A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalised
I'm often fascinated by the hoops Americans are willing to jump through to avoid having to give people basic rights, but this is the first time I've heard it argued that we should keep cash around to avoid having to offer poor people basic banking services.
Europe does this right, food has 'calories per 100g' on every package.
I've been counting calories on both continents and I've found that it has its pros and cons.
For a bulk product like flour, I don't care how many calories are in a 27 gram serving. I want to know how many are in 100 grams so I can more easily do the math in my head.
For an appropriately portioned food like an individual piece of chocolate, I don't care how many calories are in 100 grams. I want to know how many there are in this 15 gram piece.
If people don't want modern preservatives, BPA, MSG, GMO, or whatever today's vilified buzzword is, I'm generally ok with it.
What peeves me is when the primary difference is labelling and presentation. It's increasingly a problem everywhere, but Whole Foods does it more than anyone:
* Sugar => Evaporated Cane Juice * Contains 10% whole grains => Made with 100% Whole Wheat (and other ingredients) * Raisins => Gluten-free, Vegan, Kosher certified dried grapes * High Fructose Corn Syrup => High Fructose Cactus Syrup (agave syrup) * Artificial vanilla flavor => All Natural vanilla flavor (made from fermented grains without any vanilla pods)
Even the cold, hard numbers of the nutritional facts are being gamed through reduced serving sizes and rounding.
Grandparent means that chip&pin transactions are slow, and in the US it's true. They are significantly slower than in Europe.
I don't know if it's the connections, the CPUs or the configuration, but doing Chip&Pin in the US feels like browsing on dialup. When you go on vacation, the difference is astounding.
Obviously this is a grievous error which should be fixed, but I can definitely see how a machine learning system could pick up this answer as a false positive with no foul play*: extinction through biblical flood may be the most commonly held hypothesis in the US.
42% of Americans believe in creationism, and it's not unlikely that they'd all believe dinosaurs were killed in a flood.
The other 58% could be split between asteroids, volcanos, continental drift, "other" and "don't know", with no single group having a share over 42%.
* Centuries of generally teaching BS to kids notwithstanding
The stated challenge is to make a reasonable argument against gay marriage, not against marriage inequality, so any arguments in favor of abolishing all marriage as a legal concept (gay, straight and others alike) would technically qualify.
I agree in spirit, but it wouldn't be slashdot without several pedantic, belaboured "well, actually" comments.
Don't forget the complementary question, "How fast does each individual core have to be to run a single threaded Word Processor at an acceptable speed?"
Imagine if instead of 4x 3ghz Xeons you had 4,000x 486s or 4,000,000x 286s.
CPUs have been fast enough for the mainstream users for 30 years now. It's by definition: nothing becomes mainstream if it's not "good enough".
Screencasting/bluetooth as a desktop replacement is still far too slow. LZMA takes seconds per megabyte. IDEs run like molasses. Video editing is awful. Offline voice recognition sucks. Heavy web apps are laggy. Stitching a photosphere takes minutes.
"And you can get a keyboard for it, and OF COURSE, it runs Microsoft Office"
'Cause THAT'S what people do with tablets...
It's what they did with the MBAs they're trading in, and it's what people can do with a tablet that isn't just an electronic etch-a-sketch.
It's sad that people are carrying around devices with multicore CPUs, several GB ram and storage, wifi and HD screens, and they still have to say "sorry, I can't -- I didn't bring my computer"
They tend to take a bit longer to finish a project, but that project is usually of higher quality and better architecture
How much of the speed difference would you say is directly attributable to younger people unwittingly cutting corners on edge case handling and infrastructure?
What kind of judgement calls are more likely to be useful in an accident situation?
1. Solving hard ethical dilemmas, such as swirving to avoid a baby carriage at the cost of running over an elderly person.
2. Out-of-the-box ingenuity, such as ramping off of the guard rail and balancing on two wheels to avoid the accident.
3. Stomping on the brakes as early as possible.
Human judgement definitely excels at 1 and 2, but in all honesty, I think 3 is the most practical. It also happens to be the one a computer would be best at.
If you exchange the 1 second human reaction time for a 1ms computer reaction time, you will go about 18km/h (11mph) slower when you hit something, dramatically increasing your and their chances of survival.
Obviously I know that you personally would be able to deftly maneuver to avoid the accident and that you'd react way faster than 1 second because you're always alert and a better than average driver (and it's not illusory superiority, because you'd have to be an idiot to believe you're good when you're average).
However, you're just one incredibly good driver, while there are a hundred million average ones. Statistically, it makes way more sense to opt for the 11mph reduction in impact speed.
why is paying by phone so much better than with plastic?
Why is paying with plastic so much better than by phone? Here's a transaction I had yesterday at Toys'R'Us:
1. In line, I unlocked my phone and found my loyalty card 2. The cashier pointed a scanner at my phone and read it 3. I already had the phone unlocked in my hand, so I touched it to the payment terminal.
What would I have gained by putting down my phone and taking out and swiping my credit card instead?
This is not an insightful, quirky observation about modern, overengineered gadgets that try to do everything but fail to do anything well.
It's a tired and overused rant being perpetually parroted by people who don't even want what they're asking for.
If you were actually looking for such a phone, you'd have done a simple web search and found plenty of phones in the $30 range with over a month of standby time, like the Nokia 105.
You shouldn't try to find $1500 worth of value in the current product. If there was, they'd be selling it to everyone.
Take a look at a list of apps and see if this is a technology you'd find fascinating, and decide based on whether you have the time and resources to invest into exploring it.
Glass today is basically like Internet access in 1994. Slow, expensive, flawed and of no practical value -- but interesting and fun for those with the time and interest to tinker with it.
There are some good indie games these days, like Gone Home; Papers, Please and Sir, You Are Being Hunted.
Gone Home does a very fine job of interactively telling a story by searching through an abandoned house.
Papers, Please is a puzzle game about ethics and paperwork, which is much more interesting than it sounds.
Sir, You Are Being hunted is a procedurally generated stealth/survival game, in which you're trying to sneak under the noses of armed gentlemen robots.
Slashdot Mirror
The first post that's not about how technology is dumb and how 1080p ought to be enough for everyone.
I wish I had mod points.
Caffeine pills are $0.05 each on Amazon. I'm surprised you're trying to save that cost.
The air pollution is due to the current forest fires, friend. The air quality was excellent a month ago.
Kids have likely been taking to dolls for hundred or thousands of millennia. Is this really that different?
What is it you get out of having a land line and cable TV that makes you put up with this? What do you use them for?
I'm often fascinated by the hoops Americans are willing to jump through to avoid having to give people basic rights, but this is the first time I've heard it argued that we should keep cash around to avoid having to offer poor people basic banking services.
I've been counting calories on both continents and I've found that it has its pros and cons.
For a bulk product like flour, I don't care how many calories are in a 27 gram serving. I want to know how many are in 100 grams so I can more easily do the math in my head.
For an appropriately portioned food like an individual piece of chocolate, I don't care how many calories are in 100 grams. I want to know how many there are in this 15 gram piece.
If people don't want modern preservatives, BPA, MSG, GMO, or whatever today's vilified buzzword is, I'm generally ok with it.
What peeves me is when the primary difference is labelling and presentation. It's increasingly a problem everywhere, but Whole Foods does it more than anyone:
* Sugar => Evaporated Cane Juice
* Contains 10% whole grains => Made with 100% Whole Wheat (and other ingredients)
* Raisins => Gluten-free, Vegan, Kosher certified dried grapes
* High Fructose Corn Syrup => High Fructose Cactus Syrup (agave syrup)
* Artificial vanilla flavor => All Natural vanilla flavor (made from fermented grains without any vanilla pods)
Even the cold, hard numbers of the nutritional facts are being gamed through reduced serving sizes and rounding.
Grandparent means that chip&pin transactions are slow, and in the US it's true. They are significantly slower than in Europe.
I don't know if it's the connections, the CPUs or the configuration, but doing Chip&Pin in the US feels like browsing on dialup. When you go on vacation, the difference is astounding.
Obviously this is a grievous error which should be fixed, but I can definitely see how a machine learning system could pick up this answer as a false positive with no foul play*: extinction through biblical flood may be the most commonly held hypothesis in the US.
42% of Americans believe in creationism, and it's not unlikely that they'd all believe dinosaurs were killed in a flood.
The other 58% could be split between asteroids, volcanos, continental drift, "other" and "don't know", with no single group having a share over 42%.
* Centuries of generally teaching BS to kids notwithstanding
The stated challenge is to make a reasonable argument against gay marriage, not against marriage inequality, so any arguments in favor of abolishing all marriage as a legal concept (gay, straight and others alike) would technically qualify.
I agree in spirit, but it wouldn't be slashdot without several pedantic, belaboured "well, actually" comments.
Don't forget the complementary question, "How fast does each individual core have to be to run a single threaded Word Processor at an acceptable speed?"
Imagine if instead of 4x 3ghz Xeons you had 4,000x 486s or 4,000,000x 286s.
This is a really bad way of choosing passwords.
The number of verses of songs, nursery rhymes, poems and paragraphs that people would tend to think of probably number less than a million.
Your particular example has 946 hits on Google.
CPUs have been fast enough for the mainstream users for 30 years now. It's by definition: nothing becomes mainstream if it's not "good enough".
Screencasting/bluetooth as a desktop replacement is still far too slow. LZMA takes seconds per megabyte. IDEs run like molasses. Video editing is awful. Offline voice recognition sucks. Heavy web apps are laggy. Stitching a photosphere takes minutes.
Let's not stop now.
You're talking about how you come off as less geeky because don't have a smart phone, all while carrying a tablet around everywhere?
I don't think you have to worry...
It's what they did with the MBAs they're trading in, and it's what people can do with a tablet that isn't just an electronic etch-a-sketch.
It's sad that people are carrying around devices with multicore CPUs, several GB ram and storage, wifi and HD screens, and they still have to say "sorry, I can't -- I didn't bring my computer"
How much of the speed difference would you say is directly attributable to younger people unwittingly cutting corners on edge case handling and infrastructure?
What kind of judgement calls are more likely to be useful in an accident situation?
1. Solving hard ethical dilemmas, such as swirving to avoid a baby carriage at the cost of running over an elderly person.
2. Out-of-the-box ingenuity, such as ramping off of the guard rail and balancing on two wheels to avoid the accident.
3. Stomping on the brakes as early as possible.
Human judgement definitely excels at 1 and 2, but in all honesty, I think 3 is the most practical. It also happens to be the one a computer would be best at.
If you exchange the 1 second human reaction time for a 1ms computer reaction time, you will go about 18km/h (11mph) slower when you hit something, dramatically increasing your and their chances of survival.
Obviously I know that you personally would be able to deftly maneuver to avoid the accident and that you'd react way faster than 1 second because you're always alert and a better than average driver (and it's not illusory superiority, because you'd have to be an idiot to believe you're good when you're average).
However, you're just one incredibly good driver, while there are a hundred million average ones. Statistically, it makes way more sense to opt for the 11mph reduction in impact speed.
Why is paying with plastic so much better than by phone? Here's a transaction I had yesterday at Toys'R'Us:
1. In line, I unlocked my phone and found my loyalty card
2. The cashier pointed a scanner at my phone and read it
3. I already had the phone unlocked in my hand, so I touched it to the payment terminal.
What would I have gained by putting down my phone and taking out and swiping my credit card instead?
This is not an insightful, quirky observation about modern, overengineered gadgets that try to do everything but fail to do anything well.
It's a tired and overused rant being perpetually parroted by people who don't even want what they're asking for.
If you were actually looking for such a phone, you'd have done a simple web search and found plenty of phones in the $30 range with over a month of standby time, like the Nokia 105.
How so?
You shouldn't try to find $1500 worth of value in the current product. If there was, they'd be selling it to everyone.
Take a look at a list of apps and see if this is a technology you'd find fascinating, and decide based on whether you have the time and resources to invest into exploring it.
Glass today is basically like Internet access in 1994. Slow, expensive, flawed and of no practical value -- but interesting and fun for those with the time and interest to tinker with it.
So a game about making decisions should not present you with decisions you shouldn't make? Have you considered watching a movie instead?
There are some good indie games these days, like Gone Home; Papers, Please and Sir, You Are Being Hunted.
Gone Home does a very fine job of interactively telling a story by searching through an abandoned house.
Papers, Please is a puzzle game about ethics and paperwork, which is much more interesting than it sounds.
Sir, You Are Being hunted is a procedurally generated stealth/survival game, in which you're trying to sneak under the noses of armed gentlemen robots.
You're saying that as if the two are in any way equivalent.