police forces ignoring a problem like swatting would have some kind of national police knocking on their door pretty quickly, but in the US individual states have more latitude to do their own thing and thereby more latitude to mess things up (and often they get to mess things up pretty badly) before the federal government can step in and that extends to more areas than just policing. For example, I have severe problems imagining that a state government in Germany could have gotten away with systematically laying waste to it's state finances for as long as Sam Brownback has done with his 'Kansas experiment'.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, x64 -> arm -> arm64? You're having bad hallucinations again, stop snorting oven cleaner, fucking moron.
Naw, he probably just reads techradar: http://www.techradar.com/news/...
Net walls to capture the plastic and reuse it?
You can only downcycle plastic. Eventually you still end up with a mountain of plastic garbage. A more interesting idea is to replace petroleum based plastic packaging with something biodegradable. The dilemma is that with petroleum based plastics you sequester the carbon in the packaging but you are stuck with mountains of plastic garbage clogging up your landfills and your oceans, bio plastics degrade but that means they release, methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas. However, if we could come up with a packaging material that could actually be composted into soil with no harmful residue and bring it into universal use you might actually have a situation where you could make money off of disposing of the stuff in a sustainable way and you would skip the problem you currently have when recycling petroleum based plastics of washing and sorting the plastic before you can downcycle it. With bio degradable plastic you just pile your used food wrappers and other packaging into a composer, let bacteria do the work and harvest the methane. There are already Bio-plastics whose environmental footprint ranges from 0 percent less to 42 percent less than petroleum based plastics depending on the material. However, even if the environmental footprint of a bio plastic was the same as that of a petroleum based plastic, the fact that the bio plastic bio degrades means that with the bio plastics at least you don't clog up the oceans with garbage that takes it takes natural processes millennia to break down. Also, if there is a way to make a profit off of disposing of bio plastic there is an economic incentive to collect and dispose of it. If you compost the bio plastic and capture the methane you can at least burn the methane, turn it into less harmful greenhouse gasses and do something with the compost. Either way, there is no way around the fact that we need to seriously rethink our laws and regulations regarding product packaging starting with how much of it we even need and what materials we are going to have to banish because petroleum based plastic packaging will have to be eliminated sooner or later and I'd rather see it happen sooner. Why does a package of cookies have to consist of a cardboard box, with a plastic bag inside it that is full of smaller plastic bags each containing one or two cookies? ... and I don't remember Coca Cola tasting any worse when it came in mutli use bottles (who can be made from plastic) or that a Mars bar tasted worse when it came wrapped in paper.
You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.
After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.
A wave or two after that, there will be no humans who can do anything a machine can't do better and cheaper. Not engineers. Not artists. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Not you, either.
Nobody. Period.
"Jobs" are going to be OVER soon. Concentrating on putting people in different jobs ignores the main problem.
We better fucking come up with a better way to run things and a way to make the transition, or we're fucked.
To take a real world example, you may not be able to turn a coal miner into a robotics expert but you can re-train the coal miner to be a solar panel installer or wind turbine installer. The real urgency is to bring the coal miner's kids to a level of education that allows them to become robot repairmen. However, what the US is currently doing is promising the coal miners that the 19th century will come back, that the nation will go back to coal and oil, (cue flags, xenophobic rhetoric and patriotic music) which is stupid because wind and solar have been cheaper than coal for a while now and they are becoming cheaper than oil and gas which means solar and wind are in effect better choices for pure business reasons. Meanwhile Betsy DeVos is busy tearing the guts out of the public educations system in the name of libertarianism, objectivist philosophy and the private education industry so that public education can be replaced with a private system that leaves you with a worthless business degree, the mountain of debt you piled up to pay for it and fat bottom lines for the private education providers that sold it to you. The result will be generations of young people with huge student loan debts that can be milked for money by Wall Street, no markatable knowledge or skill and who would have been better off going to a community college and getting a degree in something useful (even if it isn't a spiffy business degree from some private college or big name Ivy League institution) and that's assuming there are any such community colleges left that haven't yet been eradicated by the likes of Betsy DeVos or some variation on Sam Brownback's 'Kansas Experiment'.
Most consumers will never notice, most of the pancake syrups in the supermarket are just manufactured sugar with some coloring.
That's why I use High Fructose Bee Vomit.
Same problem, manufactured sugar with some coloring.
I've not seen honey for sale, labeled as such, that wasn't honey when you look at the ingredient list. Are they lying/being fooled by suppliers?
Somebody finds my comment funny, but it wasn't meant to be. Counterfeit honey is a real problem and detecting it using sophisticated scientific methods is a growing business since the counterfeiters are getting extremely sophisticated at beating the quality assurance tests. A lot of cheap counterfeit honey comes from China and it is bankrupting natural honey producers around the globe in large numbers. There is a new documentary series on Netflix Called 'Rotten' that contains an excellent episode on the honey industry and the problem with fake honey.
Don't expect one company's walled garden to allow tools to help you detect other company's walled gardens. These walled gardens are becoming more like the hedge maze at the Overlook Hotel.
Or maybe one of Apples App reviewers is just a die hard Trumpkin and an enthusiastic Ajit Pai fan? It would explain the"objectionable content" and "has no direct benefits to the user." labels.
That's why I use High Fructose Bee Vomit.
Same problem, manufactured sugar with some coloring.
What Apple did is a very useful feature.
Stop that. Please. Apple injected a hidden function that slows down iPhones little by little, over time. To the point the user wonders: that thing is barely usable, maybe it's time to purchase the next newer model. That could have been a "feature" if users were made aware of it, and were able to disable it ; the slowness had side effects (the GPS became less accurate for instance) and the user might have chosen to utilize their device at full speed for a day, rather than a crippled phone for two ; also, people, if they'd know, could have chosen to replace the battery ; since the function was hidden, users didn't even know they could just buy a new battery to basically get a new phone. That's definitely not a feature ; this is an intentional hack to make people think their phone is "too old and needs to be replaced with a new one".
Oh, users were made aware of 'the 'feature' all right. The power management feature was introduced in one of those Apple keynote events and every user got a splash screen with 'new features in macOS ' so there is little justification to complain about a power management feature in a mobile device being 'hidden' with some kind of malicious intent. Furthermore it is entirely predictable that while you don't notice it on newer phones in normal use when CPU performance is degraded by the energy saver algorithm to extend battery life, you will notice it on older phones who are getting close to barely being able to run the latest OS smoothly even with a new battery and no PM algorithm active. You have a point about being able to switch the PM algorithm off though. I carry a spare battery and a 5 cm lightning cable with me and I don't really care about a slightly shorter batter life, I'd rather have the performance as long as the phone charge lasts me a day (which it usually does and if it stops doing that I'll take it in for a battery replacement). Furthermore, Apple have now removed the ability to see the battery cycle count which is pretty annoying.
The GP was probably referring to this analysis: If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States.
This analysis was based on median income (not mean or per capita income or GDP) to address concerns about wealth inequality, and takes into account social services, taxation, and cost-of-living. A glance at the second chart, the one adjusted for regional price parity, shows that adjusted median income in Louisiana—the poorest of the U.S. states—is higher than that in France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, half of the OECD member states of Western Europe (as defined by the CIA), and also higher than the median incomes in Spain and Portugal, the two OECD countries in Southwestern Europe. The exceptions are Belgium (5.1% by population), Luxembourg (0.2%), and the Netherlands (7.6%).
In other words, 87% of the population of the OECD countries of Western and Southwestern Europe live in a country with a lower median income (including tax-funded social services) than the poorest U.S. state, after adjusting for cost-of-living.
Based on the above statistics, I feel that the GP was actually quite generous in comparing the wealth of most Western European countries to Mississippi or Alabama.
I don't quite agree with his figures though. Some 33 US states are at or below the US annual income per household per capita and another 4 are no more than $1000 above the US median and that includes wealthy California. It sounds to me as if Germany, Sweden and California are about on the same level in terms of per capita income and all are competitive high tech modern economies with a highly educated population. Also, if you are comparing Germany with Alabama you are comparing a country of 82 million people that has a fairly high average standard of living with a state that has a population of 4.8 million, that is a net recipient of federal aid money and has some of the worst poverty levels in the US. Comparing Germany and Sweden to California would be a better comparison.
According to him:
EU Average - $35632
Which sounds about right if we are talking about median income per capita per annum.
However, according to this: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/in... I get the following average incomes per household per capita:
US: $29,865.60
Germany: $31,136.72
According to OECD per household per capita:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex...
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex...
Sweden: $30,553
Germany: $33 652
OECD average: 30 563
US states (according to the 2010-2014 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income
The 2016 figures are from here: http://www.deptofnumbers.com/i...
Highs:
1) District of Columbia: $45,877 (2016: $45,545)
2) Connecticut: $39,373 (2016: $41,087)
3) New Jersey: $37,288 (2016: $38,911)
Around median:
15) California $30,441 (2016: $33,389)
16) Illinois $30,417(2016: $32,849)
17) Hawaiii: $29,736 (2016: $32,634)
Absolute lows:
49) West Virginia: $22,714 (2016: $24,769)
50) Mississippi: $21,036 (2016:$22,694 )
*) Puerto Rico: $11,241
Where I live all the kids are listening to the same autotuned R&B cr@p either with some mysogynistic neanderthal with his pants down by his knees rapping out some teenage wannabe bullshit or else some wailing woman in her knickers putting it out there.
Heh, the original question was: Is Pop Music Becoming Louder, Simpler and More Repetitive? Apparently you think it is, in fact the only thing missing from your statement is: NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!!.
Here's another question: How do you know when you are have begun the process of morphing into a grumpy old gaffer?
Answer: When young people's music begins to sound like noise pollution (a.k.a. Louder, Simpler and More Repetitive).
There is nothing you can do about getting older, but you can keep an open mind to new kinds of music and morphing into a grumpy old gaffer is optional, not mandatory.
Remove fossil oil, and relation between nations change. Saudis will be obvious loosers.
The Arabs are actually sitting on, or rather under, another massive energy resource which is solar. They can produce solar energy very efficiently, without interruption and at low prices. If they start using their sovereign wealth funds to begin prepping now and if they can get that energy to market somehow they do stand a chance of transitioning relatively smoothly.
I wonder if Russia's economy is diverse enough to avoid collapse.
Ummm.... No.
And without oil, US interest for middle east vanish, will US Israel support too?
No, not as long as pandering to the Christian community in the US is key to wining elections in the US so unless there is a sudden rift between US Christians and the Israelis and the Zionist movement I don't see that happening.
I'm wondering what's going to happen when the US and the rest of the world loses collective interest in the middle east? Saudi Arabia is just now trying to figure out how to modernize their country when the price of oil collapses. They're desperately trying to get women into the economy because their current social system isn't compatible with the kinds of two income families countries want/need to maintain the growth/profit margins they're used to.
Well, the Gulf and Arabia i general is one of the cheapest and most efficient places to generate solar energy. They have lots of space for solar plants and very few people complaining about solar panels ruining their view and offending their sense of aesthetic harmony. Some of the smaller countries in the region are already stating to realise this so my theory on what will happen when oil starts to decline is that if they can figure out a way to export the energy or switch to high energy manufacturing they and start doing that before the bottom falls out of the oil market completely (which will still take a while) they should be relatively OK. If they don't do any of this, what will happen is massive social unrest and probably war.
I remember all the stupid jokes from my fellow nerd buddies. They didn't get it. The MB Air was the first full powered portable work PC that you could carry around without breaking your back. 1.5 kg, 6 hours of battery time, sometimes more if you dimed the backlight and turned off wifi. I still have mine and it still is usable and useful. Although it does boot rather sluggish with macOS Sierra.
I hope they continue the line and make cheaper mac laptops again. 1500 Euros for a regular MB pro is just too much,
Bought the 12 inch MacBook instead of the MacBook Pro, I can't say I miss the Pro model's processing power all that often and I don't miss the extra weight either. The really fun part is discussing my preference for super compact laptops (even at the expense of CPU power) with some of my co-workers who still have a PC gray-box standing in a little shrine in their apartment, Nvidia display card, 32 GB of RAM Latest Intel processor, Windows, ... 'How can you live with only 8 GB of RAM?!?!?' ... It's like a debate between Republicans and Democrats, i.e. total disconnect.
Thanks, Tesla ! Without you, those feet-dragger's would have never done this.
Well, if you ever wondered what the world would look like if it was run by the 'ain't broke don't fix it" crowd go to a Ford dealership, a world full of the utterly mediocre and uninspiring. The problem isn't that Ford and the rest of that ilk can't innovate with cutting edge tech if they want to, the problem is that they don't want to innovate with cutting edge tech unless forced to.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans. Both parties love to create districts - or agree to create districts - that guarantee safe seats. And when the fact is that "Maryland and North Carolina are essentially tied for the honor of most-gerrymandered state." but only North Carolina - a GOP State - is mentioned but Maryland - a Democrat State - is not, it's pretty clear that /. is also pretty gerrymandered...
Well Maryland is mentioned in the Wapo article you linked to so you must be complaining about the Slashdot summary which is about North Carolina's congressional map being ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered so I'm not particularly surprised that Maryland is not mentioned since it is not a party to that lawsuit (Fun fact: The article the Slashdot summary links to actually mentions Maryland and the republican's complaints about that state's election map). Complaining that Maryland is not mentioned in the summary of an article whose primary topic of discussion is gerrymandering in North Carolina is like complaining that the summary of an article about rotten apples does not spend half of it's column space talking about rotten oranges .... (hint: it's because the article was about rotten apples).
So which is it? Are minimum wage employees the bedrock of our economy or a completely superfluous bunch of kids and seniors. They can't be both.
It is absolutely both. If younger people cannot gain work experience, if older people cannot supplement social security, the whole system is devastated - the earrings potential alone that is lost to the younger generation is staggering.
But beyond that you are ignoring the cost increases that have to pass through businesses always running close to margin - namely restaurants. Any increase will almost always get passed along which means poor people are the worst screwed by the whole thing - they lose jobs they could have worked for some money, but then they cannot even afford to eat. I'm pretty sure you don't mean to screw poor people over, right? You'd be against that I assume?
The thing is that wages have stagnated in the US for 30-40 years. Wages cannot stagnate forever while prices increase, low skilled jobs are progressively eliminated, for profit schools are allowed to cheat people out of massive mounts of money in return for a degree that is basically crap and 90% of the nation's wealth rests in the offshore bank accounts of the richest 10% who into the bargain have now been largely exempted from paying taxes on what revenues they didn't already dodge taxes on courtesy of the collection of mad clowns that call itself: 'Congress'.
Agreed.
I am for rational NN. And i am 100% Republican.
If Congress makes the law... all the better. The FCC does NOT have this power at this time.
I'm a100% liberal and Im in favour of rational NN as well. The internet should be a place where even small players are able to grow into big players because they don't have to pay protection money to telcos just like a small trucking outfit should be able to grow into a big one because they don't have to pay protection money for access to 'fast lanes' on the nation's highways. All that charging for access to 'fast lanes' does is stifle competition because the big guys can afford to pay but the small startups cannot. It's nice that in an age of trench warfare we can still agree on something.
Funny, the group of white nationalists which usually echos those sentiments seems to think skin colour and gender is an excellent attribute to justify not hiring people
Because white nationalists are as bigoted as progressives. Identity politics is cancer, from both sides.
Then why are you quoting from their playbook?
You know, a wise man once said :
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Maybe one day we'll be rid of Identity Politics.
Noble sentiment, and I hope it will some day be realised. However, as long as conservative white males, the most privileged group of people on the planet, can feel themselves persecuted, discriminated against and trodden upon by people whose prospects of getting work and being as well paid for it as white males are is limited simply because of their gender and/or the colour of their skin then I'm not going to be to holding my breath. In the mean time, I'm going to have limited sympathy for any fellow white male because he objects to diversity in a company whose business model it is to not give a hoot about the skin colour, gender, religion or any other personal trait of their customers.
... he did nothing wrong at all. Google got bad press because they force everyone into "diversity training" and then don't like it when people don't think "skin color" or "gender" is a good attribute to base hirings on ...
Funny, the group of white nationalists which usually echos those sentiments seems to think skin colour and gender is an excellent attribute to justify not hiring people, casting doubt on their intelligence, and in the case of skin colour generally doubting that they deserve to be citizens of their country or in some cases that they deserve more than... how did that angry white nationalist in Charlottesville put it? ... ah yes, be thrown into an oven. White male conservatives are not being discriminated against, white male conservatives are the most privileged group of people on this planet except maybe for Saudi Arab princelings. White male conservatives should quite frankly stop feeling sorry for themselves and stop acting like a bunch of whiny little bitches. Putting on the cry baby act every time something does not go their way is not doing white male conservatives any favours. Google is a company that is trying to appeal to the widest possible customer base and as such has the right to fire people it feels those people are impeding their efforts to appeal to the vast majority of potential customers on this planet who aren't whiny white male conservatives with a victim complex (which, by the way, is a quite small minority of white male conservatives to begin with).
Would You Use a Smartphone-Style Laptop With a Three-Day Battery Life?
Just reading that headline made me think of a tiny smartphone sized laptop, but on further inspection they seem to be talking about a regular old 13.3 inch laptop with a built in mobile network chip, lots of batteries and 360 degree hinges so you can use it as tablet. I will never say no to more battery capacity and I like the idea of a mobile network chip built straight into the laptop. My dad had a similar device from ASUS and quite frankly I was not impressed with their service or the robustness of the hinge system and Asus' battery life claims were extremely optimistic. The thing also died after a few months of light use and had to be replaced, but I am going to assume that is not the rule with Asus devices since I have not used enough of their gadgets to judge. Finally, I would probably want to run something other than Windows but that is a personal preference.
So, are these what they call the Clovis or "pre-Clovis" people or are we talking way before them? We visited a Clovis site in New Mexico this summer, and they were a fascinating culture who hunted mammoths. If I remember correctly, they also died out, so are considered a "dead end".
Judging by the date these are a hitherto unknown group of 'Clovis' people but Clovis is more of a cultural and temporal designation than a genetic one. Clovis (oversimplifying here) is currently a label that is stuck on any group inhabiting the Americas between ~15.000-11.000 years ago and that used a particular style of cultural artefacts and (mostly) their stone tools (because stone tools and garbage piles is usually all we ever find). Thus Clovis is a cultural grouping that does not map directly to a distinct genetic population any more than all modern humans who use claw hammers, wrenches, files, soldering irons, ... etc belong to the same genetically distinct population since humans readily adopt new cultures and abandon old ones if they see an advantage in it. Walk the streets of Tokyo or Shanghai, and you won't see many people in Edo or Qing dynasty period clothes. The locals have all abandoned their traditional clothing culture for European/American style clothing culture for the most part while we here in America/Europe have supplemented much of our food culture with Oriental food culture.
The majority of the early Native Americans were of Asian descent while a smaller group among them may have come from a population in Siberia with some genetic affinity to populations that settled Europe but that population has died out in Asia and was swamped by later immigration waves in Europe. If I'm understanding this correctly the early settlers of N-America split into two populations with one group staying in Beringia while the rest migrated into N-America where that group then split once again into the distinct northern and southern branches of Native-Americans. The Beringians were then later swamped or absorbed by immigration waves coming back up into Canada and Alaska from the south out of North America. What is interesting about these results is firstly that they indicate a single settlement wave that gave rise to all modern Native American populations and that the DNA seems to indicate immigration into the northern most parts of North America began over 20.000 years ago. This can either mean those people were pre-Clovis if they used that tool culture or alternatively that Clovis can be pushed back to over 20.000 years ago just like 'Ötsi' the ice mummy found in the Alps some years ago pushed back the beginning of the copper age in Europe by about a thousand years.
I can think of no possible way this could be abused as political censorship
While I detect a certain sarcastic tone I think you might actually be correct, not because they would not abuse it but simply because censoring the web does not work regardless of reason. Any affected website will just move to another country. This will apply both to real fake news sites as well as those targeted for political reasons. The can make it illegal in France but not Canada, the US or any other country with strong free speech laws.
If one actually goes and RTFA it becomes clear that this is less Macron and the evil gubbermint coming to take away your sacred freedom of speech and more of a mixed bag of measures like increasing transparency in political advertising, introducing a spending cap on political adverting and providing what amounts to a fast-track legal mechanism to file libel suits in order to then take down malicious content or block abusive sites. It seems to be aimed at putting an end to the tactic of spewing large amounts of boldfaced lies and then rely on the fact that by the time the legal system finally reacts and issues take down notices, the election is over your guy has been elected and the shell organisations who spread the propaganda have been dissolved or declared bankrupt so, ... who cares? Mission accomplished. However, if Macron actually goes ahead and does this the process had also better be affordable to grassroots organisations to use and it had better have a mechanism to prevent it begin spammed and clogged up with large amounts of pointless lawsuits. Whatever you think of this idea, I think it is pretty clear that something has to be done to prevent the situation from becoming the norm where the guy with the most money and the ability to spew the most lie and slander saturated sewage into the news cycle from winning elections because the judicial system moves at a snails pace. We are all used to being showered with bullshit during the lead up to elections but the 2016 US election took that to a new low and IMHO that is too low to be tolerated.
Trump won 30 of the 51 Presidential Elections in 2016. Why would you think Clinton should have the office when she won less than half of the elections?
Because she won the popular vote meaning that a majority of the people of the United States wanted her to be president (hint: that's how a functioning democracy should work, majority wins, and this even in a North American republic with representative democracy) When one person has data proving to a mathematical certainty that the majority of the people chose X but you are arguing that is unimportant because the mangled gerrymandered hopelessly antiquated and bribe ridden system spat out Y because Y won a few swing counties in a few swing state that have decided almost every election since WWII and therefore Y is the indisputable choice of the people (and somebody please flush that annoying popular vote down the toilet) you are not arguing a very strong case. The USA needs is a return to a place where the popular vote is represented in the mixture of people that end up in congress and in the person that occupies the White House, and at the moment you do not have that kind of representation in the US, not by a long shot. If you had true representation you'd have a bunch of senators and house members working tirelessly to resurrect the economies of the rust belt states by spending public money on education and modern infrastructure there instead of spending it on giving already super wealthy people even more massive tax breaks. If you had true representation your congress persons would be trying to alleviate poverty in the south and the misery of your urban poor by doing things like raising the minimum wage which incidentally would be more likely to stimulate your consumption driven economy than making the American oligarch class tax free.
Elon must have missed that lecture in Marketing 101
I think Elon also missed the entire series of lectures on logistics as well. I know of two car dealers in my neck of the woods who placed fairly large orders with Tesla for (a combined total) about a hundred Teslas but Tesla was completely unable to keep their delivery schedule. After pouring a sizeable amount to money into infrastructure, marketing and sales to sign up customers for those cars they went bankrupt when the customers lost their patience cancelled their orders due to the excessive delivery delays. The Tesla brand now has a very bad reputation around here, and not for making bad cars mind you, but rather for making promises they can't keep (the cars are pretty nice, if you can afford them).
Why would you publicly defame current or former employers?
Ooh, I don't know, would you appreciate being informed by a former employee that the restaurant you are about to eat at scrapes the rice out of the bowls and off the dishes that come off the cleared tables, washes the stuff in a sieve, makes fried rice out of it and sells it back to the next customer? Or that they take any meat left over on the dishes, dice it up, store it in the fridge and cook a stew out of it once a week? Daily special, our own spicy stew recipe (extra spicy to mask the old meat taste) ... YUMMY! Or maybe you'd appreciate knowing that there are roaches in the kitchen? Because a surprising number of restaurants do these things, and quite a few of them are regularly reprimanded for recurring roach infestations due to lacking hygiene, which is why I normally only eat at places where I can see the food being prepared. The interesting thing is that this kind of behaviour is not necessarily most common in budget restaurants. When I was working my way through college I saw this sort of thing going on to varying degrees of outrageousness in a couple of pretty high priced establishments while some of the cheaper places were models of cleanliness and professionalism.
Nothing was done because law enforcement doesn't take SWATing seriously. It's just a "prank". Local police won't do anything, if they even can. The FBI just dumps your SWATing complains into the nearest dumpster - they're far more concerned with credit card fraud.
Maybe now that someone has died, police will realize this is a thing, that it is dangerous, and that the perpetrators need to have their asses kicked HARD.
I don't think it works like that. Crimes like this are reported to and investigated by local police. The FBI only becomes involved if the crime involves activities that cross state lines or if local police requests their involvements or use of FBI resources. It's only in movies where the FBI shows up, takes over an investigation and sidelines local police. Usually relations between the FBI and local police are quite cooperative in nature. If swatting reports get dumped in the trash by anybody it's local police and that certainly might earn them the interest of state police or even the FBI which would lead to questions being asked. This often boils down to that old American obsession with sates rights and the autonomy of states. In most other countries local police forces ignoring a problem like swatting would have some kind of national police knocking on their door pretty quickly, but in the US individual states have more latitude to do their own thing and thereby more latitude to mess things up (and often they get to mess things up pretty badly) before the federal government can step in and that extends to more areas than just policing. For example, I have severe problems imagining that a state government in Germany could have gotten away with systematically laying waste to it's state finances for as long as Sam Brownback has done with his 'Kansas experiment'.