Your genes are elsewhere in the world even if you don't reproduce. If you have a sibling then they have about half your genes, and if they have two kids most of those pass along. If you have two siblings then the fraction of you out there is even higher. And one can go back up the ladder, looking at cousins.
So basically you are all out there and statistically at least half your genes are in someone if you have a lot of family.
You are therefore unnecessary as a vessel for the genes to keep going. But if you feel you have an obligation to your genes then you should care about the planet.
In fact the same logic applies to people with kids. Personally they themselves will die. Only their genes go on. So why should anyone care about the planet if you don't??
Not having kids is not any basis for your logic
The headline on the article is misleading. there is nothing more worrying about this year than last year. The rate of emissions is doing whatever it was doing last year (going up, going down, staying the same...). All that changed is a temporary fluctuation in one of the sink tems is low this year. But this is just a normal environmental fluctuation not the driver term.
So yes one should be interested in emission rates and their long term impact but worrying about next year is not something one needs to place any different concern on.
At my company the party line is we hire the best and most distinguished people not the people who happen to be on hand for the job at hand.
At first this seems really dumb. A lot of jobs require some specific skills and it's hard to get people with less specialized experience to do them since they need to retrain.
But over the course of a career you see that the people who manage to stick around and succeed are the ones with a broad base and ability to shift and retrain.
THis is not exclusive from deeply experienced people who are good at one job. But the level of deep experience in new hires is nil. They have a few tricks they recently learned and maybe one great project they once did. But that's not deep expeince, it's more of a fad skill that could become the basis for getting started fast and developing, but it isn't deep experience yet.
Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.
But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills it's going to make people more disposable. It used to be the IBM was the pinnacle of developing career oriented workforces dedicated to the company. I guess not any more.
So what's so great about degreed people? Well especially for pHDs it proves they can take on a task and finish it. Postdocs show they can plan a job, and finish it on time. Undergrads show they can learn new things and if they have a masters, concisely reach for the right tools and apply them.
That's what degrees show. It's not just that you learned stuff, but you know how to learn, apply, and plan with new tools. Innovating, Planning the job and delivering on time are the real drivers and it's why senior people are actually worth their pay, at least the good ones are
Somehow if human life were exterminated in the space laser sharkanado accident and eons late another species of arose and archaeologically revealed this epic Darwin Award extinction in pursuit of FOMO gossip then humanities role in the universe will have been fulfilled. Nothing could have been more futile.
More seriously, do we really think it's a good idea to let the mercenary Facebook "scientist" put future rubbish in space. They have proven they are incautious and will exploit any loophole to its full extent with no concern about what might be good for anyone else but facebook. THey will, if it suits them, completely fill every orbital channel and burn zuckerbergs all-seeing face on the moon
granted that there's a some point where a song is so long it interferes with itself. But that's not ordinarily the case. And 20 minute songs really are in their own class
There's no incentive for any one artist to go shorter. An artist only benefits from other artists shortening their songs but you get no benefit from shortening yours. So why would any artist choose to shorten their art for the benefit of others but not themselves? Ad supported streaming services that I have seen simply display ads on the screen in the player not interrupt the music. Perhaps there are some but I'd doubt those would have any affect on the collective behavior of the industry as a whole.
THe logic of the article also makes no sense. The article says that people are paid per song not per minute so this makes shorter songs better. ummm no. People are not looping your song to fill an hour, so the length of your song has nothing to do with how often it gets played. And if there were pressure from that economy then streaming companies would prefer to stream longer songs so they pay less royalties to fill an hour. Artists would prefer to make longer songs so their songs would occupy more time in the listeners attention. Now would short attention span millennials prefer longer or shorter songs? I don't know but since they pay bulk montly rates they aren't economizing by preferring shorter songs.
SO there's no economic pressure here.
With AM radio, the shorter the songs the more frequent the advertisements, so there was a little economic pressure there. But not on the seconds time scale like this silly article is measuring. And streaming services don't have ads so that pressure is gone.
In the hey day of AM radio the songs aimed for 2 min 30 seconds. It's not economics. And on top of that, comparing averages to individual songs is also silly. Half fo them will be longer than the median. Lastly Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
Your analogy is accurate-- about the only thing that never seems to have evidence Fads turning like a wind-vane in a twister is coffee. Coffee is just good for you.
One thing that makes me suspect that tans are not so bad is that it's often the case that sexual attractivness is also an indicator of health or wealth or success --- that is, the general suitability of a mate for enhanced fitness.
We go to great lengths in fact to look better than we are!
And generally, on white folks, a glowing tan is considered attractive, just as a healthy flush in the cheeks is more attractive than a goth palor or a crimson palor.
So if a Tan is such a leading indicator, it might be rooted in biological fitness. That might not mean health-- it might mean your mate is an active hunter not a cave surfer--but I'd bet on health as the indication it forecasts. IN modern times, tans also are indicators of Leisure and therefore wealth, but historically that wasn't the case-- rich folks were a whiter shade of pale to specifically not be farmer-tanned.
that is, how can something that looks good be bad? Surely many ways but there's a rule of thumb here.
Vid Angel was a streaming service based on the idea you could purchase a DVD from them, they would rip it for you and stream it to you, then they would buy back the DVD. Notionally, you are entitled to do anything you like with something you own besides distribute it in violation of the copyright (which you are not doing since you lose access the moment you sell it back).
They also had one more wrinkle in this equation that appeared to defeat any challenge to the legality of that model. As a paid service they would Bowlderize the content. That is they would micro edit out a user specified set of things you requested. e.g. delete images of gentalia, swear words, gory violence. These might be cuts shorter than 1 second-- and rarely even noticable in practice. They would macro edit longer sequences.
This put it squarely under the Family viewing act exemption for ripping, and streaming of purchased media for the purpose fo family freindly editing.
It seemed inconceivable anyone could challenge the plain english of the act.
Disney did. And they won in court against two different companies trying to use this model.
But I think the real problem is these were not deep pocket companies. They could not defend themselves. And in the case of vid angel their mission was family friendly viewing not evading copyright laws, so they decided it was better to stay in bussiness. They stayed in bussiness by simply piggybacking their service on other streaming services (Netflix, hulu...) rather than ripping DVDs.
So at present you can't hire someone to rip a DVD and stream it to you.
If that could be challenged then one could once again unify all these fragmented providers for any content that was available on DVD.
Often people get upset with lawsuits. And in some cases, e.g. patents and copyright, there might be some grounds for that. But in point of fact Class actions, which reward lawyers in small numbers and give token payments to masses are just part of our process. They are a form of regulation. It's a bit of a blunt axe. But it's the fire alarm when regulatory agencies don't exist or won't act.
Eventually these either reach an equilibrium where companies increase their responsiblily in areas they felt free to ignore before, or they actually seek protection by asking for regulation. Sometimes congress gets in the act and at that point companies usually propose a an industry code of conduct that is voluntary but advertisable as a way to head off congress.
So tort law isn't exactly about making people whole. It's about shutting down shitty practices that put people at risk.
it's especially important for the case you seem to scoff at. Namely, it's true that staying at a marriot and handing over my info is within my control. But not really. I have to travel and I'm going to to fork this over to ten different companies and their "partners" before I even have my tickets booked. They know I have no alternatives. And if I do have alternatives then it's too much of a personal transactional effort to gather the information to know those alternatives. I can't distinguish between one company and another in regards to data protection standards.
thus these parasitic companies like "life lock" and such that companies like marriot buy "credit monitoring" for the injured are just there to be painful not to really protect me. the protection comes when the companies themselves start safeguarding the data to avoid the pain
Intel is the dominant CPU maker but GPUs are increasing the market sectors they are irreplacable in. First Gaming, now AI, and soon drone and embedded vision systems, and soon servers will use them for many mundane things like flight schedule planning. Once they break into tablets then We'll see some applications we havent thought about yet. TVs also need them evidently though some say they are better off without the smoothing.
Nvida doesn't make decent CPUs and Intel doesn't make decent GPUs. AMD makes both.
Yet NVIDIA GPUs and Intel CPUs still are much much better in actual use. Why? it's not the hardware it's the software. Intel MKL crushes AMD for anything numerical. And CUDA-writ-large crushes AMDs offering. And consequently everyone write APIs that depend on INTEL and NVIDIA first.
Even Meltdown and related bugs that come from Intel's inability to sign threads during context switches (AMD supposedly can but I really don't understand this) isn't enough to kill intel's out- perfrormance on AMD on numerical calcls.
But now that AMD has finally equaled Intel and Nidia you'd think an integrated CPU/GPU could be unbeatable. The achilles heel of GPU's is the lack of memory shared with the CPU and this could potentially solve that
One group with low rates of cancers are people who work in the nuclear industry or on navy ships. They don't have shocking better healthcare plans than most middleclass folks so it may not just be wealth buying better health care. One guess is that by the nature of the work they are industrious people self selected to have otherwise healthy lifestyles but even studies trying to control for that still find lower cancer rates. Another possibility of course is that low level nuclear radiation is good for you. Since life evolved in a higher radiation level environment than today, it might not be shocking if multi-cellular animals figured out some way to differentially profit from radiation over their single cell parasites. But that's a stretch too. An even more likely hypothesis is apparently nuclear material environments actually are less toxic than others. That too would not be surprising since Nuclear is all about safety and avoiding accidents so hazards are controlled carefully. A final hypothesis remaining is that it's not that bad for you in low doses compared to the variability in life itself.
I think the world lost something in moving away from skewmorphic icons for boring bauhaus styling.
as this shows there is a deep psychological mapping from real desktops to virtual ones.
This is not a surprise as many parts of the brain that do modern processing are just adaptation of things never intended for the purpose and as a result have advantages when new problems are cast in the old frameworks the neurons are actually organized for.
Apple's new UI feature "stacks" actually gathers all the shit in a folder ort desktop and tries to organize it into logical piles like an admiistrative assitant might. Nice idea. Now where did my admin put that file i needed.
I actually like not having a TV be the Center piece of my living room that all-must-face. So I use a projector. I plastered the wall so the all itself is worth looking at even as a blank white wall.
Projectors have downsides: they need dark rooms but I consider that a good thing--- it discourages TV watching during the day when you could be something other than a couch potato. The real downside is they can't match the color saturation and contrast of a good TV. But on the otherhand they are pretty good and affordable compared toa TV of the same size.
Since I run mine at 120" I would definitely not want a leviathan sized TV stuck to my wall.
I'm more interested in the microLED panels with zero edge thickness. Those won't roll but they probably can be folded perfectly along the boundaries making a widescreen flip-phone possible. Samsung is making modular living room panels with these in small quantities right now.
The achilles heel of bitcoin is that it has to be expensive to be secure. The cost of securing 51% needs to exceed the profitability of achieving it. Thus as the market cap of bitcoin rises, the greater the potential to engage in a profitable double spend. So the cost of the transactions has to rise. SInce the transaction reimbursement has to cover the cost of the hash confirmation and that's paid in bit coin then either the fees or the reward value has to increase. This may possibly, but not necessarily, indirectly pressure the value of a bit coin to rise, further increasing the market cap.
There are some newer currencies just created that appear, at my superficial glance, to escape from some of that pressure on the cost of the transaction securing the block chain.
But for bit coin and similar one is stuck with proof of work having to be exorbitant as the profitability of foul play rises. Eventually the only people who can mine are the people who steal electricity. It's not a bug, it is in fact the ONLY thing that makes it work at all other than pure good will and altruism
Slashdot Mirror
Your genes are elsewhere in the world even if you don't reproduce. If you have a sibling then they have about half your genes, and if they have two kids most of those pass along. If you have two siblings then the fraction of you out there is even higher. And one can go back up the ladder, looking at cousins.
So basically you are all out there and statistically at least half your genes are in someone if you have a lot of family.
You are therefore unnecessary as a vessel for the genes to keep going. But if you feel you have an obligation to your genes then you should care about the planet.
In fact the same logic applies to people with kids. Personally they themselves will die. Only their genes go on. So why should anyone care about the planet if you don't??
Not having kids is not any basis for your logic
The headline on the article is misleading. there is nothing more worrying about this year than last year. The rate of emissions is doing whatever it was doing last year (going up, going down, staying the same...). All that changed is a temporary fluctuation in one of the sink tems is low this year. But this is just a normal environmental fluctuation not the driver term.
So yes one should be interested in emission rates and their long term impact but worrying about next year is not something one needs to place any different concern on.
You just face the camera at 90 degrees on the selfie stick. So simple! amazing no one thought of this before.
At my company the party line is we hire the best and most distinguished people not the people who happen to be on hand for the job at hand.
At first this seems really dumb. A lot of jobs require some specific skills and it's hard to get people with less specialized experience to do them since they need to retrain.
But over the course of a career you see that the people who manage to stick around and succeed are the ones with a broad base and ability to shift and retrain.
THis is not exclusive from deeply experienced people who are good at one job. But the level of deep experience in new hires is nil. They have a few tricks they recently learned and maybe one great project they once did. But that's not deep expeince, it's more of a fad skill that could become the basis for getting started fast and developing, but it isn't deep experience yet.
Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.
But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills it's going to make people more disposable. It used to be the IBM was the pinnacle of developing career oriented workforces dedicated to the company. I guess not any more.
So what's so great about degreed people? Well especially for pHDs it proves they can take on a task and finish it. Postdocs show they can plan a job, and finish it on time. Undergrads show they can learn new things and if they have a masters, concisely reach for the right tools and apply them.
That's what degrees show. It's not just that you learned stuff, but you know how to learn, apply, and plan with new tools. Innovating, Planning the job and delivering on time are the real drivers and it's why senior people are actually worth their pay, at least the good ones are
it's not 57% it's 56.732%. Let's keep this discussion rooted in reality people.
In a space Sharknado.
Somehow if human life were exterminated in the space laser sharkanado accident and eons late another species of arose and archaeologically revealed this epic Darwin Award extinction in pursuit of FOMO gossip then humanities role in the universe will have been fulfilled. Nothing could have been more futile.
More seriously, do we really think it's a good idea to let the mercenary Facebook "scientist" put future rubbish in space. They have proven they are incautious and will exploit any loophole to its full extent with no concern about what might be good for anyone else but facebook. THey will, if it suits them, completely fill every orbital channel and burn zuckerbergs all-seeing face on the moon
granted that there's a some point where a song is so long it interferes with itself. But that's not ordinarily the case. And 20 minute songs really are in their own class
There's no incentive for any one artist to go shorter. An artist only benefits from other artists shortening their songs but you get no benefit from shortening yours. So why would any artist choose to shorten their art for the benefit of others but not themselves? Ad supported streaming services that I have seen simply display ads on the screen in the player not interrupt the music. Perhaps there are some but I'd doubt those would have any affect on the collective behavior of the industry as a whole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's 5:15 sec, which reminds me The Who.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
but it's only 5 minutes
Yes but it is so monotonous it bzip compresses down to a 4KB file and you can put 180,000 copies of it on a digital CD
THe logic of the article also makes no sense. The article says that people are paid per song not per minute so this makes shorter songs better. ummm no. People are not looping your song to fill an hour, so the length of your song has nothing to do with how often it gets played. And if there were pressure from that economy then streaming companies would prefer to stream longer songs so they pay less royalties to fill an hour. Artists would prefer to make longer songs so their songs would occupy more time in the listeners attention. Now would short attention span millennials prefer longer or shorter songs? I don't know but since they pay bulk montly rates they aren't economizing by preferring shorter songs.
SO there's no economic pressure here.
With AM radio, the shorter the songs the more frequent the advertisements, so there was a little economic pressure there. But not on the seconds time scale like this silly article is measuring. And streaming services don't have ads so that pressure is gone.
In the hey day of AM radio the songs aimed for 2 min 30 seconds. It's not economics. And on top of that, comparing averages to individual songs is also silly. Half fo them will be longer than the median. Lastly Album oriented music tends to be longer than radio/stream oriented music because the former has a larger story telling context and the latter is about a catchy vibe.
Your analogy is accurate-- about the only thing that never seems to have evidence Fads turning like a wind-vane in a twister is coffee. Coffee is just good for you.
One thing that makes me suspect that tans are not so bad is that it's often the case that sexual attractivness is also an indicator of health or wealth or success --- that is, the general suitability of a mate for enhanced fitness.
We go to great lengths in fact to look better than we are!
And generally, on white folks, a glowing tan is considered attractive, just as a healthy flush in the cheeks is more attractive than a goth palor or a crimson palor.
So if a Tan is such a leading indicator, it might be rooted in biological fitness. That might not mean health-- it might mean your mate is an active hunter not a cave surfer--but I'd bet on health as the indication it forecasts. IN modern times, tans also are indicators of Leisure and therefore wealth, but historically that wasn't the case-- rich folks were a whiter shade of pale to specifically not be farmer-tanned.
that is, how can something that looks good be bad? Surely many ways but there's a rule of thumb here.
Chia seeds will grow on terracotta pottery and water.
Vid Angel was a streaming service based on the idea you could purchase a DVD from them, they would rip it for you and stream it to you, then they would buy back the DVD. Notionally, you are entitled to do anything you like with something you own besides distribute it in violation of the copyright (which you are not doing since you lose access the moment you sell it back).
They also had one more wrinkle in this equation that appeared to defeat any challenge to the legality of that model. As a paid service they would Bowlderize the content. That is they would micro edit out a user specified set of things you requested. e.g. delete images of gentalia, swear words, gory violence. These might be cuts shorter than 1 second-- and rarely even noticable in practice. They would macro edit longer sequences.
This put it squarely under the Family viewing act exemption for ripping, and streaming of purchased media for the purpose fo family freindly editing.
It seemed inconceivable anyone could challenge the plain english of the act.
Disney did. And they won in court against two different companies trying to use this model.
But I think the real problem is these were not deep pocket companies. They could not defend themselves. And in the case of vid angel their mission was family friendly viewing not evading copyright laws, so they decided it was better to stay in bussiness. They stayed in bussiness by simply piggybacking their service on other streaming services (Netflix, hulu...) rather than ripping DVDs.
So at present you can't hire someone to rip a DVD and stream it to you.
If that could be challenged then one could once again unify all these fragmented providers for any content that was available on DVD.
the remake is Who I Spy
Often people get upset with lawsuits. And in some cases, e.g. patents and copyright, there might be some grounds for that. But in point of fact Class actions, which reward lawyers in small numbers and give token payments to masses are just part of our process. They are a form of regulation. It's a bit of a blunt axe. But it's the fire alarm when regulatory agencies don't exist or won't act.
Eventually these either reach an equilibrium where companies increase their responsiblily in areas they felt free to ignore before, or they actually seek protection by asking for regulation. Sometimes congress gets in the act and at that point companies usually propose a an industry code of conduct that is voluntary but advertisable as a way to head off congress.
So tort law isn't exactly about making people whole. It's about shutting down shitty practices that put people at risk.
it's especially important for the case you seem to scoff at. Namely, it's true that staying at a marriot and handing over my info is within my control. But not really. I have to travel and I'm going to to fork this over to ten different companies and their "partners" before I even have my tickets booked. They know I have no alternatives. And if I do have alternatives then it's too much of a personal transactional effort to gather the information to know those alternatives. I can't distinguish between one company and another in regards to data protection standards.
thus these parasitic companies like "life lock" and such that companies like marriot buy "credit monitoring" for the injured are just there to be painful not to really protect me. the protection comes when the companies themselves start safeguarding the data to avoid the pain
I haven't seen a lot of discussion about when an I7-8700 is faster than the new I7. Whereas threadrippers are going in the opposite direction.
What's the fuss. They have been selling 1TB cards on ebay and amazon for years now,.
Intel is the dominant CPU maker but GPUs are increasing the market sectors they are irreplacable in. First Gaming, now AI, and soon drone and embedded vision systems, and soon servers will use them for many mundane things like flight schedule planning. Once they break into tablets then We'll see some applications we havent thought about yet. TVs also need them evidently though some say they are better off without the smoothing.
Nvida doesn't make decent CPUs and Intel doesn't make decent GPUs. AMD makes both.
Yet NVIDIA GPUs and Intel CPUs still are much much better in actual use. Why? it's not the hardware it's the software. Intel MKL crushes AMD for anything numerical. And CUDA-writ-large crushes AMDs offering. And consequently everyone write APIs that depend on INTEL and NVIDIA first.
Even Meltdown and related bugs that come from Intel's inability to sign threads during context switches (AMD supposedly can but I really don't understand this) isn't enough to kill intel's out- perfrormance on AMD on numerical calcls.
But now that AMD has finally equaled Intel and Nidia you'd think an integrated CPU/GPU could be unbeatable. The achilles heel of GPU's is the lack of memory shared with the CPU and this could potentially solve that
One group with low rates of cancers are people who work in the nuclear industry or on navy ships. They don't have shocking better healthcare plans than most middleclass folks so it may not just be wealth buying better health care. One guess is that by the nature of the work they are industrious people self selected to have otherwise healthy lifestyles but even studies trying to control for that still find lower cancer rates. Another possibility of course is that low level nuclear radiation is good for you. Since life evolved in a higher radiation level environment than today, it might not be shocking if multi-cellular animals figured out some way to differentially profit from radiation over their single cell parasites. But that's a stretch too. An even more likely hypothesis is apparently nuclear material environments actually are less toxic than others. That too would not be surprising since Nuclear is all about safety and avoiding accidents so hazards are controlled carefully. A final hypothesis remaining is that it's not that bad for you in low doses compared to the variability in life itself.
isn't the reason I need a big case with big fans all about cooling?
Do they throttle this?
Does it sound like I'm clinging to the chain link fence on Mako beach as the jet engine wash blows over me?
I think the world lost something in moving away from skewmorphic icons for boring bauhaus styling.
as this shows there is a deep psychological mapping from real desktops to virtual ones.
This is not a surprise as many parts of the brain that do modern processing are just adaptation of things never intended for the purpose and as a result have advantages when new problems are cast in the old frameworks the neurons are actually organized for.
Apple's new UI feature "stacks" actually gathers all the shit in a folder ort desktop and tries to organize it into logical piles like an admiistrative assitant might. Nice idea. Now where did my admin put that file i needed.
I actually like not having a TV be the Center piece of my living room that all-must-face. So I use a projector. I plastered the wall so the all itself is worth looking at even as a blank white wall.
Projectors have downsides: they need dark rooms but I consider that a good thing--- it discourages TV watching during the day when you could be something other than a couch potato. The real downside is they can't match the color saturation and contrast of a good TV. But on the otherhand they are pretty good and affordable compared toa TV of the same size.
Since I run mine at 120" I would definitely not want a leviathan sized TV stuck to my wall.
I'm more interested in the microLED panels with zero edge thickness. Those won't roll but they probably can be folded perfectly along the boundaries making a widescreen flip-phone possible. Samsung is making modular living room panels with these in small quantities right now.
The achilles heel of bitcoin is that it has to be expensive to be secure. The cost of securing 51% needs to exceed the profitability of achieving it. Thus as the market cap of bitcoin rises, the greater the potential to engage in a profitable double spend. So the cost of the transactions has to rise. SInce the transaction reimbursement has to cover the cost of the hash confirmation and that's paid in bit coin then either the fees or the reward value has to increase. This may possibly, but not necessarily, indirectly pressure the value of a bit coin to rise, further increasing the market cap.
There are some newer currencies just created that appear, at my superficial glance, to escape from some of that pressure on the cost of the transaction securing the block chain.
But for bit coin and similar one is stuck with proof of work having to be exorbitant as the profitability of foul play rises. Eventually the only people who can mine are the people who steal electricity. It's not a bug, it is in fact the ONLY thing that makes it work at all other than pure good will and altruism