You are correct, but TFA doesn't exactly claim to be predicting the future, they claim to be inspiring it.
"Rather than predicting the future, the SF genre is much better at inspiring the future. Visionaries read or see cool ideas in their favorite SF books or films, then decide how to make it a reality."
"I asked several of my SF writer colleagues to turn on their imaginations, let their ideas flow, and sound off on any aspect of where they thought the future of computing might go. Maybe they'll inspire new technologies we will all be using in a few years."
Slashdot is certainly not like Facebook, but it is certainly a social site IMHO. I use several different social sites and almost none of them require the same level of detail or are so blatant about sharing those private details with other people. Most particularly Facebook is only one of two that tries to require you to use your real name.
I have no problem with recommending that people stay away from Facebook as much as possible, a practice i try to follow myself as well. But that doesn't mean i'm willing to tar all social sites with the same brush.
To a certain extent, isn't that true just by being alive? Certainly joining a social site makes it easier, but almost everything you do in life can potentially be tracked one way or another. It's hard to live as a completely unobserved hermit. We make trade-offs between exposing ourselves to public view in exchange for certain conveniences, it's just a question of how much you think any particular convenience is worth the price they ask for it.
You certainly seem to think you get enough out of Slashdot to make it work joining this social site after all, or you would have had to post your complaint about social sites as an AC.
So the main advantages of this engine are that it's quieter and has fewer moving parts, while the downside is that it's more expensive and less fuel efficient.
So why would i want one of these? There have been a lot of improvements to noise reduction with regular engines so that's not as big a deal as it once might have been. Does fewer moving parts mean fewer breakdowns? It could, but it doesn't have to. It's always possible that the fewer parts have a higher individual rate of failure that balances things out. And when it does break how do the repair costs compare? If it breaks half as often but costs twice as much to fix when it does then i'm not really gaining a great deal in the process. And of course with gas prices hovering just below $4 a gallon where i live the fuel economy thing is kinda important.
Maybe the accusations are justified, maybe they aren't, but you can't say Apple hasn't been in the news about screwing over their workforce. Well you could try, but personally i'd view any claim that Apple has disavowed all responsibility for the people making their products by outsourcing to the lowest bidder in another country as pretty disingenuous.
That's a very good question, and a lot of people would like to know the answer to it. Whatever system they use has a number of issues, in particular it seems calibrated for "western" names, or at least that was how it worked at first. A lot of people with "funny" foreign names got flagged, which led to accusations of unintentional racism. I think that's going a bit too far personally, but clearly it needed some work. I also have a friend who knows knows a Native American with a stereotypical new agey sounding name that got flagged. It also flips out on some perfectly normal sounding names for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
It's easy to do some searches and find complaints about people whose real names got flagged but it's not so easy to find out exactly what rules Google is using to flag names. Contrarily it's easy to find lots of people on G+ using obviously fake names who haven't been flagged... yet. Every so often one of them will apparently get caught and change their name to something more normal, but so far Google is still getting a lot of false positives _and_ false negatives. (Or just being very slow at processing the names.)
At least for me anyways. I have no interest in going on about my life on the internet in a way that's easily traceable to my real life identity. So i signed my "real" name account up for G+ when it became available and ended up using it for nothing other than playing games.
When they made G+ open to everyone i signed up the gmail account i use in association with my LJ and am currently using it to cross-post stuff from there so my friends who use G+ but don't read LJ anymore can stay in touch more easily. When and if Google's automated hunter bots crack down on me for having a "fake" name then i'll try to argue that the long history of my LJ and my use of the name on other sites make it a "real" identity. I've heard that's worked for a few people, but definitely not for everyone who tries it. If Google refuses to agree then i'll just close down G+ part of that profile and go back to posting stuff only on LJ and using G+ only for games.
Sure there are only a couple people who give a damn about what i've been doing, but i can't help but wonder if there's a cumulative effect. Google may have to decide at some point between having a niche product that acts as an "identity service" and having a more mainstream product where people can be who they want to be. Facebook already seems to have a lock on being the place to go when you want to find someone using their real name so Google may need to differentiate themselves.
Actually the games on G+ are the main reasons i still visit the site regularly. I'm currently playing City of Wonder, Edgeworld, Dragons of Atlantis, and occasionally Zombie Lane. There are a couple more games that look interesting but that i haven't tried out because i can't afford any more time sucks of the same nature. A lot of my "friends" (ie City of Wonder allies) also play Cityville, but i am thoroughly sick of hearing about Zynga and don't really want to try any of their games.
I'd be willing to accept that argument, but if that's the way Apple/Jobs do/would have actually felt it doesn't seem reasonable to me to expect other companies to delay their work out of respect while Apple keeps on doing their work out of respect. If you believe Android is part of his legacy than they should keep on doing that work out of respect too, and if you don't believe Android is part of his legacy then his death doesn't really impact it at all.
The one thing i don't really like about my Nexus One is the semi-soft buttons, The back/menu/home/search buttons along the bottom are touch based but they _seem_ to be separate from the main touchscreen. However they are right next to the touchscreen and there is no divider. So often when trying to hit one of the bottom row of buttons i'll accidentally hit one of the four menu type buttons instead. This is especially problematic on the rare occasions when the touchscreen wigs out and detects my finger offset slightly from where it actually is. (I've seen this problem on more than one phone, so i'm not sure if it's a problem with the current version of Android or just a problem with multiple hardware sets.)
So encouraging full software buttons seems like a mistake to me in that respect. But in addition i really wish there were more physical hardware buttons. When listening to music or audiobooks i really with there were a physical set of buttons i could use without having to turn the screen back out. Rewind, play, pause and fast-forward would be the most obvious and useful ones. The volume rocker already works perfectly well has a hardware button that performs its function while the screen is off and there's plenty of room along the right side of the phone for more buttons.
So Google and Samsung decided they ought to delay their press conference to announce the Galaxy Nexus Prime (or whatever they're calling it) out of respect for Steve Jobs' death, but Apple went ahead and started doing pre-orders for the iPhone 4s on the day of his funeral.
I'm not sure if Google and Samsung were being overly sensitive or if Apple was being callous.
Most decent authors i know put out far more than one book every 5-10 years. A lot of authors have a regular day job and still manage to put out at least one book every 5-10 years. (In fact i've heard from more than one author who quit their day job so they'd have more time to write and then found they actually had a harder time focusing on writing when it was their "real" job.)
And on top of that, on the lower end of the scale $40,000 post-taxes per year is nothing to sneer at. I think i make something around that after taxes and yet _somehow_ i manage to survive in California. (Note to the sarcasm impaired, it's actually pretty damn easy if you've got even moderate money management skills.) One can get by for less than that in a lot of areas of the US. I don't actually know the numbers but i wouldn't be surprised if someone could get by on $20,000 post-taxes per year in some areas of the mid-west without a second job if they were willing to, er, work at it.
So if you can't write more than one book every 5-10 years then either being an author ought to be your lifelong dream that you're willing to sacrifice for, or you really need to find a job that you're better at.
Another area that's seen a lot of improvement is Low self-discharge NiMG batteries. A few months ago i got around to replacing my old set of rechargeable batteries with a new set of these and i've been pretty impressed. They hold a bigger charge for longer, and they even seem to recharge faster, though that might just my optimistic thinking on my part. My only complaint is the charger requires me to recharge them in pairs rather than one battery at a time, but that's just an issue with the design of the charger.
But unless you pay attention carefully or do some research on the subject it's easy to miss the improvements. They "just work", and how many people pay attention to the things that are working fine? Very rarely when an improvement makes its way to the shelves does it make a big splash. It might get hyped up in the marketing materials but we've all trained ourselves to ignore that stuff.
"I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him"
No, not really. I haven't used an Apple computer in... about 20 years now. The first time my family got an IBM clone to replace the old Apple 2c(?) i was amazed by how much more i could do with it and never looked back. Yeah, he did some "great" things, but nothing he's done has had a direct impact me in a long time and most of the indirect impact over the last few years has been to aggravate me (misleading commercials, bogus patent lawsuits, etc.)
I never wished the man ill (well, not seriously anyways) and it's always a tragedy when any human being dies, but about 150,000 people die every day and almost every one of those deaths is a tragedy for someone. Jobs had a lot of fans who are upset by this, the same way that i'd be upset if one of my personal cultural heroes died, but Steve Jobs didn't mean a great deal to me one way or the other.
It's quite possible i'll get modded as a troll for saying so, but i just thought i'd point out that not everyone has been directly affected by Steve Jobs or feels a personal connection to him, so not everyone in the community will miss him.
RIP to all 150,000 or so people who died today, Steve Jobs no more or less than any of the others, even if i don't know those others by name.
I haven't read TFA yet, but what's with the "but not so fast, says a study in Science" bit?
There's a theory that economic stability combined with a surplus of food production leads to less war and conflict. Science's study claims (according to the summary) that changes in climate in the past have disrupted crops, leading to food deficits, and that has resulted in more war and conflict. When the climate changed again and food surpluses increased, less war and conflict.
It seems like the theory and the study by Science are in violent agreement rather than one refuting the other?
That makes it different from any other class how? There isn't a reputable school in the world (at least not a technical/practical one) that depends on some kind of "secret knowledge" in their classes. Everything is available one way or another to anyone who wants to find it.
The purpose of classes is to organize that material and teach it to you in an efficient way via a guide who can answer common questions in an immediate and interactive way. Some people do find it easier to go out and dig up the information and teach themselves, but a lot of people benefit from a classroom type scenario where they receive instruction from someone knowledgeable in the area.
Honestly i'd be much more wary of them if they promised that they had secrets to surviving a plane crash that weren't available to anyone else.
they report that Alibaba is actually one of three parties looking into a joint bid for Yahoo, the others being the equity firm Silver Lake and Russian tech investor Digital Sky Technologies.
So how's the joke supposed to go now? "In capitalist Russia, Chinese employee buys YAHOO!"?
In a perfect world they would get their patent and sue anyone else who tried to track users in the same manner into the ground. Then we'd only have to worry about one site horribly violating our privacy and those who cared could avoid it.
Unfortunately in the real world Facebook would only be all too happy to license this special secret technology to anyone willing to pay the appropriate fees.
What definitions are being used to declare this the "largest astronomical installation in the world" as opposed to the VLBA? The VLBA claims to be the "world's largest, full-time astronomical instrument." I can't seem to find exact info on ALMA's baseline, but i doubt it exceeds 8611 km.
The only company that's ever made me actually happy to use Microsoft's competing product instead. Now if only this self imposed isolation will convince everyone else to ditch Oracle SQL so i can stop supporting it =P
Hey, that's totally unfair! He's not a plant he's an animal, he consumes O2 not CO2. So for a proper scientific analogy we ought to put up a fumigation tent around his house and fill it with O2. Some of it is good so more of it must be better, right?
Oh dear gods, you can lead the ignorant to knowledge but you apparently can't make them read. Either that or you're so ignorant (or just so obstinate) about what you don't know that you're not aware of what you should be reading.
Name of phase - Average start day - Average end day
Menstrual phase (Menstruation) - 1 - 4
Ovulatory phase (Ovulation) - 13 - 16
Fertile window:
The most fertile period (the time with the highest likelihood of pregnancy resulting from sexual intercourse) covers the time from some 5 days before until 1-2 days after ovulation.
So in other words, the period of time (er, so to speak) in which a woman is most fertile is pretty much exactly opposite from when she's menstruating. Which only make sense since menstruation is the process of getting rid of the built up lining of the uterus which is unneeded because the woman did NOT become pregnant. If she's already menstruating it is far too late to make her pregnant for that cycle. There are almost certainly rare exceptions, probably involving very early ovulation for the next cycle or something, but it's far from the way things normally happen.
What you said: "What do you think is involved in pregnancy? You fuck the girl while she's on her period, BLEEDING."
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but TFA doesn't exactly claim to be predicting the future, they claim to be inspiring it.
"Rather than predicting the future, the SF genre is much better at inspiring the future. Visionaries read or see cool ideas in their favorite SF books or films, then decide how to make it a reality."
"I asked several of my SF writer colleagues to turn on their imaginations, let their ideas flow, and sound off on any aspect of where they thought the future of computing might go. Maybe they'll inspire new technologies we will all be using in a few years."
That was exactly my thought as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peshawar_Lancers
Slashdot is certainly not like Facebook, but it is certainly a social site IMHO. I use several different social sites and almost none of them require the same level of detail or are so blatant about sharing those private details with other people. Most particularly Facebook is only one of two that tries to require you to use your real name.
I have no problem with recommending that people stay away from Facebook as much as possible, a practice i try to follow myself as well. But that doesn't mean i'm willing to tar all social sites with the same brush.
To a certain extent, isn't that true just by being alive? Certainly joining a social site makes it easier, but almost everything you do in life can potentially be tracked one way or another. It's hard to live as a completely unobserved hermit. We make trade-offs between exposing ourselves to public view in exchange for certain conveniences, it's just a question of how much you think any particular convenience is worth the price they ask for it.
You certainly seem to think you get enough out of Slashdot to make it work joining this social site after all, or you would have had to post your complaint about social sites as an AC.
So the main advantages of this engine are that it's quieter and has fewer moving parts, while the downside is that it's more expensive and less fuel efficient.
So why would i want one of these? There have been a lot of improvements to noise reduction with regular engines so that's not as big a deal as it once might have been. Does fewer moving parts mean fewer breakdowns? It could, but it doesn't have to. It's always possible that the fewer parts have a higher individual rate of failure that balances things out. And when it does break how do the repair costs compare? If it breaks half as often but costs twice as much to fix when it does then i'm not really gaining a great deal in the process. And of course with gas prices hovering just below $4 a gallon where i live the fuel economy thing is kinda important.
Also, I don't recall them ever having been in the news for screwing over their workforce.
Er, what? You must be new here?
Maybe the accusations are justified, maybe they aren't, but you can't say Apple hasn't been in the news about screwing over their workforce. Well you could try, but personally i'd view any claim that Apple has disavowed all responsibility for the people making their products by outsourcing to the lowest bidder in another country as pretty disingenuous.
That's a very good question, and a lot of people would like to know the answer to it. Whatever system they use has a number of issues, in particular it seems calibrated for "western" names, or at least that was how it worked at first. A lot of people with "funny" foreign names got flagged, which led to accusations of unintentional racism. I think that's going a bit too far personally, but clearly it needed some work. I also have a friend who knows knows a Native American with a stereotypical new agey sounding name that got flagged. It also flips out on some perfectly normal sounding names for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
It's easy to do some searches and find complaints about people whose real names got flagged but it's not so easy to find out exactly what rules Google is using to flag names. Contrarily it's easy to find lots of people on G+ using obviously fake names who haven't been flagged... yet. Every so often one of them will apparently get caught and change their name to something more normal, but so far Google is still getting a lot of false positives _and_ false negatives. (Or just being very slow at processing the names.)
At least for me anyways. I have no interest in going on about my life on the internet in a way that's easily traceable to my real life identity. So i signed my "real" name account up for G+ when it became available and ended up using it for nothing other than playing games.
When they made G+ open to everyone i signed up the gmail account i use in association with my LJ and am currently using it to cross-post stuff from there so my friends who use G+ but don't read LJ anymore can stay in touch more easily. When and if Google's automated hunter bots crack down on me for having a "fake" name then i'll try to argue that the long history of my LJ and my use of the name on other sites make it a "real" identity. I've heard that's worked for a few people, but definitely not for everyone who tries it. If Google refuses to agree then i'll just close down G+ part of that profile and go back to posting stuff only on LJ and using G+ only for games.
Sure there are only a couple people who give a damn about what i've been doing, but i can't help but wonder if there's a cumulative effect. Google may have to decide at some point between having a niche product that acts as an "identity service" and having a more mainstream product where people can be who they want to be. Facebook already seems to have a lock on being the place to go when you want to find someone using their real name so Google may need to differentiate themselves.
Actually the games on G+ are the main reasons i still visit the site regularly. I'm currently playing City of Wonder, Edgeworld, Dragons of Atlantis, and occasionally Zombie Lane. There are a couple more games that look interesting but that i haven't tried out because i can't afford any more time sucks of the same nature. A lot of my "friends" (ie City of Wonder allies) also play Cityville, but i am thoroughly sick of hearing about Zynga and don't really want to try any of their games.
I'd be willing to accept that argument, but if that's the way Apple/Jobs do/would have actually felt it doesn't seem reasonable to me to expect other companies to delay their work out of respect while Apple keeps on doing their work out of respect. If you believe Android is part of his legacy than they should keep on doing that work out of respect too, and if you don't believe Android is part of his legacy then his death doesn't really impact it at all.
The one thing i don't really like about my Nexus One is the semi-soft buttons, The back/menu/home/search buttons along the bottom are touch based but they _seem_ to be separate from the main touchscreen. However they are right next to the touchscreen and there is no divider. So often when trying to hit one of the bottom row of buttons i'll accidentally hit one of the four menu type buttons instead. This is especially problematic on the rare occasions when the touchscreen wigs out and detects my finger offset slightly from where it actually is. (I've seen this problem on more than one phone, so i'm not sure if it's a problem with the current version of Android or just a problem with multiple hardware sets.)
So encouraging full software buttons seems like a mistake to me in that respect. But in addition i really wish there were more physical hardware buttons. When listening to music or audiobooks i really with there were a physical set of buttons i could use without having to turn the screen back out. Rewind, play, pause and fast-forward would be the most obvious and useful ones. The volume rocker already works perfectly well has a hardware button that performs its function while the screen is off and there's plenty of room along the right side of the phone for more buttons.
So Google and Samsung decided they ought to delay their press conference to announce the Galaxy Nexus Prime (or whatever they're calling it) out of respect for Steve Jobs' death, but Apple went ahead and started doing pre-orders for the iPhone 4s on the day of his funeral.
I'm not sure if Google and Samsung were being overly sensitive or if Apple was being callous.
Most decent authors i know put out far more than one book every 5-10 years. A lot of authors have a regular day job and still manage to put out at least one book every 5-10 years. (In fact i've heard from more than one author who quit their day job so they'd have more time to write and then found they actually had a harder time focusing on writing when it was their "real" job.)
And on top of that, on the lower end of the scale $40,000 post-taxes per year is nothing to sneer at. I think i make something around that after taxes and yet _somehow_ i manage to survive in California. (Note to the sarcasm impaired, it's actually pretty damn easy if you've got even moderate money management skills.) One can get by for less than that in a lot of areas of the US. I don't actually know the numbers but i wouldn't be surprised if someone could get by on $20,000 post-taxes per year in some areas of the mid-west without a second job if they were willing to, er, work at it.
So if you can't write more than one book every 5-10 years then either being an author ought to be your lifelong dream that you're willing to sacrifice for, or you really need to find a job that you're better at.
Another area that's seen a lot of improvement is Low self-discharge NiMG batteries. A few months ago i got around to replacing my old set of rechargeable batteries with a new set of these and i've been pretty impressed. They hold a bigger charge for longer, and they even seem to recharge faster, though that might just my optimistic thinking on my part. My only complaint is the charger requires me to recharge them in pairs rather than one battery at a time, but that's just an issue with the design of the charger.
But unless you pay attention carefully or do some research on the subject it's easy to miss the improvements. They "just work", and how many people pay attention to the things that are working fine? Very rarely when an improvement makes its way to the shelves does it make a big splash. It might get hyped up in the marketing materials but we've all trained ourselves to ignore that stuff.
"I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him"
No, not really. I haven't used an Apple computer in... about 20 years now. The first time my family got an IBM clone to replace the old Apple 2c(?) i was amazed by how much more i could do with it and never looked back. Yeah, he did some "great" things, but nothing he's done has had a direct impact me in a long time and most of the indirect impact over the last few years has been to aggravate me (misleading commercials, bogus patent lawsuits, etc.)
I never wished the man ill (well, not seriously anyways) and it's always a tragedy when any human being dies, but about 150,000 people die every day and almost every one of those deaths is a tragedy for someone. Jobs had a lot of fans who are upset by this, the same way that i'd be upset if one of my personal cultural heroes died, but Steve Jobs didn't mean a great deal to me one way or the other.
It's quite possible i'll get modded as a troll for saying so, but i just thought i'd point out that not everyone has been directly affected by Steve Jobs or feels a personal connection to him, so not everyone in the community will miss him.
RIP to all 150,000 or so people who died today, Steve Jobs no more or less than any of the others, even if i don't know those others by name.
I haven't read TFA yet, but what's with the "but not so fast, says a study in Science" bit?
There's a theory that economic stability combined with a surplus of food production leads to less war and conflict. Science's study claims (according to the summary) that changes in climate in the past have disrupted crops, leading to food deficits, and that has resulted in more war and conflict. When the climate changed again and food surpluses increased, less war and conflict.
It seems like the theory and the study by Science are in violent agreement rather than one refuting the other?
That makes it different from any other class how? There isn't a reputable school in the world (at least not a technical/practical one) that depends on some kind of "secret knowledge" in their classes. Everything is available one way or another to anyone who wants to find it.
The purpose of classes is to organize that material and teach it to you in an efficient way via a guide who can answer common questions in an immediate and interactive way. Some people do find it easier to go out and dig up the information and teach themselves, but a lot of people benefit from a classroom type scenario where they receive instruction from someone knowledgeable in the area.
Honestly i'd be much more wary of them if they promised that they had secrets to surviving a plane crash that weren't available to anyone else.
they report that Alibaba is actually one of three parties looking into a joint bid for Yahoo, the others being the equity firm Silver Lake and Russian tech investor Digital Sky Technologies.
So how's the joke supposed to go now? "In capitalist Russia, Chinese employee buys YAHOO!"?
In a perfect world they would get their patent and sue anyone else who tried to track users in the same manner into the ground. Then we'd only have to worry about one site horribly violating our privacy and those who cared could avoid it.
Unfortunately in the real world Facebook would only be all too happy to license this special secret technology to anyone willing to pay the appropriate fees.
What definitions are being used to declare this the "largest astronomical installation in the world" as opposed to the VLBA? The VLBA claims to be the "world's largest, full-time astronomical instrument." I can't seem to find exact info on ALMA's baseline, but i doubt it exceeds 8611 km.
The only company that's ever made me actually happy to use Microsoft's competing product instead. Now if only this self imposed isolation will convince everyone else to ditch Oracle SQL so i can stop supporting it =P
Hey, that's totally unfair! He's not a plant he's an animal, he consumes O2 not CO2. So for a proper scientific analogy we ought to put up a fumigation tent around his house and fill it with O2. Some of it is good so more of it must be better, right?
Ahh, so you're saying you don't understand probability theory either? Okay, i understand.
Name of phase - Average start day - Average end day
Menstrual phase (Menstruation) - 1 - 4
Ovulatory phase (Ovulation) - 13 - 16
Fertile window:
The most fertile period (the time with the highest likelihood of pregnancy resulting from sexual intercourse) covers the time from some 5 days before until 1-2 days after ovulation.
So in other words, the period of time (er, so to speak) in which a woman is most fertile is pretty much exactly opposite from when she's menstruating. Which only make sense since menstruation is the process of getting rid of the built up lining of the uterus which is unneeded because the woman did NOT become pregnant. If she's already menstruating it is far too late to make her pregnant for that cycle. There are almost certainly rare exceptions, probably involving very early ovulation for the next cycle or something, but it's far from the way things normally happen.
What you said: "What do you think is involved in pregnancy? You fuck the girl while she's on her period, BLEEDING."
Reality: The exact opposite.
As a New Zealander I do find it annoying when people fail to identify the timezone.
On a US site? Or does it just bother you that your country doesn't have a site like this?
As a west coast USian, i do find it annoying when people fail to identify the timezone.