If ONLY they made headphones that would connect directly to USB, or adapters that could allow you to connect a standard pair of headphones via the USB or Lightning ports.
Yes because I really want to carry around one set of ear buds for my laptop and another set for everything else - that's assuming they even make USB-C compatible ones yet so more likely I will need a special set plus a dongle. Sounds like a real winner of a solution.
If only they were not getting rid of the USB-A ports too. Still I suppose I could buy a brand new headphone set that I do not need or want and then buy another dongle so I can plug it into a USB-C port. This is NOT easier than having a headphone jack.
I have no idea what they will really release, but I'm pretty sure many Slashdot posters (who would never buy Apple hardware anyway) will hate whatever they change
If I never bought Apple hardware why would I care what they changed? The problem with these events is that while I once looked forward to them to see what new improvements and capabilities they would be adding I now look at them with some trepidation because the new features are generally things I do not care about or which make things actually worse. I'm in the market for a new laptop and desktop to replace my aging macs but I want high performance machines, including the GPU, which do not require me to travel around with a bag of dongles to make them work. Frankly if I could run OS X reliably on a Dell XPS 15 it would be "hello again" Dell.
These machines are marketed to, and used by, "pro" users, and built-in audio on ANY computer is not used by anyone serious about audio work.
Perhaps you are unaware but there are some professionals who are not serious about audio work and who still use the audio for things like video conferencing and who would like to have some privacy or avoid disturbing others while doing so. A headphone is rather essential for that and no a wireless thing which has to be kept charged and only lasts for a few hours is NOT a suitable replacement. Having to miss a meeting because you forgot to keep yet another device charged is anything but professional.
I seriously doubt this will happen, unless the costs for this type of DNA analysis comes way down.
I seriously doubt it will happen at successful companies even if the costs go way down and it becomes legal. Nature is only a part of what determines your character: nurture plays a large role as well. That combined with the fact that I am not sure we all agree on what characteristics make a good leader leads me to have very severe doubts about whether this is even vaguely useful.
I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff.
I buy it because I need a Unix-based OS which just works. As a grad student and postdoc I used Linux for everything but as a faculty member I no longer have time to poke around getting it to work properly on the desktop plus I need access to commercial programs for various things (again partly as a result of not having the time to make OpenSource packages do what I need).
That being said the recent trend with Apple is just getting ridiculous. They are selling a MacPro that is 3 years old; their support for GPUs both in software and hardware is bad (and I nee this for some video editing) and they seem to be more interested in some bizarre design ideal than in making a machine that makes the user's like easier.
I'm going to wait for this event to see what they come up with but if the new laptops have replaced every port with a USB-C ports "because it looks cool", except for a lightning port instead of a headphone jack then I'm going to seriously consider dumping Apple and switching to some combination of Windows and Linux on a Dell. I'm not going to buy and then carry around 42 dongles to make everything work no matter how much I like their OS.
For instance, if Mercedes stated that their car would swerve into a tree instead of hitting a crowd of 5 pedestrians, what's to stop me and 4 friends from jumping out in front of the cars just to laugh as it crashes itself to "save" us.
How about the same thing that stops you dropping rocks on cars from a bridge over a road? You know, basic ethics and the consequences of breaking the law. In your example the problem is you and your psychopathic fiends, not the decision made by the car. The best arguments for the self preserving algorithm is that this is what a human driver will instinctually do so it is no worse in causing deaths than a human (and given the far faster reaction time almost certainly far better) and that nobody will ever buy a car that ranks their own lives below that of everyone else around.
There really is no other logical way to approach this. If they went the other way and prioritized the pedestrian, a psychopath could sprint back and forth across a busy freeway, causing accident after accident and injuring or killing lots of innocent passengers.
I agree with the first statement but your argument does not hold water because with this priority setting that same psychopath can now just drive back and forth setting up situations in which the car mow down pedestrians. The problem here is that you have a psychopath, it has nothing to do with the decisions made by the car.
This is common sense. All the self driving car moral bullshit...
I agree but the problem here is the law which can rarely be accused of following common sense. A reasonable person would look at the number of lives saved by the car and decide that this was, on average, a very good thing. The law will look at one instance where a life was lost and, unlike a "gut reaction" of human will show that this was a calculated decision (I expect pre-meditated might even be used) to kill a pedestrian and will then sue the manufacturer who has far deeper pockets than the driver.
While the law can be changed I expect most politicians will be very wary about passing a law which might appear to declare open season on pedestrians...or at least I expect that is how the other problem, the media, will present it.
No it won't if their phone and/or watch has been hacked. This is an utterly stupid rule because if a minister's phone will really listen in to all s/he says then the moment s/he leaves cabinet and starts talking with his civil servants and MP colleagues to put what was discussed in place then whomever hacked the phone will hear the plans then. At best this puts a tiny extra hurdle in the way.
I suspect that what they are far more worried about is that someone in cabinet will record their discussions and leak it to the press, or worse the House of Commons. With all the Brexit negotiation preparations ramping up there are a lot of concerned MPs wanting to know details given all the talk of a 'hard' Brexit and a leak of something like that could be catastrophic for the government.
12k miles is considered average yearly mileage that's about 32 miles a day so 2 million miles wouldn't be like 300 years of human driving.
It's even worse when you consider that there are over 6 billion humans on the planet and just over a billion cars for them to drive so if the average is 32 miles a day that makes 32 billion miles of human driving every day. So perhaps the headline should read 5.4s of human driving or 167 years of one person driving.
Exactly - what matters for data retention is the data volume times the decay rate not just the decay rate itself. In the current information age we have far, far more of our lives and knowledge documented many, many times over. While a good deal of that data is on far more ephemeral media not all of it is. For example if we consider carved inscriptions on buildings and other stone memorials we still probably save more data this way than ancient civilizations did. We tend to neglect it as trivial compared to the data we save in other ways because it is but the total rate - and content - is probably comparable to ancient civilizations.
However we also have data stored in printed media some of which are books of which there are millions of copies some of which are high quality but even those that are not the more rapid degradation can be somewhat offset by the far, far higher number of copies. This, along with the ease of making copies, suggests that the trivialities of life are still just as likely to be kept as they were before. In the past it took someone to keep a box of old love letters or a handwritten journal etc. in suitable conditions for it to survive through the centuries. Now that journal may have thousands of digital copies - each may have a lower chance of surviving but if even one does the data are preserved.
The concern is that in most respects, the US offers one of the wider definitions of freedom of speech. It's not perfect, but it really is better than most.
That depends on what freedoms you prioritize. The US priority is that the government cannot restrict freedom of speech but turns a complete blind eye to corporations restricting that freedom for employees or for others by suing. While this does not carry the threat of jail lifetime financial ruin is just as effective in silencing people and the power is controlled by entities which the people have zero control over.
European countries tend to have a more comprehensive view and put restrictions on what speech both government and corporations can restrict. However those restrictions are less comprehensive that US government restrictions. Personally I tend to think that the European system results in more free speech than the US system in situations that matter to most people while the US system ends up with more free speech for groups of the extreme fringe of society e.g. holocaust deniers, racists, extreme religious groups etc.
If they're having trouble finding donors, I suggest they try... the House of Commons
The problem is not just getting donors it is getting a donor that someone is willing to use. Would you want a child who is genetically related to your average MP?
That was my point: there will still be a time mis-calculation but instead him thinking it was 81 days and it turning out to be 80 because of the Earth's rotation he will think it took 80 days when actually it took 81 due to time dilation (if he goes fast enough).
Only really as a research project which provides a dietary supplement. The fact remains that the vast majority of people on the bases do not spend all the time attempting to grow food. This would not be the case on Mars.
...only the twist is that thanks to time dilation while Fogg thought it only took 80 days it actually took 81 in solar system's reference frame so he actually lost the bet.
Additionally you can read about the large amount of supplies that are required every year to keep the base going.
True but that is because nobody on an antarctic base spends their time trying to grow things (unless that is part of their science project). If you have everyone on the base dedicating all their time to growing food, finding resources, making repairs etc. you will probably need far fewer resources to support the base. This is impractical in Antarctica because it is cheaper to ship the food there than to support even more people living there who try to grow food themselves.
However I do agree that this proposal seems rather optimistic but the task is so amazingly hard that I expect that any Mars colonization mission will always appear overly optimistic until one actually succeeds.
There are literally tens of thousands of scientists that don't think it's warming.
Ok it should not be a problem to name some then should it? Please pick some that are in faculty positions at reputable universities though because when I have spoken with my colleagues over in geophysics and earth and atmospheric sciences not one of them has raised any doubts whatsoever that the mean temperature of the planet is increasing. There IS debate about the level mankind's contribution to the increase but absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the temperature is increasing....and before you go off the deep end about funding conspiracies etc. a lot of these people receive grants from the oil industry so if anything they would have a bias against global warming.
So apologies if I take the word of world experts in the field over a random guy on slashdot who has provided absolutely zero evidence to back up his claims. For example what evidence do you base your claim that only 4% of the world's CO2 is from humans? This plot shows a 25+% increase in the level since 1960. What natural process has caused such a rapid yet steady rise in CO2 over that period? I'm more than willing to keep an open mind about the causes but it seems very plausible that human CO2 emissions caused this increase and I've not heard of any natural process that could account for it. If you want to convince people you need to explain the data. Just stating what you believe and shouting at anyone who disagrees is not how science works.
As for whether such a tube would be flexible enough to accommodate the two ends getting closer together or farther apart by three or four inches per year, though, I have my doubts.
Look up vacuum bellows tube. Obviously this would only provide a limited range of extension but it should be enough to last quite a few years given the length of pipe involved. Of course you would also have to scale them up which would undoubtedly produce some technical challenges but probably nothing unsurmountable if you have the money.
I'd be happier if the meagre details they do post were at least correct. If one fifth of a ream is 100 sheets then 200 reams is 100,000 sheets not 10,000 as the summary states.
Air travel should be something that you do when you're crossing an ocean, because trains over water (and subduction zones) are physically impractical
Actually it is fiscally impractical, not physically impractical. You could physically build a vacuum tube-based maglev train where the tube is at some depth in the ocean to avoid surface issues and plate boundary problems. However the costs when people look at these things are utterly insane...but in theory it is physically practical to build such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If ONLY they made headphones that would connect directly to USB, or adapters that could allow you to connect a standard pair of headphones via the USB or Lightning ports.
Yes because I really want to carry around one set of ear buds for my laptop and another set for everything else - that's assuming they even make USB-C compatible ones yet so more likely I will need a special set plus a dongle. Sounds like a real winner of a solution.
of USB headphones for video conferencing?
If only they were not getting rid of the USB-A ports too. Still I suppose I could buy a brand new headphone set that I do not need or want and then buy another dongle so I can plug it into a USB-C port. This is NOT easier than having a headphone jack.
I have no idea what they will really release, but I'm pretty sure many Slashdot posters (who would never buy Apple hardware anyway) will hate whatever they change
If I never bought Apple hardware why would I care what they changed? The problem with these events is that while I once looked forward to them to see what new improvements and capabilities they would be adding I now look at them with some trepidation because the new features are generally things I do not care about or which make things actually worse. I'm in the market for a new laptop and desktop to replace my aging macs but I want high performance machines, including the GPU, which do not require me to travel around with a bag of dongles to make them work. Frankly if I could run OS X reliably on a Dell XPS 15 it would be "hello again" Dell.
These machines are marketed to, and used by, "pro" users, and built-in audio on ANY computer is not used by anyone serious about audio work.
Perhaps you are unaware but there are some professionals who are not serious about audio work and who still use the audio for things like video conferencing and who would like to have some privacy or avoid disturbing others while doing so. A headphone is rather essential for that and no a wireless thing which has to be kept charged and only lasts for a few hours is NOT a suitable replacement. Having to miss a meeting because you forgot to keep yet another device charged is anything but professional.
I seriously doubt this will happen, unless the costs for this type of DNA analysis comes way down.
I seriously doubt it will happen at successful companies even if the costs go way down and it becomes legal. Nature is only a part of what determines your character: nurture plays a large role as well. That combined with the fact that I am not sure we all agree on what characteristics make a good leader leads me to have very severe doubts about whether this is even vaguely useful.
I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff.
I buy it because I need a Unix-based OS which just works. As a grad student and postdoc I used Linux for everything but as a faculty member I no longer have time to poke around getting it to work properly on the desktop plus I need access to commercial programs for various things (again partly as a result of not having the time to make OpenSource packages do what I need).
That being said the recent trend with Apple is just getting ridiculous. They are selling a MacPro that is 3 years old; their support for GPUs both in software and hardware is bad (and I nee this for some video editing) and they seem to be more interested in some bizarre design ideal than in making a machine that makes the user's like easier.
I'm going to wait for this event to see what they come up with but if the new laptops have replaced every port with a USB-C ports "because it looks cool", except for a lightning port instead of a headphone jack then I'm going to seriously consider dumping Apple and switching to some combination of Windows and Linux on a Dell. I'm not going to buy and then carry around 42 dongles to make everything work no matter how much I like their OS.
For instance, if Mercedes stated that their car would swerve into a tree instead of hitting a crowd of 5 pedestrians, what's to stop me and 4 friends from jumping out in front of the cars just to laugh as it crashes itself to "save" us.
How about the same thing that stops you dropping rocks on cars from a bridge over a road? You know, basic ethics and the consequences of breaking the law. In your example the problem is you and your psychopathic fiends, not the decision made by the car. The best arguments for the self preserving algorithm is that this is what a human driver will instinctually do so it is no worse in causing deaths than a human (and given the far faster reaction time almost certainly far better) and that nobody will ever buy a car that ranks their own lives below that of everyone else around.
There really is no other logical way to approach this. If they went the other way and prioritized the pedestrian, a psychopath could sprint back and forth across a busy freeway, causing accident after accident and injuring or killing lots of innocent passengers.
I agree with the first statement but your argument does not hold water because with this priority setting that same psychopath can now just drive back and forth setting up situations in which the car mow down pedestrians. The problem here is that you have a psychopath, it has nothing to do with the decisions made by the car.
This is common sense. All the self driving car moral bullshit...
I agree but the problem here is the law which can rarely be accused of following common sense. A reasonable person would look at the number of lives saved by the car and decide that this was, on average, a very good thing. The law will look at one instance where a life was lost and, unlike a "gut reaction" of human will show that this was a calculated decision (I expect pre-meditated might even be used) to kill a pedestrian and will then sue the manufacturer who has far deeper pockets than the driver.
While the law can be changed I expect most politicians will be very wary about passing a law which might appear to declare open season on pedestrians...or at least I expect that is how the other problem, the media, will present it.
What is said in cabinet, stays in cabinet.
No it won't if their phone and/or watch has been hacked. This is an utterly stupid rule because if a minister's phone will really listen in to all s/he says then the moment s/he leaves cabinet and starts talking with his civil servants and MP colleagues to put what was discussed in place then whomever hacked the phone will hear the plans then. At best this puts a tiny extra hurdle in the way.
I suspect that what they are far more worried about is that someone in cabinet will record their discussions and leak it to the press, or worse the House of Commons. With all the Brexit negotiation preparations ramping up there are a lot of concerned MPs wanting to know details given all the talk of a 'hard' Brexit and a leak of something like that could be catastrophic for the government.
12k miles is considered average yearly mileage that's about 32 miles a day so 2 million miles wouldn't be like 300 years of human driving.
It's even worse when you consider that there are over 6 billion humans on the planet and just over a billion cars for them to drive so if the average is 32 miles a day that makes 32 billion miles of human driving every day. So perhaps the headline should read 5.4s of human driving or 167 years of one person driving.
Even stone can wear over time.
Exactly - what matters for data retention is the data volume times the decay rate not just the decay rate itself. In the current information age we have far, far more of our lives and knowledge documented many, many times over. While a good deal of that data is on far more ephemeral media not all of it is. For example if we consider carved inscriptions on buildings and other stone memorials we still probably save more data this way than ancient civilizations did. We tend to neglect it as trivial compared to the data we save in other ways because it is but the total rate - and content - is probably comparable to ancient civilizations.
However we also have data stored in printed media some of which are books of which there are millions of copies some of which are high quality but even those that are not the more rapid degradation can be somewhat offset by the far, far higher number of copies. This, along with the ease of making copies, suggests that the trivialities of life are still just as likely to be kept as they were before. In the past it took someone to keep a box of old love letters or a handwritten journal etc. in suitable conditions for it to survive through the centuries. Now that journal may have thousands of digital copies - each may have a lower chance of surviving but if even one does the data are preserved.
The concern is that in most respects, the US offers one of the wider definitions of freedom of speech. It's not perfect, but it really is better than most.
That depends on what freedoms you prioritize. The US priority is that the government cannot restrict freedom of speech but turns a complete blind eye to corporations restricting that freedom for employees or for others by suing. While this does not carry the threat of jail lifetime financial ruin is just as effective in silencing people and the power is controlled by entities which the people have zero control over.
European countries tend to have a more comprehensive view and put restrictions on what speech both government and corporations can restrict. However those restrictions are less comprehensive that US government restrictions. Personally I tend to think that the European system results in more free speech than the US system in situations that matter to most people while the US system ends up with more free speech for groups of the extreme fringe of society e.g. holocaust deniers, racists, extreme religious groups etc.
If they're having trouble finding donors, I suggest they try ... the House of Commons
The problem is not just getting donors it is getting a donor that someone is willing to use. Would you want a child who is genetically related to your average MP?
That was my point: there will still be a time mis-calculation but instead him thinking it was 81 days and it turning out to be 80 because of the Earth's rotation he will think it took 80 days when actually it took 81 due to time dilation (if he goes fast enough).
Well if they sell their farm here on Earth they will probably have enough money but I absolutely agree that the plan is somewhat overly ambitious.
Only really as a research project which provides a dietary supplement. The fact remains that the vast majority of people on the bases do not spend all the time attempting to grow food. This would not be the case on Mars.
...only the twist is that thanks to time dilation while Fogg thought it only took 80 days it actually took 81 in solar system's reference frame so he actually lost the bet.
Additionally you can read about the large amount of supplies that are required every year to keep the base going.
True but that is because nobody on an antarctic base spends their time trying to grow things (unless that is part of their science project). If you have everyone on the base dedicating all their time to growing food, finding resources, making repairs etc. you will probably need far fewer resources to support the base. This is impractical in Antarctica because it is cheaper to ship the food there than to support even more people living there who try to grow food themselves.
However I do agree that this proposal seems rather optimistic but the task is so amazingly hard that I expect that any Mars colonization mission will always appear overly optimistic until one actually succeeds.
There are literally tens of thousands of scientists that don't think it's warming.
Ok it should not be a problem to name some then should it? Please pick some that are in faculty positions at reputable universities though because when I have spoken with my colleagues over in geophysics and earth and atmospheric sciences not one of them has raised any doubts whatsoever that the mean temperature of the planet is increasing. There IS debate about the level mankind's contribution to the increase but absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the temperature is increasing....and before you go off the deep end about funding conspiracies etc. a lot of these people receive grants from the oil industry so if anything they would have a bias against global warming.
So apologies if I take the word of world experts in the field over a random guy on slashdot who has provided absolutely zero evidence to back up his claims. For example what evidence do you base your claim that only 4% of the world's CO2 is from humans? This plot shows a 25+% increase in the level since 1960. What natural process has caused such a rapid yet steady rise in CO2 over that period? I'm more than willing to keep an open mind about the causes but it seems very plausible that human CO2 emissions caused this increase and I've not heard of any natural process that could account for it. If you want to convince people you need to explain the data. Just stating what you believe and shouting at anyone who disagrees is not how science works.
As for whether such a tube would be flexible enough to accommodate the two ends getting closer together or farther apart by three or four inches per year, though, I have my doubts.
Look up vacuum bellows tube. Obviously this would only provide a limited range of extension but it should be enough to last quite a few years given the length of pipe involved. Of course you would also have to scale them up which would undoubtedly produce some technical challenges but probably nothing unsurmountable if you have the money.
Getting tired of "news" posting _zero_ details.
I'd be happier if the meagre details they do post were at least correct. If one fifth of a ream is 100 sheets then 200 reams is 100,000 sheets not 10,000 as the summary states.
Unless the door to door time is faster dont bother. I can suck carbon out of the air I can not make more time.
Actually you can make more time: you just need to make the world go faster but extracting carbon from the air is probably easier.
Air travel should be something that you do when you're crossing an ocean, because trains over water (and subduction zones) are physically impractical
Actually it is fiscally impractical, not physically impractical. You could physically build a vacuum tube-based maglev train where the tube is at some depth in the ocean to avoid surface issues and plate boundary problems. However the costs when people look at these things are utterly insane...but in theory it is physically practical to build such a thing.
Given the MPs we have a better slogan would be: "Cheaters may later become law makers".